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“Just Want to Say”: Performance and Literature, Jackson and Poirier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Peggy Phelan
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Extract

In August 2009, when Richard Poirier died, I was mourning the death of Michael Jackson, with an intensity that surprised me. While I had admired Jackson's talent and followed his career with steady interest for decades, my grief was out of proportion to my feeling for him when he was alive. I felt caught up in a psychic complex that had hold of the wrong object but was determined, nonetheless, to play itself out. Puzzled by the intensity of my grief, I began reading everything about Jackson I could find—books, journalism, Web postings—while listening intently to his music, trying to hear something in it that would console me and justify my frenzied mourning. But instead of hearing that, I heard Poirier had also died.

Type
Thinking the Future
Information
PMLA , Volume 125 , Issue 4: Special Topic Literary Criticism for the Twenty-First Century , October 2010 , pp. 942 - 947
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2010

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