"Outside is the Side I Take" An Interview with Roberto Bedoya

“Outside is the side I take”—Patti Smith

Part 1 of an email interview with Roberto Bedoya conducted in September and October 2008

RTM: In a book entitled Opposite Sex (NYU), you have a conversation with two other gay men about gay men's perception of lesbian sex--a very interesting conversation by the way. You sketch out a narrative of your own coming out. You write:

..in the seventies, when I was in my twenties, it was about being a Chicano, doing organizing work for the Farmworkers' Union, being a part of Latino Activists' work. I grew up in the Bay Area and I was there when the Castro came into being, but I didn't become active in that world, maybe because it was too white, or maybe because of my age, my own homophobia. In those days it was hard to be a Chicano fag (229).

Later on you discuss how Patti Smith and AIDS moved you to think of yourself as queer.

So much to unpack here! Can you talk more about this trajectory? What was it like being at the intersection of so many identities--at a time when identity-based movements were really becoming powerful and the boundaries of which were perhaps less porous? It sounds as if your first allegiance, so to speak, was to identifying as a Chicano.

Roberto: Yes, there is a lot to unpack. In the 70s “identity-based movements” that crafted and informed Feminism, Gay Liberation, Chicanismo, multiculturalism, the alternative arts movement that created artists’ organizations like Intersection or New Langton who supported the experimental writing community, these movements were grounded in an ethos of self-determination – which is “my allegiance.” It was not so much about identifying as Chicano but about my political right to be myself. The dominant US ideology of Whiteness had policies that made me invisible which I challenged, still do.


A story: Racism California style in the 50s (I was born in 51) was played out in many different ways, not so much as overt discrimination but more along the lines of you’re “less than”… and in acts of belittlement. For example, I grew up in the SF East Bay, the barrio Decoto that is part of Union City, which is halfway between San Jose and Oakland. My schools were integrated, Anglos, Asians and Latinos, no Blacks lived in the south bay at that time. But the classrooms were not. For example, there were 2 classes of 1st grade, 2nd grade….. and one class was primarily for the Anglos and the other for the rest of us. A few of us got to cross, meaning on occasion I was in the white classroom, which is how I understood the situation as a kid – there’s the white classroom and there’s our brown classroom – I saw it as our classroom because that’s where my cousins and neighborhoods friends were. Our Asian population was very small, a few Japanese and Filipinos which played out with the Japanese in the white classroom and the Filipinos in the brown classroom. That’s how racial profiling worked then and it still haunts me - more on that later.

When the emancipation movements of the late 60s/70s upended all that crap, the Chicano movement was where I found myself engaging in political work: The UFW, grape boycotts; student walk-outs for ethnic studies, anti-war activities. The VISTA teachers who chose to work at my High School cuz we were poor and the Franciscan priests who I grew up with and who had a Berrigan Brothers/Dorothy Day impulse in them shaped my activist thinking. I remember Father Henry taking our teen church group to the People’s Park protests in Berkeley and telling my mom and Tia who were watching the protest on TV that I was going to join them and …they rolled their eyes and gave me permission because it was a church outing. Oh glorious 1968!!

This a long story but it informed my work at Intersection for the Arts and my career in the cultural sector – making the space for inquiry, making policy arguments, feeding the mechanism that supports the social imaginary.

As to Patti Smith, two quotes from her: Jesus died for someone’s sins but not mine” and “Outside is the side I take.” I remember the Jesus quote spray-painted on the side of the Catholic Newman Center in Berkeley – cool. And “Outside,” well if you find yourself more often in the terrain of “outside” than in the dominant ideologies-- embrace it.

RTM: Do you find Queer to be a more capacious way to construct your location and actions in the world? Teresa de Lauretis, the theorist who originally coined the term Queer Theory has moved away from it, since she sees it as having been co-opted by the status quo. What's your thinking about this?

Roberto: Queer is akin to “outside” which I am comfortable with but Queer is not my location. Where is my location? - My interrogations into place, home, shelter? In part. My life as a reader? To answer my own question I think of Edmond Jabes’ influence in my life and answer – the location is the question.

In 1988/89 I was living in NYC and working on a play dealing with AIDS and engaging with ACT-UP actions. At that time Queer was how we self-identified and it was a way to name ourselves and our form of activism. I wasn’t heavy into ACT-UP but went to the meetings and the protests. I was actively a part of the Day Without Art efforts and Visual Aids, the group that produced the red ribbon.

To circle back to the first question about my sexuality and this question about Queer-- it is linked in part to my notions of public and private. The AIDS activism dictum “SILENCE=DEATH” was a powerful cultural claim that changed society and altered the border between private and public. I believe Michael Warner’s writing on Publics and CounterPublics is very insightful on this moment of activism and he does a wonderful job of animating the meaning of queer and it roots which I embrace.

AND…. As to the Queer clothing line at a trendy boutique near you, well I prefer the DIY Cholo/dandy style of Latino homeboys.

RTM: It is interesting to me that in The Grand Piano, the Collective Autobiography written by 10 of the Language Writers, there's an assertion that part of their project has always been queer. For example in Part I, Carla Harryman writes that "...it almost goes without saying that opposition to the regulation of gender in literature had everything to do with formal innovation produced by us, as men and women" (38).

You were very much involved in the SF Bay Area writing scene in the 80s. What's your response to this?

Roberto: So many stories about the 80’s scene and I feel very lucky to be a part of it: as a presenter, a reader, as an observer/listener and writer.

I do agree with Carla’s statement that “opposition to the regulation of gender” prompted much innovative writing. The new narrative posse of Bob Gluck, Bruce Boone, Steve Abbott, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy… and the How(ever) group of wonderful thinkers, these creative mining’s I found exhilarating. They embedded in their practices an “opposition to regulation.”

I also appreciate the community of women writers that included Genny Lim, Canyon Sam, Karin Brodine, Susan Griffin, Paula Gunn Allen, Judy Grahn, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Eileen Myles, all of whose investigations of the regulations of gender social systems were queerish in their ways.

These writers gave readings or talks at Intersection.

RTM: Tell me a bit more about your literary work in SF during this period. You ran the reading series at Intersection for the Arts. Who did you invite to read in that series? You brought Harryette Mullen to SF didn't you?

Roberto: I started off at Intersection as a volunteer in the early 80’s. Prior to that I had been in the creative writing program at Fresno State studying with Phil Levine. The program at Fresno was known at that time for being a creative hub for Chicano poets. Fresno was not working for me so I went back to the Bay, got a job at Bookpeople which was the largest distributor of small presses in the nation at the time and I started volunteering at Intersection. Jim Hartz was the literary director at the time. As a volunteer I set-up the room and took the money at the door. I would produce an occasional reading, primarily with writers of color. And because of my connection to Bookpeople I worked with some of the poetry publishers outside the Bay Area whom we distributed and presented readings of their authors who would be traveling through town. Jim was great as the director and he was very supportive of the Language School writers, who initially I found very bewildering. Yet my bewilderment became part of my education as a listener and reader. When Jim became the director of the Poetry Center at SFSU I became the director of the literary program at Intersection. I worked at Intersection from the early 80s to 88.

Intersection has a long history, 40 years plus as an artists-centered organization. In the beginning of the 80s we were in North Beach and then moved to the Mission. The North Beach venue was a former church, the Mission venue a former mortuary. Where Intersection is today, that was formerly a furniture store.

You asked “who.” Well, over the years so many. The abundance of writers in the Bay, and Intersection’s curatorial philosophy of supporting the breadth of this community manifested in an eclectic program. Of the many different poetics at work in the literary community, I was committed to presenting the most innovative/fresh/probing voices for the public. How I defined innovative, fresh, probing was based on my reading of the many works that came across my desk. I understood my curatorial responsibility along the lines of contributing to the aesthetic education of the public.

I took a great deal of pleasure in presenting new voices to the community, often through programming an emerging writer with an established writer. Most of the time it worked. I don’t know if Nate Mackey introduced me to Harryette or not, but I did offer her her first SF reading and she was very well received. I introduced Harryette’s work to Lee Ann Brown which resulted in Lee Ann publishing Harryette’s book Trimmings.

I often thought of my job at Intersection as a connector. And, to use some popular jargon, to be a contributor to a “tipping point” moment in an artist’s career or a publisher’s effort to establish themselves or expand their audience. I loved working with the independent publishers whether it be the local efforts of Tombouctou Books, Tuumba, MOMO’s Press, City Lights, North Altantic Books, Kelsey Street Press, the Figures or beyond the bay - Copper Canyon, Coach House. Gray Wolf. Many of these relationships with these publishers were created when I worked at Bookpeople in the sales department.

I also loved working with the editors of literary journals and so I would present group readings associated with ACTS, Five Fingers Review, Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K, Mirage, No Apologies, Soup, Little Caesar, Temblor.

I could go on with a lot of names associated with some memorable readings: The Frances: Frances Mayes, Frances Jaffer and Frances Phillips; The Bob’s: Bob Gluck, Bob Perlman, Bob Kaufman, Bob Hass; Leslie Scalapino and Leslie Silko; Bill Barich and Bill Berkson; Jane Miller and Jane Hirschfield; Victor Martinez and Victor Hernandez Cruz; Jessica Grim and Jessica Hagedorn; David Henderson, David Meltzer, David Melnick, David Highsmith like going through the alphabet A- Aaron Shurin, B- Beverly Dahlen…..

I had very much a catholic-- with the small c --POV, which I employed as a presenter. How fortunate to be a part of a very dynamic community with the wide range of poetics during the 80’s. I was especially fond of the experimental feminist writing community loosely associated with How(ever), Kelsey Street, and women who were associated with the writing program at New College – Norma Cole, Mary Margaret Sloan, Edith Jenkins, Susan Gevirtz, Kathleen Fraser Jean Day, Laura Moriarty, Beverly Dahlen and many others due in part that I found in their poetics an understanding of the “outside”-- the gender outside, the class outside of mainstream culture, mainstream writing.

I recall a conversation with Bob Holman who programmed the series at St. Marks’ while I was at Intersection, and we were joking about the “no’s” we said to authors who wanted to read at our organizations … something like artists say yes and bankers say no and that our challenge was how to say no as an artist to an artist – not always easy. One guy was into harassing me and complained loudly to my board and other writers about me while I told him no. Yet, this trash talk was not the norm.

In regard to talks/lectures-- what Bob Perelman was doing at Langton with his talk series was mirrored at Intersection in spirit- offering an opportunity to writers to speak about their practices, their poetics, their reading habits.

Some of the talks I produced were by Bill Barich, Leslie Scalapino, Kit Robinson, Rosemarie Waldrop, Jessica Hagedorn, David Henry Hwang, Benjamin Hollander, and Carl Rokosi.

I have too many stories…

RTM: How did you negotiate the "poetry wars" of the 80s? What's your understanding and/or experience of what those wars were about?


Roberto: ….by keeping moving. I am joking a bit but I and Intersection were not inside those heated debates. Believe me I heard from folks -- how could you present the language poets; the North Beach beats types; the sentimentalist AWP types; the queer/sexual outlaw types; the multicultural nationalists; those odd ducks from LA, NYC, Seattle, Fresno, Vancouver; the Eco Humboldt County types; the Minnesota “Bly” sensitive types; the non-fiction New Yorker writers…. But really those that were complaining to me were often those who were not readers of the work they often criticized. I just listened because I could not understand all this animosity (antagonism is a different story).

People knew my taste preferences, which were more towards the new narrative and the experimental feminist writers, but Intersection was about the public we, the we of a probing literary scene.

Post Intersection, I came across this quote by Emmanuel Levinas: “We is not the plural of I,” which speaks much about the aesthetic battles I’ve witnessed, especially the cultural war of the 80s/90s. I recall a conversation with David Levi Strauss about the privatization of culture that those 80s battles were much about. In many ways these battles were and continue to be about the privatization of the pronoun “we” – whose definition of “we” were talking about in these 80s battles?: the Jesse Helms’ “we” of ultraconservatives, the Reaganomics’ “we” that David pointed out was rooted in California’s Prop 13. Prop 13 can be marked as the beginning of the dismantling of the tax system, a system that was supposed to support the public community. Levinas’s “we” is not a “we” of me and my friends and associates. It resonates for me because it speaks to a meaning of “we” that includes people you don’t know.

The cultural wars of the 80s and 90s were a battleground for me. The attack on artistic freedom of expression and the NEA by conservatives was where I found myself in the battle. Maybe one way to read the attack on the poetics of the LANGUAGE School writers, or multiculturalism or the sexualized writing of Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, is that these Poetry Wars were part of a conservative turn in our culture. I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to serve on a number of NEA funding deliberation panels for the Literature and Interdisciplinary programs. While on the lit panels, I was often surprised by the hostility to experimental poetics that I heard from other panelists. I was on panels dealing with publishing and presenting – not the fellowship program. This, coupled with my experiences on the Interdisciplinary panel which supported new works, helped me to begin to understand how the Culture Wars were really about content, whether it be experimental poetics, performance arts, images of sex as well as artists’ support systems. In regards to artist support systems, the Culture War battles resulted in the unraveling of a system that provided financial support for artists-centered organizations that presented innovative art: the elimination of the NEA Fellowship for individual artists and the support for new experimental artworks; the efforts to destabilize artists-centered networks, such as the National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture, The National Association of Artists’ Organizations, The National Performance Network, the National Network of Organizations of Color, Alternative Roots which, as service organizations, exist to support artists and their development – all eliminated because of probing content.

The political and cultural conservative attack on most contemporary art practices and arts presenters was in many ways part of a developing US Cultural Policy of constructing complicity with the aims of markets and state. Now I know I am talking shop here as an arts administrator, but I had my work questioned because of who I presented at Intersection or the organizations I supported as the ED of The National Association of Artists’ Organizations (NAAO). My work was questioned by artists, private and public funders, or Joe Citizen, who did not believe there should be any public support of the arts. My responses to these questions in part took me down the path of cultural policy- the path of making arguments about the role of artists, freedom of expression, the value of artists-centered organizations. I used these arguments to defend the policies of the organizations I was a part of as well at those national cultural policymaking tables that included me.

The dogmatic position of some writers against other writers and their animosity bothered me. I’m cool with antagonism because really that is the terrain of politics, to believe or not believe in a position, such as a particular poetic investigation, and to argue about it is great. But animosity – too much divorce court and hate speech drama which unfortunately occurs and is poison. Intersection as a public venue felt some of the animosity out there but it didn’t change our policy of supporting innovation. Maybe a different window into the Poetry Wars is to look at Poetry Flash-- that's where a lot of dishing happened.

To talk politics here for a moment, I’ve gained an understanding of the affects of antagonism and animosity at work in the public sphere through the writings of Chantal Mouffe, which have informed greatly my work as a policymaker. Her riffs on “negotiated equivalences” are rich and they upend the democratic ideal of some greater good on the horizon that we work towards as a democracy. She argues for democracy as a chain of equivalences that we create among ourselves informed by the ethico-political value of liberty and equity.

Intersection for me was in many ways about creating a chain of equivalences -- which is not about engaging in happy-face reductionism of “can’t we all get along” as a presenting strategy. It was about working with community difference, working with antagonism. Today, you and I together are admirers of George Oppen, tomorrow you and I are arguing about Adrienne Rich - who is the you and I in the scenario – the reading public, the writing community.

RTM: Can you also talk a bit about what it was like to be a person of color in a fairly white San Francisco experimental poetics scene? What about your sexuality? Were you out at this time?

Roberto: It had its odd moments. I can’t speak to the “white” writer and what he or she thought when they looked at their audience and saw me, so often the only person of color in the audience. But I don’t want to dwell too much on that point; it was at times odd but never an obstacle.

Remember the story I told earlier about my elementary school education and my classroom experience with the “white classroom.” The experimental poetics scène at time felt like the “white classroom.” It’s surprising how that feeling lingers. Earlier this year there was a symposium at the University of Arizona Poetry Center “ Conceptual Poetry and its Other,” which was wonderful, but at the same time my first impression was it was a return to the “white classroom” - there were maybe 150 folks at this conference and there were the poets Tracie Morris, Sherwin Bitsui, the scholar Carlos Gallego and myself who were the only folks of color at the event. It was one of those scenes that I have often encountered-- where their background determines the foreground, where I am in a ‘white space’ that brought into focus by my browness, my otherness at that moment. The questions the symposium prompted within me were not just about aesthetics but also about sociology and dramaturgy in the art world.

In regards to dramaturgy, I have often been invited to be a participant on panels about some contested cultural issue and I look at the setting, stage, actors, and script associated with the event. If I am invited to speak because of my diversity, because the scripts ask for the Post-Colonial other, I think hard if I want to participate and if I do, how do I problematize my own positionality.

The sociology of the art world is odd. I look at the various worldviews at play. In Tucson I see the tension between a strong Latino and Indigenous culture worldview that places great value on place--making place rub up against an Euro-Centric avant-garde view of the non-referential, the non-place. Further to the point about the sociologies of art within various disciplines--whether it be letters, music or the visual arts--one needs to be aware of the politics of taste and the politics of resources and position that are a part of these sociologies. These politics shape how artists and art works are validated and supported. They inform how distinctions are made, tethered as they are to ethics and aesthetics.

Another story – back to the experimental poetics white classroom characterization- (which I know is problematic.) I remember a reading/talk at Intersection in the North Beach Days-- early 80s-- and I was at the back of the room listening and feeling frustrated. I don’t remember who read but someone associated with the LANGUAGE School and I wasn’t getting it – too much vertigo for me. There was a talk, Q & A, afterwards and I rarely spoke at those occasions but somehow the conversation was becoming too academic and I was having that intense “white classroom” reaction – feeling that folks were not addressing the politics of marginalization at work in the world. Bob Perelman was next to me and he just leaned over and encouraged me to speak, to ask my question – which I did do. He read my tension, my awkwardness and made an opening for me. Kit Robinson, Steve Benson and Leslie Scalapino through their generosity of being and poetry dislodged some of my white classroom framing often by the conversations we had after a reading at the bar – where my aesthetic education about their lines of inquiry was fed.

I am not shy but the belittling I received for being a racial “other” in my early years still lingers and effects my voice, my presence. I suspect everyone has some “other” like this in their life.

To circle back to the question about being a non-white in a white scene, here’s another story. There’s a cool group of activist artists out of Chicago associated with a group called Temporary Services. I recall going to a lecture a few years ago at their space called Mess Hall and there was all this talk about aesthetic intervention. Again I was the only person of color in the room of young spirited anarchist /prairie socialists’ types all with deep passion. At a certain point I was getting fatigued with an on-going dialogue about intervention. I think what triggered the conversation was that they were recently in a show at MASS Moca, anyway I spoke up and questioned their privileging, romancing, and fertilizing of the term Intervention. I told them how when I walk into a high-end fashion store like a Barney or Saks often I’m clocked-- security follows me. I am marked as an intervention. I then spoke of Project Row House in Houston, which they did not know about, an artist-centered community development effort and how for some folks of color reform strategies were a course of political and aesthetic action which is different from intervention because of the conditions of privilege. I don’t recall the upshot of my questioning but the meeting ended shortly after.

Stay-tuned for Part 2 of this interview!

Roberto Bedoya 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 <http://www.npnweb.org/> ). 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.

New Featured Author Section!

This month we are very pleased to unveil our first Featured Author, Magdalena Zurawski. (Oh, Maggie, behind the veils you are lovely, lovely . . .) Maggie's novel, The Bruise, won the Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize sponsored by Fc2.

If you have suggestions for our Featured Author Section, please contact klouhome at bellsouth.net.

Happy Reading!

KLS

Featured Author: Magdalena Zurawski

Statement on Crossings
When you asked me to comment about my novel in terms of "Crossing," I didn't think I would have much to say, but now I think I might be able to say a little. I'm not sure if the novel is cross-genre. (That's the first "cross" word you suggested.) There's a couple of poems excerpted in it. But there's a lot of poems in a George Eliot novel and I don't think that's cross-genre, nor would many other people. And a couple people have suggested that it isn't a novel, but a poem disguised as a novel. That might be true. I paid a lot of attention to the sounds of words and the breath of the reader, and I have never really written prose before, or taken a class on how to write prose, but only know some things about poetry. So I am sure I didn't write a novel correctly and only used what I knew about poetry to try to write what I thought was all along a novel. So maybe it isn't a cross-genre work, as much as a work that failed to cross over into the genre it wanted to be. That seems to me the most satisfying answer insofar as the whole novel worries about change being possible. Why shouldn't the form itself?

The kind of crossing I'm more interested in thinking about right now, especially in regards to this book, has to do with the relationship between textual space and extra-textual space, or, as my narrator, who is both me and not me, would say, the relationship between the writing in books and the real life outside of books. I've been thinking about this a lot while walking my dogs this week. I'm wondering if a writer isn't a kind of failed magician. Or if it's an erroneous gesture for a reader or a writer to apply the kind of thinking required in the space of the book to a space outside of the book. What I mean is, a reader or a writer is praised for the correspondences she can make between things in the space of a book. The more unexpected relationships or links I can make between different ideas or objects in my book, the "smarter" I'll appear as a writer. The same goes for a reader. The person who can point out the most relationships between things, who can make the most meanings, is the best student. And maybe this is true in the game of reading. A magician, if I remember my Spicer correctly, is a person who does this in the world, in the object world. A magician creates correspondences between things that another person wouldn't necessarily see and that's where the magic comes from. But I'm beginning to think that for a person to read the world in the same way that she reads a text is a kind of false or failed magic, if only because the world is not a sealed system the way a book is. A book is a limited set, whereas the world is infinite. We don't get the whole story when we are outside of a book, but the practice of reading books, especially if we are good at it, might make us confident enough to read the real this way. I think it gives us a false sense of control because the world is too big. Too many things remain outside our ken. So to create a narrative based on certain coincidences of experiences, to read life the way we read a book, seems to me, at least this week, emotionally dangerous. We can ascribe people and places too much significance. Maybe I'm just feeling a victim of my own magic because the book uses so much of me as material for itself. The life of my early twenties is the furniture of the novel, though the majority of events are invented. But in the writing process the text started echoing so many parts of itself that it seemed so much smarter than me. Everything corresponded. I think I began to believe it could reach out beyond its pages, cross over into my life and make meanings where there maybe were none to be made. But maybe most things that happen outside of books aren't meant to contribute to a person's narrative of self. Maybe to try to make meanings in your life the way you would in a book is simply the tic of a reader. Maybe reading only works in books.

Excerpt from The Bruise

The Melting Heads
Shortly after L-- left me it seemed as though my entire person was reduced to being a weak ache of body so much so that I didn’t hear poems anymore and I had no thoughts that went beyond understanding how to move myself through time and space. The only thing I felt was a mild ache in my bones that seems hardly worth calling an ache because in truth it didn’t cause me any pain but simply made my body heavy as if I wore everywhere the lead apron given to me by an x-ray technician whose office I didn’t remember visiting. So even to name the feeling I am describing as an ache is not accurate but I know no name for the weight I felt that was not the ache of any specific ailment but only the slight and constant annoyance of having a body.

And whoever had given me the bruise was sending me now a revisionary message but this time because I had never felt so alone I could no longer see anyone except myself in the shower room mirror or the brass doorknob so the new message didn’t come through a dream or a poem but instead through a book that someone else had written. The book was a book I had found on one of the reading tables in the Periodicals Room as I was on my way to my seat in the Rockefeller Library. I had stopped to look at the book not because I had recognized the name or the author of the book but because I had seen the book out of the corner of my eye as I passed it on the table and the cover was a special cover that caught my eye. A cover that had three different paintings of a man’s face melting on it and there was something that I had liked about the way the faces looked when they were melting and I think it was that the faces when they were melting looked not like faces of dripping paint but like faces of melting flesh and the flesh didn’t look so much like flesh but meat. And since there were no faces really left in the paintings but only these melting heads of flesh that looked like meat there must have been something that I also liked about the fact that the faces weren’t faces any more but only heads made of meat. And even though in the book there were no more pictures of the heads of meat only the author’s ideas about what it meant for this painter whose name was Bacon (which somehow seemed right for a painter who made pictures of heads that looked like meat) to make a picture a portrait of a person that turned the face into a head of meat I decided to read the book since the pictures so much seemed right to me that I was willing to read about them even without being able to see them and though the book was a little bit difficult for me to understand especially without pictures to show me all the ideas about flesh and faces and heads and meat that the author saw in Bacon’s paintings there was one idea that was easy for me to understand and it stuck with me and because it was easy for me to understand I thought that it must be an idea that I needed at that moment because I was so sad that L-- had left me.

The idea that I liked so much was the idea that in the paintings the faces turn into melting heads because the faces are mostly trying not to be faces anymore and the faces are attached to bodies that don’t want to be bodies anymore. What I mean is or what the author meant was that the people in the paintings are trying not to be flesh and blood any more and so the melting head of meat is just the first step in a long process of not being flesh and blood anymore and so the painter by being this kind of melting meat painter is helping the person’s whole body begin to disappear. And so the book said that when a person is screaming in one of Bacon’s painting it’s not exactly like the person is screaming just to scream -- just to show that something hurts -- but the person is trying to create an opening -- a hole -- for the body to slip out of itself. So when there is a painting with a melting head that is screaming the head is really trying to melt into and out of the open mouth and disappear into a sound so it doesn’t have to be a body anymore and there was something about that idea that I really liked and I think that I liked the idea because it seemed to be the opposite idea that the bruise wanted to give me or that the poem gave me because it seemed to me that the bruise and the poem had made me try to become a face and a body when I had just been a head of meat waiting to slip out of my own mouth like an idea. But then the bruise came and the poem came and it seemed like all those things came to bring me back into my body so that I would finally kiss L-- and finally become a person. But even though I kissed L-- and let myself be a person in a body still L-- left me and suddenly now it didn’t seem so important to have a body anymore and it didn’t even feel very good to have a body anymore and even when I was with L-- it was very confusing to have a body but even though it was confusing at least when I was with her there seemed the possibility that I wouldn’t be lonely anymore but now that L-- was gone it didn’t seem very important to have a body anymore because the body just seemed to make the loneliness worse. So when I read this book even though I thought it was a message from the same person who gave me the bruise and the poem and all my dreams I wondered if it was really the same person at all and I thought maybe this was a message from another voice -- a voice that was against the voice that gave me the bruise and the poem -- a voice that didn’t want me to be a person in a body anymore. And I thought maybe this new voice was a better smarter voice that knew it was better not to have a body but I didn’t even know if all these signs came from angels or ghosts or voices or if all these messages were coming from different parts of me and with all the confusion it was impossible to know who I should listen to or what exactly I was listening to. But the idea that a body could so much no longer want to be itself that it could scream just to fall out of itself seemed like a real idea to me and sometimes late at night when I couldn’t sleep because I was too much thinking about how it used to feel to sleep next to L-- I would open my mouth and although I wouldn’t scream I would keep my mouth wide open until I fell asleep just to see if suddenly my body would slip out of my mouth in the middle of the night and I would become something else but I never did. And I liked the idea that even when the person in the painting was too tired of being a person to scream and free himself that even when he was so tired that he had to lean over a sink in the painting that the flesh was still willing enough to melt even though there was no mouth to melt through and the sink knowing that there was no mouth for the person to fall through let the melting flesh fall and escape down the drain. The drain was there for the flesh to fall through so that the person could finally disappear from the world and no longer have to be himself.

And the more I read about how Bacon liked to turn peoples’ faces into heads of meat so they could melt away and not have to be people anymore the more I wondered if when he walked down the street and looked at peoples’ faces if he could actually see how much the people didn’t want to be in their own faces anymore. And then I wondered what it would mean to see a person’s face and see how much the person didn’t want to be in her face and so because the face showed so much how it didn’t want to be a face the person looking at that face would not see the face but only see this melting head of meat that was really the first step in helping the person escape her face. And when I thought about that I began to think that the painter was almost like a saint saving people from the flesh and helping them become part of the spirit world faster and if he only could do in real life what he did in his paintings there would be so much less sadness in the world.

And in the mornings after I hardly slept because I missed L-- so much I wondered while brushing my teeth in the shower room if the horrible feeling that I was feeling in my body because I was no longer with L-- I wondered if the horrible feeling was actually my flesh not wanting to be flesh anymore and I wondered if I leaned there on the sink long enough if I would just melt down into the drain and disappear into the spirit world. And because I never fell out of my mouth at night or down the drain in the morning even though I felt like I didn’t want to be a body anymore I began to wonder if the idea that Bacon was painting was actually an idea for real life or just an idea for paintings. And since I hadn’t even really seen any of the paintings but only read about them in the book I thought maybe the idea wasn’t even an idea that worked in paintings and I wondered if when I actually saw the paintings of the scream and the sink if I would really look at the paintings and think that the bodies were really trying and wanting to melt out of their own flesh. And the less I melted when I wanted to and the more I thought about this idea I wondered how it would even be possible to have a painting that could really show this idea and maybe the idea was just the idea of the author of the book -- an idea that he had while writing about the paintings after not looking at them for a very long time because I knew that it was easy to write anything that you imagined with words because words could say anything especially when a person just started typing with a small idea and let the words take over the idea. But I wondered if a painting could really show that a person just standing over a sink was really a body that wanted to melt and fall down the drain of the sink. And so the next time I went back to the library I went to the card catalog and found a book with pictures by Francis Bacon and when I went to the third floor into the stacks and found the book and opened it the first picture I saw was not one of the pictures I had come to see. It was not of a man screaming or of a man leaning over a sink waiting to melt down the drain but it was a picture of a man sitting. The picture was of a man sitting on a white table with wooden legs. A table that was long enough to reach across the painting left to right. And it was impossible to say where the table was exactly except in the painting because in the painting there was nothing but a color for a background. A bright orange color. So it was impossible to tell where the table was exactly because the background was not a specific place but just a color and not a place -- a very beautiful bright orange place that was not a place. And the man on the table was sitting in such a way that his right leg was extended in front of him and that leg was a horizontal line across the middle of the painting -- just as horizontal as the table top. And the other leg -- the left leg which was deeper in the painting because the figure was extending his right leg from left to right in the painting -- was bent into a V and the man’s arm was clasping the bent leg right below the knee. And the head of the man was turning into the painting so that I couldn’t see the face of the man just his back and on his back there was a very deep cut and the deep cut was the first thing I noticed when I looked at the painting and when I saw the deep red cut that looked like a long red gash I immediately imagined the rest of the man falling into the cut as if the cut were like a drain and I imagined the whole man disappearing and there being nothing left in the painting except the table the beautiful orange color and a floating red mark that used to be a gash in the body but was really a gateway to a whole other universe where flesh no longer had to be itself and when I thought all these things I remembered that I had thought them all because I had just read a book that had said all these things almost and so I began to wonder if I actually would have thought these thoughts if I had never read the book about the paintings. I wondered if I would have thought these things if I had only just seen the paintings and so I closed the book of pictures and opened it again to see if a picture was as strong as an idea about a picture and when I opened the book again I saw the same thing. I saw the entire body wanting to slip out of itself through the long red gash in the man’s back and because I could see the want so much I could also make myself see what wasn’t happening on the painting and one more time I saw the whole body falling into the cut on the back and disappearing. And again in my mind I imagined the beautiful painting that was just the table and the lovely orange color and the beautiful red gash floating by itself in mid-air with no body to hold it anymore and I wondered what would have happened to me if the bruise on my forehead hadn’t been a bruise on my forehead but a deep cut on my back.

Links

Magdalena Zurawski's Blog (with reading dates): http://minoramerican.blogspot.com/

FC2 Page: http://fc2.org/zurawski/bruise/bruise.htm
Review of The Bruise: http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6584376.html
Excerpt of The Bruise in Shampoo: http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooTwentynine/zurawski.html

Aaron Shurin, Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye at Small Press Traffic

Last night Kelly Holt and I raced from a tasty meal at Crepevine where we were discussing Jack Spicer and Nathaniel Mackey, to Small Press Traffic to hear Aaron Shurin, Anne Waldman and Ambrose Bye read and perform. Autumn has begun its reign and so it was already dark as we slipped in at about 7:45.

Aaron read first.It has been a long time since I've heard him, though I've always loved Shurin's work and years ago sent him a copy of my first chapbook. I believe he sent a little missive in return and I wonder where that note is now.

But back to the evening's events-- I was mesmerized by Aaron's sonorous voice and beautifully paced reading. He read from his new collection of personal essays King of Shadows. These pieces are as much about Shurin's love affair with the glittering city by the Bay as they are about his passion for literature and language and the city's nascent (in the mid 1960s) and ever evolving gay scene.

Here's a gem from "In the Bars of Heaven and Hell," a piece he read from last night:

"...Imaginary metropolis, fleur de ciel, balm for a wound and the wound's own inflamer, city of promise or pleasure or pain, city of the heathenly heavenly gate, city of all gratification given or lost in place, still there, still here, still there..." (132).

Aaron didn't read from "Morning in the Valley" last night, but I like this piece, so here's a little morsel from it. The scene is a Hot Springs resort where the narrator spots an attractive man, and then I skip forward to the piece's closing:

"...His body's an urban primitive canvas of torso-wide geometric tattoos; his pierced dick's weighed down by an alarmingly large silver ring.) I can see now that the extended pictographic lines across his back and shoulders are the wing bones of what I think is the skeleton of a pterodactyl, whose body of pure bones is suspended from the nape of this guy's neck.The archaic--no, the archaeological!--conjoins the contemporary....For the sake of compositional accuracy I pick up my books and towels and go looking for the illustrated man, to find out what the pterodactyl image really is. I want to ground my fancy in his imagination. But he's nowhere to be found, of course; he's gone from the valley, gone home. I'm left with the image that I've constructed, my ideogram, my remedial tattoo. It broadens my shoulders and aligns my back, a corrective wingspan of meditative synthesis. Taken from his torso it fits me like a fact.

I flex the page and stretch" (60-63).

One wonders "how does he do it?" How does he manage to write sentences that both soar with romantic excess and are unafraid of the exacto knife; sentences of desire and its extension to the world, a sharp edge so precise and dangerous?

Shurin's reading was followed by Anne Waldman accompanied at the end by Ambrose Bye on keyboards. Waldman performed "Red State, Blue State," which managed to be chock full of everything from Enron to Oppenheimer, Homeland Security, the Library of Alexandria, jackals, writing dances, and a wail about wanting to strangle Dick Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld. Another piece on manatees posited "manatees thinking archivally," an image that interested me. It's a pleasure to watch Waldman. She so inhabits her body and moves with(in) it.

Geyser! a New Play by Kevin Killian and Wayne Smith

The picture isn't good, but the play was.








Small Press Traffic hosted the premier of Geyser! on Friday, September 12, 2008.


Geyser! takes place in a small town in Oregon where the short-lived TV series Geyser was filmed. Many locals appeared in the series and although the town's geyser hasn't gone off in 30 years, the town is hosting the convention of the Geyser fan club. Geyser, the TV show ended with the death of one of its stars, Lawrence Kansas, shot on location. His murder is unsolved until the close of Geyser! the play.


I arrived just before it all began. The cast was huge including:

Kala Milosevich as Kitty Potter, host of "Kitty Corner" (She purred her way through the piece in the most delicious southern accent! I could listen to her all day.)

Rex Ray as Rick Penny, host of "Rick Penny Among the Many" (Slippery, so slippery! Rick and Kitty are rival talk show hosts.)

Wayne Smith as Crimmins the beleaguered butler of a great star [Marjorie Cantrell]

Kevin Killian as Marjorie Cantrell, the first lady of the American theater (She hasn't left her home in thirty years. No make-up for this gal--just lots of sunscreen. She's photophobic!)

Gerald Corbin as Celebrity Stylist Maurice Anton (So smooth!)

Craig Goodman as Jared Oriole of Sherman Oaks (What was the line? --He's the sparkplug around which everything revolves. He's the organizer of the Geyser fan club. He's supposed to to be marrying Anouk at the fan club conference but instead marries Klanglar from Iceland.)

Tanya Hollis as Anouk, Jared's fiancee from Brittany (So French, so moody, oui! oui!)

Mac McGinnes as Wilford Hall, town clerk (Perfectly doddering.)

Jocelyn Saidenberg as Klanglar Gunnarsdottir, from Iceland (Her high-pitched voice and inverted syntax, those furs and glasses!--Jocelyn, was that really you?)

Laurie Reid as Mayor Constance Strode (So Palin-like in her glasses and suit with her hair swept up. But Constance has a heart and a long lost son.)

Colter Jacobsen plays Charlie Strode, Mayor Strode's son, a local fan and a clown, known as "Buttons" (Charlie dropped out of RISD to join the Radical Clown Collective, and needs to ask his mother for money to pin on the trees in the forest.)

Glen Helfand as Michael Carson, local fan and owner of a bed'n'breakfast place

Lindsay Wagner, a dangerously deluded fan is played by David Brazil (He and Tanya, aka "Anouk" draped around each other were fab.)

Donna Mangiafranni, fan from Florida was suavely underplayed by Margaret Tedesco

Stephen Boyer played Teddy French, life partner of Michael Carson (His crossed leg swinging boyishly.)

Suzanne Stein played Molly Martin, Twin Cities fan (Her room sports a blown up photo of Dennis Quaid, close-up of his midriff, I believe.)

Taylor Brady as Gypsy Kincaide, truck driving fan (Who could have believed Taylor, one of the more articulate speakers out there could so convincingly play someone of so few words!)

Cliff Hengst as Bobo, clown leader (Charismatic as the leader of the radical clown collective. Cliff and Kevin (Marjorie) perform a duet at the play's close of "Send in the Clowns.")

Anne McGuire as Buttercup, a clown

Scott Hewicker as Dennis Quaid

Timken Hall was packed for the play and a good time was had by all. At some point in the middle of the play, there was a momentary lag, but it was only momentary. The theater was filled with bouts of raucous laughter. The cast obviously enjoyed themselves too. Kudos to all.

Nick Robinson's Poets Theater

Nick in Eileen Corder's play Mister Sister (1980)

Poets Theater Program Notes
originally written for Small Press Traffic's
Poets Theater Jamboree 2007
Nick Robinson

By 1979 I was done with school and trying to figure out what to do with myself. Should I move to Vermont and join the Bread & Puppet Theater Company, as my college acting teacher had advised? Or get more involved with practice at the SF Zen Center, in spite of the martial tone that prevailed there. I applied for a Fulbright to study music in Bali, and while waiting for my free ticket in the mail I learned a few banjo tunes and cast about for a DIY theater project. I was living with Eileen Corder on York Street off 24th. Tinker Greene’s brother John had the Studio Eremos space in Project Artaud, and he let us rehearse and perform there for free, maybe we collected a little money and gave it to him but basically this was off the grid.

Carla Harryman and Steve Benson and I had done a one-night performance of Frank O’Hara’s Try! Try! at the Grand Piano, but Eileen and I had bigger ideas and wanted to do plays like we’d been doing them for the past 4 years in college in Michigan and Santa Cruz – real productions with rehearsals, direction, sets, costumes, lights, multiple performances. The poets were ready. I don’t remember having any trouble getting people to commit to 2 or 3 nights of rehearsal per week for a month or more, and a couple weekends of performances.

We’d show up at the studio around 7:30 and the actors would trickle in from their day jobs, or just from their days. Sometimes they’d already be in character. The dreamer, the bad boy, the cranky kid, the con man, the princess. Everybody seemed to have a shtick.

I didn’t have much idea of poets theater except I knew I didn’t want it to be like a staged poetry reading where everybody would just stand around and read their lines. I wanted something to happen between the actors, and I wanted that something to be expressed physically. So I leaned on what I’d learned from improvisational theater, much of it non-verbal – Viola Spolin theater games, 60s NYC experimental theater exercises a la Open Theater, El Teatro Campesino improvisational exuberance, Grotowskian plastique exercises – and I just started throwing it at the poor actors who probably wondered what any of it had to do with the script. But they stuck to it and let me lead them through all sorts of physical and vocal experiments. After a while they started to enjoy it, and then they started to play together. When I saw this I knew that I could start giving them lines from the script. As soon as they got their lines they’d stop playing together and start “acting”, which would be terrible, so I made the improvisations more structured and demanding so they wouldn’t be able to resume their habitual shtick, even though they wanted to. In this way, at times, the actors would surpass themselves.

Of course I tried to focus and score the improvs into a kind of physical/vocal/emotional subtext that bore an intentional relation to the text, but with texts like Third Man, Particle Arms, and Collateral (which Eileen directed) there was a lot of leeway for defining that relation.

The results? Mixed. There was a lot of excitement. We had big crowds. People laughed and cheered. Everybody learned something about the processes of making theater. Some of the writers plowed that knowledge back into their work which it continues to inform to this day.

It went on like that for a few years. When it ended for me (“… and so castles made of sand…”) I was still trying to figure out how to bring all the elements together in a dynamic and vital balance. Each time I watched a rehearsal or performance was a new chance to notice what was really happening between the actors and the text. That was the part I enjoyed the most. So it’s with pleasure that I join you for a viewing of selections from plays done by SF Poets Theater nearly thirty years ago.

Original manuscripts, correspondence, audio and video recordings, photos, programs, posters, and director’s notes to the productions are housed in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at New York Public Library at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.

Some of the plays are published in: This 11, Spring 1981; Hills 8, Summer 1981; Hills 9, Spring 1983; Busy Wrong: Two Plays, Eileen Corder, Jimmy’s House of Knowledge, 1986; Animal Instincts: Prose, Plays, Essays, Carla Harryman, This, 1989; Crowd and not evening or light, Leslie Scalapino, O Books, 1992.

Nick Robinson lives in Albany, California, works as a librarian at UC Berkeley, and plays in several Bay Area string bands. His group the Ragtime Boyos will perform Sunday September 14 in the Berkeley Old Time Music Convention Cabaret from 3-6pm at Jupiter in Berkeley. Check out their video.

Here's Nick with the Imaginary String Band (2007).

Poetry, Politics & Class

Earlier this year in an article about the Clinton
vs Obama primary race I was struck by the following quote:



"You campaign in poetry,
but you govern in prose."
--Hillary Clinton, Nashua, N.H., Jan. 6.


Clinton was suggesting that Obama's discourse is poetry
and her own prose. By setting up this dichotomy--on the
one hand, poetry as that which persuades or stuns or
lure's an audience versus prose which, on the other hand,
is the discourse of logic and policy and the stuff of action--she
constructs their differences but also makes an implicit value
judgement and assessment about the relationship of each
to the social world. Poetry is powerful, seductive (a formulation
as old as Plato's banishment of poets from the polis in The Republic)
while prose is practical. Such a formulation also points out that
each is shaped by and the instrument of ideology.



Clinton was also participating in the construction of
ideologies about both. With this figure, she capitalized
on an existing belief that poetry is the stuff of sentiment
and insufficient for governing, dangerous even. It is
more suited to the passions. While banishing poetry
from a portion of the public sphere, she also assigns it
other powers; its power of otherness. This is all
entangled in a mess of exoticization and contradiction.
And interestingly contains all kinds of reverberations
about who actually gets to participate in the polis.
Who counts.

There's more:

David Orr on The Poetry Foundation web site in an
article entitled Poetry & Politics provides another
example of poetry's appearance in the public sphere
as a way to launch his own examination of poetry's
relationship to politics:

"Shortly before Ohio's Democratic primary, Tom
Buffenbarger, the head of the machinists' union
and a supporter of Hillary Clinton, took to the
stage at a Clinton rally in Youngstown to lay
the wood to Barack Obama. 'Give me a break!' snarled
Buffenbarger, 'I've got news for all the latte-drinking,
Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies
crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won't last a
round against the Republican attack machine.'
And then the union rep delivered his coup de
grace: 'He's a poet, not a fighter!'"

In this quote, the speaker clearly disparages poetry,
associating it with an elitist demographic and
juxtaposing it to the figure of the "fighter."
McCain, near the end of his speech on Thursday
night, invoked over and over this figure of the
fighter, the warrior --get up and fight! According
to such rhetoric (which harkens back to the Romantics
although if we take it back to the troubadours this
becomes problematic as they eventually
came from the "lower classes," and were people
who worked with their hands!),poetry is for
lovers, not fighters.

Interestingly, in this quote too, poetry and Obama
are each figured as other and each gets aligned
with a particular class location: poetry (and Obama)
elitist; prose (and the working class) the language of battle,
and for the speaker above, the language of Hillary Clinton.
Neither Clinton, nor McCain and his seven kitchen tables,
nor even Obama currently qualifies as working class.

Poetry & Natinoalism: If I had time here, it would be
worth thinking through poetry’s relationship to
nationalism. And perhaps the connection between
creative writing programs in primary schools and
democracy as DG Meyers outlines it in The
Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880.
But there isn’t time at the moment!


Poetry, Politics & The San Francisco
Bay Area:This discussion about poetry
and its relationship to politics at the
present political moment is interesting
to me because I've been at work
writing about the San Francisco Bay
Area poetry in the 70s and 80s. During
this period, poetry's relationship to the
social world is one of the central animating
debates of these decades.

Here are a few quotes to illustrate:

"Writing itself is a form of action."
(Ron Silliman. The New Sentence 4)

"My theme probably has most to do
with a very strong feeling that telling
stories actually has an effect on the
world, and that a relation is achieved
between the one telling those stories
and her or his audience and history"
(Bruce Boone. Century of Clouds 42).

"The political is an ordeal. Or rather,
to undertake politics properly is to
undergo an ordeal. Not poems then,
but poetry and the dialectics of
writing (Ron’s ‘Not this. What then?’):
If the polis could serve as a site for the
appearance of writing, might not writing
serve as preparation for the polis?"
(Lyn Hejinian, The Grand Piano Part 2 75).

In 1988 an article entitled, "Aesthetic Tendency
and the Politics of Poetry: A Manifesto"
is published in the journal Social Text. Ron Silliman,
Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Benson,
Bob Perelman, and Barett Watten
co-authored this article and constructed
it as a direct response to the types of
criticism lobbed at this group of writers
frequently identified as Language Writers
though they themselves problematize this
identification (for example in their refusal to
use the term Language writing until the
twelfth page of the article) while valorizing
the group as community. Despite the
problematic nature of group identity,
these authors articulate themselves as a
"community of writers who read each
other’s work"(261). The article states
"we are arguing for the significance of a
group against the canonical individual
of the ‘expressivist’ tendency, itself a
social movement" (273), one that is
naturalized so to appear to "provide
an ideology of no ideology" (264).
The authors provide examples of
the problematic construction of a
transcendent, isolated individual
proffering personal experience in
a variety of poems and assert
that in such cases, "authorial ‘voice’
lapses into melodrama in a social
allegory where the author is precluded
from effective action by his or her very
emotions" (265). It is "this kind of
worked-over accounting of ‘experience,’
we think, [that] is primarily responsible
for the widespread contemporary
reception of poetry as nice but irrelevant" (264).
Such poetry, this article argues, accounts for
the public perception that poetry is
ornamental but irrelevant in the social world.

In his introduction to the magazine Soup in 1981,
editor Steve Abbott offers a brief description
of New Narrative. He writes: "New Narrative is
language conscious but arises out of specific social
and political concerns of specific communities...
It stresses the enabling role of content in determining
form rather than stressing form as independent
or separate from its social origins and goals."

Robert Glückwrites:
"Whole areas of my experience, especially
gay experience, were not admitted to
this utopia [of language writing],
partly because the mainstream
reflected a resoundingly coherent
image of myself back to me–an
image so unjust that it amounted
to a tyranny that I could not turn
my back on. We had been
disastrously described by
the mainstream–a naming
whose most extreme (though
not uncommon) expression was
physical violence. Political agency
involved at least a provisionally
stable identity....Bruce [Boone] and
I turned to each other to see if we
could come up with a better
representation–not in order to
satisfy movement pieties or to
be political, but in order to be.
We (eventually we were gay, lesbian
and working-class writers) could not
let narration go ("Long Note on
New Narrative" 26-27).

Class: And then there are issues of class and its
relationship to poetry and the Bay Area
writing community. Dodie Bellamy takes
up the issue of class in a post on her blog.

This excerpt is from my review, forthcoming
in Crayon, of Mike Amnasan’s novel Liar:

"In a recent email exchange about class and
the San Francisco Bay Area writing scene,
Amnasan wrote:
'To talk about class issues was considered
an attempt at one-ups-man-ship, trying
to get special attention through an illegitimate
means that no one was going to take seriously.
A lot of middle class writers felt that if a
working class person learned from the
books and resources that they themselves
had learned from they became middle
class with the same privileges....I think
the basic attitude among a lot of language
writers was that the social class of an
individual had become too hard to
distinguish with all the different kinds
of labor and vocations people now had
so that class was no longer valid as
criteria in regard to individuals and
so it was simply no longer interesting'
(June 16, 2007 email from Mike Amnasan).


So, these are just a few quotes that suggest some
of the contentions around politics, poetry
and social engagement, and class.
Just the tip of the iceberg!