Excerpts from "Womanifesto" by Maria Morisot (Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

[De Villo Sloan]

Cover of “Womanifesto” by Maria Morisot (Iowa City, Iowa, USA)

February 7, 2015 - I am honored to have received a hard copy (ranging somewhere between 50-100 pages) of “Womanifesto” by Maria Morisot (aka Moan Lisa). I am only posting modest excerpts today because the entire document can be accessed elsewhere, although the copy I have appears to be one-of-a-kind and will be carefully preserved in the MinXus USA Archives.

I have been a reader of Maria Morisot’s lyrics for some time now. They are very well-crafted and have an interesting, sometimes sonnet like, formal structure. They are not unlike Emily Dickinson’s poems – I see them emanating from that impulse – in the sense that they have a serial quality built on associative themes using a mix of rhetoric and imagery.

The “Womanifesto” has a consistent, additional element of interest with the (apparently) asemic notations added.

In most cases, the notations are embellishments. Sometimes they are erasures.

The “Womanifesto” can be viewed as part of a larger gender exploration project involving writing and visual arts being conducted by Moan Lisa.

As stated earlier, the foundation for the “Womanifesto” is a fairly traditional lyric sequence, although occasionally variants appear (such as the 3/6/3 haiku above) that provide textual disruption.

Many thanks to Maria Morisot for entrusting me with an MS of the “Womanifesto.”