House-Scrub, or After Porn by Rob Halpern at Margaret Tedesco's [2nd floor projects]

Sunday March 1, 2015--at Margaret Tedesco's [ 2nd floor projects]

projects2ndfloor.blogspot.com  
Sundays 12–5pm, Wednesdays 1–8pm, and by appointment

 

 

Left: Nancy White, Untitled; Center: Courtney Johnson, I am Living My Fantasy;
Right: Gregory Kaplowitz, Untitled (Shroud)Photos from M. Tedesco's blog

 

We celebrated the artwork by Courtney Johnson, Gregory Kaplowitz and Nancy White along with the publication of Rob Halpern's chapbook HOUSE-SCRUB, or AFTER PORN. 

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 HERE.

photo courtesy of Margaret Tedesco




 

Here's a brief excerpt from Rob's compelling and beautiful work:

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 rhetoric & blood, price & value, datum & event 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.

 

Rachel Zolf in San Francisco

Yesterday afternoon at ATA on Valencia at 21st in San Francisco, SMALL PRESS TRAFFIC presented RACHEL ZOLF with special guests  SIRAMA BAJO, DAVID BUUCK and ERIKA STAITI.  The afternoon included a film, reading, and polyvocal performance from Janey’s Arcadia (Coach House, 2014), "an aversive, conversive reckoning with the ongoing errors of Canadian settler-colonialism."






Here's how Coach House describes Janey's Arcadia:


Janey's Arcadia restages Canada's colonial appropriations in a carnivalesque cacophony of accented speech, weather, violence, foliage and carnality. Rachel Zolf assembles a pirate score of glitch-ridden settler narratives, primarily from Manitoba. Clashing voices squall across time, flashing pornographic signs that the colonial catastrophe continues with each brutal scrubbing of Indigenous knowledges and settler responsibility. Unsettling the Arcadian promise of a new pure home, this poetry asks whose bodies are consumed as fuel, and whose glitched subjectivities dirty up received narratives of supremacy and vanishing. Subversive, aversive, conversive, Janey's Arcadia propels the reader toward necessary ethical encounter.

In her introduction, Samantha Giles, at Rachel's request, discussed her own background which includes Chickasaw, an ancestry cloaked in silence within the history of Giles' family. This is something a number of us can attest too. My family's Mic'mac ancestry was, until my maternal grandmother's death, a rumored but tabooed subject. I bring this up as Zolf's work engages with questions of erasure, misrecognition, denials and repressions, personal, communal, social, political. How to excavate these histories and in what languages articulated by what subjects are questions at the heart of her project. Janey's Arcadia followed Zolf's work on Neighbor Procedure and her visit to Israel and Palestine.

Erika Staiti and Rachel Zolf

Zolf's event began with her reading from her book, accompanied by David Buuck, who worked the overhead projector, displaying multiple, palimpsested layers from a variety of texts and images, including the one on the book's cover.  This sliding performance of layered images/texts/words accompanied Zolf's resonant, guttural, lyrical, sonically textured languages, which include among others, Cree, French, Gaelic, Scot's English, Red River twang, and the linguistic cacophony created by "errors of recognition" within the Optical Character Recognition software (OCR) Zolf used for obtaining digital copies of historical documents and texts.

Rachel then invited the audience to have a discussion. She shared some of her process, asked us if we felt as if we were settlers and wondered what feelings were evoked by the work. This last question, for me, proved provocative as there was so much to take-in in the rich performance. I found myself sonically pleasured, and I supposed troubled, as well as interested by the contextual resonance of images and text moving on the screen. For example, at one point an image of an 1886 pamphlet entitled "What Women Say of the Canadian Northwest" was juxtaposed/overlaid with a text that included a sentence that read something like, "if any woman should be so audacious...the board....will grind her to dust....!). Where affect is in the midst of so much going on is difficult to pinpoint. There's a great deal to explore here--where affect is in a piece, how it is evoked, mobilized, beyond stock strategies and with complexity, how and when it is experienced (immediately, upon solitary reading, belatedly, etc.,)  by an audience member or reader--these are all engaging questions. What form has to do with all of this is also live. Zolf shared her own earlier engagement with formalism in the tradition of Russian formalism and her current interest in mobilizing affect.

Sirama Bajo and Erika Staiti

This discussion was followed by the showing of a short film Zolf has worked on with a number of collaborators. The film includes footage marked with the Canadian National Film Board's (NFB) watermark and includes the running time log or signature. The footage includes this material because Zolf appropriated it as it was too expensive to purchase the rights. Rachel explained how she likes having these features as part of the film since they markedly declare who owns the gaze. After the film, we moved outside onto the sidewalk on Valencia for a reading which included a polyvocal performance of the poem and the names of indigenous women murdered in Canada. Here Zolf was joined by Erika Staiti, David Buuck, and Sirama Bajo. Passersby stopped to listen, walked through the performance, pulled their BMWs out of the adjacent parking spot. The twilight was lit by the many upscale neon lights to be found on Valencia these days. The performers' voices struggled against the ambient sound of urban night life as the humid day began to unwind. Bajo closed the event with an indigenous song, her beautiful voice rising powerfully above the street sounds around her.  

David Buuck, Sirama Bajo and Rachel Zolf

If you weren't there, that's too bad. Zolf gave us much to think about and feel; we had the chance to talk together, an opportunity always built on the foundation of provocations and risk, and in this case, exhilaration.

Two by Alli Warren

 

I make a list of demands

the right not to be

always a sight, distant

splendor of night

hard metal

dirty mink

scratching song

in the soft parts

before release

How’d that tussin treat you?

All hitherto existing society

Excuse me you’re being paged

TRACY WANTS TO DANCE

on the way to the bar

I pass three other bars

what is known mediately

in trampled domains

with the wetness of a girl

on the phone fingering

a taut cord, a coveted bloom

of indecision

dots the horizon

thru this peep hole

I toe the light

I jab my finger in it

nay, I ginger gently

At the very moment

of emergence, obsolescence

as seen on drunk with dreams

over and above

my undying love?

Tar sands, high winds, and friendship

Sopping up the excess

with a cocktail napkin

as seen in fidelity

to our newest member

self-propagating

aeroelastic dream fluff

 

Alli Warren was born where the Santa Ana winds blow, and has lived in the Bay Area since 2005, or 2001 if Santa Cruz counts. Recent work can be read in a chapbook called GRINDIN (Lew Gallery), and heard via KQED (http://www.kqed.org/arts/programs/writersblock/episode.jsp?essid=107775). In the fall of 2013, City Lights will publish her first book, Here Come the Warm Jets. Alli co-edits the Poetic Labor Project (http://labday2010.blogspot.com/) and continues to contribute tidbits to that out of fashion form known as the weblog. (http://theingredient.blogspot.com/).
 

Susan Gevirtz and Eileen Tabios: Starry Messengers, Tornadoes, and the Children Who Pop Up

Susan Gevirtz



Eileen Tabios







A week ago on Friday night May 7th Susan Gevirtz and Eileen Tabios read as part of Small Press Traffic's reading series. It was the night of an end-of-year fashion show at the California College of the Arts. There was a huge white party tent and young people in snazzy youthful outfits milling about. There was music.

In Timken Hall we were dazzled by Susan and Eileen. In her reading, each poet addressed current events; Susan mentioned she was thinking a lot about Greece and their economic and social crises and Eileen, as you'll read below, wrote and spoke about the recent adoption return case involving an American family and a child adopted from Russia.


Susan Gevirtz's reading was expansive and I wanted a copy of AERODROME ORION & STARRY MESSENGER right then and there! Sadly, for various reasons, author boks were not availble on this evening. I particularly liked the pieces I heard from Starry Messenger. Susan didn't read the piece below, but since I haven't a copy of her book on hand, let me share this excerpt from elsewhere online:

Brief History of the Sky: A Manual for Air Traffic Controllers

It is well known that brevity is essential to any discussion of the sky. Thus for the
sake of brevity we will divide the sky into its fractions: the Ptolemaic sky, the
afternoon sky, the weatherless sky, the seared sky of summer, the skewered sky of winter tree tops, brother to the Titian sky, sister to the drawn-out sky, Father of the perspectival sky, Mother to the smoke-stacked skyline of London in 1870. All of these skies require further divisions into many more skies that can only briefly be mentioned or barely even motioned at, here. The drenched sky whose light withers seeing, skies of insomniacs plastered with sleep, little-known night skies for the sake of pollination, navigating by fluorescent light the daunted night sky under which urban cleaning occurs, Athena's sky palace, the sky whose character alters according to the ages of ice. This is to divide the sky into some of its many halves, some of which contain a moon, and some of which understand the moon as a lamp lit by the night-candler. The night sky as we now know it in major urban electrical centers, is an infant sky. It has only watched us sleep, lorded over us, posed at dark, for a mere century and a half, in a futile attempt to persuade its inhabitants to buy the concept of rest. It is perhaps the briefest of all the brief skies in the history of skies. Why is any of this important to air traffic controllers? Because air traffic controllers navigate many skies at once. There is the sky on the screen and that is the fastest sky ever to burn --strung up by an umbilicus of connected dots: one dot is the pilot's voice, another the pilot's eyes, another the air traffic controller's voice and fourth leg is the air traffic controller's eyes. All of these, far more than the jet engine shoving air out of its path at such high speed that the plane creates its own slipstream into which it proceeds forward, keep the plane up. And the sky is kept up by the same means.
There is no other time in history that the sky has been kept up over the earth in this fashion.

You can read more of Susan's work and a translation of it into Greek by Vassilis Manoussakis at the Paros Symposium web site. Founded by Susan and Siarita Kouka in 2004 to foster translation and exchange between Greek and Anglophone poets, translators and scholars, the Paros Symposium meets annually.

Here's what Robert Kocik writes about Gevirtz's work:

It's not possible to be more phenomenologically direct than the poetry on these pages. This is removal of the obstacles of perception, beginning with perception, often by means of the obstacles themselves. This is what the sky is. All other skies in this one. There is a host of impossibilities to be found in AERODROME ORION & STARRY MESSENGER. Susan Gevirtz's page is both an inclusion of a scale too vast for inclusion and a selection of the minutiae that includes it. Someone might say 'air.' She has said 'astro stage.' I'd introduce the Sanskrit term 'akasa' (akasa is free or open space--the most primary and pervasive of elements--medium of life and sound). What is all over the place is normally not only beyond our grasp, it's not even noticeable. A path is usually cut or carved. Yet her paths are melted into the medium that is itself the way. This is incredibly accurate with regard to consciousness when we are indeed conscious. Terribly limited terms are not only not obstacles, they're instrumental and indispensable in opening the view--like little portals. Like latches. Like Lockheed's P3 Orion 4 engine aircraft. Hers is a prosody that responds to the physical forces of flight. She measures in leap seconds (again, not possible). Just as she has asked of a feather, I can with like awe and admiration ask of each page of this work: 'how can there be such a thing as'"
--Robert Kocik.

The Kocik quote comes from the Small Press Distribution web site where you can purchase Susan and Eileen's books.

You can read Susan's poem "Orion" from Aerodrome here.


Eileen followed Susan and captivated the audience with recent work reflecting on the catastrophic situtation of orphans. She prefaced her reading by citing the news stories about the American family who returned their 7 year old adopted child to Russia by putting the child alone on a plane to be picked up at the airport in Russia by someone the family had contacted through the interent. Eileen spoke about the "boneheaded" act of putting a 7 year old on a plane alone but noted that she did not blame the mother for returning the child as many in the adoption and world at large have. The work she read provided an explanation why.

On The Children I Couldn’t Bring Home

It is Mother’s Day 2010 as I write this, and it’s been just over a year now since I and my husband adopted our son Michael from Colombia, where he had been living in an orphanage for about seven years. Today, Michael gave me the best Mother’s Day present: a drawing of some Terminator-type character upon which he’d collaged a tiny booklet of poems I’d written for a Haiti relief fundraiser called “Hay(na)ku for Haiti” (http://meritagepress.blogspot.com/2010/02/haynaku-for-haiti.html). On his drawing, Michael features the strange Terminator character as saying, “I heart your book.” Well, what a wonderful gift for a child to give a writer-mom!



But prior to Michael joining our family, there was an earlier attempt to adopt another boy, a ten-year-old I will call “M”. That failed adoption—a “disruption”, in adoption lingo…and what an understatement!—occurred due to M.’s failure to attach to us as new parents. Older children (and I’ve seen “older” in the adoption world to be defined as low as four years or older) are asked for their consent prior to being placed with adoptive parents. After spending time together, M. chose not to continue with his adoption. Because of the way his life had unfolded through abuse and neglect, M. found it difficult to attach to anybody and, given a choice, ultimately chose not to take on the uncertainties of another family. Since this occurred after nearly a year of communicating with M. who expressed interest all along in joining our family, the disruption during what was supposed to be the final phase of adoption was extremely difficult. During the plane ride back to San Francisco, I ended up trying to write about the experience (mostly to deal with the anguished result) through poems, the last of which became

Ars Poetica at Age 47

Sometimes
the world
cannot become fitted

into
the poem.
Even the “Poem.”

What I wrote in that plane ride came to be a haybun (a combination of prose and hay(na)ku poems) that would be published in my book The Blind Chatelaine’s Keys . But since that time—since the above poem—three years ago and until very recently, I barely wrote any new poems. My lack of creativity was masked by the release of new books and chapbooks (including The Thorn Rosary which also includes the haybun among its Selected Prose Poems), but such merely reflected the time lag between writing poems and seeing them published in book form.

My experience with M. returned to haunt me again recently when the news broke out in April over the incident of a Tennessee woman, Torry-Ann Hansen sending her adopted 7-year-old son Artem Saveliev back home to Russia by himself with a note demanding that the adoption be annulled; supposedly, Artem suffered severe psychopathic issues which were not revealed by Russian authorities to the Hansen family. For the record, the Russian authorities dispute Hansen’s assessment.

Like many adoptive parents—especially those waiting to adopt Russian children and whose cases would come to be affected by the Hansen situation—I was pained by this incident. On my part, I’ve seen estimates range from 37 to 200 million for orphans worldwide, and the most difficult category for its members to get adopted are "older boys." There is a lot of fear over adopting older children, and especially older boys, and my own experience with M. makes me empathize with such fears. But spurred by the recent Hansen incident, I decided to talk more about my son Michael with the hope that my experience will offset the media coverage of adoption failures. Most adoptions do succeed, but they are not the ones garnering headlines.

And I suppose, as a poet, I also didn’t want my poem “Ars Poetica at Age 47” to be my last word on the subject, or any subject. Thus, at my recent SPT reading and in some recent writings elsewhere, I’ve been doing something that comes very easily to me: I’ve been insufferable… as I boast about my son Michael. So let me share about Michael:

He lived in an orphanage for about seven years. At the time of his adoption, he was 13 years old, but only in 4th grade, though the grade level was by that orphanage’s terms. At the time of his adoption, he could add but barely subtract. But just six months later, he was slotted into 7th grade (because of his age) in one of California's top public schools. There, with vigilant tutoring on my part and with his huge work ethic, he swiftly became honor roll. Last quarter, he received three top-of-his class certificates in addition to his A-average Honor Roll certificate. This quarter, so far it looks like he’ll be a straight-A student.

In sports, he was on a championship soccer team, and does well in other sports new to him, from skiing to tennis to swimming. He also just received an awards certificate in P.E.--he can run a mile in just over six minutes. This is a child, by the way, who is small for his age because of past neglect and malnutrition—he is 14 years old today, but could pass for ten. Fortunately, he’s growing swiftly—he grew more in the past year within our family than he did from about six to eight years old in an orphanage.

His hobbies today include building model rockets, photography, drawing (he's an excellent artist), bee-keeping, skateboarding, movies and exploring the night-sky through telescopes. I’m delighted to share that he’s also developed into a reader—he reads himself to sleep every night.

He knows his manners, is engaged with people, and has developed a humorous wit. He is also sensitive and compassionate—recently, he told me about seeing a group of drivers from a Ferrari rally, and thinking that those drivers need to have spent all the money acquiring their cars for "better" reasons, like solving the plight of poor people. When he's helped bring food to the local food pantry, I can see his eyes observing, assessing, and ... caring, even as it also bolsters his fortitude for making something of himself (whatever that may mean)

Of course, he’s been taking English-as-a-Second-Language class. And in that class he also just wrote his first English-language poem, an acrostic entitled “Tornados”, and you are about to be blessed with this brilliant (!) poem by my son Michael

TORNADOS
Oh no!
Run, run for your life
Nobody is safe
All the houses are
Down, televisions crashing into cars
Oh my god, my
Son is safe!

A close reading of this superb (!) poem reveals the expansiveness of this 14-year-old’s world view—this poem is not written from the personal “I” which often afflicts teenagers. That last couplet, “Oh my god, my Son is safe” relates to a parent’s point of view. I like to think that the lines “my / Son is safe!” is him extrapolating from the loving care he receives at home. A sense of safety, after all, is ever made more precious by a history that resulted in bringing him to an orphanage, and then having to leave for a new home in a new country with a new language.

So that is my son Michael—a scholar, athlete, philanthropist (he puts coins whenever he can in the charity bottles by supermarkets’ cash registers), artist (whose drawings have been shared now with such art world luminaries as the artist Eve Aschheim as well as the poet-art critic John Yau), and now budding poet. This is my son Michael—who for many years was neglected by those who were supposed to take care of him. This is my son Michael who, in terms of possible adoption, was once considered to be “a lost cause.” This is my son Michael—who needed that against-all-odds alternative of finding an adoptive family in order to thrive.

As for my poems, to my own surprise, I don’t write much about Michael. The children who pop up in my poems so far are the ones I met during our two-year international adoption process—the children to whom I couldn’t give a home and are still waiting for a so-called “forever family.” Some samples available online are “The Blue Mule: An Ad(o)aption Triptych” and “from Orphaned Algebra”.

If these poems, as well as my sharing about my son Michael’s life, can help spread the word about the global humanitarian catastrophe posed by orphans, I can think of no better use for my writings.

Last but not least, our family met Michael through a wonderful organization, Kidsave. One of its programs is to bring over older children to the U.S. for a five-week summer break. While here, host families and Kidsave contacts explore the possibility of finding them adoptive parents. It's a great arrangement as it enables folks interested in adopting "older" children as well as the children to get to know each other over a prolonged period of time (longer than the time usually given in most adopting processes). Kidsave is now preparing for this year's "Summer Miracles" program; information is their site, or directly at this link: http://kidsave.org/summer.shtml Please pass the word -- if even one child gets adopted by someone learning about Kidsave (which is what happened with us), that result is a Home Run!

Thanks to Susan and Eileen for outperforming the fashionable goings-on outside!

Bios from Small Press Traffic:

Susan Gevirtz's recent books include Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press), Broadcast, and Without Event: Introductory Notes (forthcoming). Along with teaching locally at various Bay Area institutions, she runs with Greek poet Siarita Kouka The Paros Symposium, on Paros island, an annual meeting of poets and translators from Greece and the United States.

Eileen R. Tabios has released 15 print, four electronic and 1 CD poetry collections, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, and a short story collection. Her most recent book is Rosary of Thorns: Selected Prose Poems 1998-2009.

Response to Michael Cross and Rob Halpern Reading San Francisco Aug. 2, 2008

Lately, in addition to the various institutional settings (Small Press Traffic, The Poetry Center, various bookstores, etc.),The San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene is happening in people's homes. The other night, August 2nd, Tanya Hollis and Taylor Brady hosted a reading by Michael Cross who is visiting the Bay Area from Seattle and San Francisco's own Rob Halpern. What a reading it was too. Tanya and Taylor's flat was packed with people;there were at least 30 of us there. Michael read first. I was not familiar with his work prior to the reading but I am looking forward to reading more of his own writing and the work he publishes as part of his amazing Atticus/Finch chapbook series. As Taylor said in his introduction, Michael's work is rich with a deep and varied lexicon. Cross read from his book Throne in which words like "plinth" recur and alliteration abounds. The sheer pleasure of linguistic jouissance startles as inthis example:

precutaneous
what visage does, debeller, razed, expiating
bas, our auctor wedged da twixt
the visor's amice grey made gaze
to palm some steely rubric-a-touch
harnessed her face lacks thingnesses sides
between the heat of the subject and the heat
of her lawfulness, sighs against
the pressure, kid, wrinkles, bellows,
apophantic facing the subject's front to come

Rob read a couple of short pieces from his forthcomingDisaster Suite
and then from his newly published Imaginary Politicsfrom Blake Riley's TapRoot Editions.The book itself is a beautiful letterpress, hand-sewn work in the unusual size of 10 x 5 inches. Beautiful work Blake! The writing inside is no less astonishing.

I've been reading Walter Benjamin lately and thinking about his angel of history (see quote below**)and then reading Paul Naylor's Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History whose introduction includes a lovely reading of Benjamin's angel which Naylor uses to argue that the writers he examines--Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe, Kamau Brathwaite, and M. Nourbese Philip--are "writing history poetically." I bring this up because hearing Rob read last night brought Benjamin and writing history poetically to mind. How hard it is to mobilize a poetics that can engage history from inside and in a complex fashion and with human scale. Benjamin's angel of history is blown into the future from paradise while it bears witness to the piling debris, the catastrophe that history is. The way Naylor reads it, Benjamin's angel is both witness and messenger. See Michael Cross's review of Rob's Rumored Place (Krupskaya) in which he eloquently discusses Halpern's work vis-a-vis Benjamin.

In Halpern's writing a number of strategies enable the writing of history poetically. The writing serves as both witness and messenger. In Rob's work, the body is the fulcrum. For example:

....We were once ourselves, but
then traversing the trench, a fault between dim pockets
of ruined life forms, I felt something, a kind of mind
without sex, a shudder with no reference, yr breathtaking
crevasse, a loss I can't mourn, which I've hastily mapped
onto this making of waste....So now there's nothing, the shadow
of yr name having melted to my cock, their skin, my
urethane veneer. The moon, the stars, a spangled heaven,
all nesting deep inside the thing's old sunken groin. Our
bodies hewn and, feigning being bodies, sundered by
forces real.

The "I" that is mobilized in this writing is never outside looking in but rather implicated and also resistant.

the forest and the rain, yr face, my verdant slick. nothing
resembles, nothing to see, an abundance without birds.
erection and machinery, no tongue on my thigh, the
world that made you possible, gone now, too. i feel dirty.
my soldier running, or my image for that, a corruption in
the record. such clean subordination. broken subjects,
surface areas, and coastlines now contiguous with the
vastness of that blank, repeating what won't go down

a thing i'll never hear arouses me,
begging you to enter the objects i'm investigating. his
hair. his wood. his barn. his clover. relics of my rapture,
birds remain outside my sentence. you say, i don't believe
a thing you write. i say, i don't remember myself, it could
have been anyone--


And then there is something I can only name as love.


Unwinding into national moods, looting all the shit
our forms so endlessly fulfill, nursing on withdrawn
spectacular slaughter. Now undo this habit. It won't take
long, and then we'll emerge, together, in a hole blast
thru the audio feed, our ears, at last prepared to hear,
discovered in the mud.


and wry criticism:

Now a word for all my Christian Zionist friends. Love,
being a model for the war. Take the IMF, an AK-47 or
machete, my purest intermediaries. Fuck me with the
things our meanings make.

What other writers these days engage with and write from a position of such exposure, vulnerability, abjection, even. But not as a solipsistic, self-aggrandizing pose. This exposure acknowledges and is situated in an address to the other and is an ethical engagement. I suspect that it is the intersection of human relation and the dazzling and horrifying discourse in which we founder, resist, repeat, ask for, use and misuse love and perpetrate individual, institutional and social crimes that takes this writing to the brink of the articulable. Its sheer capaciousness and ability to take us inside engenders hope and awe.

**
From Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History:

IX
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.
—Gerhard Scholem, "Gruss vom Angelus" *

*My wing is ready for flight - I would like to turn back. - If I stayed timeless time, - I would have little luck.

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
from: http://danm.ucsc.edu/web/KhazarDANM202thesesOnThePhilosophyOfHistory