After Vanessa Place
Résumé
If Narcissus found himself wanting, Echo wants-for nothing. Slated to resound, she's luckier than you or me, because she knows full well the desire to be is to be heard, and not seen. And the desire to be heard is largely a desire to hear back. This is her generosity. Her cruelty is that through this listening, you will be well seen. Coming and going after is Echo's affair; it is also the stuff of conversational pursuit. After Vanessa Place is an email exchange between poet and artist Vanessa Place and critic Naomi Toth on the backsides of speech and sight, where repeating and being conflate and confound in the trialectic of message, meaning, and motion. To be read as it is, or backwards, after the manner of history. And, echoing history, what's missed calls for more.