tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90062834256955476172024-02-20T19:49:59.553-08:00X Poeticsfor sound, crossing, mobility, eXchange,
for doubt & uncertainty, bird cries,
duende, multiplicity, former, eXcess, XcountryUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger291125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-9172843679434469352017-11-26T18:06:00.000-08:002017-11-26T18:06:02.525-08:00From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice in Print and Online!<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">So pleased to announce the availability of this book project that Rob Halpern and I have been working on for some 5 years. It is here and awaits you Dear Readers!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWQhWgR7l8lP9fyZoLN2KMDWI_SbGHcy1mWPas5b9Q8zr_-aV_fFfwg-DXCW7nt3Ko4C9arWvPZRWtc23CBAzJclZghOUMiEqJrziDKWoXFAgVwWsK0OXUTfBGrGk9DlptaQSiOJv7ZQ/s1600/From_Our_Hearts_to_Yours_Front_Cover%252B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1307" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWQhWgR7l8lP9fyZoLN2KMDWI_SbGHcy1mWPas5b9Q8zr_-aV_fFfwg-DXCW7nt3Ko4C9arWvPZRWtc23CBAzJclZghOUMiEqJrziDKWoXFAgVwWsK0OXUTfBGrGk9DlptaQSiOJv7ZQ/s320/From_Our_Hearts_to_Yours_Front_Cover%252B%25281%2529.jpg" width="244" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Contributors to the print volume include:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Lindsey Boldt</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Brandon Brown</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">David Buuck</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Amanda Davidson</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Robert Dewhurst</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Thom Donovan</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Joel Fares</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Ariel Goldberg</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Rob Halpern</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Kaplan Harris</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Carla Harryman</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Colin Herd</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Arnold J. Kemp</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Trisha Low</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Jason Morris</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Trace Peterson</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Ted Rees</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Camille Roy</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Kathy Lou Schultz</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Eric Sneathen</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Brian Teare</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Robin Tremblay-McGaw</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Catherine Wagner</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Stephanie Young</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://on-contemporarypractice.squarespace.com/from-our-hearts/" target="_blank">You can purchase a copy through the publisher, On Contemporary Practice</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">An additional rich reservoir of other materials are available online, including some fabulous interviews:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59ebda1e4c326dcab886e775/1508629022885/Saidenberg_Boone_Interview_Final.pdf" target="_blank">Jocelyn Saidenberg & Bruce Boone</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59ebda684c326dcab886e98e/1508629097162/Bellamy_Dewhurst_Interview_Final.pdf" target="_blank">Robert Dewhurst & Dodie Bellamy</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59ebda7b64b05f695b6b1420/1508629115840/Mellis_Killian_Interview_Final.pdf" target="_blank">Miranda Mellis & Kevin Killian</a></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Other online resources include:</span></b></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">an online copy of the introduction:<a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59ebdb01cd39c3b259d51f81/1508629250162/From_Our_Hearts_to_Yours_Introduction.pdf" target="_blank"> </a></span><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59ebdb01cd39c3b259d51f81/1508629250162/From_Our_Hearts_to_Yours_Introduction.pdf" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">"'A Generosity of Response': New Narrative as Contemporary Practice,"</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> by Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw</span></li>
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<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">the Left Write! Transcripts of the 1981 Left Write Conference, edited Steve Abbott, in two parts: <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59f34143085229b30b0ac178/1509114201936/Left_Write%21_Transcript_Part_1.pdf" target="_blank">Part 1</a> and <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59f340f7109526b62a6995b9/1509114151952/Left_Write%21_Transcript_Part_2.pdf" target="_blank">Part 2</a>.</span></li>
</ul>
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<li><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59f3418927ef2db556d1860e/1509114255070/Left_Write_Conference_Supplementary_Material.pdf" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Archival documents related to the organization of the Left Write Conference.</a></li>
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<li><i style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">Soup 2</i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">, The New Narrative Issue, edited by Steve Abbott in two parts:</span><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59f341d171c10bb49d32d03d/1509114328657/Soup_Issue_2_Part_1.pdf" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank"> Part 1</a> and<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59f341e7d6839ab9dd62e058/1509114350271/Soup_Issue_2_Part_2.pdf" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Part 2</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">.</span></li>
</ul>
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<li><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59f34280e31d19b2c6c68956/1509114497371/From_Our_Hearts_to_Yours_Bibliography.pdf" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">The Bibliography of Works Cited in <i>From Our Hearts to Yours: New Narrative as Contemporary Practice.</i></a></li>
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<li><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59f3429be31d19b2c6c68c3d/1509114524094/New_Narrative_Index_of_Keywords_and_Concepts.pdf" style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;" target="_blank">An Index of Keywords and Concepts</a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> (which is nearly a poem in and of itself).</span></li>
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<li><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52010d47e4b0eefc5e9e9bf0/t/59f342ee692670b730ef9209/1509114609346/Jackson+Strategies004.pdf" target="_blank">The opening section to "Scandalous Narratives," </a>from <i>Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Representation</i> by Earl Jackson Jr. (Jackson's work in this chapter represents the first scholarly study of New Narrative in 1995; it discusses the work of Dennis Cooper, Kevin Killian, and Robert Gl</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">ück.) </span></li>
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<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;">If you are interested, you can also check ou<a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7knO8AoOhwnW-jGse1chw/videos" target="_blank">t these links to videos </a>from the <a href="https://communalpresence.com/" target="_blank">Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today Conference </a>held at UC Berkeley and various other sites in October 2017. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt7knO8AoOhwnW-jGse1chw/videos" target="_blank">The links include video from the plenary panel on From Our Hearts to Yours! </a></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-74468506626363174332017-04-16T18:26:00.001-07:002017-04-16T18:28:24.457-07:00Catching Up! Simone White's Holloway Reading and Ariel Goldberg's The Estrangement Principle at Alley Cat Books<br />
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The World is Too Much....<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">sometimes for staying on top of everything, including
poetry. So, I'm tardy reporting on these two thrilling Bay Area readings/talks.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">First, on February 15th, <b>Simone White</b>, recent Whiting
Award winner, gave a talk as part of the UC Berkeley Holloway Reading Series
which I missed since it was in the afternoon (sadly the recording is not
available!), though I did make the reading later that night. <b><span style="color: #274e13;">Tonya Foster</span> </b>and I
barted over to Berkeley from Bernal Heights arriving just in time for Simone's
reading. What can I say? I've always loved Simone's work and it just keeps
getting better and better, dazzling in its opacity, its warp and woof of linguistic
registers, beauty, and surprise. Every time I read or hear her work, it makes
me want to write.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Simone read not from her recent amazing book<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>Of Being Dispersed</i>, but rather
from new work, work written since the birth of her son, Isaac. These poems include lines like this which I recorded in my notebook: "the great shock
of suck" and "grammatical properties of the pronoun
motherfucker." Simone read from an amazing piece entitled
"MESSENGER." I can't wait to see it in print. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJxQFvdlse28UErKpZlg1NGSgdvVyQ7T6APtCF70FfRwd9m9bmsxihyogAZJxYPmyOgtFvrd6jCK2pXiggBddFZCVjQAjjzQaXy6BCJOgXjgykZrHd2Uu454nPsWstQoSNwJv-_jf_ZQ/s1600/Simone-White.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJxQFvdlse28UErKpZlg1NGSgdvVyQ7T6APtCF70FfRwd9m9bmsxihyogAZJxYPmyOgtFvrd6jCK2pXiggBddFZCVjQAjjzQaXy6BCJOgXjgykZrHd2Uu454nPsWstQoSNwJv-_jf_ZQ/s320/Simone-White.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo from Harper's Magazine</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Here's an excerpt from it that appeared In <i>Harper's Magazine</i>, February 2017:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>ευάγγελος addresses the mother with no mate the mother who
panics the mother who watches with dread and wonder the careless pleasure of
other mothers in the presence of their children the hours spent in fear the
isolation of motherhood the metempsychotic deprivation of sleep nothing you
have is yours not even deposits of fat you are the nothing toward which the man
nods in acknowledgment of your motherhood which is grand which is prostration
which is the deactivation of all known powers which is the evacuation of power
your share in the speechless condition of your baby speech rushes you freeze in
the weakness of joint potentiality you cannot share yet you share you have no
faith yet you must have faith this is a test this is not a test everything that
was has been evacuated in your arms someone has fainted someone's got a mote in
her eye someone is pricked by ευάγγελος, hunter (Harper's, February 2017 36)</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Another difficult and lyrical piece can be found <a href="http://bostonreview.net/poetry/NPM-2016-simone-white-stingray" target="_blank">here at the Boston Review. This is a poem called "Stingray,"</a> a must read.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkKSIWECLDHd7MuSUTGPfiBJ6pOUWR-WryjNh18RD_tiGQumrOIG8293Qvbsp76qCYL_u03NI7l-Lqin_4D5OjfltSdE3tetJnrElV1UtpcXXRIczgyTFpJRQxKMQw2hvwcQwWvwfHyA/s1600/Ariel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkKSIWECLDHd7MuSUTGPfiBJ6pOUWR-WryjNh18RD_tiGQumrOIG8293Qvbsp76qCYL_u03NI7l-Lqin_4D5OjfltSdE3tetJnrElV1UtpcXXRIczgyTFpJRQxKMQw2hvwcQwWvwfHyA/s320/Ariel.jpg" width="260" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo from SFSU's The Poetry Center</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Then in March, on the 11th, <b>Ariel Goldberg </b>returned to the Bay to
read from their new book: <i>The
Estrangement Principle.</i> Again, <b>Tonya </b>and I headed out for another special event. Ariel read at <b>Alley Cat Books</b>, at an event organized by <b>Kevin Killian</b>. Ariel read from two sections of the book:
"To Project Presence and Risk Absence" about New Narrative and
"Full Umph," a playful thinking and writing through Kay Ryan whose
work contains few if any traces of her lesbian life. Goldberg writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Kay Ryan interrupted her poem at the 92nd Street Y o say
something like, 'These lines have been engraved in the Central Park Zoo.' The
audience mustered a collective ooh and ahh that registered on my back like an
itchy blanket. Laryssa and I were in the front row, as close to Ryan as possible
for my character study. I kept turning around to watch how the teenagers were
reacting. Each 92nd Street Y reader also visits a public school English class
and the students receive free books by the author. Ryan interrupted another
poem, "that one was just published in The New Yorker.' Ugh, I thought. I
waited in the Barnes & Noble-sponsored book signing line without a book to
sign. When it was my turn, I gave Ryan the pamphlet loosely containing the
first two chapters of this book. I write about your work in this, I said. 'Are
you a student?' 'No, I'm an artist.' I didn't know how to explain to Ryan that
I constructed, with the help of Jess, an alter ego named May Lion to satiate my
hunger for traces of lesbian life in Ryan's poetry.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>May Lion gave her premier reading to a crowd of fifteen or so
friends and friends of friends at the now shuttered Uncanny Valley in Long
Island City in spring 2012. May went on after the cellist Meaner Pencil, as
seen on the NYC subway. The poems 'Are My Sneakers Frumpy,' 'I Got a Butt Plug
and Neti Pot for My Birthday,' 'Cheese Puff Dust Under Your Nails,' 'Tattoos
Remind me of My Relationship to the Holocaust,' and 'The Height of Floss,' had
their first airing. I used that gel with air bubbles to slick my hair back into
the shape of a bike helmet. After May's reading, I was greeted by a lengthy
manologue from an audience member about how he edited his high school literary
magazine (and therefore has a special relationship to poetry). This confession
was just his icebreaker before divulging that May's poem about hand sanitizer,
potato chips, and latex gloves had expanded his idea of what sexual
intercourse even is (186-187).</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Ariel responded to audience questions from respondents organized by <b>Kevin Killian-</b>-<b>Syd Staiti</b>,
<b>Evan Kennedy</b>,<b>Matt Sussman</b>, <b>Zoe Tuck</b>, and <b>yours truly</b>--and others. More readings should
proceed like this I think. Conversation proves so engaging and powerful.<o:p></o:p>
<br />
<br />
Ariel's book is an exploration of "queer art," a thinking-through of naming, categorizing and the work
it does and doesn't do, the legibility it provides or obscures. This work strikes me as a form of
New Narrative criticism, an ethical criticism that engages the location of the writer writing, a writing
that names names, takes risks, reflects and attempts to narrate the text and its emergence.
Exciting stuff!
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-64786570902473341772017-02-20T17:25:00.000-08:002017-02-20T17:25:06.031-08:00Celebratory Reading: Bob Glück and Aaron Shurin <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">What now feels like waaaay back in December, on the 17th--</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">[s</span><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">trange and disturbing how the election and all that has ensued since has changed my sense of time-- a terrible nightmare simultaneously on slo-mo and fast-forward happening right now]</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">--I had the pleasure of attending the Small Press Traffic event celebrating the 70th birthdays and recent essay collections of two of the Bay Area's creative anchors-<span style="color: #b45f06;"><b>Bob G</b></span></span><b><span style="color: #b45f06;">lück</span> </b>and <span style="color: #b45f06;"><b>Aaron Shurin</b></span>.<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;"> </span>Bob's<i> Communal Nude: Collected Essays </i>is recently out from Semiotext(e) and Aaron's <i>The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks</i> from the University of Michigan Press.</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaa-vN5WLUU6bKkeblmR2xn-TDInHzfd5cKqEYNNldS-bQ1VnKHeiNSH8YFjwGtxsV6YPl9P0rTXe33Hj1M0p5FpZzxeccrqAzw4O-vGGl_VW6vzJh5Hvhe2yfoYNRm-Vrt8_6guchGw/s1600/bob+and+aaron+dec+2016+by+kevin+killian.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaa-vN5WLUU6bKkeblmR2xn-TDInHzfd5cKqEYNNldS-bQ1VnKHeiNSH8YFjwGtxsV6YPl9P0rTXe33Hj1M0p5FpZzxeccrqAzw4O-vGGl_VW6vzJh5Hvhe2yfoYNRm-Vrt8_6guchGw/s320/bob+and+aaron+dec+2016+by+kevin+killian.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bob & Aaron, photo courtesy of Kevin Killian</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">So, here is to the critical, creative, capacious thinking that might sustain us, provide pleasure, enable us to be, as Norma Cole put it when I saw her at Mary Burger and Truong Tran's art show some weeks ago--tenacious.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="color: #b45f06;">The first piece is from one of Bob's current projects</span>:</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">excerpt from</span></i><span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">
I Boombox<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Note: this is an excerpt
from a long poem, I Boombox. The poem is
assembled from my misreading’s. In that
sense, it’s an autobiography in which I dream on the page. It’s my version of
the modernist long poem, published in sections and only interrupted by the
author’s death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">My car likes to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Sleep on my favorite<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Chair, the ominous <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And elevated <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Streetcar. Important<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Cheeses, it goes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Right through my <i>Vino.</i>
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Masked and distinguished,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Groaning with <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Indignation, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Escaping to the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Shades below, composer’s <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Love transforms as <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">A dramatic <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Theme, the first to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Flatter a paper <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Flower behind <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Her ear. The corruption <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Here is for buyers. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Orphan nation,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Groaning with <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Indigestion,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Escaping to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The shades below <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">To make skeletons <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Of the physically<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Unfit. Pre-emptive <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Word on Cher, who<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Can be happy<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Only when she’s<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Abstract. What I <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Have been Waiting <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">For, something <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Torn from a photograph<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Ben saw brazenly,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Lending his attraction<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">To the boys across<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The street and pressured<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Them into his <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Book. Eclipsed cultivar <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Of genius departing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">For religions <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Unknown. Said he <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Had been undercut <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">On a red-eye. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Destructive logic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And inspired guess-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Work, the official<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Interrupted sky. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I had just praised<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">His bowels! The first<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Known in something<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Like its eternity <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">From Sicily <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">To Somber. I <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Flashed an impressive<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Smile at pouty<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Four-inch heels. One <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Day neglecting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The next, the writing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Banged out the<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Complexity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Born to a <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Preposterous<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Family, she <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Stood on her head<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Cocked to one side. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Beef encounter, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Her face lived in <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Concentration<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">To unrape me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The water has<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Taken seven <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Lives from me yet<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">We moor on your<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Shoes because contagion <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Is not easy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">A dreamer bests <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Himself again <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And break the back <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Of paper. He <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Had been spreading <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Humans onto <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Pita. In less <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Than a mouth he’d <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Be totally <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Gone, a miserable<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Grocery bag. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Bronze frog that sits <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">On a throne Lillypad, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Called bride because <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">It squeaked with the <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Slightest move. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Christianity<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Is a vice.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Corporate poetry<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Month forms a kind<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Of obstacle <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Discourse. The system <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Eats the continent<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Until all that’s <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Left is the system.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Their politeness <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Is asking for<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">A castration,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Mein hand stroking<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Flint shattered by<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">An art teacher, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">the broken porn <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Night. Redevelop<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The linebreak. I<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Revise only <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">In the cemetery<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">But the reflections <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Of my voice mouths <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Of pre-trial <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Dentation to <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The Kidney Korner, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Mission and <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Indigestible. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">A grin woman<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">With a world view,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">She tolerates <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Little devotion <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And also a <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Campy Impresario.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">His immature <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Camaro was <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Used in ritual<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Dreams. I enjoyed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The Eucharist. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">They planted grapes<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">In better suites.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The building lava-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Lamp parsley<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Prefers stale <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Over substance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Wattlewood trees<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Came up with, “Hi.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">I would have killed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">To spend my life<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">With him. I’m a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Deathalete. The<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Rage of European<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Minimalism, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The scared geometry,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">An iconic bridge<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And its pedophile, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Or a block of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">French lightning laughing <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">As it destroys <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The dirt with a <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Crest and back like <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">An old brick wall. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Sensory Hall <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">In Tokyo.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Drowning vipers<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Go side to side,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Plastic Fantastic<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Foreskin formed a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Celebrated<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Parsnip with Mikhail<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Baryshnikov <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">In which he repeats<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Jeanette’s diary:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">If Time Seems Personal. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Defenestration<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Moon, the great loss <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">They troll
Bloomingdale’s. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The affected <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Elegant tilt <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Of their voices.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Matriarch, Inc.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Shooting up at<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The beach after<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">The artists, dealers,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Critics, and hedge-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Fund guys jerked off<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Last weekend. “Neo <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Raunch’s<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>
next move <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Would feel it tugging <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">At its chin, protesting<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">With nervous <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Tremendousness. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">My force slips and <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">Goes funny.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;"> --Robert Glück<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">And here's an excerpt from <span style="color: #b45f06;">Aaron's essay "Prosody Now." </span>As soon as I heard about Aaron's prosody class at USF, I wish I might have been a student there and could have taken it! The essay is as close as I will get.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">from "Prosody Now"</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">This is a talk with four beginnings.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">For the first we are deep in moonlight, though it is purely textual light, since we are indoors, in the hallway of a Spanish-style house in Los Angeles circa 1965. In that verbal shimmer and glow I've flung myself across the carpeted floor to perform for my mother and brother the soliloquy that will be my tryout piece for <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>, our high school senior play. I am deliriously inside the spell of the spell-casting sonorities, as Oberon prepares Puck to begin his mission of mischief. "I know a bank..." he instructs and I declaimed, drunk on iambs and perfume, "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk roses and with eglantine. There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, lulled in these flowers with dances and delight..."The hallway carpet was a bed of flowers in which I too lay down in moonlight and drowsed...In the end, you may have read elsewhere, I was chosen to play not Oberon but Puck---nu, look at this face, who else?--but having voiced and memorized and rehearsed the Oberon lines, I held them close inside me--shall I call this somatic prosody?--for over thirty years, cherished and foundational...right up to the point that I began to teach a course in Prosody for the graduate writing program at the University of San Francisco.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">The week's topic was "The Line" and in particular the metrical line, with further inflections to come via Pound, Williams, and Projective Verse. By luck or magic I happened to be walking through Golden Gate Park--<i>that</i> flower-strewn bank--and chanced upon the Shakespeare Garden, which I'd passed many times before but never yet entered. There I found, among the living representative plants, the textual flora as Shakespeare had named them, engraved as quotations on a stone wall. And there--of course I immediately searched--I found the coordinates of my beloved forest glade, where Oberon avowed, I read, "I know a bank <b>whereon</b> the wild thyme blows..." Excuse me? Whereon? <i>That's </i>a mistake! Should be, as I'd memorized long ago, "I know a bank<i> where</i> the wild thyme blows," not "whereon the wild thyme blows." Did I have it wrong all these years, was that possible, did I have a somatic prosody malady? I ran home to Google--perhaps then it was Alta Vista--and found there was some scholarly contention as to whether the line should have scanned as perfect iambs--meaning some scribe had dropped the<i> on</i> in <i>whereon</i>--a position adhered to by a number of conservative noodle-heads, including our Golden Gate protectors of the regularity in verse--or whether Shakespeare had intended the broken foot, enacting a small caesura inside the imabic swoon. This is my first beginning. What is prosody? It is not just the difference between noodle-headed regulators and actual poets; it's the study of, or the attention paid to, the shifts of meaning in the balance in the tiny pause of a syllable suspended as a breeze blows or a petal falls. It is the possibility of "where" against the probability of "whereon."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">For the second beginning let me take you to my apartment in San Francisco circa 1981, where a group of poets and enthusiasts have gathered together to form the now somewhat-famous Homer Club--an informal spinoff from the Poetics Program at New College of California--with the lunatic aim of acquiring ancient Greek and reading the whole of the <i>Iliad</i> in the original simultaneously. Many of us knew not a word of Greek, but we had passion for poetic study, and, not incidentally, the ferocious appetite of group captain Robert Duncan to motivate us. And so, foolishly, doggedly, triumphantly, I clopped my way through dictionaries and the crib of multiple translations--aided, I'll say, by a Motown-inflected natural ear for rhythm--to mark the rise and fall and rise of the Homeric hexameters as they roused the troops and swung the sails and heaved the bloody spears on the fields before Troy. We chanted together to hear the aural imprint of the oral epic, in our California accents and tone-deaf attempts at pitch, and we felt the beat of the mythical poets's staff as it, tapped out the points of the six flexible feet. <i>Menin aiede thea, peleiados achilleos...Dum-de-de dum-de-de- dum dum-de-de dum-de-de dum dum.</i> I would learn to call these units dactyls and spondees, but before that I would like awake for hours with the sonic hoofprints of the beat galloping through my head...<i>not t</i>he Greek words, which I'd instantly memorized and recited, but the pure hexameters, <i>before</i> language, <i>before</i> the poem. What is prosody? It is the performance of humility before the great powers of form-in-language. It is the name of the galloping horse tearing through the fields of a restless dawn on its essential mission to gather poetic meaning. It is, as <i>The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics</i> has it, "meaning-given figured and textured shape" (37-39).</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: 18.6667px;">To read about Aaron's other beginnings, check out his book!</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-24275162613866976202017-01-29T18:52:00.002-08:002017-01-30T07:41:04.462-08:00Looking for a reason for hope? Check out Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today!<br />
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Dear All--<br />
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I am very pleased to post here the Call for Papers for the joint UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz conference~~<b><span style="color: #bf9000;">Communal Presence: New Narrative Writing Today</span></b>, to be held Friday October 13 to Sunday October 15, 2017.<br />
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The conference is convened by: Lyn Hejinian, Chris Chen, Daniel Benjamin and Eric Sneathen.<br />
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Details are available below!<br />
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<a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/337877883/Communal-Presence-New-Narrative-Writing-Today-Call-for-Proposals-1#from_embed" style="text-decoration: underline;" title="View Communal Presence - New Narrative Writing Today - Call for Proposals (1) on Scribd">Communal Presence - New Narrative Writing Today - Call for Proposals </a> on Scribd</div>
<iframe class="scribd_iframe_embed" data-aspect-ratio="0.7729220222793488" data-auto-height="false" frameborder="0" height="600" id="doc_4501" scrolling="no" src="https://www.scribd.com/embeds/337877883/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-rJl6CkSife75NoGcFaPG&show_recommendations=true" width="100%"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-43817563395434051262017-01-15T15:54:00.002-08:002017-01-18T17:38:55.892-08:00Frances Richard's George Oppen Memorial Lecture<br />
For some years now, I've tried to make it to The Poetry Center and American Poetry Archive's George Oppen Memorial Lecture. Often they are thrilling, intellectually rigorous, surprising, provocative. This is certainly true for<span style="color: #783f04;"> </span><span style="color: #b45f06;"><b>Frances Richard</b>'s</span> talk <span style="color: #bf9000;"><b>"The Mind's Own Place and Feminine Technologies: George Oppen and Possibilities of the Political"</b></span> delivered on December 17, 2016.<br />
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Frances has generously shared her inspiring talk with us. It was accompanied by a series of images of the Oppens, various publications, and art work. You can also listen to and watch recordings of her talk from The Poetry Center <a href="https://diva.sfsu.edu/collections/poetrycenter/bundles/230830" target="_blank">here</a>. I highly recommend it!<br />
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Here is one of the images from Frances's talk, William Blake's "Satan Exulting over Eve" from 1794.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzdXFtkYDaJ9bL10BZkdNCeqewCvrh7yMmAngcf4aIF5omg_Aq1cx5fKxq50JMtwPNwqOyLzTHYwDwiRIRHSg46sxdEWq8HxyuTCABv9_wXMT1Fba4aXxZw4wASE5bu0-Sd7spgTlpFQ/s1600/blake+satan+exulting+over+eve+1794.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzdXFtkYDaJ9bL10BZkdNCeqewCvrh7yMmAngcf4aIF5omg_Aq1cx5fKxq50JMtwPNwqOyLzTHYwDwiRIRHSg46sxdEWq8HxyuTCABv9_wXMT1Fba4aXxZw4wASE5bu0-Sd7spgTlpFQ/s320/blake+satan+exulting+over+eve+1794.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Blake's "Satan Exulting over Eve" 1794</td></tr>
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<a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/336946570/Oppen-Talk-XPoetics-by-FR-Updated-1-18-17#from_embed" style="text-decoration: underline;" title="View Oppen Talk XPoetics by FR Updated 1-18-17 on Scribd">Oppen Talk by Frances Richard</a> on Scribd</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEite2cDoET75ZNFrMw2x0cr8Fwg-7tjTs3jGNTTlYlLje-GfSNPcFojBGHqeZ28VGe3k1DsgfImuNjEjnn-AUcl9-iysuT6x4CdkEZirLjHqmIKs3A5tq2OfH0x19Wll4-ciXkDPzTS0A/s1600/Frances+Richard+photo2.tif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEite2cDoET75ZNFrMw2x0cr8Fwg-7tjTs3jGNTTlYlLje-GfSNPcFojBGHqeZ28VGe3k1DsgfImuNjEjnn-AUcl9-iysuT6x4CdkEZirLjHqmIKs3A5tq2OfH0x19Wll4-ciXkDPzTS0A/s320/Frances+Richard+photo2.tif" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Frances Richard</td></tr>
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<b><span style="color: #b45f06;">Frances Richard</span></b><span style="color: #565656;"> is the author of </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #565656;">Anarch.</em><span style="color: #565656;"> (Futurepoem, 2012), </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #565656;">The Phonemes</em><span style="color: #565656;"> (Les Figues Press, 2012) and </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #565656;">See Through</em><span style="color: #565656;"> (Four Way Books, 2003), as well as the chapbooks </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #565656;">Shaved Code</em><span style="color: #565656;"> (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008) and </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #565656;">Anarch.</em><span style="color: #565656;"> (Woodland Editions, 2008). She writes frequently about contemporary art and is co-author, with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, of </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; color: #565656;">Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates</em><span style="color: #565656;">” (Cabinet Books, 2005). Her writing on visual art has appeared in <i>Artforum</i>, <i>The Nation</i>, <i>BOMB </i>and exhibition catalogs from the Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum and Independent Curators International, among others. She teaches at California College of the Arts and San Francisco Art Institute.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-92088198051881730742016-12-28T17:12:00.004-08:002017-01-05T15:16:45.178-08:00Dahlen, Gevirtz and Shufran at The Green Arcade <br />
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Quick! Before 2016 is over--there are several noteworthy Bay Area events that occurred in the last half of December. Here is one:<br />
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On Tuesday December 16th, after a long hiatus from readings, I ventured out to the <span style="color: orange;"><b>Green Arcade</b></span>, a San Francisco gem, one of our community-oriented bookstores which hosts numerous literary readings and events, to hear <b><span style="color: orange;">Beverly Dahlen</span></b>, <b><span style="color: orange;">Lauren Shufran</span></b>, and <b><span style="color: orange;">Susan Gevirtz</span></b>. What a good choice I made. In the midst of so much shock and horror and the struggle to figure out what one should be doing in the face of our current and ongoing post-election crisis, there was something powerful about being in a room with others committed to the thoughtful, exploratory, nuanced engagement with language, with thinking, with making.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBa0mqfiYuyPMZ-9yT1vNxfGT7I9swq7yIq7uag8414m43Uq0BkX9Yxy4YHoFeyoQIHhpDF_MsSvZjYR63QYCwV_Pn19Guqg-8aoRh_BZICRCWnjrf9b-YvjxmXP_617B7z3f0cmfIrg/s1600/beverly+dahlen+12%252B13%252B16.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBa0mqfiYuyPMZ-9yT1vNxfGT7I9swq7yIq7uag8414m43Uq0BkX9Yxy4YHoFeyoQIHhpDF_MsSvZjYR63QYCwV_Pn19Guqg-8aoRh_BZICRCWnjrf9b-YvjxmXP_617B7z3f0cmfIrg/s320/beverly+dahlen+12%252B13%252B16.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b>Beverly</b> read from some new work which struck me as painterly, sculptural, lyrical. I love it. Here is one of these new pieces, "The Thrushes of Egypt."<br />
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<a href="https://www.scribd.com/document/335240121/The-Thrushes-of-Egypt-1#from_embed" style="text-decoration: underline;" title="View The Thrushes of Egypt (1) on Scribd">The Thrushes of Egypt </a></div>
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<b>Lauren Shufran</b> then read three recent poems all of which are part of a project that writes in tension with Whitman's <i>Leaves of Grass </i>through contemporary politics, a trip to India, references to Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, the Bhagavad Gita, Richard Spencer's National Policy Institute speech in DC, and more. This work was mesmerizing and I hope we'll see it out in the world here or elsewhere soon!<br />
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Lastly, <b>Susan Gevirtz</b> read from her new book, <i>Hotel abc</i>, just out from Nightboat Books.<br />
Gevirtz closed her reading with this lovely poem, "The Birdhandlers." And thus here on the blog page, we have a bird theme, though the evening included a variety of themes, references, topics.<br />
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Thanks to these three writers for an evening of hope.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-32627093099090579572016-10-04T12:01:00.000-07:002016-10-04T12:01:13.622-07:00Remembering Francesca Rosa<br />
It is with sadness that I learned today of the death of <span style="color: #20124d;"><b>Francesca Rosa</b></span>,<span style="color: white;"> </span>writer, activist, and publisher. I met Francesca in Bob Glück's Saturday house writing workshop in the mid-1990s where she worked tirelessly on her book <i>The Divine Comedy of Carlo Tresca</i>, a book she finished and published with Ithuriel's Spear in 2012. Francesca was instrumental in bringing my book <i>Dear Reader</i> into the world.<br />
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In honor of Francesca, I am reprising an interview I did with her in January of 2009--how swiftly time escapes us.<br />
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<a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2009/01/from-angels-of-light-to-new-narrative.html" target="_blank">Francesca Rosa: From The Angels of Light to New Narrative and Labor Activism</a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge5vpuuimf5j5bxVt6f_cGkj9ZHn7nOhqej2JCarZiRb0K6TwYZDWLJp6h736iaeUkW9P7eIS1RcUe9oFnDD1UwMwqu88F3Ywd0nIzFfQskmgC5BG-4Wg07OEIAm1LgJqAR5m9xfec8w/s1600/francesca.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge5vpuuimf5j5bxVt6f_cGkj9ZHn7nOhqej2JCarZiRb0K6TwYZDWLJp6h736iaeUkW9P7eIS1RcUe9oFnDD1UwMwqu88F3Ywd0nIzFfQskmgC5BG-4Wg07OEIAm1LgJqAR5m9xfec8w/s1600/francesca.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-46185236401200648372016-06-16T13:36:00.003-07:002016-06-16T13:36:29.427-07:00Barbara Jane Reyes and Robin Tremblay-McGaw Reading at the San Francisco Public Library<br />
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Back in mid-May I read in the <i>Local Poets Series </i>at the San Francisco Public Library in the Civic Center with Barbara Jane Reyes and Eleni Stecopoulos.<br />
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A portion of the event was recorded. Eleni elected not to be recorded, but here is an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67ttUnDs8pM" target="_blank">an excerpt of Barbara </a>reading and one from<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7SvnO0ov4E" target="_blank"> me.</a><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-62512649384170924032016-03-14T12:13:00.001-07:002016-03-14T12:24:04.029-07:00Conference Report: PhiloSOPHIA’s Poetry, Politics & Feminist Theory <br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">On <a href="http://www.philosophiafeministsociety.com/program/">PhiloSOPHIA’s Poetry, Politics and Feminist Theory Conference</a> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Hosted by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the
University of Colorado at Denver</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br />Organized by Julie Carr and Sarah Tyson<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">March 9-12, 2016</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">What a pleasure it was to be part of this conference
bringing together scholars and writers from the worlds of philosophy, poetry,
feminist theory, and literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
conference offered a rich set of readings, talks, panels, workshops and a
closing dance party.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">On Thursday evening <strong><span style="color: #0c343d;">Lisa Robertson</span></strong> and <span style="color: #0c343d;"><strong>Cathy Park Hong</strong></span> read
in Boulder, sadly an event I missed though both Lisa and Cathy, along with
<strong><span style="color: #0c343d;">Laura Moriarty</span></strong>, <strong><span style="color: #0c343d;">Dawn Lundy Martin</span></strong> and <strong><span style="color: #0c343d;">Lyn Hejinian</span></strong> read Saturday night at
CounterPath Gallery in Denver and I had a chance to hear them then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People read from old and new work,
mesmerizing the audience. Then, the chairs were moved and the music and our
bodies thrummed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Leading up to this grand finale, there were a host of
panels. On Friday I attended one that was supposed to include Mary Hickman presenting
“‘Thigh to thigh’: Trans-Life and the Arena in Anne Carson’s ‘Antigo-Nick’ and
the Paintings of Jenny Saville,” though Mary’s plane was delayed, leaving Bryan
Kimoto from the University of Memphis to fly solo. And fly Bryan did! Thrillingly
unfolding “Trans* Poetics, Erotic Embodiment, and Self-Love: A Response to
Talia Bettcher’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘When Selves Have Sex,’”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bryan’s talk was a critical engagement with
Bettcher’s piece (which I haven’t read but am eager to) and traversed a number
of arenas including, erotic structuralism, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Gabe
Moses’s poem “<a href="http://wildgender.com/queer-poetics-how-to-make-love-to-a-trans-person/2401" target="_blank">How to Make Love to a Trans Person,”</a> </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">and more. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Friday afternoon I
was part of a collaborative panel organized by Karen Lepri and Andrea Quaid
which also included Madhu Kaza, Margaret Rhee, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For our panel, “Alarming Logics: Feminist
Poetics as Discursive/Pedagogic Intervention”: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">We return to Rosmarie Waldrop’s
“Alarms and Excursions,” published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy</i> (1990).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We ask: how does the form of Waldrop’s essay
invite us to reframe our approach to the thesis-based college essay that we
teach as scholars and poets working in academia. Waldrop’s form occasions a
feminist critique of ensconced methodologies based in rationalism, logic,
evidence, and single-stance argumentation (Lepri & Quaid).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Based on Waldrop’s essay, we provided panel attendees with
note-cards with the headings “alarm,”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“excursion,” “thesis,” and “counter-alarm,” and invited participants to
write on these note-cards and to interrupt our performance with their own
alarms, excursions, theses. At various points, we moved around the room,
improvising with our bodies in the space. This was one of the most enjoyable
and engaging presentations I’ve ever participated in. People seemed to take to
it and entered into the conversation while it was happening. Their
contributions added to the fabric of our work, deepening it. It was exciting and
generative.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Later that afternoon Lyn Hejinian gave a wonderfully
absorbing plenary talk entitled “The Intimate Excess of Philosophy: Dear Sophie,”
in which she discussed the epistolary in the work of Margaret Cavendish and
Virginia Woolf. Cavendish’s letters are a philosophic project while Woolf’s,
interestingly, are not. Lyn pointed out that Woolf uses her diaries to work out
intellectual and literary concerns but her letters are a kind of phenomenology
of the sociability of everyday life. Hejinian noted that Woolf is interested in
not only the stuff of life but also the life of stuff. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Saturday morning I speed read through three papers—Ella
Longpre’s “The Wanting of Disaster: A New Erotics of Writing and Performance”; <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Katherine Davies’ “The Poetry of Gender; Anne
Carson, Sound, and Language”; and Beata Stawarska’s “Language as Poeisis,
Linguistic Productivity in Kristeva and Saussure,” so I could attend this
workshop on poetry and philosophy moderated by Lisa Robertson. Rather than read
through their conference papers, these writers presented a brief sketch of
their work and Lisa established some contextualizing and initial observations and comments. Robertson noted the
historical tension between poetry and philosophy, the current global state of
crisis around borders, refugees, and race, and then urged us to nuance and keep
complex some of the terms that get taken for granted or remain uninterrogated—the
political, the social, eros.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As Lisa parsed the three papers, I scribbled this:</span></div>
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<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-image: none; border: currentColor; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt: 0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-yfti-tbllook: 1184;">
<tbody>
<tr style="mso-yfti-firstrow: yes; mso-yfti-irow: 0;">
<td style="background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 1pt solid windowtext; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 119.7pt;" valign="top" width="160"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Ella
Longpre</span></div>
</td>
<td style="background-color: transparent; border-color: windowtext windowtext windowtext rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: none; border-style: solid solid solid none; border-width: 1pt 1pt 1pt 0px; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 119.7pt;" valign="top" width="160"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
</td>
<td style="background-color: transparent; border-color: windowtext windowtext windowtext rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: none; border-style: solid solid solid none; border-width: 1pt 1pt 1pt 0px; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 119.7pt;" valign="top" width="160"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Beata
Stawarska</span></div>
</td>
<td style="background-color: transparent; border-color: windowtext windowtext windowtext rgb(0, 0, 0); border-image: none; border-style: solid solid solid none; border-width: 1pt 1pt 1pt 0px; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-left-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 119.7pt;" valign="top" width="160"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Katherine
Davies</span></div>
</td>
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<tr style="mso-yfti-irow: 1; mso-yfti-lastrow: yes;">
<td style="background-color: transparent; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0) windowtext windowtext; border-image: none; border-style: none solid solid; border-width: 0px 1pt 1pt; mso-border-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; mso-border-top-alt: solid windowtext .5pt; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 119.7pt;" valign="top" width="160"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Disaster</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Performance</span></div>
</td>
<td style="background-color: transparent; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: 0px 1pt 1pt 0px; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 119.7pt;" valign="top" width="160"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>E</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>R</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>O</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>T</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>I</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>C</strong></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>D</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>E</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>S</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>I</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>R</strong></span></span></div>
<span style="color: #660000;"><strong>
</strong></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #660000;"><strong>E</strong></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="ES-US" style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">S P A C E/</span></div>
<h4 style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">S P A C I A L</span></h4>
</td>
<td style="background-color: transparent; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: 0px 1pt 1pt 0px; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 119.7pt;" valign="top" width="160"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Revolt</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Negativity</span></div>
</td>
<td style="background-color: transparent; border-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); border-style: none solid solid none; border-width: 0px 1pt 1pt 0px; padding: 0in 5.4pt; width: 119.7pt;" valign="top" width="160"><div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Ololyga</span></i></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Grief</span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Pun</span></div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">There was a rich conversation during this panel which it is
impossible to render effectively, but I will say Stawarska’s paper generated
interest around a new understanding of Saussure’s work based on materials from
his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nachlass, </i>“some of them recently
discovered and published in Writings in General Linguistics (2006)”
(Stawarska 1). Based on these materials, this version of Saussure attests to
the importance of speakers, asserting, “a speaking collectivity [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">masse parlante</i>] is part of the ‘very definition’ of language itself”
(Saussure qtd in Stawarska 5). Stawarska went on to explore Kristeva’s work and to argue that "linguistic productivity....offers a strategy of
resistance and revolt against normalization within individual and social life" (2). </span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Longpre’s interest in the disaster and diagrammatic
representations of the circuitry of erotics and disaster was thought-provoking
as was Katherine Davies’ fascinating thinking about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sophrosyne</i> (Greek virtue of self-control), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">logos</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ololyga</i> “a
ritual shout peculiar to females. It is a high pitched piercing cry uttered at
certain climactic moments in ritual practice [e.g., at the moment when a
victim’s throat is slashed during sacrifice] or at climactic moments in real
life [e.g., at the birth of a child] and also a common feature of women’s
festivals” (Carson qtd in Davies).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Later Saturday afternoon another plenary session included
talks by Dawn Lundy Martin, Elena Ruiz, and Rachel Jones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dawn’s awesome talk was entitled “Discomfort
as Feminist Poetic: 7 Short Lectures.” In it she proposed, via Kathleen Fraser,
a “laboratory,” a reaching toward “ragged bits” as she thought about race,
discomfort, silence on the internet, the accident and failure as swerves which,
with respect to Kara Walker’s 2014 Domino Sugar Factory installation, “A
Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” reveal violence. Lundy Martin proposed mobilizing discomfort rather than silence and began to ask what might be
possible regarding re-conceptualizing feminist poetics outside of the sphere of
the female body; she also opened up the possibility of re-consideration of the term "feminist."</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Rachel Jones’s talk, “The Relational Poetics of Barbara
Köhler: Weaving a Grammar of Singularity, Solidarity and Difference” was
engaging. She presented the work of Köhler, a German writer who reworks the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Odyssey </i>and whose writing mobilizes some
interesting properties of German grammar which make it possible to read “sie”
as [she-they-you].</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Last but not least, Elena Ruiz presented a talk “The
Aesthetics of Resistance: Poetic Language, Trauma and Feminist Narratives of
Selfhood.” Her sharp and incisive paper focused on Latin America,
state-sponsored violence, the challenges of history and memory in a totalitarian
state and the problematic of European philosophical concepts <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and methodological strategies emerging out of
them as a basis for praxis in Latin America. She reminded us of the erasure of
Mesoamerican scripts, of the violence of the alphabet, of the fact that when
there are more than 30,000 people disappeared, there is no time for syntax,
that European ontology and epistemology articulates a historical horizon of
continuity, continues to construe universality and presumes a baseline
stability of experience. Thus, disciplinary paradigms emerge out of, reflect,
and re-enact various violences and oppressions.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In short, I attended just a few of many provocative and
wide-ranging panels and workshops that left us with a lot to think and write
about and much to reflect on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">One challenge that emerges out of this conference is
thinking about how we work with materials from multiple disciplines. Sometimes
philosophy uses poetry as an illustration, seeming to simplify what poetry and
the poetic is or can be and what its work and other possibilities are. I am
sure philosophers probably find the use of philosophy by poets and others to be
similarly odd angled. I don’t think there are rules for how one can make use of
materials across disciplines and life worlds, but it is certainly worth
endeavoring to continually seek the complex and nuanced for the most capacious,
or to use a Lisa Robertson term—the most commodious--investigations; simultaneously, as Elena Ruiz argues, we need to consider the historical, political, and ideological foundations of the concepts and practices we use and engage.</span></div>
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<div style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As always, these reports
are my renderings of presentations based on scanty notes. Of course, for the
real thing, you will want to contact these writers and/or look for the
publication of these papers elsewhere. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-60916933534495322642015-12-07T16:35:00.000-08:002016-06-16T14:07:46.846-07:00KAREN GREEN and CLAUDIA RANKINE <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<h4>
S P A C E S O F D I S C O M F O R T</h4>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZorqNdtfH5qahYVeMKBtEgrHcWlxuA2541lsjY4bq1uDDUpggkpbXfqqubXzdX2Qk_HUu-_r1BJ6kevFQp4a5aOJOcT5BKpfaqrFKIlZXZ8ajanAg8mv7hzyOm61t5tUE_dfD0UyXEQ/s1600/tumblr_inline_ngcdp0Iq481rglck1.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZorqNdtfH5qahYVeMKBtEgrHcWlxuA2541lsjY4bq1uDDUpggkpbXfqqubXzdX2Qk_HUu-_r1BJ6kevFQp4a5aOJOcT5BKpfaqrFKIlZXZ8ajanAg8mv7hzyOm61t5tUE_dfD0UyXEQ/s200/tumblr_inline_ngcdp0Iq481rglck1.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="irc_su" dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Public Lynching </span><br />
<span class="irc_su" dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">August 30, 1930. </span><br />
<span class="irc_su" dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">From the Hulton Archives. </span><br />
<span class="irc_su" dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">Courtesy Getty Images (Image alteration with permission: John Lucas)from <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i></span></td></tr>
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On not just any Sunday, but yesterday, the 6th of December, California College of the Art's Timken Hall was filled beyond capacity. Oversold. <br />
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<span style="color: #351c75;"><span style="color: black;">After being introduced by CCA MFA student Rachel Kass</span>, Karen Green,</span> whose recent book <i>Bough Down</i> has garnered many accolades, including winner of <i>The Believer</i> Poetry Award 2013, sat cross-legged on a plastic chair on stage and read, beginning with this:<br />
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<i><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;">The
doctor wears his pink shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I see his flaws clearly
before he gives me the shot which will put me to sleep until after the
holidays. He is making a mercy call, and the needle is part of my invention.
Pink is a new color I am seeing.</span></span></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br /></i>
<i><span style="color: #351c75;">
</span></i><br />
<i><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;">The
Googled pills are all different colors.</span></span></i><br />
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<i><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br /></i>
<i><span style="color: #351c75;">
</span></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;">I
don’t know how not to imagine submission, even after all this. Someone says I
need to be <span style="font-family: "univers";">contained</span> but I
think he means <span style="font-family: "univers";">constrained</span>. I
let him take away my sight and my hearing while he applies pressure in another
language. He is very kind about assessing my needs, but there is a strident
protestor type inside who recoils and starts assembling contempt and mirrors.</span></span></i><br />
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<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span><br />
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<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixCYoTi_XK7buxQY62ZkC4ukmNtPGL4cOA1jgm5YgSqR3cOQjsdmrZtqAkloABXQi6khcty0HEN15-fwyXGMwxZ-_1T4uNTL6z1qSa67L3m93buIFZidopgSvX-5s_ah7KhwQjmXb1bg/s1600/karen+green+image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="187" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixCYoTi_XK7buxQY62ZkC4ukmNtPGL4cOA1jgm5YgSqR3cOQjsdmrZtqAkloABXQi6khcty0HEN15-fwyXGMwxZ-_1T4uNTL6z1qSa67L3m93buIFZidopgSvX-5s_ah7KhwQjmXb1bg/s320/karen+green+image.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="color: black;">
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<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span><br />
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<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span style="color: black;"><i><span style="color: black;"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;">What
dreams the support guys have:<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
</span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;">Their
sensible shoes wear out, they have the code blues, patients eat their own
fingers down to the first knuckle; there are contraptions to keep hands down,
mouths shut. They dream of consequences. They have their McSanctuaries to dream
in, and yet. Faux-science is replaced with newer, quieter faux-science. The
machines chirp like fledglings, they don’t beep. Some souls are so lost they
make their own privacy, they don’t need walls. The support guys are trained to
say, Why do you ask? They are trained to know when to train a patient to say,
Why do you ask. In their dreams they forget how to treat people, they forget
how to work the machinery, how to deflect, manipulate and regurgitate
accidents, they kiss their patients on the gurney while it rolls away, they run
in slow motion to catch up, there is nudity under the lab coat, they beg for
forgiveness in tongues. They remove the wrong eye, the one that sees.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
</i></span><br />
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;">The
movers say it is fire season, they’re used to it. Acres are burning and the
concierge comments on the beauty of the sunset, the eye shadow palette of the
apocalypse. I took ashes to the hotel in a hatbox. I left the murder of crows
rotating from the studio ceiling, I left too many holes in the wall. The
support guys have replaced the cells in my brother. I’m coming, wait for me.
I’m sorry I missed your call. I have to make a stop to drop off paperwork. I
cut my hand and the papers are bloody. I tell the life insurance guy, It’s not
what you think.</span></span></span></span></o:p></span></span><br />
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<i><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;"><o:p><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="color: #351c75;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></o:p></span></span></i><span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;">
<span style="color: black;">
</span></span> <span style="color: black;">Green's text is punctuated by her collages like the one above. She didn't include images of these at the reading, but I wish she would have, particularly since both Green and Rankine's books--though in different fashions--are engaged with text and images. You can see more of Green's poem <a href="http://bombmagazine.org/article/6943/">here at BOMB magazine.</a> About Green's book in the <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i> <span style="color: #134f5c;"><b>Maggie Nelson</b></span> has written:</span><br />
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<i><span style="color: #0c343d;">Karen Green’s new — and incredibly, her first — book Bough Down, from Siglio Press, is an astonishment. It is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read. The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband . . . and its harrowing aftermath for Green. The book feels like an instant classic, but without any of the aggrandizement that can attend such a thing. Instead it is suffused throughout with the dissonant, private richness of the minor, while also managing to be a major achievement. </span></i><br />
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN" style="color: black; font-family: "univers"; mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span>
I am looking forward to reading more of Karen's book.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTyk0YC01IYVlrz1ORz1TCi5cQHjW_ffGHeA29erbMRAzEXHLTDVNhajTBiJ3PZ8QPpeDyLcDhcOUlgO2LCVn02KNWDPwEEglb2JcduT-g6cwi3Wun_e83SPOq_CgkuqVsK5k43u71Hw/s1600/Hammons-In-the-Hood-via-New-Museum-1993-Show.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTyk0YC01IYVlrz1ORz1TCi5cQHjW_ffGHeA29erbMRAzEXHLTDVNhajTBiJ3PZ8QPpeDyLcDhcOUlgO2LCVn02KNWDPwEEglb2JcduT-g6cwi3Wun_e83SPOq_CgkuqVsK5k43u71Hw/s200/Hammons-In-the-Hood-via-New-Museum-1993-Show.jpg" width="162" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"In the Hood"</td></tr>
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After Karen, CCA MFA student Melissa Josephine Ramos introduced<span style="color: #4c1130;"> <b>Claudia Rankine</b></span>. On-screen, Rankine projected images from her book <i>Citizen: An American Lyric, </i>beginning with David Hammons' "In the Hood," made in 1993 after the LAPD beating of Rodney King; this image graces the cover of <i>Citizen</i>.<br />
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She also showed us a photograph of Hammons in New York City as he sold snowballs, which you cold hold and then "feel whiteness melt in your hands."<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYHFJCtrzV8Dt3TtKkx5xNPCbQz-qo48keDj8qKp7CFdBYRgI-WmMisbtYPOFCihnFMt_IrbfAa9C1hrtZeUvglxofhRQhm5DulZ1WtInC4tfEY1MdRo7uCup7t_MJ3VvfZgPIGhCycQ/s1600/hammons_yaard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhYHFJCtrzV8Dt3TtKkx5xNPCbQz-qo48keDj8qKp7CFdBYRgI-WmMisbtYPOFCihnFMt_IrbfAa9C1hrtZeUvglxofhRQhm5DulZ1WtInC4tfEY1MdRo7uCup7t_MJ3VvfZgPIGhCycQ/s200/hammons_yaard.jpg" width="137" /></a></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">David Hammons</td></tr>
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Opening her reading with the statement that "<i>Citizen</i> came to me through community," Rankine explained how she asked numerous friends to recount an experience when each was doing something ordinary and suddenly something was said that reduced the person to his/her/their race, and racism entered the discourse.<br />
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<span style="color: black;">Reading from the first part of <i>Citizen</i>, comprised of some 12 separate sections and anecdotes,</span><b> Rankine</b> began with:<br />
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<i><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #4c1130;">When you are alone and too tired
even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked
among pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty.
Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the window the low, gray ceiling seems
approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds
and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<i><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #4c1130;">The route is often associative. You
smell good. You are twelve attending Sts. Philip and James School on White
Plains Road and the girl sitting in the seat behind asks you to lean to the
right during exams so she can copy what you have written. Sister Evelyn is in
the habit of taping the 100s and the failing grades to the coat closet doors.
The girl is Catholic with waist-length brown hair. You can’t remember her name:
Mary? Catherine?<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #4c1130;">You never really speak except for
the time she makes her request and later when she tells you you smell good and
have features more like a white person. You assume she thinks she is thanking
you for letting her cheat and feels better cheating from an almost white
person.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></i></div>
<i><br /></i>
<i><span style="background-color: #f3f3f3;">
</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="color: #4c1130;">Sister Evelyn never figures out your
arrangement perhaps because you never turn around to copy Mary Catherine’s
answers. Sister Evelyn must think these two girls think a lot alike or she
cares less about cheating and more about humiliation or she never actually saw
you sitting there (5-6).</span></span></i></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="background-color: white;">Displaying a number of other images from her book, Claudia talked about where in the book they appear and what she was interested in doing with them. Among these were Michael<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> </span>David Murphy's "Jim Crow Rd," a screen shot from Hennessy Youngman's ART THOUGHTZ: How to be a Successful Black Artist," photos of Caroline Wozniacki imitating Serena Williams, and from the Hulton Archives at the Getty Museum,<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> the ph<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">otograph, </span></span>"Public Lynching" from August 1930 (pictured above), and others. About the latter image, Rankine said that the Getty initially was somewhat reluctant to let her use it but once permission was granted and Rankine asked to alter the image, to remove the hanging bodies, they were somewhat relieved since one of their concerns had been that the image would be an incitement to re-enactment. Rankine noted that she is interested in the crowd of onlookers, the spectators, since "they are us," pointing out that violence happens because we let it and because we benefit from it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="background-color: white;">Rankine read from a variety of sections of <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">her</span> book and then, because she needed to catch an early plane, she left us to watch a draft of a short film she is working on with her husband John Lucas; the piece is a meditation and deconstruction/interrogation of beauty as whiteness, by way of, among other things, various advertisements for skin lightening products from a diverse array of countries. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="background-color: white;">Claudia Rankine has a deep and pleasing reading voice and I enjoyed hearing her read and discuss her work and its relationship to the images in her text. I included the first section of <i>Citizen</i> in my Art Culture and Social Justice class at Santa Clara University this fall and I've been thrilled to be working with this text, witnessing how it engages students, particularly as we've been in conversation about how Rankine's text works, how it uses form--not just its complex deployment of pronouns, shifters that engage and implicate the reader, but also, in this first section, its attention to setting, to the diverse array of public and private, urban and suburban spaces in which racism is enacted. We noticed how victims and bystanders, perpetrators and witnesses in these scenarios are inescapably bound together in these scenes that reveal each of us is playing a part. These poems, in other words, make textual and perform in their formal architectures, that crowd beneath the tree in 1930. Only it is 2015 and there are crowds on subways, in Starbucks, in front of storefronts in Ferguson, in the streets, and in these crowds <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">people of color are <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">the </span>narrat<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">ors</span></span>. <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">Sometimes the crowd is a crowd of two.</span> These are crowds that are doing a variety of things and are comprised of a variety of people--sometimes standing by, sometimes protesting, sometimes unaware, sometimes speaking and not hearing and sometimes hearing and pretending not to have spoken. Claudia Rankine makes legible and audible spaces of discomfort, because, as she said yesterday in Timken Hall, the space of discomfort is a more civil space, maybe she said more civic space, than what we've been living in--that space that pretends we are a post-racial society, that space in which white imagination projects any number of fantasies onto the black subject become once again, object<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">;</span> that space in which, as one of the pieces and narrators in <i>Citizen</i> frames it: "Americans battle between the 'historical self' and the 'self self'" (14).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="background-color: white;">Other xpoetics posts regarding <i>Citizen</i> include:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2014/12/in-october-emily-abendroth-and-i-were.html"><span style="background-color: white;">Claudia Rankine's <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i></span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2015/06/notes-fences-stop-signs-shifters-or.html"><span style="background-color: white;">Notes: Fences, Stop Signs, Shifters, or the Conditions of Community</span></a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-39841808722096687642015-11-12T15:50:00.003-08:002015-11-13T12:17:10.409-08:00The Instead--Emily Abendroth and Miranda Melllis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<b>Emily Abendroth</b> and <b>Miranda Mellis</b> in the California Native Garden </div>
at the Arboretum in San Francisco hosted by the Carville Annex<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEwaz64uanC-8mYOIK18vJHS6IxxoJo9vtxEQ-vO9zV8Y4WdezlaDD1hTVmJJ90tV9rw4p1mCZeBajVDb-f4-dK3nO8rxPbnOao0CwyYXlc-ZYzkCV8j1OPYTuSmEBJBk3nO-mlGSbiw/s1600/em+and+miranda+nov+1+calif+natives+arboretum+sf+2015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEwaz64uanC-8mYOIK18vJHS6IxxoJo9vtxEQ-vO9zV8Y4WdezlaDD1hTVmJJ90tV9rw4p1mCZeBajVDb-f4-dK3nO8rxPbnOao0CwyYXlc-ZYzkCV8j1OPYTuSmEBJBk3nO-mlGSbiw/s320/em+and+miranda+nov+1+calif+natives+arboretum+sf+2015.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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On Sunday November 1st, I spent the afternoon sitting in a stone circle in the Arboretum basking in the pleasure of hearing <b>Diana Block</b> read from her new novel <i>Clandestine Occupations</i>, a book built around 6 female narrators, all involved in social justice advocacy, and <b>Emily Abendroth</b> and <b>Miranda Mellis</b> read from their ongoing exchange or correspondence project--<i>The Instead--</i>due out from Carville Annex Press in the spring<i>. </i>They've described it below. <br />
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But first, I can tell you that their constraints and considerable intellectual and creative powers/prowess have produced a beautiful, whip-smart piece that traces thought's and advocacy's engagement in the daily; the piece explores, among many other things, the overlap of sod and fracking and prison sites, Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," workout boot camp, Brian Massumi, and Gregory Bateson on play, authority and discomfort in pedagogies, shifts/splices/changes. <br />
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Miranda's close-reading of Lamar's video and Emily's reading of boot camp pedagogy through the bridge of Lamar's song blasting in the studio was particularly pleasing and densely layered. These close-readings reminded me of the many communal readings performed by the band in the novels comprising the ongoing series <i>From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate</i> by Nate Mackey. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bedouin
Hornbook</i>, for example, the band is in San Francisco when they come across
some graffiti on a boarded-up storefront. It reads: “‘Mr. Slick and Mister
Brother are one of the two most baddest dude in town, and Sutter Street’” (26).
Each band member interprets the message differently. Their
conversation, a performative debate or critical dozens if you will, occurs
before a crowd, one that participates with laughter and critique of their own. <br />
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To the pleasures of reading--on our own and with others, in humor and horror, criticality and hope--as provided to us by Emily and Miranda!<br />
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<span style="color: #134f5c;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">The
Instead [<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">24/48/72/96/120]</span></span></i></b><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> is a record of a
series of five email dialogues conducted during prearranged, bracketed time
periods between two time zones, states, years, and people: Emily Abendroth
& Miranda Mellis. The first dialogue unfolded over <b>24</b> hours between
11/18/14</span>–</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">11/19/14; the second over <b>48</b> hours between 12/29/14</span>–</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">12/30/14; the third
over <b>72</b> hours between 4/11/15</span>–</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">4/13/15; the fourth over <b>96</b>
hours between 6/27/15</span>–</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">6/30/15; and the fifth over <b>120</b> hours
between 9/1/15</span>–</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">9/5/15. The dialogues are punctuated by pauses during which each
person went to work, or off the grid, or to sleep or . . . to wake up/return to
new thoughts, notes, and questions.</span></i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #134f5c;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">The selection that follows below is a
short excerpt from Emily and Miranda</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s second<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">
48</b> hour dialogue session. <o:p></o:p></span></i></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">EA:</span></b><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> I think it</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s interesting to
think about how writing or other art practices might at the very least endeavor
to <i>de-mask</i> relations even if they can</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">t, all on their lonesome, change them.
In other words, we might not be able to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">write</i>
</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">the undoing of
prisons</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> or </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">the dissolution of militarized borders</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> but we can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">use
</i>our writing to unleash questions and activate inquiries that might assist
in bringing the </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">necessity</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> or </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">efficacy</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> of said systems into such a deep position of
suspicion or destabilization that the writing participates in collectively
motivating or propelling acts that push us closer toward that undoing. This is
the work that language can potentially do when it refuses to demurely accept
the naturalized or the normative protocols of its era</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s status quos. </span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">For
instance, what happens when we replace the phrase </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">police violence</span>”
– <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">which is
critically at the forefront of so many people</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s minds right now </span>– <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">with the phrase </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">the violence of
policing</span>”<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">?
A lot happens actually! Suddenly we</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">re training our eyes and minds to look, not for
a few individuals who exhibit exaggerated acts of aggression within an
otherwise functional system but, at a system whose very existence is predicated
on the violent enforcement of restrictive codes of behavior meant to </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">protect</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">the property,
lifestyles, wealth, and political ideology of a very specific segment of the
population only (along very predictable </span>– <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">and historical! </span>– <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">race, class, and
gender lines).</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">What
about when we speak not of </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">prison violence</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">but instead </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">the violence of
prisons</span>”<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">?
Not about </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">gender
violence</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">but
</span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">the
violence of gender</span>”<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">? Again, I think a lot of important work can potentially take place
in those re-framings. Perhaps even exactly the kind of labor that your vision
of the archer conjures in aiming their arrow at a specific point where the
intersectionality of various systems of oppressions is made legible and the
depth of the </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">reverse engineering</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">required reveals itself. </span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">I
think the word </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">decarceration</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">is and can be powerful in that way and I</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">m glad whenever I
hear that it successfully strikes as such to others</span>’ <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">ears. When the
Philadelphia-based group that I work and organize with, Decarcerate PA<a href="file:///C:/Users/Robin/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/IE/J2THDD0J/Potential%20Excerpt%20for%20XPoetics.docx" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="border: currentColor; color: black; font-family: "palatino"; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Perpetua; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Perpetua; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>,
first named itself several years ago, we were excited to have generated a moniker
that was also a verb/an action, embodying a demand for the reorientation we
were seeking and not just a description of the problem we were confronting. But
while I definitely agree that prisons are a striking locus point for viewing
the intrinsic violence, disequilibrium, neglect/abuse, and deeply rooted
supremacist/imperialist tendencies of the nation as a whole in an amplified
state, I think that folks who are closely and critically examining the
relations at play in schooling, health care, gender inequality, transphobia and
militarism, etc. are also doing the work of mapping many of these same dynamics
and intersectionalities. I think that maybe the task for each of us, in our
various counter-power organizing efforts, is to turn what we</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">re working on into
a </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">keystone</span>”
<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">of that kind
(whatever its focus), so that it becomes a vehicle of transport for drawing
connections to other people and struggles and disparities, rather than one that
isolates (y)our organization from others or puts it in a position of fighting
for its unique priority on a scale or ladder of issues that are actually all
deeply linked. </span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">I</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">m curious if you think of that kind of
intersectional mapping work as something that fiction can also do? I certainly
think of your fiction as often achieving or making room for something like that
</span>– <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">a
kind of intricate tracing of complex links and dense connections that in other
forums or arenas sometimes get designated as having to be ignored or left
behind because it all gets </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">too messy</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">or </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">too hard</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">
to articulate in the form of a single slogan or request/demand. And I
definitely think I frequently go to poetry or to a writing practice in general
with the personal need to open up that kind of space, whether or not I actually
succeed each time in creating it. A space to not have </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">immediate</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">
or </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">correct</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> answers, a space to rest in and wrestle with
indeterminacy. In that vein, I wanted to offer this other passage, also from
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, in their essay </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">Politics Surrounded</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">: </span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">In the clear, critical light of day, illusory
administrators whisper of our need for institutions and all institutions are
political, and all politics is correctional, so it seems we need correctional
institutions in the common, settling us, correcting us. But we won</span>’</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">t stand corrected.
Moreover, incorrect as we are there</span>’</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s nothing wrong with us. We don</span>’</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">t want to be
correct and we won</span>’</i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">t be corrected. Politics proposes to make us better, but we were good
already in the mutual debt that can never be made good. We owe it to each other
to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our
own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other
everything.</span></i><i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family: Palatino;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">I
love how </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">the
indeterminate</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">and </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">the everything</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">(at least in terms of what</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s of consequence) become parallel terms in this
closing, each understood as something that we owe one another, coupled with an
obligation to </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">give the lie to</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">institutions and cry wolf on the weak to non-existent forms of
self-determination that we</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">re consistently bribed with as compensation for our obedience. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">It</span>’<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s interesting to
consider that one of the important spaces/uses of fiction or poetry might not
be so much to invent, but rather to try to pull the wool off of current </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">conjured</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">or </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">fabricated</span>” <span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">representations of
the daily real politic. And that this effort to comprehend those forces of the
mundane, both banal and fantastical and frequently monstrous, might require
powers of mind that we</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">ve been explicitly
encouraged to leave uncultivated or underdeveloped. The novelist/essayist </span><span style="border: currentColor; font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="border: currentColor;">Ngũgĩ wa</span></span><span style="border: currentColor; font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="border: currentColor;">
Thiong’</span></span><span style="border: currentColor; font-family: "palatino"; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="border: currentColor;">o </span></span><span style="font-family: "palatino";">has</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> written: </span>“<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">I most seem to understand the inner
logic of social processes when I am deep inside imaginative territory.</span>” </div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">Where
do imaginative territory and the inner logic of social processes come into
contact as you are writing or conceiving of a written piece? Or, to take it out
of the realm of writing alone, when you are making breakfast or brushing your
teeth or teaching?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">MM: </span></b><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">The inner logic of social processes
which are misogynist and ageist will tell me when I am brushing my teeth to
lament their condition. Sure: my teeth are not new. They bear the signs of the
passing of time! And various other signs. Once my front tooth was knocked out.
A friend picked it up. At the emergency room, the attending physician asked if
anyone had the tooth. My friend held it up. This doctor, whose hair went down
to her waist, put that tooth back in. It didn</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">t
re-root</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">–</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">it was dead,
unplugged from my nervous system</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">–</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">but it has dwelt,
if not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lived</i> in my mouth ever since,
magically holding up, a little tomb, and its discoloration tells the story of
the sudden flight it took! I can laugh now</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">–</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">that
happened when I was sixteen. It was a waking nightmare at that age of intense
facial self-consciousness. One is so out of control when it comes to the face.
People socialized as female are taught to obsessively try to control what
others face when they face our face. There</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s
that trope of the dementedly made-up female face, exaggerated eye make-up,
smeared lipstick, when the face becomes abject, pleading for a rest from all
this impression-control. Some kind of long-term experiment is being performed
on how much mental space people will devote to trying to control something that
(a) can</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">t ultimately be
controlled and (b) doesn</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">t matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">In J.M. Coetzee</span><span style="font-family: "arial unicode ms" , "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">s novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Elizabeth Costello</i> there is a scene in
which the main protagonist analyzes an animal experiment such that it becomes
an exemplary parable of the stupidity of reductivism, as well as the damage
done when the unexamined assumptions of power go untested. </span><span style="font-family: "palatino";">Elizabeth Costello (I think of her as Cotezee’s
avatar) rejects the idea that animals do not possess reason. She recounts<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> an experiment that was conducted in the 1920s by Wolfgang
Kohler with an ape named Sultan who was deprived of bananas until he figured
out a way to get them. He stacks crates to reach bananas suspended beyond his
reach. What Costello emphasizes is the stupidity of setting the stupid task, which
by its very structure precludes a real exploration, and ignores the pain and
confusion of the context. She imagines Sultan thinking: “What is wrong with
him, what misconception does he have of me, that leads him to believe it is
easier for me to reach a banana hanging from a wire than to pick up a banana
from the floor?” That is, the experiment asks the wrong questions: “a carefully
plotted psychological regimen conducts him <i>away</i> from ethics and
metaphysics toward the humbler reaches of practical reason.” This is like the
corporatization of education. This is like the mercantilist policing of bodies
that teaches us to focus on appearances rather than experiences, on controlling
impressions rather than reveling in the sensuous immanence of our bodies, of
textures, colors, the play of forms. </span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">So rather than proving or disproving
the question, the experiment does a third, unintentional thing: it sabotages
intelligence, structurally reducing us to </span><span style="font-family: "arial unicode ms" , "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">the less interesting thought.</span><span style="font-family: "arial unicode ms" , "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";"> Reducing
my relationship to my teeth when I am brushing them, to worrying about how they
appear</span><span style="font-family: "arial unicode ms" , "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">–</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">which I am inculcated and invited to
do by the misogynist, necro-politicking patriarchy that precedes me</span><span style="font-family: "arial unicode ms" , "sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">–</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS";">would be
to think the less interesting thought. </span><span style="font-family: "palatino";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">Excursions
into imaginative territory can instead make me wonder at the fact that teeth
are an extension of the nervous system, that they are solid, immersed in the
fluidity and space of my mouth, that they show me the inside of my body, that
they allow me to eat, and they also show me my<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> innards</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span></i><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">logic
</i>as<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>death, my skeleton. The inner logic
of social processes, such as the structure of health care, insofar as I have
access to it, can allow me to imagine that the socius thinks my teeth matter,
and therefore that my life matters (in that having teeth allows me to eat and
continue to live). That inner logic, since health care and dentistry are not
accessible to me unless I can fulfill the condition of earning sufficient
amounts of money, also tells me that if I stop fulfilling that condition, stop
earning money, that my teeth, and by extension my life, don</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">t matter. I have to keep earning my teeth, so I
can chew up the commodity world. This thought is the end point of a possible,
as yet, unwritten parable in which from the state of someone</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s teeth we can extrapolate the teeth of one</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s state. We can look into the inner logic of
social processes, and see intertwining systems. Parables are compressed,
distilled versions of complex logics that imaginatively counsel us as to their
effects. I love Kafka</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">s parable about the
leopards breaking into the temple. But lately, I have had this Kafka parable on
my mind a lot:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: Perpetua;">I can swim like the
others only I have a better memory than the others. I have not forgotten my
former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim
is of no avail and I cannot swim after all. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">On the one hand, no justice without remembrance. On the
other hand, no change without forgetting. If our memory of our former </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">inability to swim</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> is stronger than our<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>knowledge of how to swim, even if we know how
to swim, we won</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">t be able
to swim. Sometimes one has an idea for how to solve something and one sets out
to enact changes and bring about a solution and one is confronted by treatises
on The Hopelessness of Changing Anything and The History of Impossibility In General.
</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">“</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That won</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">t work, because when we tried to do
that before</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">…”</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> The
memory of the former inability to swim prevents swimming. This is of interest
not only with regards to learning but with regards to social change. We think
of learning as remembering, but the parable says, remembering may also entail
forgetting. This parable</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">s root
system is connected to the story of Lot</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">s
wife, Edith, as well as to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Both are told not
to look back. Edith (my grandmother</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino;">’</span><span style="font-family: "palatino"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">s
name) looks back and becomes a pillar of salt. Orpheus looks back and loses
Eurydice. On the one hand, fuck you Hades, etcetera. On the other hand, the
moral of the story is, know when to look back, and know when not to. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-66091305598277933512015-11-01T16:30:00.000-08:002015-11-01T17:13:03.426-08:00Tonya Foster & David Buuck Reading at the Poetry Center Oct 22, 2015<br />
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A late <span style="color: #783f04;"><strong>October afternoon</strong></span>, students thronging the campus walkways, parking challenging! I'm at San Francisco State for <strong><span style="color: #0c343d;">Tonya Foster</span></strong> and<strong><span style="color: #660000;"> David Buuck's</span></strong> reading at the Poetry Center.<br />
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In the audience, students, Steve Dickison, Emily Abendroth, CA Conrad, and others. <strong><span style="color: #660000;">David</span></strong>, equipped with visuals, began the afternoon. His was a somewhat improvisational talking through some of his BARGE (Bay Area Research Group Enviro-aesthetics) project, with sustained attention to his "Buried Treasure Island: a detour of the future," punctuated by readings from <em>Site Cite City</em> and a sung rendition of "Dead Men Don't Bite." <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhthR_fUNR7v36w0LogLm27OBkAEtZMyUVWdflHrVdt5w_kAr2hqv4jNC3bDw9dKqHE-hR2js6YJOHhMmdgZ5HEN7vO1IizB4sPLJOADLwx5uWkJARwUs_pvRxKN2D8csoxacqOGfXeQA/s1600/buuck.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="161" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhthR_fUNR7v36w0LogLm27OBkAEtZMyUVWdflHrVdt5w_kAr2hqv4jNC3bDw9dKqHE-hR2js6YJOHhMmdgZ5HEN7vO1IizB4sPLJOADLwx5uWkJARwUs_pvRxKN2D8csoxacqOGfXeQA/s200/buuck.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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You can hear David read/sing "Dead Men Don't Bite" <a href="https://vimeo.com/144071274">here </a>at the Poetry Center's Vimeo channel.<br />
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I don't know why I missed David's Treasure Island work when it was happening in real time, but I wish I hadn't. It strikes me that his project might also be called, in the parlance of the Composition and Rhetoric world, truly multimodal; it is comprised of tours that are performative "detours" on Treasure Island with people in hazmat suits as "ghosts of the future," framing ignored "views" of the island and city beyond it as tourists and others gaze at the military industrial complex in the form of the Blue Angels streaking across the sky. <br />
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There is <br />
<ul>
<li>the event of the tour itself, </li>
<li>and all the research and work that went into developing it, (the project drawing attention to the toxic dumping ground the island became courtesy of the US Navy),</li>
<li>the text, podcasts, guidebook,</li>
<li>and the photos that accompany them, or are produced around and after the events. </li>
<li>Then there is David's reading and singing and talking about the piece. </li>
</ul>
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I loved how he detourn<span style="font-family: Calibri;">é</span>d panels once bearing graffiti which were then painted-over; he labeled them as in a gallery or museum--"untitled municipal painting."<br />
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Here's a section from "Buried Treasure":<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Notes On Method: Paranoid
Landscapes (2008)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"> <em>The sick/ of magic/ lining up</em></span><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"> --CA Conrad<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">Throughout the work on this
project, BARGE has had to re-adjust its methods to fit the 'facts on the
ground,' even as those facts filter themselves through ever-more paranoiac
scrims. By listening to the materials instead of imposing one's narratives upon
them, and letting the symptoms proliferate into new forms of understanding--the
telling itch, the site-specific discharge, the rash judgments, and above all,
the 'black spot' where the no-go zones meet flesh--one could open up the
terrain for uncanny encounters with the site and its hauntings. For instance,
when the window opened behind me and the voice hailed me with her version of
events, to be narrated in a kind of speculative poetics that the guidebook had
yet to accommodate, the feeling was not of surprise as much as the recognition
that this encounter was meant to happen at exactly this juncture in the field
work. Thus the strange white car that would often be waiting at off-limit sites
right as I was approaching would turn up in the rear view mirror at exactly the
moment I was wondering aloud where it had been hiding. Of <em><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">course</span></em> one would turn a
corner and suddenly come across a three-legged dog trotting down an empty
street. Of <em><span style="font-family: "Georgia","serif";">course</span></em> there
as a Naval "Ghost Blimp" that disappeared from the island years ago,
only to show up in Daly City, its engines running and its pilots missing.
Psychogeographic research became a kind of landscape-fugue, a cognitive
napping, where somnambulatory dériveations chart the ground-scores by which the
island improvises song within that seeming null state between past and future.
No map could hope to chart such fever-dreams, what with the open containers
full of poisoned land from other sites, the fenced-off littoral zones, the
underground petrol tanks bellowing beneath the fault lines--all real time
objects of a land-based dream-work that has yet to be fully translated into the
new cartography. In the converging crises, when the contradictions work
themselves out through the post-disaster, post-oil ecologies to come, the
survivors will have had to make use of every site for spectral nourishment,
every nook for plant life, producing oxygen for the new lungs, fever and
ferment for the new species-dreaming (53).<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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I am looking forward to reading David's book!<br />
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**<br />
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<strong><span style="color: #274e13;">Tonya</span></strong> began her reading by noting that "poetry doesn't happen without community," and then she read a portion of something she said is old though she is still very much "mired" in it. This piece with its lovely alternative titles aimed at different contexts and perhaps audiences: "Pay Attention To Where You At: A Mathematics of Chaos," a.k.a. "Its Difficult
Subjects: Jamming Between Misery and Majesty," a.k.a. "Its Difficult Subjects.
Talking Shit. At the Crossroads."* This work is engaged with a deep love for place--whether that place is Harlem or New Orleans, while it is also a powerful meditation on disaster and catastrophe and grief. She quoted Blanchot, "the disaster takes care of everything." Tonya's take is complex and surprising. She notes that as a kid, the possibility of a deluge created a kind of innocent excitement. A day of rain might mean a day out of school. That was then, and momentary. I am looking forward to seeing this piece published. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbZIE1OWVJk1y4rD1laxmCzLFjD29jfy4nI1HY30L6OhnYzUoJlZUbbxRUaCtrXHyjLfTUq1QDWWWN9_QwY11dUbSaYyeQnLV0bfYQPAt3SlgChykN31nw5W3w6xyIl1aEBlSdaKZSMA/s1600/tonya.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="186" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbZIE1OWVJk1y4rD1laxmCzLFjD29jfy4nI1HY30L6OhnYzUoJlZUbbxRUaCtrXHyjLfTUq1QDWWWN9_QwY11dUbSaYyeQnLV0bfYQPAt3SlgChykN31nw5W3w6xyIl1aEBlSdaKZSMA/s200/tonya.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<br />
She then read from her new amazing book, <em>A Swarm of Bees in High Court</em>. I love this book; its pleasure in plying language; its sharp observation and critique. There's so much attention to prosody. It is rife with anaphora, alliteration, and a kind of staccato rhythm a/mi/d/st words rendered multiple. Here's a few sections from various poems.<br />
<br />
<br />
<em></em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em>from IN/SOMNIA</em><br />
<br />
Beside her, he lies<br />
curled--sleeping apostrophe<br />
--possession and "O!<br />
<br />
mission accomplished."<br />
Again to t/his sweat. Now sleep.<br />
But not for her--sleep<br />
<br />
less eyes like stagnant<br />
city pools. Saltiness, then<br />
this thirst for ice.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<em>from IN/SOMNILOQUIES</em><br />
<br />
Knots of a woman<br />
who ain't numb with want. Who's not<br />
effaced by shut eyes?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Nots form this woman<br />
who sugars her mustards, who'll<br />
want but never ask.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In her body swarms<br />
swarms of cells, of tissue, of <br />
sounds--"achoo," blood, "shush."<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In her body, swarms<br />
mundane sadnesses--wearied-<br />
womb, "little cash," years.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Her self is a sleep,<br />
is snake-eyes, knothole, whistle,<br />
skull, gristle, and nerve.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Her self is a sleep<br />
from which t/his voice might wake her.<br />
<em>To what? To what?</em><br />
<br />
(42-44)<br />
<br />
from Aubade<br />
<br />
<br />
<em>To be</em>--the water<br />
that bandies a body, the <br />
body of a once<br />
<br />
young wo/man n<br />
a bayou of sound & words in<br />
the pre/ab/sense of sleep.<br />
<br />
<em>To be</em>--a boat as<br />
in raft or pontoon. Each word,<br />
a boat in which s/he<br />
<br />
is, in which s/he is<br />
sentenced and bandied about.<br />
To be about to...<br />
<br />
<em>To be</em> about...<br />
<br />
<em>To be</em> bandied about by water,<br />
<em>to be</em> busted and broke,<br />
<em>to be</em> bored, grief-bore, work-bore.<br />
<br />
to bleed,<br />
<br />
<em>to be</em> backache, bone of nightshifts,<br />
<em>to be</em> barren as salt lick, to bear bellyached and bloat,<br />
<em>to be</em> news and less.<br />
<br />
<em>To be</em>--tethered between seer and (un)see.<br />
<br />
To see and <em>to be</em><br />
seen?--what it is to live on<br />
perennial blocks.<br />
<br />
Her voice, no matter how loud or clear, is rendered silence, his do--<br />
shadow projected across a page, across a street, an age, across<br />
two bodies in bed (59-60).<br />
<br />
<br />
You can listen to a brief bit of Tonya's reading on the Poetry Center's Vimeo channel <a href="https://vimeo.com/144071278">here.</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Bios:<br />
Oakland-based writer <strong>David Buuck</strong> is the founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics and co-founder and editor of poetics journal Tripwire. Recent books include <em>SITE CITE CITY</em> (Futurepoem, 2015) and <em>An Army of Lovers</em>, written with Juliana Spahr (City Lights, 2013).<br />
<br />
<strong>Tonya M. Foster</strong> is the author of <em>A Swarm of Bees in High Court</em> and coeditor of <em>Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art</em>. Her writing and research focus on ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. Her next collections are a cross-genre collection on New Orleans, and <em>Monkey Talk</em>, an intergenre composition about race, paranoia and surveillance. Her poetry, prose and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Tripwire, boundary2, MiPOESIAS, NYFA Arts Quarterly, the Poetry Project Newsletter and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor at California College of the Arts. <br />
<br />
* Thank you to Steve Dickison for assistance with these titles!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-51504711283319781172015-10-04T13:36:00.002-07:002015-10-04T14:00:33.199-07:00Madhu Kaza's Accademia: A Tourist's Guide<br />
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I am so pleased to share with you<span style="background-color: #38761d;"><span style="background-color: white;"><strong> </strong></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #38761d;">Madhu Kaza's </span><em><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #38761d;">Accademia: A Tourist's Guide</span><strong>.</strong></span><strong><span style="background-color: white;"> </span></strong></em></span> Kaza looks closely at Venetian art, "letting [her] attention land where it wanted," keeping alive rather than collapsing the gap between the art's contemporary moment and the present as she notices and marks her encounter with it in real time, seeing who is in the streets of Venice, in the paintings on the walls, observing what one might find by zooming in, attending to the small detail, seeing the discrepancies and resonances across time. Enjoy!<br />
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<strong><span style="color: #38761d;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><em>Accademia:
A Tourist’s Guide</em>*<o:p></o:p></span></span>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif";"><span style="color: #38761d;">Madhu Kaza<o:p></o:p></span></span>
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<tr><td style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCSoyaXe1CAXZ7RMM4HZEkAC0cWRYYIb3RjAoYUxVT-cCdDcB-ukDQRc46E-9MbPlprxhC7rNNoj3Q3Fb91u0lAsQfQfAA97cd-Kzy-eDOW7YFm7-do4wfJgPXw6eesxiESAij29lLuA/s1600/accademia1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCSoyaXe1CAXZ7RMM4HZEkAC0cWRYYIb3RjAoYUxVT-cCdDcB-ukDQRc46E-9MbPlprxhC7rNNoj3Q3Fb91u0lAsQfQfAA97cd-Kzy-eDOW7YFm7-do4wfJgPXw6eesxiESAij29lLuA/s320/accademia1.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[detail
of “Miracle of the Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo,” Gentile Bellini. c. 1500]<o:p></o:p></span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* Located in the Dorsoduro section of Venice,
the Gallerie dell’Accademia hold a collection of pre-19<sup>th</sup> century
Venetian art.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #38761d;">Introduction:<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What if I walked through the doors of Europe (I
am an immigrant, but not there; the doors swing open easily) casting aside much
of my education, the narrow ways in which I’d been schooled to think about
culture, history and art? What if I wandered through France and Italy not in a
posture of submission, and not as a student of Western Civilization? I know
Europe well, even if I’ve hardly spent any time there. I know how greedy (how
desperate) it is for affirmation of its superiority to all other places. There <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> so much that is particular and
beautiful there, no different from any place else with its own particular
beauty.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What if I walked through the galleries of the
Accademia letting my attention land where it wanted? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When I saw the painting, “Miracle of the Cross
at the Bridge of San Lorenzo,” I wondered what the canals were like in the 15<sup>th</sup>
century; today no one swims or bathes in the water. But I didn’t spend much
time reading about Gentile Bellini and the nature and symbolism of the
“miracle” he depicted. Instead this image made me think of the bodies of
migrants and refugees that were in the waters off the Italian coasts. I’ve long
been trained to look for beauty and to prostrate myself in the pursuit of
knowledge. But I noticed when I had left the galleries that all the photos I
had taken were of details, and that when I had looked at the paintings I had
looked through them, reaching for something else: a correspondence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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*<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuq8unVfPphuu0BVyB_hVAxC98xx7841x3wZ2kY1001Ra2I56YeB3n6alZBM5csSfbeh9HeuqR_KqNeDXcQ9S1cdru_gABzfAAun83Ww31Prr_1O8ZUVcpx8rAsYKYoaznhn8dOYAZZA/s1600/vivarini2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuq8unVfPphuu0BVyB_hVAxC98xx7841x3wZ2kY1001Ra2I56YeB3n6alZBM5csSfbeh9HeuqR_KqNeDXcQ9S1cdru_gABzfAAun83Ww31Prr_1O8ZUVcpx8rAsYKYoaznhn8dOYAZZA/s320/vivarini2.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 6.0pt;">[detail of “The Marriage of
St. Monica,” Antonio Vivarini. c. 1441]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Why anyone might love Lila, the brilliant friend in Elena
Ferrante’s novel, <i>My Brilliant Friend,</i> is because she is a brutal girl
with a voracious intellect-- no saint. She won’t be loved by a man. </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The Camorrist Marcello Solara has asked for her hand in marriage.
She flatly says no and abuses him. She had already threatened him with a knife
long before he fell in love with her. Perhaps that’s why he fell in love with
her. In time (two thirds of the way through the novel), he begins to attend
dinner every night at her parents’ house and acts as if he owns her anyway. She
refuses to speak to him or acknowledge him at all. He tells her that if she begins
to see anyone else he will kill her.</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">There’s a scroll of text at the bottom of the painting by Vivarini
[not included here] that reads “this is how St. Monica was sent to her husband
by her father and her mother.” </span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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*<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">A woman not unlike “La Vecchia” was sitting on a
bench near that hiccup of a bridge that leads inland from the Giardini landing.
Giorgione’s portrait shocked me when I came upon it after all those 15th
century paintings of Madonna and Child or of various saints in their blessed robes.
Or portraits of noblemen. Giorgione flew across the centuries toward us, that
is how it seemed. I felt suddenly that Giorgione was someone I knew, or could
know.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">This is a country of the old and the dying someone said to me. The
woman on the bench at Giardini was smaller in frame than La Vecchia, her
features more refined. She was not quite the peasant, but she was an ordinary
woman. She sat with three other elders on that bench and the rest of them
seemed jovial. She sat very slightly apart. It was how she held her hand,
that’s what I noticed. In a fist, almost pointing to herself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">With time.</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmD6AqPA0FcppfqKWXjlIn0nDAQT_yYLLVRJFfLMIgxyfPFOgC2UOSHnqrt08Fma9LwghghIkxvo6XEnRM76rOgT3asIiBnL23ayTrPBmA1vsETnq5ME0dOJolf0MO5pMMrj861ZZToA/s1600/lavecchia3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhmD6AqPA0FcppfqKWXjlIn0nDAQT_yYLLVRJFfLMIgxyfPFOgC2UOSHnqrt08Fma9LwghghIkxvo6XEnRM76rOgT3asIiBnL23ayTrPBmA1vsETnq5ME0dOJolf0MO5pMMrj861ZZToA/s320/lavecchia3.jpg" width="272" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[detail
of “La Vecchia,” Giorgione. c. 1506]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[detail
of “Angel Announcing and Virgin Announciated,” Giovanni Bellini]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">You’d know in any case that he was an angel by
this detail. Messengers are always fleet-footed (winged near the ankles, in
truth). Look at his beautiful sandals. Light of step, he touches ground but he
is of the air, always about to lift away.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And the folds of the dress, like crumpled
paper.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">There was one Bangla child this morning on Via Garibaldi in bright
blue shoes, scooting around with one hand on the handlebar of his blue scooter
and holding a pink balloon in the other. He was maybe three or four, an age at
which one delights in spells of worldly and bodily autonomy. Such was his joy
and assuredness that I did not look past him in search of parents. But of the
African and South Asian communities of Venice, those who live and work here, so
far I have otherwise only seen men on the street.</span><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">They
have always been here.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6aEwHb7rnW4xunbg3u89j-K2lKr7bL4OwOMhCrlDFXLkhIlYwz7AlETCxymvp_kY4RMx7KJUSq1QhCdl-Fgwa6bTS6eJXN1a4zpWtA6P4O1NmpqBawtqd3-IPJYZEGWi5-GNDtZuQ3Q/s1600/marzial5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6aEwHb7rnW4xunbg3u89j-K2lKr7bL4OwOMhCrlDFXLkhIlYwz7AlETCxymvp_kY4RMx7KJUSq1QhCdl-Fgwa6bTS6eJXN1a4zpWtA6P4O1NmpqBawtqd3-IPJYZEGWi5-GNDtZuQ3Q/s320/marzial5.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">detail of “La Cena en Emmaus,” Marco Marziale. c.
1506]</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">He’s a
beautiful man (in the 15<sup>th</sup> century way). When I look at the
portraits, snapshots, selfies of our own times in which people are most often
smiling, their expression reaching towards the viewer, I look for what’s not
given, what’s unknowable. I search for a sign that a person has faced a camera
and kept something for herself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">There’s
no need to look for this opacity in 15<sup>th</sup> century portraits. The
figures don’t reveal themselves easily. You can read the signs: the clothing,
the color, the ornaments that demonstrate their status, but they remain
recessive. And so, what delights me, here, is this hand, how it moves the
portrait of the man forward. His hand rests lightly at that border, the
threshold between his world and ours.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyJVRBgADcPF-stQ65z00lvI8WdRlxjuHfW-Zy3OOcvsjwZXj9Tucg31NbcG8b61fOtcgv5IszcqXWhzIPTzEjQjvaSbvfZbL6FzBwsVqLrcupVqm7tJnLUwLNpXgDp4kCKBmBjeQO7Q/s1600/memling6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyJVRBgADcPF-stQ65z00lvI8WdRlxjuHfW-Zy3OOcvsjwZXj9Tucg31NbcG8b61fOtcgv5IszcqXWhzIPTzEjQjvaSbvfZbL6FzBwsVqLrcupVqm7tJnLUwLNpXgDp4kCKBmBjeQO7Q/s320/memling6.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">[detail of “Portrait of a Young Man,” Hans Memling]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I sat on
the steps of Piazza San Marco, opposite the church, in late afternoon unable to
move. I wasn’t yet ready to stand up and walk back into the sun. But something
else, too. I felt in those moments that whatever was happening in the world,
whatever there was to see, it was also happening here, but in the reduced form
of stone and flesh. Then a group of Indian tourists walked by, weaving color
back into the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">In this
portrait of Italians and Levantines, this is where I see Indians.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_8w04l21G6EO5u58jGlLFonMq1FACCi-OMZaTIQiVfYV9wdXIWtRd_sUlU04Bj0ieTz_oQy4VV2qFoT_wrHnhH2swPGoe1id9K4tys4Yafm34-0GFMojZlYwicJ48l8s8DcwmMv1bJA/s1600/vecchio7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_8w04l21G6EO5u58jGlLFonMq1FACCi-OMZaTIQiVfYV9wdXIWtRd_sUlU04Bj0ieTz_oQy4VV2qFoT_wrHnhH2swPGoe1id9K4tys4Yafm34-0GFMojZlYwicJ48l8s8DcwmMv1bJA/s320/vecchio7.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">[detail of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Sacra
Famiglia con Santa Catarine e Giovanni Battista,” Palma il Vecchio]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ck9BAgJ_Wk0p9ikEvocathGshMbfv9Ym1bRugc3DhbOnoVGWlriRMv1-7giyRuC68vnRO-Rkyss_hWdEGDf2woFbcSOIDo5iB9rrCaJtxHxLLejEfeBnFEth5BhQxofaoXj0xMbE2w/s1600/zatere+agli+incurabili+8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ck9BAgJ_Wk0p9ikEvocathGshMbfv9Ym1bRugc3DhbOnoVGWlriRMv1-7giyRuC68vnRO-Rkyss_hWdEGDf2woFbcSOIDo5iB9rrCaJtxHxLLejEfeBnFEth5BhQxofaoXj0xMbE2w/s320/zatere+agli+incurabili+8.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Cities
and Signs. In each city, perhaps, I will end up finding the same things, though
differently arranged. A ruin, a library, a museum, a hospital, an orphanage, a
wound, a gift. Built in the 16th century the Hospital of the Incurables was
once a place for syphilis patients to come and die. Later it became an
orphanage. Later still the building functioned as a juvenile court. I’m not
sure if its true that the building now houses some part of the Academy of Fine
Arts. It sounds true. And isn’t it true that there was a plaque on the same
brick wall that said Joseph Brodsky loved this place?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4VG_lMQOxNTSBvJQc-jlq1fGL5aYNqabS-lnGingMKnewDLmDPVX6jhxaAzMe7ENSD_eFOonxfjcBIfhYJNnhf5WzkbNwVsiOouLHQnBgpBe9owcbavcRFALLOSB2B6bqnBgi7q909Q/s1600/postcard9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4VG_lMQOxNTSBvJQc-jlq1fGL5aYNqabS-lnGingMKnewDLmDPVX6jhxaAzMe7ENSD_eFOonxfjcBIfhYJNnhf5WzkbNwVsiOouLHQnBgpBe9owcbavcRFALLOSB2B6bqnBgi7q909Q/s320/postcard9.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBGofEbIRTvk-ki0WtTpASv6uqw_nldM278b0TSIm-KehsDigsg6EwQmSsJe9mlAZjNgxLkgurocWkRPhbxZ8PiFB4kg34Cc5ohl3ET2KbMSTWbL4J5ifRjTzX__ZSEd5RMx1I05GTSQ/s1600/madhu+kaza.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBGofEbIRTvk-ki0WtTpASv6uqw_nldM278b0TSIm-KehsDigsg6EwQmSsJe9mlAZjNgxLkgurocWkRPhbxZ8PiFB4kg34Cc5ohl3ET2KbMSTWbL4J5ifRjTzX__ZSEd5RMx1I05GTSQ/s1600/madhu+kaza.jpg" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #38761d; font-size: large;"><strong>Madhu Kaza</strong></span> was born in Andhra Pradesh, India and works as an artist, educator, writer and translator in New York City. Her performance work on the theme of "hospitality" has been produced in New York, Minnesota, Baltimore, Boston and India. She has published translations of poetry from Spanish and a collection of short stories<i> </i>by the Indian writer Volga from Telugu. She is at work on a novel currently entitled “Afterlife.”Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-27877753966740533972015-09-15T10:07:00.000-07:002015-09-15T10:07:27.318-07:00Christopher Rey Pérez from [Forum]<br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">ALL ANGELS HAVE SPECIFIC TASKS THAT THEY <span class="w7"></span>MUST PERFORM <span class="a" style="left: 666px; top: 1257px; word-spacing: -2px;">AND TO FALSELY CALL FORTH AN ANGEL IS TO <span class="w6"></span>DEMONSTRATE NEGLECT </span><span class="a" style="left: 666px; top: 1376px; word-spacing: -2px;">TOWARD THE DIVINE ECONOMY OF LABOR</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span class="a" style="left: 666px; top: 1376px; word-spacing: -2px;"> --from <span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><strong><span style="color: #0c343d;">Pérez</span></strong> 's [Forum]</span></span></span><br />
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This summer in the Hudson River Valley I met <span style="color: #0c343d;"><strong>Christopher Rey Pérez</strong></span> and heard him read some work from a forthcoming manuscript. I liked him and his work very much. <br />
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This is what he writes about the piece he has generously shared with us: <span style="font-family: "Dia Regular","serif";"><em>[forum] is roughly a 30 page text that sets up a personal curriculum of angelology in preparation for a forensic investigation of a series of crimes. Part of a larger manuscript called gauguin’s notebook, the text begins to write through Gauguin’s Tahitian journal, published in 1901, that chronicles an intense period of artistic, amorous, and colonial production for the painter.</em></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZdpyJQgeM-5ULKCMm61kxJpSr_4kXgYQjv0wZLCcw6G2ke7xqFv5tBidSpH_1zHH0F0k3Z5qI4N9e8MpkHuL6RJS7ivc44926yOR36nKUxxi2ZQ0fqyVM8e6nninZZ5MtQO5a5s7RYg/s1600/christopher+perez.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><br />
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The excerpt below weaves a variety of voices, building an epistolary and urgent community in a tonally resonant but anonymous place as in social media, but more local than that. There is vulnerability, silence, assertion, and insertion, textured depth. I look forward to reading the whole project. <br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span class="a" style="left: 666px; top: 1376px; word-spacing: -2px;"></span></span><span style="color: #274e13;"><strong></strong></span><br />
<span style="color: #274e13;"><strong>Christopher Rey Pérez</strong></span> is the author of the chapbooks, <i>On the Heels of Our
Enemies</i> (98Editions, Beirut) and <i>427-375</i> (LIKE Editorial, Mexico
City). He is also the recipient of the 2014-2015 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging
Writer’s Residency Prize from Lake Forest College. Currently, he writes for
Intelligentsia Gallery and edits a risograph publication, called Dolce Stil
Criollo. In December of 2015, he left Palestine, where he taught at al-Quds Bard
Honors College for a period of 2 ½ years.<br />
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<a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/281138238/from-Forum-by-Christopher-Rey-Perez" style="text-decoration: underline;" title="View from [Forum] by Christopher Rey Peréz on Scribd">from [Forum] by Christopher Rey Peréz</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-19117911324882923302015-09-07T11:52:00.002-07:002015-09-19T16:30:42.821-07:00Announcing Dear Reader<br />
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Dear Folks,<br />
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I am very pleased to announce that my book<em> Dear Reader</em> has just been published by<a href="http://www.ithuriel.com/"> Ithuriel's Spear</a> of San Francisco. The cover art is a detail from <a href="http://amytrachtenberg.com/">Amy Trachtenberg's</a> stunning painting "Feelings Are Facts II." You can find the book at <a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781943209002/dear-reader.aspx">Small Press Distribution</a>.<br />
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Here's a peek inside:</div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Introduction</span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?<br />
</i><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>--Denis Diderot,
<em>Jacques le fataliste et son maître</em>, 1796</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">My friend Simone notes there are so many quotes. A sign of
anxiety? The talkers and listeners in the rooms, or out on the highway.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The fatalist and his master narrate, desire, philosophize,
serve, relate, exchange.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Out of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">master</i> one
might pull a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mast</i>, rig a ship, invent
a star to navigate by.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The writing in this book was composed over a number of
years. The three distinct series or projects--"after Oppen &
Howe," "The Melmoth Letters," and "making
mARKs"--begin in reading. "other lands" from the making mARKs
series began with a book serendipitously found on the shelves at the San
Francisco Public Library. It was a history of the bottom--asses, buttocks,
fesse, and fissum. I took notes from the book but not a citation, and for some
reason, I didn't check it out. When I went back to find it on the shelves, it
wasn't there. The catalog contained no trace of it. The missing book: was it
de-accessioned? Taken out of commission, hallucinated?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Google searches turn up "history from the bottom
up," but no history of the bottom. "History from the bottom up"
provides a useful starting point, however. Jacques is a servant, a valet, after
all; he's good at unpacking a peripatetic, self-conscious labyrinth that turns
continually astray. At the same time, history is gendered and sexed.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">the nomadic "I" restless restive sometimes resistant, even<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>extant,
recylces returns.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">to the site/sight.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Everyday experience--gendered though not only, marked by
class though not only--of words meaning more than what they say. Thus, words
erupt out of, as if under pressure to be writ large, speak more. They struggle
against autocorrect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Sometimes for the pleasure of the local--the
"nary" in binary--and other times for commentary as in:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">p<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #660000;">R</span></span></b>im<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #660000;">O</span></span></b>geni<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #660000;">T</span></span></b>ure. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>rot <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>such <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>system.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">There is<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pleasurable
revision askance; the majuscule underscores as it works to unseat gendered
subjectivity from the bottom up. The object--her--wrestles the presumed
subject--he--in a playful revision of a children's song:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">t<span style="color: #660000;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">HE</span></b> </span>subject takes a wife.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #660000;">R</span></span></b>epeat</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Or, sometimes a stutter:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">organs<span style="color: #660000;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #660000;">I</span></span></b>n<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #660000;">T</span></span></b>errupted by
happiness b<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #660000;">IT</span></span></b>ter bijoux in the dark b<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="color: #660000;">IT</span></span></b>ters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">"Reading NegativIty" emerged out of found (and
then manipulated) language from Jocelyn Saidenberg's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Negativity</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In "after Oppen & Howe," I wanted to apply
Susan Howe's history lesson to talk back to George Oppen whose writing seduces,
leaving no marks on the skin. I wanted to mark it up, while acknowledging the
pleasure of its porosity, the sonorous holes gaping. A gap in which feeling
enters. I want to call down and out history's [absent] feeling. Feeling and
counter-claim enter the gaps.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">To gape. Agape.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Reading and writing offer a model of transgression--of the
individual subject and all its architecture--gender, class, sex, race. The
subject--ideology's morphine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The subject provides the tools for the struggle to come--a
wall to chip away at with a spoon or unfolded paper clip. We seek a tunnel to
the outside from at least this side. Guided by the stars of:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A [failed] belief in poetry.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>nonetheless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">An intervention, intercession.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">A record on the cave wall of the present.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thursday October 22nd I will be reading with Jim Brashear at the Green Arcade in San Francisco. Hope to see you there!</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-86923309088512659782015-08-16T06:54:00.001-07:002015-08-16T06:54:39.412-07:00Tanya Hollis's Parch and Dee Dee Kramer on Hollis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">PARCH </span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">2015 (</span><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Acrylic paint, plaster, pigment and rust on wood)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span class="fsl">During July and early August, </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #0c343d;"><b>Tanya Hollis's PARCH</b>,</span></span> </span><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">was on exhibit at the Right Window Gallery (curated by Kevin Killian), on Valencia Street in San Francisco.</span><br />
<span class="fsl" style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br />The opening for Tanya's show--which sadly I missed because I was out of town--included poetry readings by Norma Cole, Dee Dee Kramer, and Kevin Killian, with the premiere of a new film by Jason Michael Leggiere, <i>Wall of Early Morning Light</i> (2015).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Looking at PARCH, I am reminded of an aerial view of the salt ponds as you fly into the Bay Area. You can't get enough of them. Tanya's work is beautiful and it registers catastrophe. Cracked earth residue in a time of drought. Parch. Your throat tightens. Extremity's rasp. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Here's what <span style="color: #38761d;"><b>Rob Halpern</b> </span>has to say about this work:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #38761d; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Tanya Hollis’s stunning PARCH offers a horizon from which we can see beyond the perils of our anthropocene. Like homeopathic medicine for the eye, the work’s elemental vision and geologic scale inform a feeling of drought as if transfigured from space, allowing us to see our own condition as if for the first time. Hollis’s sculptural canvases—exquisitely rendered with plaster, acrylic paint, pigment, iron, and salt—are parchments from an archive of the present. You cannot not see this work without risking oblivion (Halpern).</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU1EbBygkdE-9QCj6uzH6RJ-BhyphenhyphenJ84kGBb2R745GPMX9PwO1ThgMQAkq56F3oZKCMMM78nM6FPRgOvDNrFCLmKxScBpqcw9aKX2RSs74wEJY5oU5r90IsyhWXKrrl5B-0hsYWkl0UKHg/s1600/PARCH_two.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhU1EbBygkdE-9QCj6uzH6RJ-BhyphenhyphenJ84kGBb2R745GPMX9PwO1ThgMQAkq56F3oZKCMMM78nM6FPRgOvDNrFCLmKxScBpqcw9aKX2RSs74wEJY5oU5r90IsyhWXKrrl5B-0hsYWkl0UKHg/s320/PARCH_two.jpg" width="161" /></span></a><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="color: #20124d;"><b>Dee Dee Kramer</b></span>, poet, artist, archivist, and dear friend of Tanya's wrote a beautiful introduction for Tanya's opening. It traces the entanglements of friendship, art-making, work life, life-making. She's generously shared it with us here:</span><br />
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<b style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">July 2015<br />Dee Dee Kramer</span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s funny to be here today, reading with Norma Cole, because a few months ago, when I read Laura Moriarty’s essay on the Poetry Foundation blog about Norma’s group show, I had been thinking about how I might write about Tanya’s work, and now here we are at Tanya’s show, maybe sort of in a similar situation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">How is the situation similar? Mostly, it’s similar because like Norma and Laura, Tanya and I have been friends for a long time, 20 years now. The situation is personal. I knew her before she was a San Franciscan and before she was an archivist. We were collage and garbage artists together in Buffalo. We were going into poetry-debt and wondering what to do for jobs. We decided to go to library school while working in the Poetry Collection at UB with Michael Basinski. He helped each of us learn to work a job and make art at the same time; in other words, how to play the life game we are given.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’ve watched Tanya make art all this time, over the course of most of her adult life. I’ve seen her with burlap, and paste, and massive plastic jars of acrylic gel medium (matte, gloss), rope, rust (we were in the Rust Belt, after all), cellophane tape, sewing patterns, industrial product catalogs, encyclopedias, teeth, and pieces of machinery. A lot of words and newsprint. Canvas, fabric, yarn. Oil paint for awhile-- she got sick from that--the attic apartment (it was a beautiful attic apartment on Baker Street) didn’t have enough ventilation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So the situation is personal, even to the point of our studios sometimes being in our bedrooms. And not just until we “make it” and move out.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the things that comes to my mind when I look at these slabs is Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed,” but just the mattress-- no pillow or blanket or sheets. No bedding. This makes me think about care and neglect. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ8mtFuMP9aMZjFzK6NZbpTWLbpCLJVGvuRbREW4WWbqA9clzzDFAmGf6mUfp41ozbjDtvzsRhJRCtN728GwMC3N9OFzIHV45mGlS-jmEfrLfF_x1fuzaWTAXamlg-bpzpgdGXjq2G8Q/s1600/PARCH_detail2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: #0b5394;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZ8mtFuMP9aMZjFzK6NZbpTWLbpCLJVGvuRbREW4WWbqA9clzzDFAmGf6mUfp41ozbjDtvzsRhJRCtN728GwMC3N9OFzIHV45mGlS-jmEfrLfF_x1fuzaWTAXamlg-bpzpgdGXjq2G8Q/s320/PARCH_detail2.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Right now, Tanya rents from Rob [Halpern] and Lee [Azus] and lives in their upstairs apartment, four blocks away from me. Last winter, she moved her bed to the smaller room. It had been in the front room, the bigger room with the better light. She talked to me when she was considering that shift, about what it had meant to have the bed in the central living area. What it would mean to move it.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now that front, light room is her art area, and I’m assuming that’s where she made these pieces. But honestly, she made them so quickly I never saw. Somehow, during a workweek. I mean, it’s always a workweek. You take a couple of days off and then work like hell to finish. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I look at these pieces and I think of the archives (we each work in one now): the mess, the mold, the backlog, the markup language. The reference desk. Mold can be black, reddish, blue-green. If it smears, you’re in trouble because it’s active and will spread to other manuscripts and documents. For this problem, and for innumerable others--flood, dirty data, not enough room--Tanya’s the one who gives me advice on what to do: freeze it, hire someone, buy a shop-vac, use a Magic Rub eraser, use this style-sheet or software, and if you can’t download anything because you don’t have admin privileges, here’s how you do it by hand. Here’s how you talk to your manager. Here’s how you become one so you can get these things done.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">We try not to “talk shop” much when we’re not on-the-clock, but it all seeps through. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">These slabs show mold and rust, and are also or might be topographical maps that won’t fit into the flat file drawer. I don’t know where she will put them.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So, as I said, the situation is personal, but it’s also professional. Mike taught us how to put on the monkey suit. It’s a suit we break in and own. When I graduated from library school (a semester before she did), Tanya made me a Librarian’s bun and put it in a box with a label. It tied around my head with a blue satin ribbon. It was shellacked. The box was labeled “Librarian’s bun. Kaiser. Everyday wear.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">But I shouldn’t give the impression that we have too much in common, or that we’re together all the time. We’re not. We’ve lived most of these 20 years locally to one another, so we could come over. But often, we don’t see each other for weeks. Maybe that’s part of our intimacy--I know she’s still there even if I don’t see her. And there’s so much I don’t know or understand about her work. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I do understand loving the stuff while at the same time wanting to throw it all away. I understand being tired and wanting to sleep. I am her witness. I understand the threat of exposure. I’ve said that the situation is personal, but it’s also public. That’s how art and poetry are. How painful that can be. Because people can see. And it hurts if they do and it hurts if they don’t. The mortification of “Don’t look!” but also the despair of “No one sees!” As her witness, I see, at least some of it. And so do you. And sometimes, walking by the window, so do strangers. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">How can I talk about a friend’s artwork publicly and for her benefit? I’m not sure. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #0b5394; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I see the the gunk and adhesives that look like wounds and scabs and bandaids. I see her scratching, ripping, renovating, tearing, repairing, pasting, peeling, painting, knitting, chipping, sewing, brushing, covering, collecting and discarding. Decollage, one of Tanya’s modes, includes the connotations of becoming unglued, or unstuck, also of taking off in flight. This new work gives an aerial view from the ground, which is technically impossible. But here it is.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0b5394;"><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I read in this book about writer’s block that cynicism is when you don’t like the game as it is played, so you spoil it. It made me think about neglect again. Neglect would be not playing. That’s tempting, and I’m pretty sure we’ve both tried it. But not playing doesn’t work for very long without deadening us internally. So, and maybe this is pat, we come back to play with the spoils. This is how to work a job and make art at the same time (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Kramer</span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-size: 14.66px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">).</span></span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-42076304940878187152015-06-13T12:11:00.000-07:002015-06-13T12:11:04.382-07:00Notes: Fences, Stop Signs, Shifters, or, the Conditions of Community<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">June 2015</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Recently in a workshop at Bard College with this year's <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Language and Thinking faculty, we did some
reading and writing around selections from several texts: Claudia Rankine’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Citizen</i>, Thomas Kuhn’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>,
James Gleick’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chaos: The Making of a New
Science</i>, Fanny Howe’s “Bewilderment,” and in the group I was in, Verlyn
Klinkenborg’s<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Several Short Sentences
About Writing,</i> among other things. At the same time, I was thinking about
all the ongoing crises here and around the globe, including those in the poetry
world around Kenny Goldsmith’s performance of a reworking of Michael Brown’s
autopsy report at the Interrupt 3 Conference at Brown and even more immediately
Vanessa Place’s tweeting in Blackface of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone
With the Wind</i>. All of this was reaching a crescendo on Facebook and
elsewhere in social media in the experimental poetry scene in the U.S., just as
I was leaving California. In New York before bed, I had begun reading Maggie
Nelson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Argonauts.</i> The question
hovering over our thinking and writing in the workshop at Bard was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what needs to be the case for things to be
otherwise</i>. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">____________</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Last year watching the British crime drama <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Broadchurch</i>, I found myself pleasured by
the cinematic fetish of West Bay’s cliffs in Dorset—straw- colored and sheared
to the sea, up against a panoramic sky, the sort of visual pageant infrequently
found on American TV. The diegetic sound offered a counterpoint. Words were
spoken, conversations occurred between characters; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">did he say?</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We understood none of it. What was it? Rewind.
Listen. Hit play. Rewind. Listening. Disciplining ourselves, learning to hear
English spoken otherwise. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Otherwise” implicates a perspective.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">____________</span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In the course of explaining how scientific revolution shifts
the "historical perspective of the community that experiences it,"
Thomas Kuhn describes a psychological experiment. Subjects were shown a series
of cards, including anomalous versions—a black four of hearts for example. Many
people “without any awareness of trouble” articulated what they saw according
to existing conceptual categories, for example, identifying the card as either
a four of hearts or spades. Over time, some subjects experienced hesitation and
an “awareness of anomaly,” eventually registering the discrepancy in the card
while others “were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their
categories" (Preface, 63-4).</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">____________</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Describe [something] you
couldn’t recognize for what it was as it was happening… </i>(Longabucco)</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">The first time I read at Small Press Traffic (SPT) back in
the late 80s or early 1990s, I was in my mid-to-late 20s and SPT was in a white
building on the corner of 24th and Guerrero. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>C was there, though he would come to hate and
stop going to these events. As soon as someone discovered that he was not a
poet or artist, that person would begin to drift, eventually turning away. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Wearing a ribbed long-sleeved shirt in tawny yellow, I
nervously perused books for sale. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
shirt fit like a cliché. In my memory, Kevin Killian found me in stacks, like
the library, though SPT had, I think, nothing of the sort, the books displayed
on ledges hip high, facing out at you. I remember he said something kind, made
me feel welcomed. Strangely, I don’t recall <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what</i>
I read, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> I read with Jean Day
whose work I was unfamiliar with, whose language is chilled marble. Now having
excavated some of the history of that present (of which I knew nothing then), I
realize, the audience, there to hear Jean, would have disliked, frankly,
disparaged whatever I had read. Too embodied. The subject had not been cut-out.
Poor subject. She didn’t even know it. Double b(l)ind.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">____________</span><br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You must have something to give in the economy of the field.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You must make yourself vulnerable.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You must espouse a recognizably radical politics.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You will attend many readings and say something positive to
the author afterwards.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You must be fortified.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You should appear to be comfortable.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">You will recognize that you are deeply uncomfortable. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will not always say hello or be sociable.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will feel our power and superiority over others.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will feel brutalized by our disempowerment, so many
silent cuts.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will feel inside this community, held.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will always feel outside this community. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will be pleased to be included. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will feel the sting of our exclusion.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will try to be inclusive.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">We will not discuss our feeling.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">They will commit violence in the name of overturning it.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">They will take up more time and space because they can.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">They will disagree.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I will still need fellowship.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I will experience moments of startling depth and connection.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I will be sick to my stomach.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I sometimes wonder about the healthiness of participating in
this community.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I am on the edge</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">_________</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">given the histories of you and you— </i>(Rankine 140)</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the subjects. Look at who is refusing the subjects.
The individual who is at the center of an author function can only stutter I I I
I I I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the periphery are those whose
mouths should be shut. Who should not have opened their mouths he said he knew
where her mouth had been and it had been all over. “Who do you think
you are, saying I to me?” (140). She called out a fact. And because this fact
had a story—that the avant-garde in poetry has a history of white supremacy—and
because he has been trying to keep the facts in order in line in his line of
vision this speaker who is she was called a mouth. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Look at the pronouns. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He deleted his post.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there were witnesses. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">___________</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">“Every scientist [poet] who turned to chaos [language, or
contrarily, marked experience, the body] early had a story to tell of
discouragement or open hostility” (Gleick).</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Every scientist/poet who turned over the rock of white gendered
supremacy anytime had stories of virulent hostility. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Threats. Words and their histories. Let us
conduct autopsies on the practices and languages that are being used and by whom.
Who describes my death? Calls for a mouth to be shut, uses a body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In other words,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Who------------</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">__________</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the street sign <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jim
Crow Rd</i>.</span></div>
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_NO8KNNdCXgUyKwB-QYajZQcMQevlXamSbVVHeXkDtKhZqvCA7B105cFBsPpKx6tgF5h1QjkyH7aW0DkTOcgs0XS__9T51bUppjbgXmPrwoK59oL5oG91owMNw0ALo8Pk78IUM8JIqw/s1600/rankine2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="261" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_NO8KNNdCXgUyKwB-QYajZQcMQevlXamSbVVHeXkDtKhZqvCA7B105cFBsPpKx6tgF5h1QjkyH7aW0DkTOcgs0XS__9T51bUppjbgXmPrwoK59oL5oG91owMNw0ALo8Pk78IUM8JIqw/s320/rankine2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span> </div>
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<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span> </div>
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<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; page-break-after: avoid;">
<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; page-break-after: avoid;">
<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span> </div>
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<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; page-break-after: avoid;">
<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; page-break-after: avoid;">
<span style="mso-no-proof: yes;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoCaption" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<strong><span style="color: #4f81bd; font-family: Calibri; font-size: x-small;">[Photo: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jim Crow Rd</i>.
by Michael David Murphy<br /> printed in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Citizen</i>]</span></strong></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at a world collapsing inside.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the stop sign whose face that never reads Stop! has
been turned away.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the back of the stop sign all grey, or is that
white?</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the shadow of the stop sign. It looks like a
lollipop or the sign of a hanged man.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the white houses with their black roofs.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the white car in the driveway.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at how the white houses stand out against a blue sky.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the white space against the black type.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at how the trees are dark against the glare of
whiteness.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the stain on the edge between the blue-black road
and the yellowing grass. </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at how you can’t see what the name of the crossroads
is.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Look at the fence deep in the background.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">__________</span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">In
her latest book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Argonauts</i>,
Maggie Nelson describes how during a book tour for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning</i>, a well-known playwright comments
on her pregnancy asking her “how did you handle working on all this dark
material [sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence, and so on] in your <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">condition</i>?” Nelson explains “the old
patrician white guy …call[s] the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one
misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the
pregnant woman who thinks</i>. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that
more general oxymoron, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a woman who thinks</i>”
(91).</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></o:p> </div>
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">____________</span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Writers,
Verlyn Klinkenborg says, must authorize themselves. “No matter who you are”
(37). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a claim that provides
permission; in fact, is an imperative. I wonder about imperatives. I wonder
about I’s who authorize themselves. Yet permissions are powerful. I know the
necessity of authorizing oneself. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
needs a commons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Step out onto the
stage of this blog.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">I’s
and their authority cut all kinds of ways.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My I’s too. Foucault reminds us an author is subject to punishment. The
author function provides a means for controlling the bewildering energy of a
text. It puts up fences. An obsolete definition of the word authorize, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oxford English Dictionary</i>, says is “to
vouch for the truth or reality” and yet, Rankine also cautions, “all our
fevered history won’t instill insight” (142); however, "that man who is
forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human
cruelty that rages to destroy it….achieves his own authority, and that is
unshakable” (Rankine 126). </span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">What
is the space between I and I and you and we and they. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What’d</i> he say? What’d <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i>
just say? Say it again so I can hear we can hear between</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">in world of differences</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"> who's there?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">collective life </span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">alive in the gaps</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">powers of departure</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">processes of becoming</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Calibri;">otherwise</span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">Sources</span></i><span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">:</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Longabucco, Matt. Workshop at Bard College
June 6, 2015</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Gleik, James. “Revolution.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chaos: Making a New Science</i>. New York:
Penguin, 2008.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Kuhn, Thomas. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Structure of Scientific Revolutions</i>. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Klinkenborg, Verlyn.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Several Short Sentences About Writing</i>.
New York: Vintage, 2013.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Nelson, Maggie. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Argonauts</i>. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. 2015.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Rankine, Claudia. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Citizen: an American Lyric</i>. Minneapolis:
Graywolf Press, 2014.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">Thanks to Matt Longabucco for the
writing prompts that generated much of the work in this piece.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-73730471962430403352015-04-17T10:28:00.001-07:002015-04-17T10:28:47.775-07:00Up From the Archives: Talking with Roberto Bedoya<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhugsO6I3f_f9so5ere37IVWSwQfDwc7wgzntxuXDBttj_47QsWQO_b2WQj6gLSucgre6v72mkO-bfnYUy4NkflihISv82FeUUlaao3-ABdwVMtVJkx5onhyphenhyphennKcreYXEMENjMclSQoKbg/s1600/roberto+(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhugsO6I3f_f9so5ere37IVWSwQfDwc7wgzntxuXDBttj_47QsWQO_b2WQj6gLSucgre6v72mkO-bfnYUy4NkflihISv82FeUUlaao3-ABdwVMtVJkx5onhyphenhyphennKcreYXEMENjMclSQoKbg/s1600/roberto+(2).jpg" height="320" width="234" /></a></div>
<br />
<em>The dominant US ideology of Whiteness had policies that made me invisible which I challenged, still do</em>.<br />
-- Roberto Bedoya<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
In September and October of 2008, I had the pleasure of interviewing Roberto Bedoya, writer, activist, arts administrator, curator for the reading series at Intersection for the Arts in the 1980s, and so much more!<br />
<br />
You can find the interview here:<br />
<br />
Outside is the Side I Take: Part One<br />
<a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2008/10/outside-is-side-i-take-interview-with.html">http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2008/10/outside-is-side-i-take-interview-with.html</a><br />
<br />
<br />
Doing Civic: Part Two <br />
<a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2008/10/doing-civic-part-2-interview-with.html">http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2008/10/doing-civic-part-2-interview-with.html</a><br />
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<strong>Roberto Bedoya</strong> is the Executive Director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council. He is also a writer and arts consultant who works in the area of support systems for artists. As an arts consultant he has worked on projects for the Creative Capital Foundation and the Arizona Commission on the Arts (Creative Capital№s State Research Project); The Ford Foundation (Mapping Native American Cultural Policy); The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (Creative Practice in the 21st Century); and The Urban Institute (Investing in Creativity: A Study of the Support Structure for US Artists and the Arts and Culture Indicators in Community Building Project). He is the author of the monograph U.S. Cultural Policy: Its Politics of Participation, Its Creative Potential (www.npnweb.org <<a href="http://www.npnweb.org/"><span style="color: #063e3f;">http://www.npnweb.org/</span></a>> ). He is the former Executive Director of the National Association of Artists№ Organizations (NAAO) a national arts service organization for individual artists and artist-centered organizations, primarily visual and interdisciplinary organizations. NAAO was a co-plaintiff in the Finley vs. NEA lawsuit. Bedoya has been a Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-50257172030625381952015-03-24T13:38:00.001-07:002015-03-24T14:24:18.773-07:00Celebration of Kathleen Fraser's 80th Birthday!On Sunday March 22nd,<span style="color: #073763; font-size: large;"> Kathleen Fraser</span> turned 80 <br />
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<em>Claim through and through,</em><br />
<em>breathe me now window.</em><br />
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<em>Lift. Oh turn your back.</em><br />
<em>Turn will do. </em><br />
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<em> --"Claim" from Notes preceding trust</em><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo by Steve Dickison</td></tr>
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and a crowd of people from far and wide <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUOeClV45uGBoJ9F0bURbIuwNYyaPepPlG8kNRGrQ4kylyZM9hUjgutBtIaibipKGgResdnStyHvn4bkQT07DagG-pCE66zIg__cPIMSoV1X-CWPV93XEaaTwEItb0t3gpy8vCV5j6wg/s1600/crowd+shot+by+john+sakkis.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUOeClV45uGBoJ9F0bURbIuwNYyaPepPlG8kNRGrQ4kylyZM9hUjgutBtIaibipKGgResdnStyHvn4bkQT07DagG-pCE66zIg__cPIMSoV1X-CWPV93XEaaTwEItb0t3gpy8vCV5j6wg/s1600/crowd+shot+by+john+sakkis.png" height="313" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">a small portion of the audience<br />
photo by John Sakkis</td></tr>
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gathered at the California College of the Arts Writers' Studio on De Haro in San Francisco to f<span style="font-family: Calibri;">ê</span>te Kathleen. <br />
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The event was organized by <span style="color: #274e13;"><strong>Stephen Motika</strong></span> and <strong><span style="color: #274e13;">Susan Gevirtz,</span></strong> and co-sponsored by <strong>The Poetry Center</strong> and <strong>Small Press Traffic</strong>. <br />
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The Writers' Studio was jammed with countless writers, book printers and artists, former students, colleagues, friends, family, and admirers. A group of about 15 writers each read for some 6 minutes, offering selections from Kathleen's work and their own responses, some in the form of poems or mini essays in various styles; some spoke extemporaneously about their encounters with Kathleen's work and with Kathleen herself. Opting to give myself entirely to the event, I didn't take notes, but here's a bit about what I remember people presenting. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVaXBAfp-GpIuLnP60eDEwB1kv3GDbxMih8RG2wlaET_BSM2IR4Ep0GiAXQmDqnT3KnWAte7GQAZn46sYTFKRqjCH-TDxNJT7R3Q7q5XNtgk5cy8lxrWYWxcwVe2cUeCNNjaNICGh9oA/s1600/program+by+john+sakkis.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVaXBAfp-GpIuLnP60eDEwB1kv3GDbxMih8RG2wlaET_BSM2IR4Ep0GiAXQmDqnT3KnWAte7GQAZn46sYTFKRqjCH-TDxNJT7R3Q7q5XNtgk5cy8lxrWYWxcwVe2cUeCNNjaNICGh9oA/s1600/program+by+john+sakkis.png" height="320" width="210" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo by John Sakkis</td></tr>
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<strong>Frances Richard</strong> talked about Kathleen's work and poetic matrilineage, <strong>Brian Teare</strong> beautifully re-encountered <em>Wing</em> via Mel Bochner's work, one of the original inspirations for the piece,<strong> John Sakkis</strong> elaborated a kind of litany inspired by Fraser, <strong>Jeanne Heuvi</strong>ng told the humorous story of her move from an admirer of Donald Barthelme as a model for what she might be aiming for in her own writing to an encounter with Kathleen's <em>New Shoes</em> and its playful erotic energy, and then later with <em>when new time folds up</em>, in which Jeanne found pleasure in the graphic elements of "Etruscan Pages." <br />
<strong>El<span style="font-family: Calibri;">é</span>na Rivera,</strong> <strong>Norma Cole</strong>,<strong> Beverly Dahlen</strong>, and<strong> Brenda Hillman</strong> addressed Kathleen's work in poems and experimental mini essays. <strong>Kazim Ali</strong> recounted an experience of taking Kathleen's workshop in New York City and his excitement about the promise of working with scissors and glue although the workshop never got around to actually using these materials since their discussions were so vibrant; nevertheless, cutting and pasting are integral facets of Kazim's process. After working through the lunch break, the whole group walked down the street for the Robert Creeley memorial. <br />
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<strong>Linda Russo</strong> recounted her experience of meeting Kathleen at a reading and Fraser's impact on Linda's own writing and book work. <strong>Lauren Shufran</strong> discussed moving to San Francisco from Buffalo and completing an interview with Kathleen started by Linda Russo. In Washington Square park Kathleen and Lauren talked for some 6 hours. Listening to these recordings later, Lauren was struck by how much of the time Kathleen was engaging her. Lauren and a number of other readers noted Kathleen's generous correspondence and the beauty of her letters. <strong>I</strong> read from "Notes re echo," briefly contextualizing Kathleen's use of the epistolary in poetry and literature's long and ongoing interest in the letter, from Ovid and Horace to Spicer, Mackey, Bellamy and Adnan, suggesting that the letter provides a formal and rhetorical zone in which the personal and the lyric can be remade, enabling poetry to work the lyric, record and remake the social, poetic and political landscape of our presents, or what will become our histories.<br />
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<strong>Kathleen</strong> closed the evening first by reading "little joy poem," published in <em>The New Yorker</em>. <em>The New Yorker</em> asked Fraser to change the title of the poem, but Kathleen refused. They published it.<br />
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little joy poem<br />
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Like a shiny bus in the snow,<br />
I feel good this morning--<br />
new upholstery, green and tough,<br />
I'll never wear out!<br />
The snowplow came at 2 a.m.<br />
last night on its lonely task<br />
and I looked from the window<br />
waving my toothbrush.<br />
(At night, the snow<br />
changes color.)<br />
Here I am--two legs<br />
a new morning<br />
and joy,<br />
like the whiteness of cold milk,<br />
filling me up.<br />
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Then, reading from <em>WING</em>, gorgeously produced by Dale Going who was in the audience from the east coast, Kathleen left us with her words and resonant voice vibrating in the air. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_gt-AgFcwQx71aqmJYQX1KIYYX0lWc7N73FdZrkQOVZ2CME7jdgMra8skdosSGAK7fD-YkFyP-1DFhXW7TlWgzVZsVheTsoslUcvuix90wjRXkxcfGmPRsekBTqD8Po2VrX5KQPupiA/s1600/wing071.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_gt-AgFcwQx71aqmJYQX1KIYYX0lWc7N73FdZrkQOVZ2CME7jdgMra8skdosSGAK7fD-YkFyP-1DFhXW7TlWgzVZsVheTsoslUcvuix90wjRXkxcfGmPRsekBTqD8Po2VrX5KQPupiA/s1600/wing071.jpg" height="213" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo by Dale Going</td></tr>
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The good news is you don't have to rely on my memory. <strong>Night Boat Books</strong> is going to publish a limited edition collection of the essays and encounters with Kathleen's work. This is forthcoming in the Fall. Keep an eye out for it.<br />
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All of the presenters offered rich and engaging encounters with Kathleen's work, but of course, even <strong>this diversity barely scratches the surface</strong> <strong>of Kathleen's contributions to the poetry world</strong>. There are indeed her more than 15 books, but there is also her work as a teacher, her feminist poetics seminars, workshops, and other classes at San Francisco State, her mentoring, her work as the founder and editor of the groundbreaking HOW(ever) and HOW2, her role as the Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State (1973-1976), her dumpster diving there to rescue NET Outtakes footage (a fact John Sakkis noted in his talk as "legendary"), and more. <br />
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I first met Kathleen at SFSU where I was an MA student beginning in the fall of 1985. I remember being in Kathleen's seminar and working with classmate Mira Pasikov on our presentation of Barbara Guest's <em>Seeking Air</em>. I was in my early 20s. It was daunting and exhilarating. During the years I spent at State, Kathleen suggested I interview various writers, write reviews of books or performances. She prodded me to do this and to submit these pieces to <em>Poetry Flash</em>. And I did. I'm still doing it!<br />
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WITH GRATITUDE--<br />
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H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y KATHLEEN!<br />
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Some more pictures of the event:<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3OidZ6daPh_BS-zlLmBA9_WMFqO3g1BHUhdWvhI5pCVcnshndi4ydQ5i04h_t_lThs1UWLMhkeymLHQRZq5cDMGyt95-i1RdVVJm4vBKUFD4BzX0ti-_LM4OIUi1CsbZhe8T8mRs2rA/s1600/kevin+kazim+ali+and+arthur.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3OidZ6daPh_BS-zlLmBA9_WMFqO3g1BHUhdWvhI5pCVcnshndi4ydQ5i04h_t_lThs1UWLMhkeymLHQRZq5cDMGyt95-i1RdVVJm4vBKUFD4BzX0ti-_LM4OIUi1CsbZhe8T8mRs2rA/s1600/kevin+kazim+ali+and+arthur.jpg" height="145" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Arthur Bierman, Kevin Killian and Kazim Ali</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beverly Dahlen and Norma Cole<br />
photo by Kevin Killian</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRlFtR-maZLPvbuPB_2eFgPndf1Fhh_IKg7zbp_gIFI2Tj5yocXNxOQadHJGOd1oJww9d3mFdpigX4RPZbQQ_LTuR4diHNrs8sNHGFmHf5Xi41ZJwgfR0KgPavq3qGhcKTfsOigANUmA/s1600/elena+rivera.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRlFtR-maZLPvbuPB_2eFgPndf1Fhh_IKg7zbp_gIFI2Tj5yocXNxOQadHJGOd1oJww9d3mFdpigX4RPZbQQ_LTuR4diHNrs8sNHGFmHf5Xi41ZJwgfR0KgPavq3qGhcKTfsOigANUmA/s1600/elena+rivera.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Elena Rivera<br />
photo by Kevin Killian</td></tr>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-22078581705948141902015-03-07T09:01:00.003-08:002015-06-15T12:10:43.465-07:00House-Scrub, or After Porn by Rob Halpern at Margaret Tedesco's [2nd floor projects]<br />
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Sunday March 1, 2015--<strong><span style="color: #0c343d;">at Margaret Tedesco's [ 2nd floor projects]</span></strong> </span></div>
<span style="color: #666666; font-family: "Franklin Gothic Medium","sans-serif"; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;">projects2ndfloor.blogspot.com
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Sundays 12–5pm, Wednesdays 1–8pm, and by appointment<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Left: Nancy White, <em>Untitled</em>; Center: Courtney Johnson, <em>I am Living My Fantasy</em>; <br />
Right: Gregory Kaplowitz, <em>Untitled (Shroud)</em>Photos from M. Tedesco's blog</td></tr>
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</span>We celebrated the artwork by
<span style="color: #660000;">Courtney Johnson</span>, <span style="color: #660000;">Gregory Kaplowitz</span> and <span style="color: #660000;">Nancy White</span> along with the publication
of<span style="color: #0c343d;"> </span><span style="color: #660000;">Rob Halpern's chapbook HOUSE-SCRUB, or AFTER PORN</span>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Tedesco's light-filled and airy room
accommodated some 35 or so people eager to hear Rob read. Many of these same
people later headed over to Small Press Traffic's 5pm event, a Field Report
with Jennifer Tamayo, Amy De'Ath and Cassandra Troyan. For a report on that
event, click <a href="http://xpoetics.blogspot.com/2015/03/field-report-with-jennifer-tamayo-amy.html">HERE</a>.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo courtesy of Margaret Tedesco</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;">Here's a brief excerpt from Rob's compelling and beautiful work:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #274e13; font-family: Calibri;">There are so many things I want to tell you, things that embarrass me most, though it's hard to voice any one of them, even for you whom I've come to trust. So far, all my writing amounts to these strategies of evasion. That's what I was telling Dana & Lee, sitting outside in the late August heat as we tried to grasp where it all might be going. Casting idols on my brain, the sun produces these false appearances, the dahlias burning under gunmetal skies, so I've yet to discover what real life feels like. At least that's what I tell them. But what I want to tell you is, well, take my body, for example, a place where incommensurables collide<em> rhetoric & blood</em>, <em>price & value</em>, <em>datum & event</em> the bad equivalent of a hole in a soldier's bladder before he's given the form to join the donor's club. The dialectic, having come to such dumb arrest, yields this taxonomy of wounds pasted to a straw man I'll never fuck, a cheap shot at militarization, its so-called human face. What figure do combatants cut against a company that earns the bulk of its twelve billion in annual revenue from army contracts, and whose product tracks my car as it moves thru any one of eight hundred Oakland intersections. This is why my book amounts to a simple X without the algebra to resolve its value in the world where the word 'decorative' modifies unintelligible things, thereby assisting sales. As in every cash-starved city, the promise of federal dollars makes military surveillance an easy cow. See what I mean, in the absence of incident, structure eludes, the poem being but the gesture of a body groping its own withdrawn architecture. Whether bound or bundled, all my usable parts compress to the volume of a prosthetic device shoved inside a foreign orifice. This is how capital explodes in song, usurping the air you might be privately singing, the way the very idea of the flood dries up after the deluge. That's so dutifully Rimbaud, but what would the equivalent be? After the idea of collapse recedes, my use of disjunction will bear no relation to a break in the chain of title, a detainee's autopsy report, or any old forensic audit robo-signed& withdrawn in hazy spells of law. But nothing appears to accumulate inside the hole my organ makes when, mortally wounded in grenade attack, his blown genitals get contracted to a public utility, a city square or park, this being but an asset to securitize, a convention by whose rhyme scheme 'scars' and 'cars' seem to be of common scale, a sound to sing no polis.</span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-37667906134422382942015-03-02T16:46:00.001-08:002015-03-13T09:22:33.532-07:00Field Report with Jennifer Tamayo, Amy De'Ath and Cassandra Troyan<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Sunday March 1, 2015</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Yesterday afternoon <strong><span style="color: #073763;">Small Press Traffic</span></strong> and <strong><span style="color: #0b5394;">Mills College</span></strong>
collaboratively hosted a conversation/field report with <span style="color: #990000;"><strong>Jennifer Tamayo</strong></span>, <span style="color: #990000;"><strong>Amy De'Ath</strong></span>
and <span style="color: #990000;"><strong>Cassandra Troyan</strong></span> on the subject of gender and sexual violence in the
writing scenes in New York, Vancouver and the UK, and Chicago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Bay Area writing scene has been grappling
with these issues as well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Artists Television Access (</span>ATA), where
the event was held, was packed with people standing, sitting on the floor, and
spilling on to the stairs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Each of the three presenters spoke for 10-15 minutes,
informing attendees about recent events, the work they and others are doing,
and articulated their own questions, doubts, and concerns about actual and
potential possibilities for action, change. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After Jennifer (who went by JT), Amy, and
Cassandra spoke, the audience was invited to ask questions while Samantha Giles
and Stephanie Young recorded these questions on large sheets of paper. Each
speaker then addressed some of these comments and concerns, the event
culminating with all present invited to offer up <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ideas for action. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Below I've tried to capture some of what I
heard the participants saying. There have been a number of sexual assaults and gendered violence in
writing communities and various public discourses around these events, many of those under discussion in the last year or so. Some
of these I was hearing about for the first time. I've done my
best to reflect a small portion of the content of this urgent discussion. For more info on this event and the discussants, please see </span><a href="http://smallpresstraffic.org/"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Small Press Traffic's web site.</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="color: #660000;">Jennifer Tamayo (JT)</span></strong> told us about her experience working
with<span style="color: #20124d;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Enough is Enough</i></span>, a group that
came together after several sexual assaults against women in New York in August
of 2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>JT expressed frustration with </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->pervasive sanctioned sexism</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->unsafe poetry events </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->misogyny</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->the promotion of poets accused of sexual assault</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->a poetics of domination that operates under the
guise of aesthetic gesture</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->the valuing of reputation over accountability</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->the lack of institutional and community memory
(the aggressors are forgotten)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>both
the lack of resources and the continual refrain of "the lack of resources"
as a rationale for an absence of response. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">JT spoke of various concerns and tactics--</span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->considering who maintains a safe space</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->attending other events and meetings</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->supporting the shutting down of readings with
men who are sexual assaulters</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt 0.5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo4; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->working on developing a site to maintain
institutional memory.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">JT closed with a list of "15 Things I've Learned."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was no way for me to record all of
these but I found this list powerful in its ethos of critical assessment, for
example, when JT asked "What is preventing me from using these resources?"
Other things on the list include:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 37.95pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->"Organizing poets is hard and
infuriating"</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 37.95pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Demand what you want and be direct</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Writing and thinking together is empowering</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 37.95pt; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Shaming works</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 37.95pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">A
number of these statements were interwoven into larger points and thus do not
indicate discrete items, but as I was so engaged with listening, my pen couldn't
keep up.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">JT
also noted "Ways I have Failed":</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->my efforts are too sectional</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->and are focused around cis women</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">·<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><!--[endif]-->Enough is Enough hasn't reached out to older
generations</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">and
argued that "there needs to be more destruction before building"
since the problems are systemic. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">This
last claim I found particularly provocative and engaging; throughout the discussion, we returned to this a number of times.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="color: #20124d;"><strong>Amy De'Ath's</strong></span> talk began with outline of three topics: First
Nations in Vancouver and here in San Francisco, class in the UK, and online
organizing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She explored how one might
use gossip and conjecture as a feminist strategy. De'Ath contextualized her own
position in Vancouver as a settler on unceded Coast Salish territories,
reminding us of the more than 1,017 indigenous women and girls who have been
murdered in Canada and how the Canadian government refuses to launch an
investigation into these murders, considering them isolated criminal cases
rather than sociological and racist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amy
offered a critique of Rachel Zolf's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Janey's
Arcadia</i> worrying that it risks implying catharsis, suggesting that white
settlers can cathartically work through settler issues, <span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">but also noting
that this might be part of the problematic that Zolf intends to present.</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: 19.2pt; margin: 1em 0px; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Amy used to live in London and was part of the UK
poetry scene which she described as "macho and </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">exclusionary along
class lines.”</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">
De'Ath expressed frustration with the confidence and </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">rhetoric of
entitlement among </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>dominant
male writers </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">and
wanted to think about how this is linked to "the poetics of difficulty” particularly associated with Cambridge poetry. </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">She discussed the
posting of Elizabeth Ellen's "An Open Letter to the Internet" to the
UK poetics list-serve and the fallout of that discussion. A group of feminist poets collectively left the list as a result.</span></span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There might be a piece in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chicago Review t</i>hat is forthcoming on
all of this. I'm not sure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>De'Ath also
discussed her participation in a group and list-serve that excluded cis males
but did have one male queer feminist artist. </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">Amy noted that she (ambivalently and hesitantly)
thought that he should not be in the group, for reasons not at all to do with
his personal politics – a position he later confirmed when he thoughtfully
volunteered to leave. </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">She also recounted the fact that a woman of color
left the group because she did not feel welcome there. There were only two
direct immediate responses to this woman's email announcing her departure, </span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-font-family: "MS Mincho"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;">and for De’Ath,
this event raised several serious problems in relation to issues of race and the
question of what kind of content gets the most attention, and who is most
comfortable speaking up in a space.</span><span style="mso-ascii-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-font-family: Calibri;"> At a number of points throughout the evening the
conversation turned to the ongoing problems of white supremacy and racism
across numerous writing scenes.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span> </div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">
Last
but not least,<strong><span style="color: #0c343d;"> Cassandra Troyan</span></strong> spoke about their experience in Chicago which, because
of <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>geographic, racial, and class
segregation, doesn't quite have a central writing "community." They noted that when it comes to gendered violence, "silencing is
extreme," with few women willing to name the men involved since many of
them run institutions, presses, etc. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Troyan</span>
spoke of their work with the Chicago Feminist Writers and Artists (CFWA)and
Feminist Action Support Network (FASN), noting that there is a cross-cultural
scene there, with people coming from punk, radical, art, and music communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Troyan expressed interest in an
accountability process, in facilitating safe spaces, in collective goals, discussing ongoing Sunday workshops on a variety of topics, from mental health to
self-care, healing justice, generational violence--that have been taking place.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Some of the Questions/Comments Proposed by
Attendees:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><o:p> </o:p>How
do we surface unconscious bias?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How
can people support individual work?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">What
can we learn from what others are doing?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Someone
wanted to know why JT read off the list of names of the 72 attendees at the
first Enough is Enough meeting.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How
do we respond in the moment? How to call shit out!</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Exclusion
and transformative justice and how these are related to systems of
incarceration</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">What
are the limits of gossip?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How
does information move?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How
to differentiate between aesthetic preference and closed communities</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">What
is the link between aesthetic difficulty and class, gender, race?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How
to dismantle white supremacy in poetry circles?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The
problem of indigenous issues not being able to be made present. An attendee
mentioned someone who did not come to the Sunday event because of this concern.
There is simply no space to address this issue, given the community.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another participant underscored this claim noting
that race cannot be addressed precisely because the community is largely white and
cis.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Some of the comments under A Call to
Action, generated by the entire group included (The discussion was out of time as
ATA needed to close for the evening. Some of these were more notational or
working propositions, rather than explicit calls):<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">An
understanding that not everyone wants to take action in the same way. How can
we make this possible?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Creating
individual healing for those most affected.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Safe
spaces.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Establishing
Support Liaisons</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Organizing
Rage Liaisons </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">How
to collectively lower inhibitions around booing and hissing </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Gossip</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">Some
people suggested that writers of color do not need white people or cis men. A
brief discussion about who is needed or wanted ensued. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The
atmosphere was alive at this event. Stay-tuned: there may be follow-up
meetings.</span></strong></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-add-space: auto;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span></strong> </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-34924431082664742232015-01-23T13:37:00.002-08:002015-01-23T13:37:21.559-08:00Class and New Narrative Redux!<br />
I've decided to dive into the archives of xpoetics which has now been "on air" since 2008 (can hardly believe it) to give some of the posts a second life. While I do not very often publish my own work on xpoetics, sometimes I do, and I am going to take the liberty of exhuming one of my pieces:<br />
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<span style="color: #0c343d;">Out of Context: What’s Class Got to Do with It?</span> <br />
A Review of <em>LIAR</em> by Mike Amnasan<br />
San Francisco: Ithuriel’s Spear, 2007<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4aPpRgvp0NHN2l0pPRn0ydIT5GtRGAp5Jzgqxh3Y-CKWL4KNE2yFS-XehFxY2SdNQXd4k7rq61wm3UyCvoAmahu_ybkzUFhb0VQIflktOBfO_EpCt-uWVxoaFr8sK6wIQy_9_QMbtGg/s1600/liar+book.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4aPpRgvp0NHN2l0pPRn0ydIT5GtRGAp5Jzgqxh3Y-CKWL4KNE2yFS-XehFxY2SdNQXd4k7rq61wm3UyCvoAmahu_ybkzUFhb0VQIflktOBfO_EpCt-uWVxoaFr8sK6wIQy_9_QMbtGg/s1600/liar+book.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4aPpRgvp0NHN2l0pPRn0ydIT5GtRGAp5Jzgqxh3Y-CKWL4KNE2yFS-XehFxY2SdNQXd4k7rq61wm3UyCvoAmahu_ybkzUFhb0VQIflktOBfO_EpCt-uWVxoaFr8sK6wIQy_9_QMbtGg/s1600/liar+book.png" height="320" width="203" /></a></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4aPpRgvp0NHN2l0pPRn0ydIT5GtRGAp5Jzgqxh3Y-CKWL4KNE2yFS-XehFxY2SdNQXd4k7rq61wm3UyCvoAmahu_ybkzUFhb0VQIflktOBfO_EpCt-uWVxoaFr8sK6wIQy_9_QMbtGg/s1600/liar+book.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> </a><br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4aPpRgvp0NHN2l0pPRn0ydIT5GtRGAp5Jzgqxh3Y-CKWL4KNE2yFS-XehFxY2SdNQXd4k7rq61wm3UyCvoAmahu_ybkzUFhb0VQIflktOBfO_EpCt-uWVxoaFr8sK6wIQy_9_QMbtGg/s1600/liar+book.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> </a><br />
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It is particularly fitting to begin with this piece since <em>LIAR </em>was published in 2007, but was actually written decades earlier. <br />
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Prior to its publication, the sole surviving copy of the manuscript was in the hands of <span style="color: #20124d;"><strong>Camille Roy</strong></span> who photocopied it for classes she was teaching. My review of<em> LIAR</em> was originally published in <span style="color: #660000;"><em>Crayon 5</em>.</span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;"></span><br />
<span style="color: #660000;">Enjoy!</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/253546311/Out-of-Context-What-s-Class-Got-to-Do-with-It" style="text-decoration: underline;" title="View Out of Context: What’s Class Got to Do with It? on Scribd">Out of Context: What’s Class Got to Do with It?</a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-51871565381152085172015-01-10T15:05:00.002-08:002015-01-10T15:05:27.060-08:00Marianne Morris's "Mother Poems" and a Poetry of Live Address<br />
I am so pleased to offer you a selection of work by UK poet<strong><span style="color: #134f5c;"> Marianne Morris.</span></strong> In addition to a selection of poems, Morris has graciously shared with us a prose piece contextualizing the poems and their relation to performance and politics via live address and human interaction. Enjoy!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPMyUJwa3xUP0TUp0pvhXCdwojaCnUAZEG8n-1nlue1TGWBEGVWzJhRmm3pZyp2_M_la0VZoc5GBks4czCnbKDmq2oPoIqmIkDQi1zTLWORMg4nvBEW4CxyvDYLYituV7oX0KutMdjA/s1600/marianne.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoPMyUJwa3xUP0TUp0pvhXCdwojaCnUAZEG8n-1nlue1TGWBEGVWzJhRmm3pZyp2_M_la0VZoc5GBks4czCnbKDmq2oPoIqmIkDQi1zTLWORMg4nvBEW4CxyvDYLYituV7oX0KutMdjA/s1600/marianne.jpg" height="320" width="207" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #0c343d;"><strong>Marianne Morris</strong></span> started Bad Press in 2003, which has since published over ten, mostly female, authors, in the UK and North America. She has written over ten chapbooks; her first full collection, <em>The On All Said Things Moratorium</em>, was published in 2013 by Enitharmon Press. She holds a PhD in performance writing from University College Falmouth, and a BA in English from Cambridge University; St. John’s College awarded her the Harper-Wood Studentship for Creative Writing in 2008. She is currently studying Oriental Medicine and herbalism in California.<br />
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">MOTHER
POEMS</span></b><br />
by <em>Marianne Morris</em><br />
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<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> </span></div>
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The sequence called ‘Mother
Poems’ is the result of a long process of my efforts to develop a poetry of
live address: it evolved out of editing original drafts of a poem variously
called ‘The Great Sublimation’, ‘The Unsublimation’, and ‘Greek With Me’. These
titles evolved in the aftermath and anticipation of ten separate public
readings over two years.<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[1]</span></span></span></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The act of public reading provided assistance in the composition
and editing of these poems because it focused my attention on the idea that the
poems were being heard, and therefore belonging in the realm of human
interactions. After reading an early draft in New York, for example, I
significantly cut a long section referring to Hegel’s writings, hearing or
understanding in their live echo as I read, a disconnection between the obscure
references and the audience’s immediate ability to grasp their origins.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">‘The Great Sublimation’, the first in the series, relies on a
framework of references to Ancient Greece to maintain its focus, but is also
marked by the extensive use of quotations from Hannah Arendt, G.W.F. Hegel,
John Keats, Jacques Lacan, J.H. Prynne, and Harvey Yunis. This focus on quoted
material links back to Plato’s conception of writing as unable to articulate
its needs for itself, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">‘<em>always
need[ing] its father to help it’, and its implied need for legitimacy</em>.</i><a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[2]</span></span></span></a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Reference has also been associated with male tendencies in
conversational speech, which ‘men tend to orientate to its referential
function’:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> M</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">en’s reasons for talking often
focus on the content of the talk or its outcome, rather than on how it affects
the feelings of others. It is women who rather emphasise this aspect of talk.<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[3]</span></span></span></a></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">I employed reference material in ‘Mother Poems’ in order to subject
it to poetic language. I cut the quotes up, changed them, and added my own
words. They are intended to function in these poems more as raw materials than
as indicators of outside knowledge. In addition to the quotes already
mentioned, in the final poem, I also included fragments of the initial notes
that I made during composition. The earliest drafts of ‘The Great Sublimation’
were heavily footnoted, and part of the editing process involved amalgamating
the text of the poem with the text of these notes. This helped to resolve the conflicts
implied by the two different registers of discourse, and also to contain and
streamline the poem, reasoning that the presence of footnotes would not only
interrupt the flow of poetic discourse, but also to imply that there was
thinking about the poem’s content that needed to be done separately in order
for it to convey its full meaning.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">The word feminism has a medical root. In 1875,
it denoted ‘[t]he appearance of female secondary sexual characteristics in a
male individual; feminization’ (OED). This root is particularly interesting with
regard to the semi-permeable boundaries of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">polis</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oikos</i>, because in the early
medical sense, feminisation was the appearance of female characteristics in
places where they were not expected. In accordance with a feminist poetics,
then, I wanted to write a poem through the idea of the fixed, male, despotic
space of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">polis</i> being confronted by
some of the female qualities of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oikos</i>
– permission, fulfillment, intimacy. I wanted to see what would happen if
Ancient Greek <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">polis</i> had a mother.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I came to this conclusion through various
public readings of drafts of poems that ended up as ‘Mother Poems’. I started
off introducing the early drafts at readings by explaining that I had some
grievances with Ancient Greece. In a January 2012 reading in New York, I
described the drafts as the result of my thinking about Ancient Greece and
‘trying to fight with it in my poetry’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[4]</span></span></span></a> This description was a
modification of my earlier attempt to describe the poems in the introduction to
a December 2011 reading in Berkeley, CA. I discussed this earlier introduction
in an interview with the California-based poet, David Brazil:</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">DB</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">: In your reading in Berkeley in 2011 you said, “Fuck
the ancient Greeks.” Were you thinking of any ancient Greeks in
particular? Would you rather root for the Persians? How about the
modern Greeks? How about petrol bombs against astunomoi, February 2012?</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">MM: </span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Oh dear, how rude. I am so not punk. I am actually
pretty fond of a number of Ancient Greeks, Plato and Sappho among them. I think
maybe it’s just that the Ancient Greek ideal city-state of polis would benefit
from a mother. I have been working on a poem for a couple of years now that
attempts to address the faulty elitism of polis, the city space which excludes
everyone except the male heads of households, but which nonetheless still
retains important ideas for contemporary thinking about political engagement
(for example, in its conceiving of speaking and acting as equally valuable).
And I’m about to contradict myself, but I also get frustrated when I see so
much Ancient Greek thought sneaking into modern theory—Jacques Rancière I am
looking at you—at least partly because one of Plato’s best ideas in the
Phaedrus is that writing is just a little kid who needs its daddy to hold its
hand because it is immutable and doesn’t know how to speak to anyone, and the
reiteration of Ancient Greek thought in the present time seems like a perfect
metaphor for this hand-holding. I have many imaginings about a poetry of live
address that can and does know how to speak and who to speak to.<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[5]</span></span></span></a></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">These comments are tied to Plato’s description of writing in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phaedrus</i>, where he tries to discredit it
as being immutable, confined to a rigid space, unable to speak to anyone. The
paragraph that particularly bothered me was this:</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<em><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The offspring of painting
stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain
most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were
speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that
has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that
very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse
roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no
less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it
should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked
unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend
itself nor come to its own support.</span></em><a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[6]</span></span></span></span></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">This seems to me the crux of the contradictions inherent in the
notion of a ‘political’ writing, or perhaps simply the anachronism of it.
Political space is, etymologically, womanless, and when it translates into
contemporary time, it carries that inherently masculine structure with it, in
patriarchal traditions of thought. Plato prescribes here for writing a
patrilineal doom: it is doomed not only because the written word amounts to a
helpless babbling Echo, but that its only hope is in its being helped along by
its masculine elder, who provides through his very presence a form of
legitimacy. Jacques Rancière’s recycling of this idea serves only to reinforce
this perception of the written word, both as helpless, and requiring the help
of its father. Rancière is speaking generally from ‘the Platonic point of view’
when he paraphrases this idea, without directly acknowledging its source: </span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">By stealing away to wander
aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing
destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the
relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in
shared space.<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[7]</span></span></span></a></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Rancière recycles the root of the idea and builds on it, crucially
altering the clause about illegitimacy to posit writing itself as the root
destroyer of ‘every legitimate foundation’ for its own circulation. Most
peculiarly, he also brings in ‘the position of bodies in shared space’ to
support his argument: surely bodies in space are the correct setting for reclaiming
the legitimacy of language, where ideas remain possible, unfixed, and subject
to dialogue. Rancière’s manoeuvre here in fact reinforces the anti-political
aspect of the written word that Plato finds so oppressive, first by attempting
to re-posit a stale idea, and secondly by sourcing this idea from the archive
of a fatherly figure, whose very presence ‘protects’ it, and gives it
legitimacy. Its legitimacy comes from the safety of repetition; it is
(literally) unimaginative, and thereby the antithesis of progressive politics.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">For Rancière, therefore, it is no surprise that ‘[p]olitics
revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it’ (13) – essentially
prescribing a permanent re-positing of what is already in existence, a
championing of the status quo. His politics consists of the interpretation of
events, sealed in by existing actualities, rather than the imagining of the
future possible, in which the idea of change is rooted. </span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Politics here is submitted to a reading of itself as relating to
fixed categories of what is visible, what can be quantified, and what does not
change. The comments made in the interview with Brazil quoted above aim to
challenge this notion. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">What I particularly
like about the exchange is the way that, in re-positing my original aggression
back to me and challenging it through confrontation, the aggression necessarily
deflates and submits to more careful and articulate examination: a somewhat
crude example, perhaps, but therefore perhaps a striking metaphor about the importance
of poetry’s having an audience, or of being thought of as having an audience.
Not, perhaps, to the extent that a poet is writing for ‘a reader’, but that,
particularly in the context of a poetry that is read in public, it is part of a
social interaction, an exchange, and will encounter people in different
contexts on its way. I do not mean to invoke the category of ‘the reader’ as
the building blocks of a market, a mutable category exhibiting a particular
taste. This is not ‘the reader’ discussed by Barry and Hampson (paraphrasing
Donald Davie): </span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">the general poetry reader will tolerate a degree of
surface difficulty, but only so long as the subject matter remains essentially
familiar.<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[8]</span></span></span></a></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Nor is it the reader Don
Paterson describes as seen by ‘the Mainstream’ as ‘equal collaborator in the
creation of the poem’, contrasting this with the reader in Postmodern poetry,
who ‘is alone’.<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[9]</span></span></span></a> These allusions to the
reader are tied to the idea of poetry as a product, and the idea of the public
as its patrons, who in turn expect a particular kind of service. I have come to
conceive of the idea of an audience in the sense discussed by Nicholas
Bourriaud as ‘relational aesthetics’, which produces</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt 0.5in; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">[…] an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm
of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an
independent and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">private</i> symbolic
space[.]<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[10]</span></span></span></a></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span></div>
<br />
<div align="right" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: right;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">we
the massive majority in our bodies are few</span></i></div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="right" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: right;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">as am
I from my seat upstairs alone being with you</span></i></div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="right" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: right;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">being
with you</span></i></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="-ms-text-justify: inter-ideograph; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">The reader, who does
not exist, becomes anyone; it becomes the category of people listening, which
is unfixed and uncertain. It is predicated on the only things that a person can
assume to have in common with any other person, the abstractions that fall under
the watch of the category of compassion, and under the motherly qualities of
care lacked by ancient <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">polis</i>.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="right" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: right;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><s><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">IF YR</span></s></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> A FEMINISTʼS</span></i></div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="right" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: right;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">YR A
MOTHER</span></i></div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="right" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: right;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">YR YR
A FEMINIST</span></i></div>
<br />
<br />
<div align="right" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: right;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">YR A
MOTHER</span></i></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
</div>
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Some of
‘Mother Poems’ became a weird pop opera, which I performed in London at POLYply
11 (June 2011) to a backing track of reggaeton and synth voices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of it went into the final manuscript for
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DSK</i>, a chapbook printed by Tipped
Press in Tokyo in 2012.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">I read
the final version of this poem in June 2012 at a reading to mark the launch of
the fourth issue of The Paper Nautilus, a magazine devoted to women’s poetry
and poetry criticism. I read with four other female poets, all my age or
younger than me. In terms of thinking about the relevance of ‘Mother Poems’ to
the current sociopoetic landscape, this reading seemed an exemplary event in
that the other readers were all young women. In addition, each poet was asked
to read the work of another poet in addition to something of their own, which
opened up the reading to new voices and new poetries, broadening the dialogue,
expanding the sphere of knowledge, and posing a generous model for sharing
work.</span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span></b><br />
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<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[1]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">I first read ‘The Great Sublimation’ in Cambridge, May
6, 2011, and then read subsequent drafts at nine separate poetry readings:
POLYply11 and Intercapillary Places in London (June 2011), Hi Zero in Brighton
(November 2011), a house reading at Woolsey Heights in Berkeley, CA (December
2011), Segue in New York (January 2012), Lyric & Polis in Falmouth,
Cornwall (February 2012), Poets Against Dominque Strauss-Kahn in Cambridge
(March 2012), Stichting Perdu in Amsterdam (March 2012), the Arnolfini Gallery
in Bristol (April 2012), and the Poetry & Revolution conference in London
(May 2012).</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Plato
(1973) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Phaedrus & Letters VII and
VIII</i>. Translated by W. Hamilton. Middlesex: Penguin, p.56</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Holmes,
J. (1995) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Women, Men and Politeness</i>.
London: Longman, p.2</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">‘</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">MARIANNE MORRIS, SEGUE
READING SERIES, BOWERY POETRY CLUB, JANUARY 7TH, 2012’ [audio] [online]
Available at: < </span><a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris-Marianne/Morris-Marianne_Segue-BPC_1-7-12.mp3"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="color: blue;">http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Morris-Marianne/Morris-Marianne_Segue-BPC_1-7-12.mp3</span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">> [Accessed September 19,
2012].</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt;"> Marianne
Morris, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Iran Documents</span></i><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"> (Tennessee:
Trafficker Press, 2012), pp.44-5.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[6]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt;"> C.D.C. Reeve, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus,
Alcibiades with selections from Republic, Laws. </i>(Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing, 2006), p.275.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[7]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Jacques
Rancière, <i>The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible</i>.
Translated by G. Rockhill, 2006 (2000). London: Continuum, p.13.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[8]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Barry, P & R. Hampson. <i>New British Poetries: The Scope of the
Possible</i>. </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Manchester: MUP, 1993), p.4.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[9]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri;">Don Paterson & Simic, C., <i>New British Poetry </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">(</span>Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2004)
p.xxix.</span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/ALEX/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/R1EDTC9K/Mother%20Poems%20edited%20for%20pub%20SHORT.docx" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-fareast-font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="color: blue;">[10]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"> </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;">Nicholas
Bourriaud, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Relational Aesthetics</i>
(Paris: Les presses du reel, 2002), p.14.</span><br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-38004797282192150422014-12-21T15:27:00.000-08:002014-12-21T17:26:03.587-08:00Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7LdXas2su60Ab9b_RQwxkjlLGv61ylkTKNCacPSfJKr4QBsxATGVhybQy1X0QrhcFGbrmE2eAsEeOalHMP7amrOW4tnDmg9_L4x5o_Nl4kN-77sEiRYQ6NO7aZfp6gqrKTZAuyZLW-w/s1600/poetry_rankine_citizen_f.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7LdXas2su60Ab9b_RQwxkjlLGv61ylkTKNCacPSfJKr4QBsxATGVhybQy1X0QrhcFGbrmE2eAsEeOalHMP7amrOW4tnDmg9_L4x5o_Nl4kN-77sEiRYQ6NO7aZfp6gqrKTZAuyZLW-w/s1600/poetry_rankine_citizen_f.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></a></div>
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In October Emily Abendroth and I were at a Bard meeting and we shared a room at a YMCA camp in the Catskills when the trees around us had reached their zenith of flame and color. Emily had brought along a copy of Claudia Rankine's book <i>Citizen</i>: <i>An American Lyric</i>. Its opening immediately engages:<br />
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<i><span style="color: #0c343d;">When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. Usually you are nestled under blankets and the house is empty. Sometimes the moon is missing and beyond the windows the low, gray ceiling seems approachable. Its dark light dims in degrees depending on the density of clouds and you fall back into that which gets reconstructed as metaphor (5).</span></i><br />
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Hailing the reader with its deployment of the second person, the writing subtly and fairly rapidly shifts away from what might first appear to be a luxurious, even narcissistic meditation--"you let yourself linger"--to a series of traumatic anecdotes, conversations, and experiences. For example:<br />
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<span style="color: #073763;"><span style="color: #073763;"><i>At the end of a brief phone conversation, you tell the manager you are speaking with that you will come by his office to sign the form. When you arrive and announce yourself, he blurts out, I didn't know you were black!</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i>I didn't mean to say that, he then says.</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i>Aloud, you say.</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i>What? he asks.</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i>You didn't mean to say that aloud.</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i>Your transaction goes swiftly after that (44).</i></span></span><br />
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<i><span style="color: #073763;">The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your glasses to single out what you know is there because doubt is inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark, their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet. Yes, and its raining. Each moment is like this--before it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen. What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you (9).</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="color: #073763;"><br /></span></i> <i><span style="color: #073763;">A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from the misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant (14).</span></i><br />
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While the poetry sometimes makes use of the third and on occasion first person "I" narration, Rankine's writing powerfully employs the second person to convey discrete, individual experiences that are <i>also</i> all too frighteningly frequent, and therefore common, in common, shared by many. While the particulars of an encounter revealing racism at work may vary in their specific details, the shape of these encounters, what they reveal is markedly the same--namely,what it is like to live in a thoroughly racialized and racist society.<br />
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At the close of her book, Rankine thanks a large number of people who "generously shared their stories" (169), suggesting that her research and writing process included consulting friends and colleagues and incorporating their experiences into the text. The second person renders these stories in such a way that the reader is interpellated and implicated; emphatically the <i>you</i> of the text is at once discretely singular and plural. <br />
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from "Stop-and-Frisk"<br />
a script for Situation video created in collaboration with John Lucas:<br />
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<span style="color: #073763;"><i>I knew whatever was in front of me was happening and then the police vehicle came to a screeching halt in front of me like they were setting up a blockade. Everywhere were flashes, a siren sounding and a stretched-out roar. Get on the ground. Get on the ground now. Then I just knew.</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span> <span style="color: #073763;"><i>And you are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description (105).</i></span><br />
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The subtitle of Rankine's book is "An American Lyric." <br />
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While any subject, any "I," is a subject of shattering, and the lyric itself is predicated on this split subjectivity--the "I" of any poem always a discursive construction--Rankine's writing in <i>Citizen</i> marks the myriad spoken and unspoken, overt and covert constructed ways race and racism traverse, shape, and undergird our relations. Her careful deployment of pronouns reveals the emptiness of the "I" who cannot see others, or the discrepant fissure in social relations in which a black American "I" is read by others as a <i>you</i>, nameless, less than human, an indistinguishable object. At the same time, the collective <i>you</i> marks the communal--in all of its potential beauty and many horrors. I guess what I mean to say is Claudia Rankine elaborates the plenitude and the abyss every pronoun marks, demonstrating the ways race is a force of "undoing" and "doing" in a thoroughly racialized society, a democracy founded and foundering on its historically problematic construction of citizenship. <br />
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When a man says "I can't breathe," who does not hear the "I," see the human being struggling to breathe? What is it that some people see when they look at a black man or woman? Darren Wilson described Michael Brown as “look[ing] like a demon” or "Hulk Hogan" (McCoy).<br />
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Claudia Rankine's book <i>Citizen</i> exposes the ugly truth at the heart of the histories of <i>citizens</i> and <i>citizenship</i>.<br />
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For every citizen there is a non-citizen, an other that makes possible the category of "citizen." From <i>The Oxford English Dictionary:</i><br />
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<i>Citizen</i>:<br />
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<li> An inhabitant of a city or town; <i title="especially">esp.</i> one possessing civic rights and privileges, a burgess or freeman of a city</li>
<li> A legally recognized subject or national of a state, commonwealth, or other polity, either native or naturalized, having certain rights, privileges, or duties.</li>
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The writing throughout <i>Citizen</i> moves with a quiet, deliberative pace, one that is adept at suddenly turning a corner and revealing the precipice, one that the reader realizes is never <i>suddenly</i> there, but rather <i>always</i> present, if sometimes, less conspicuous. <br />
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<i><span style="color: #073763;">Sometimes "I" is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then what is comes apart the closer you are to it.</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="color: #073763;">This makes the first person a symbol for something.</span></i><br />
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<i><span style="color: #073763;">The pronoun barely holding the person together (71).</span></i><br />
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I couldn't put this book down. I want to hold this book up in the air.<br />
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McCoy, Terrence. "Darren Wilson Explains Why He killed Michael Brown." <i>The Washington Post</i>, 25 November 2014. <br />
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Rankine, Claudia. <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014.<br />
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<span style="color: #073763;"><i><br /></i></span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006283425695547617.post-63598313915556764082014-12-09T10:18:00.000-08:002014-12-09T10:18:43.454-08:00Celebrating Brandon Brown!<br />
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<span style="color: #660000;">A Hearty Congratulations</span> to the Bay Area's own <span style="color: #660000;">Brandon Brown </span>who recently received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship!</h2>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdGsQWP7VShdNUqCC3rwqKY00v-SThPWapmVgk5jyqLvGWdJeM7zVRGj56c84XYBvmhj-xmptunO1HllpJJ1ktZZn-_B9vd8iAdtO0HJJa9flb2_6zXlFo1qJPRh2kABfmfjtg8b_h6Q/s1600/BBresized.+jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdGsQWP7VShdNUqCC3rwqKY00v-SThPWapmVgk5jyqLvGWdJeM7zVRGj56c84XYBvmhj-xmptunO1HllpJJ1ktZZn-_B9vd8iAdtO0HJJa9flb2_6zXlFo1qJPRh2kABfmfjtg8b_h6Q/s1600/BBresized.+jpg.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
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<em>Brandon Brown is the author of four books of poetry, most recently <span style="color: black;">Top 40 </span><span style="color: black;">(Roof) and the forthcoming </span><span style="color: black;">Shadow Lanka </span><span style="color: black;">(Big Lucks).</span><span style="color: black;"> </span><span style="color: black;">His poetry and prose have appeared recently or will appear soon in </span><span style="color: black;">Open Space</span><span style="color: black;">, </span><span style="color: black;">Art Practical, Maggy, Elderly, Berkeley Poetry Review, </span><span style="color: black;">and </span><span style="color: black;">Where Eagles Dare.</span><span style="color: black;"> </span><span style="color: black;">He is an editor at Krupskaya, occasionally publishes small press materials under the imprint OMG!, and helps curate the Heart’s Desire reading series at the Bay Area Public School. </span></em><br />
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I have always admired the way Brandon's writing moves across multiple linguistic registers from pop culture to the classics. It does so with wit and linguistic and rhetorical flair. It is capable of bragging and being humble simultaneously. In its crossing and ability to register feeling, capaciously and often with a punch, his writing reminds me of Frank O'Hara's. <br />
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You believe the writing when it claims: "Dunno, but I do feel these feelings and feel torn apart" (<em>The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus</em> 156).<br />
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Here is section 50 from Brandon's poem "Sparrow" in <em>The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus</em> from Krupskaya:<br />
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<span style="color: #073763;">Dear God, it's me, Catullus, except this time I'm talking to you as a virgin, in stanzas of three glyconics followed by a pherecratean, a metrical system found in the work of Anacreon (6th century BCE). Each stanza observes synaphaea, or 'fastening together,' and each glyconic ends with a syllable that is long. Halfway through the poem I start to talk about your name, and how powerful you are, and how you're the moon and the vegetables I eat and are really old, and <em>sui generis</em>, so spritely, so gentle.</span><br />
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<span style="color: black;">And section 29:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #073763;">of his community who have caused him outrage, and lovebirds who have rearranged spatialities that Catullus had found pleasing. I have belabored this because it gives me an opportunity to talk about the process of translation in this book called <em>The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus</em>. Translation as I understand it involves a preceding writing, a proceeding writing--in between is the body that translates. The preceding writing is absorbed by the body of the translator in the act of reading. And when the translator writes something down which proceeds from the act of reading and the preceding writing, that is called "translation." However, far from idealizing repetition, this translation</span><br />
<span style="color: #073763;"><br /></span>So many sections of this poem hang in <em>medias res</em>, inviting the reader to turn the page. Get the book to find out where the next section takes you.<br />
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Brandon has kindly shared with us the poem he submitted to the NEA Committee. Enjoy!<br />
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<a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/249664386/The-Last-Words-of-Gerard-Manley-Hopkins-by-Brandon-Brown" style="text-decoration: underline;" title="View The Last Words of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Brandon Brown. on Scribd">The Last Words of Gerard Manley Hopkins by Brandon Brown.</a></div>
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