Slow Listening: Lessons from Robin D. G. Kelley on Thelonious Monk

Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original has been my reading companion for one year. It is a thick book, organized chronologically, beginning with Monk’s family history and ending with his death in 1982. The book tells the story of seemingly every recording session, concert, detail about family life, gigging, venues, and the surrounding historical times. It is fully absorbing, and the details accrue toward several points Kelley makes about Monk, art, history, music, being “American,” race, and being “original.”

I think Kelley is also saying something about doing history. This book honors the details of Monk’s life by the compositional choice not to structure the material around one main thesis. In so doing, Kelley re-writes Monk’s life—where critics and historians and filmmakers had often tried to pigeon-hole Monk, beginning with a thesis and then making him fit whatever they wanted to prove, Kelley is careful to tell the story of a full and complex life and music.

And so I think the text truly honors Monk. It may not be easy or common to think of “honor” as a textual characteristic or presence—but Kelley’s tone and approach aims to be more about Monk than about the historian doing the work of telling. Kelley’s gaze is wide and the feeling, reading such a wide view, is one of fullness—that it might be possible to know something about Monk, and therefore it might be possible to be a unique person and to be known. I deeply admire this about Kelley’s method and tone.

I hesitate to say that I take lessons away from this book—I am a white poet, born into the middle class, though tenuously middle class and without any inheritance or trust fund, and while I struggle at the moment to secure full time work, and my health benefits have been inconsistent and a point of anxiety throughout my whole adult life, I certainly have not lead a life of struggle like Monk.

But I want to say, as an artist whose work is non-commercial, that there are some things to gather up from this book and from Monk’s life and store in my consciousness as fortifications for what may come. As if his musical genius is not enough—prior to reading Kelley’s book, I knew that Monk was my favorite jazz pianist of all time—now I can not only listen to his music, but maybe I’ll even navigate my life remembering some of the things I read and take courage. Such as:

Tradition/Innovation:

Monk innovated and he was traditional. What a lesson for poetry communities who sometimes talk about “experimental poetry” as if it is an aesthetic into which one “graduates” and from which one never waivers. Kelley proves, by providing careful musical analysis, that Monk was an innovator. Kelley gathers testimony from so many musicians about how Monk’s playing was different, how Monk schooled them, how many of them wanted to learn from him—and they did because Monk was a willing teacher. Yet when be-bop rose into prominence as “the modern music,” Monk criticized the way this kind of jazz privileged speed. He often favored slowness, silence, the well-chosen note, the melody, and at the same time, rhythmically, he wanted to find ways to make something slower swing hard.

And later, when “out” jazz, or “the so-called avant-garde” came into being (and I love the way Kelley always signals the positionality of the term “avant-garde” by calling it “the so-called avant-garde”), Monk commented on the ugliness of the sound. He persisted in playing his repertoire, and even when he was older and not feeling well, he provided a lot of musical joy for some crowds not quite pleased with Miles Davis’ fusion approach. And he was still schooling musicians coming up who were eager to learn from his soulful complexities.

(On a side note: this got me thinking about my love of John Coltrane’s music—even his later, “out” stuff—and then my falling in love with Alice Coltrane’s music, whose late album “Universal Consciousness” seems to signal a return to the blues, and to church traditions. How perhaps she followed Coltrane’s inquiry to the very end, and maybe in a “Monkian” twist, returned to roots.)

Roots/The Future:

Kelley describes Monk as a Janus-faced artist: looking ahead while looking back. Like the way he kept both hands going, doing something interesting on the keyboard with the right and the left, making dissonance, using his whole body—his famous elbow crash down on the keyboard—all the while, referencing jazz’s stride piano roots.

Money:

Monk struggled with finances. He rarely got a fair shake from the record industry. He had no health insurance—nor did his family. For me, reading, after a fall and winter of listening to “We are the 99%” which has disturbed me a bit because if the slogan's potential to ignore great variation in class struggle and render the poor invisible, Kelley’s book does good work to tell the details of a life on the financial brink. He does not cut this biographical information short by citing some general platitudes about struggle and the necessity of art, but rather he breaks down the actuals: Kelley reports income figures, enumerates the percentages of “profit” Monk had to pay out to his sidemen, the exact cost of Nellie’s dental care, and so on.

These dollar amounts as details were, to me, some of the most potent poetry I encountered all year.

Along the way, Monk and Nellie and their children were often helped out, financially, by the Baroness Nica. Kelley proves that Nica was a trusted family friend.

Friendship:

This book is also a record of support—often of friendship across race and life circumstance. Artists who privilege innovation and originality often need support from people who have money and who believe in art, who believe in the artist and shape their lives around supporting them. There are numerous anecdotes that express this kind of respect. Some white critics whose life course would never have helped them understand the details of Monk’s life were his greatest advocates—they really heard his music and extended this kind of respect to his being and his life.

The fraternity of artists is also a sub-story in this book—jazz musicians were often there for each other. If the institutions of law enforcement, the courts, health care, education, and even the musicians’ union was not on the side of the black jazz musician, they were certainly on each other’s sides. Kelley shows how Monk grieved the loss of so many of his jazz musician friends. He also relays many other anecdotes of friendship: fundraisers, hospital visits, donations, people coming around to Monk’s apartment to see how he was doing, and extended family helping Nellie and Thelonious out with babysitting, caretaking, moving apartments, helping them out after their apartment fires.

Monk received this kind of support; he also gave it.

Illness/Wellness:

It is possible that Monk “inherited” bipolar disorder from his father. But Kelley shows us that more of an impact, for sure, was Monk’s grueling schedule, the fact that drugs were pumped into the black community by the government, and that so many “doctors” took money from jazz musicians to supply them with suspect care and “vitamin shots” that contained illicit drugs. I doubt that the health care industry has reformed itself much from those times—it seems like a minor miracle to find a doctor who will act with ethics and have enough time and attention to actually provide holistic, good care. I thought about this as I read.

How healthy can artists be? And artists of color, or artists who don’t come from money, at that? I feel this struggle all around me, in the poetry community, among artists in this country who feel barely visible, barely allowed to be artists, let alone to be healthy and deserving of good care. Nellie eventually took Monk’s health, to a large degree, into her own hands. Over and over, this kind of vigilance, family, and community support and intervention is what saves a person on the brink—which is an experience close to the edge of security and what I think it feels like, often, to be a living, working artist. In this way, artists, even if they grew up with money or still have it, can extend a lot of understanding toward the poor in this country.

Pro-artist causes are linked, crucially, with anti-poverty causes.

Quitting:

I paid attention to the stories of jazz musicians leaving jazz. I appreciated this recognition of the sacrifice that art takes, and the struggle that perhaps is sometimes just not worth it. Kelley discusses Monk’s own version of quitting—when he was older, really not feeling well, living out in Jersey in Nica’s house so that he could have some quiet while Nellie tried to run a juice business out of their Manhattan apartment, Monk stopped playing piano. Barry Harris was also living there at the time, and Monk would listen to Harris play, but resisted his coaxing to join him. Kelley is pointing something out that is valuable, and often suppressed in the narrative of an artist’s life: while art making might be the very thing that moves the blood through an artist’s veins, it is also tiring, exhausting even, and it is possible for an artist—even an absolute original and musical genius such as Monk—to stop.

Politics:

Monk was not detached from politics, and from the Civil Rights Movement—he played in many benefit concerts and followed the news of the day closely—but when asked, his answers focused on his role as musician, as artist. He did not want to be a politician, a social worker, an activist. He did not believe he needed to. But many times others were not content to let him be an artist—as if that was not radical enough.

Respect:

Monk could seemingly sense when respect was being extended to him, and he knew when it was not. Monk stayed silent and evasive during interviews where he could sense the interviewer’s agenda: to make Monk out to be this or that, crazy, more of a piano player than a composer, more of a traditionalist than an innovator. He evaded questions, and increasingly, as the years went on, even in his personal life, he stayed silent. When pressed by one of his musician friends later in life to “Say something!” Monk replied, “Something.” But when he wanted to, when he felt respect, he was open, funny, and told stories and expressed his opinion freely.

Context:

How you see a person, what you hear, and what you think about them may be linked to what you have decided to believe about that person as a type. This is called prejudice and in an era of liberalism and political correctness, we are often quick with the disclaimer, “I am not prejudiced.”

But what we think of a person is linked not just to who they appear to be at first glance, but how willing we are to learn their context, hear their stories, and listen and try to know. Of course this applies to race. This applies to ideas of wellness and mental illness. This applies to class. To ideas of “the genius of the artist.” This applies to music and art criticism, and how history gets made. Where it might have been easy to see Monk’s behavior as this or that, Kelley relies on the researchable facts and the probable situation that always allows for the fullness of Monk’s life.

This generosity is inspiring—I take it as a practice to emulate. As writers, researchers, and as teachers and even citizens, in our rush to make sense of a person and figure out what to say and do in response to their being, how many times do we cut a person off, make assumptions, and believe what we hear from others? Kelley provides all of Monk’s episodes, behaviors, and actions with context.

Kelley’s long book is an example of the beautiful slowness of knowing, a practice of slowness that fosters a resistance to quick conclusions.

For example, a painter was commissioned by a magazine to do a portrait of Monk. During the sitting, Monk fell asleep. The painter later said he found this strange. Kelley answers this bit of historical data with the “counter-thesis” seemingly in plain site: Monk was tired. His schedule was grueling. He had to gig in order to take care of his family and pay the bills. Why wouldn’t he be prone to nodding off?

And another joyous example: Kelley does a wonderful job in the beginning of the book tracing the origins of Monk’s famous dancing on stage—his spinning—his seemingly spastic moves. One of Monk’s earliest tours as a pianist was with a woman Pentecostal preacher. They played in churches where the band would accompany the sermon and the altar calls. Monk was not a believer, but he felt the music, and witnessed the dancing—the “ring shout” and “shout step” styles. So, later, white critics and those unfamiliar with Monk’s past, and unfamiliar with the somatic shapes of this cultural context, called Monk’s “antics” notable, mysterious, bizarre, and/or entertaining. For those who would not know this history, Kelley lets them in, reframing Monk’s very being—his body, his music—and Kelley’s example perhaps encourages us to do more research before our next set of conclusions when encountering another.

Toward a Conclusion:

I come back around to the idea of history’s gaze—I think Kelley has performed an embodied, slow-paced, wide-angle history which compliments the music of Monk: angular, evading neat conclusions, but dedicated to providing something beautiful for the listener in its truth. How wonderful: these dual epistemological ways forward—into history making and into art making, with Monk’s music at the center.

While I have left the church behind where I first learned the song, I love Monk’s rendition of the hymn “Abide with Me.” And so today, and hopefully for a long time, I want to “abide”—listening for the way to make and live something new, listening to Monk.

Madwomen in a New Year: the Poems of Gabriela Mistral

I am sitting with Madwomen, a volume of the late poems of Gabriela Mistral—two volumes she titled Lagar, or in English, “Winepress”: image of skins crushing, bleeding, at a certain age. Welcome: a new year.

Reading her life—a childhood of relative poverty, yet middle class, Chilean, questing for an education with no official sanctioned access, only favors from a sister who taught her, and access to the libraries of other poets who helped her along the way. She was an educator. She directed girls’ schools in Chile. She left Chile for Mexico to take an educational reform post there, then Europe, Brazil, then the States.

A life of shifting continents, homes, political associations, so much change, wars, exiles: this is the first half of the 20^th century for a nearly self-taught woman who was unmarried and who was not born into the literary class. She adopted a son who killed himself. After, she said she lived dangerously on two planes. She walked with ghosts. Randall Couch, translator, and the author of the volume’s introduction, writes that Mistral “collected injustices” and lead a life of “financial anxiety.” Of course. And she wrote. She wrote herself in and out of territories, states:

“The Abandoned Woman”

Now I am going to learn

The sour country,

And unlearn your love

Which was my only language,

Like a river that forgets

Its current, bed, and banks.

In 1955, two years before her death, she wrote this in a letter to a friend:

“Each poem is an adventure with new paths, including unknown animals and weapons. And one has to invent at full speed a bow capable of felling the incandescent meteor coming down on us or the vertiginous bird that circles us. I start from an emotion that little by little is put into words, helped by a rhythm that could be that of my own heart. You will smile, knowing my tachycardia . . . . But aren’t many of my poems, especially those in Lagar, riding a runaway heart?”

It is a new year. In my notebook this morning I wrote, “good to wait for things to come.”

Who and what teaches us to wait? Where do we go to school for this? Into the field of art: suspending the certainty of meaning, a cause, a purpose. I have said it before and keep needing to repeat this idea: the result of art’s action remains unknown. The poem: a performance, a field of vision into which the known appears then disappears. Living as a poet is twining a life of magic with the life of packing up the house, filling out a bank deposit slip, cleaning out your book bag. What if every scrap glows?

Beauty as electrical charge, conducting, moving, approaching, receding. There is no “before” and “after,” “darkness” then “enlightenment.” In literature borne of intensity and absence—literature of an emergency situation—there are circuits. Her poems: the rhizomorphic burrows Deleuze and Guattari describe in On the Line. No dichotomy—no need to choose one plane over the other.

“She Who Waits”

Before the threshold and before the path,

I wait and wait for the one who walks straight

and advances truer than water or fire.

He comes because of me, he comes for me,

not for shelter, nor for bread and wine,

but because of the fact that I’m his food

and I’m the cup that he lifts and drains.

The difference between anticipating and waiting—what is this difference? Maybe this:

To anticipate is to plan for possible outcomes, to prepare. To anticipate is linear. Perhaps waiting recognizes the possibility of exchange, circuit, rhizome, unknown. To wait is to map a space and occupy it, not build a road and travel toward. To wait is to be consumed by questions and even to agree to be the vessel, the delivery mechanism used by another in order to feed: “I’m the cup that he lifts and drains.” To wait is to expect exhaustion, expect to be used, emptied, strongly passive. I am summoning this in the new year.

And they know, yes my body and soul know

that he comes walking the livid

ribbon of my own shout, without

entangling himself in the glorious ash-tree

or resting on the hard-packed sands.

The waiting shouts and might be “livid.” The shout as conduit. There is no particular value to patiently waiting—a radical revision to polite society’s expectations for a girl, for a good boy.

2012 is years after having made the decision not to have children. This year I am studying menopause. My facts are dubious—please check them (I tried but came up empty handed)—but I recall hearing or reading somewhere that the theca, the outer layer of the ovary responsible for producing eggs becomes subsumed by the ovary’s inner layers: pleasure centers. “This is self-cannibalism,” I told my beloved. There is nothing unused; there is no withering, no death.

Evolutionarily speaking, why does menopause exist? There are various theories, yet none can be proven. Is the answer “because of poetry”? Another kind of language. Another life calibrated toward pleasure. Supplanting the need for progeny. So the body and the social body watches for the change, a new circuitry.

“The Other”

I killed a woman in me:

one I did not love.

She was the blazing flower

of the mountain cactus;

she was drought and fire,

never cooling her body.

She had stone and sky

at her feet, at her shoulders,

and she never came down

to seek the water’s eye.

[….]

and at her side

I bent and bent . . .

I left her to die,

robbing her of my heart’s blood.

A new year and I bend and bend, cooling, waiting for water—

Ethics, Textures, and Readers: Considering the Outcomes of Compositional Choices in Documentary Poetry

Why think through documentary poetry via four modes—expository, observational, interactive, reflexive—proposed by documentary film theorist Bill Nichols?

1. To explore modes available to me that I may not have considered, compositionally. This answer highlights aesthetics.

2. To consider, explicitly, a work’s possible effects on audience, on readers—or the relationship between compositional mode and reception. This answer highlights ethics. I am most interested in the second consideration, and this essay will concentrate on ethics.

Regarding the use of these modes, writes Nichols, “. . . each mode deploys the resources of narrative and realism differently, making from common ingredients different types of text with distinctive ethical issues, textural structures, and viewer expectations.”

This inquiry stems from my desire to more prominently feature the audience in discussions of poetics and poetry. I am reaching into film theory to find a lens that admits this: regardless of author intention, reception is a worthy consideration.

This essay also builds on my previous blog post on documentary as a discourse—and hopefully illustrates the idea that more interesting discussions of ethics emerge when we step away from trying to form a stable definition of documentary poetry.

The Expository Mode in Film

According to Nichols, “The expository text addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that advance an argument about the historical world.” This mode is employed in network news, and early documentary works like “Nanook of the North.” This mode features voice-over, a commentary, an argument, borne of modernity’s idea of the benefits of “knowing” and collecting knowledge outside of one’s own experience. If interviews are featured, they tend to be highly edited, to support the over-arching argument. These projects are concerned with cause and effect, hoping to educate, and hoping that common sense will emerge in response, often, to a social problem or societal ill.

Nichols explains that not all expository documentaries are organized around history, a problem, a past, or an argument. He posits that a “poetic” approach may also be expository in that it sets out to describe, to attempt a portrait, a snapshot of a situation perhaps assumed not readily available to a viewership or readership.

The Expository Mode in Poetry: C. D. Wright’s One Big Self: An Investigation

An example of this mode, particularly the “poetic” approach within exposition, might be C. D. Wright’s One Big Self: An Investigation, a work of poetry centered around prisons, prison subjectivity, as well as the subjectivity of her own whiteness and status as artist who interviews prisoners. Wright states the challenge of her role as interviewing, composing poet, “going to prison” in order to “investigate.”

While her book contains elements of the interactive mode—containing interviews—the work does not privilege the interviewer/interviewee relationship. Wright chooses, compositionally, to treat language collected as a large collage, removing quotation marks, so that instead of singular portraits and scenes, a large fabric of being and experience is portrayed—a “One Big Self.” Individual identities are more or less subsumed into the larger argument: an argument of discovery. This is especially noticeable if you trace the origins of this project. Wright’s book is formed from text initially written for an art book featuring photos by Deborah Luster. Luster, on a quest to understand violence and criminality in the wake of her mother’s murder, took portraits of inmates, gifted copies to them, and then made this book along with a gallery show, with a portion of the proceeds going to the inmate welfare fund.

The photo book version of this project, then, is a very thorough expository project because it contains actions toward a solution—and “solution” is a concept often present in the expository mode.

The photo version of this project also features small text profiles of each inmate. In a sense, by removing specific images as well as those “captions” or profiles, Wright has written a long voiceover, a voice that narrates prison life, leaving the reader with, I believe, primarily a feeling of empathy for the inmates. In a moment of reflexivity, Wright comments about having some guilt at looking at a bowl of delicious blueberries on her own table at home—this moment of beauty and freedom serves as high contrast to the lives she is writing about.

The disdain for prison proliferation and the racism of the criminal justice system is obvious in Wright’s work. Also obvious is the particular “othering” inherent in a project where the one who makes the work is “on the outside” and must go and visit, literally, an “other” space of confinement where she will meet her subjects. Wright also points out the economics of it all—that stock in prison design systems are rising in value. One Big Self aims to educate, and though it proposes no particular solution, in classic expository mode, the book points to a problem, a social ill.

The ethical challenges or perhaps unintended consequences of the expository mode are also present: Wright retains authorial power over the found text she has gathered, and has created a subjectivity in “the other” to explore her own non-inmate status. The idiosyncratic arrangement of each page—moving from found text to commentary of various sorts, containing sentences as well as phrases, and various types of white space highlight an author at work. Though it is clear where she stands as author—against prison proliferation—her expository approach privileges, ever so slightly, the one who knows, who writes, who sees and arranges, and possibly re-inscribes the inmate as one without the totalizing view, without the power to arrange this logic, this portrait.

Some of the work’s ethical challenges came to light when I taught this book in a class on documentary—in film, visual art, and poetry—at The City College of New York. The students were fascinated by the collage technique employed by Wright. They were in solidarity with her politics, and so they became more interested to know that poems could be composed in this manner and that they could center around a social problem.

The class, mostly students of color, came to rest on an uncertainty, though—and this ethical question is key in the expository mode—the question of whether Wright had the “right” to tell others’ stories. How did it benefit the subjects of the book that their story—stitched together as a collective—was being told?

And if Wright herself was the subject of the book, what right did she have to garner sympathy or empathy while the other subjects of her text are incarcerated? Did they, as readers, care about her dilemma of representation?

The class went back and forth on these questions.

Students sensed that Wright was asking questions of subjectivity and privilege throughout the book, and so as a class, we decided that Wright’s expository approach was heavily inflected with reflexivity. Yet perhaps confessing her doubts was also not enough: many readers were not sure that an issue so apparently clear and devastating needed to be so self-reflexive. In the end, some students asked, what if she could write this text so that it was not at all about her? What would that look like?

Most interesting to me was this: the possibility that utilizing the expository mode, constructing a work where authority is in the voice and composition of the poet, meant that some students seemed to want more clarity of argument from Wright’s project. They believed her book had a fault line: to highlight the guilt of individual prisoners, by telling the details of their often violent crimes, confused the overarching social problem of prison proliferation.

Perhaps wary of the exceptionalism of individual crime stories often used to justify entire racist systems of punishment, these readers wondered why she wouldn’t edit out some the “individual crime” content, positing that maybe her approach put a solution to the problems of the criminal justice system at even more of a distance.

The Observational Mode in Film

Sometimes called cinema vérité, or direct cinema, observational documentaries stress, according to Nichols, “the non-intervention of the filmmaker. Such flims cede ‘control’ over the events that occur in front of the camera more than any other mode.” The observational documentary eschews voice-over, music external to the film, and other devices such as reenactments, and interviews.

“Observational filmmaking,” posits Nichols, “gives a particular inflection to ethical considerations.” These include “whether or not the author has received permission to film, whether they are just furthering their career on the backs of others, whether the exposure of their subjects will harm or help them, and should the filmmaker’s own opinions find a place in the final product.”

Instead of a focus on a problem/solution narrative, as expository works emphasize, observational film most often attempts to capture “the everyday” and “the typical.” A close cousin to this mode is ethnography, with its desire to suspend authorial argument, but to simply “expose” and “describe.”

Whereas filmmakers who work in this mode might intend the following: to disappear as authors, and to make something “impersonal,” in fact, the effect of this tactic is often the opposite. According to Nichols, “authoring agency presents itself as an absence.” Attempts at invisibility or non-intervention highlight, for the viewer, the author’s decision to turn the camera on. Rather than an “impersonal” film, observational documentaries are often in fact quite personal—viewers are allowed to see, window-like, into the life of the social actors who are framed.

The Observational Mode in Poetry: Goldsmith’s Soliloquy and Place’s “The Guilt Project”

Perhaps “found text” or “appropriated text” work in poetry may be thought of as an equivalent to the observational mode in documentary—an equivalent, to some extent, of turning on the camera and “walking away” as an author.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s Soliloquy immediately came to my mind. Goldsmith “composed” the work by recording everything he said for one week in May, and transcribing it as one long paragraph.

I read every word of Soliloquy. I felt that I was being asked, as a reader, to not read. And because it felt like a dare, and I admit from my sports background that if presented with a dare, I will attempt to compete, and so I read every word.

As the pages went on and on, I became closer and closer to Goldsmith’s “personal” life. Without editing, Goldsmith’s authorial presence is, ironically, enormous. Goldsmith’s uncensored ways are quite compelling in his interactions especially with family, a site of relationship that developed as the book progressed. Soliloquy becomes incidentally confessional. I admit that I feel like a trickster, offering this read of Soliloquy. As an untamed narrative, composed by a very transparent procedure, it is one of the most romantic (in the literary sense) autobiographies I have ever read. I am doubtful that Goldsmith intended this.

One might think of some of the work of Vanessa Place as observational as well.

Note on “conceptual writing”: Goldsmith and Place together have been called, and call themselves “conceptual writers.” But as I study, and admittedly I am in the middle of figuring some things out, I am not yet convinced of the theoretical value in importing the term “conceptual” from the visual arts into writing and poetry. So I will leave that label, mostly tied to methods of producing work and critiquing institutions, behind for the moment. As authors interested in “non-fictional” representational systems—so not the work of the imagination or the expressive work of the individual poet—I actually find it quite generative to think about Goldsmith and Place’s work within the realm of documentary. When I do this, I can burn through what I feel is the somewhat useless, for poetry, institutional critique aspect of “conceptual art” and get to more juicy issues of ethics and audience reception.

Just last week I heard Vanessa Place read from two projects: “Statement of Facts” and “The Guilt Project.”

“The Guilt Project” features court proceedings that recount the details of a child sexual abuse case. The record appears to be unedited, and as Place read the transcript, she also read cataloguing or identifying numbers that accompany the court record. This ups the ante in terms of the idea of the veracity of the documents. The numbers also provide a bit of a reprieve: their banal lack of information was, for me, a welcomed relief from the terrifying and terrible details of what happened to a girl.

It is important to pause here and acknowledge that this discussion of Place’s work centers not around my private reading of her work, but listening at a reading—so in a sense, I experienced the work almost as I would experience a documentary film. I think the time-based nature of the poetry reading intensified some of the ethical issues emerging form Place’s work. Another contextual detail: I listened from the position of a teacher of creative writing, who has become very tired of trauma narratives, so much so that I am about to embark on a study of the possible “best practices” in teaching—to facilitate a student’s growth toward excellent writing. Listening to Place I wondered if the choices for this subject matter were extreme “othering” or complete silence. Neither one, to me, pedagogically, seems quite right.

Back to Place’s work:

As Nichols suggests, Place presents us with “the sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world.” Because Place seems not to “intervene” as an editor—she presents the texts, resituating them into the space of “a poetry reading”—we are left with three options from this authorial stance as Nichols identifies them, and I felt them to be highly applicable in this case: “empathetic identification, poetic immersion, or voyeuristic pleasure.”

The result of any of these options is, with “The Guilt Project,” aversion.

On empathetic identification: if I began to identify with the victim of the transcript, I felt short of breath and victimized, perhaps flooded with my own unpleasant memories, or worrying about the memories of others in the room. I also felt sorry for the abused subject frozen-as-victim status and if I began to catalogue any similar wrongs committed against me, then that also did not feel like a way to honor the subject’s specificity, individuality. On poetic immersion: if I became immersed in the poetic language and Place’s performance, then I was abandoning the subject matter, which felt like an inhumane abandonment of the subject. On voyeuristic pleasure: if I rested on voyeurism, then I was possibly identifying with the perpetrator, whose own visioning mind committed the first objectification of this girl.

Sitting, listening to Place, watching her read, my choices, if I stayed in the room which I did, were to either withstand the discomfort of all of these choices, or exit the trap of “no good choice” by beginning to wonder about Place herself, running through a list of her possible intentions. Therefore, in a stance of “stepping aside,” Place’s authorial presence ironically loomed quite large. I also began to ask some things of poetry, splitting off from the subject matter at hand, some questions that viewers typically ask of the observational mode: “Why choose this subject matter?” and “What new light is being shed on this subject matter?”

In Place’s work, in an attempt to honor her work, I came up with two possibilities, one having to do with poetry itself, the other having to do with the law.

First, Place obviously wants to say something about poetry—that a poetry reading could be this, that one need not be lulled by beauty, but instead poetry could smack you with intense realism. Second, Place’s work displays the problematics of legal discourse and processes. As the feminists have warned us, the victim gets re-victimized in court. And so a victim can be re-victimized at a poetry reading, which places a severe wedge in our idea of poetry and art—as well as the law and justice—as “good for us.”

None of these ideas are new to me, and when confronted with these options at her reading, I did not experience any new ideas about poetry readings, the role of art, or women and the law and language.

Additionally, when Place read from “Statement of Fact,” also a legal document that quotes a conversation between inmates, including a transcription of rap lyrics, the complexity of the use of the word “nigger” was made flat, made intellectual by Place’s whiteness and the poetry reading setting—a classroom in a neo-gothic building on the campus of University of Chicago. I crave complex poems about race written by white poets, but I believe that flattening this word via pure quotation pulls up short, unless the poet’s primary goal is to say, “I can say this word,” which then seems to be much more about re-inscribing a certain mainstream art stance: everything is fair game for the artist regardless of social context, the author’s own identity, and audience reception.

I write this not entirely sure what Place’s choices could be for this subject matter, but one thought experiment came to mind: what if she replaced every instance of the word “nigger” with a hand gesture like brackets and said “n-word”? The absurd repetition of that, perhaps, could have achieved something on many more levels: evoking ideas of permission, avoidance, and possibly even getting rid of the beautiful sound of that word—the way it is used poetically within the speech of those quoted—could this have made for a more interesting text performed by Place?

So if it is not me, who, then, would Place’s ideal audience member be? The irony is that she would likely never get invited to read in those places where her work could have the most impact: a traditional poetry venue like the 92^nd Street Y in New York, or downtown, at a class at NYU Law. But maybe NYU Law School is not ideal because of critical race theory, a theory whose origins are in race-based critiques of the language of law. Perhaps her work would shake the ground in a class on feminism?

If Nichols claims that an observational mode gives viewers “revealing views,” what is to be revealed via Place’s work might hinge entirely on who her audience is.

And if what is interesting is Place’s biography—I learned that she is a public defender who defends accused rapists—then I wondered if there were other narrative strategies that could get at the complexity of her job, strategies that would not “use” a victim of violence to explicate Place’s own experience, perhaps, of the violence of her workplace discourse. Perhaps if Place had used her own name in her work, putting herself into those rooms, the complexity possible in an interactive documentary mode would have solved some of the problem of re-victimizing the victim.

Finally, because of the mode and subject matter of Place’s projects, she faces ethical questions central to the reception of every observational documentary: quoting Nichols, “To what extent and in what ways shall the voice of people be represented?” and “Does the evidence of the film convey a sense of respect for the lives of others or have they simply been used as signifiers in someone else’s discourse?”

The Interactive Mode in Film

This mode features footage of interviews and is less about interrogation or prosecution, and more akin to the role of public defender: the idea is to illicit response and frame the response to bolster an argument or further a particular point of view. Filmmakers in this mode are even, at times, featured in the film, on camera, or their voice is just off camera, involved, and doing the asking. The interactive mode, according to Nichols, has a strong “present-tense quality,” sense of the local and the specific as viewers witness a relationship, a person, a place unfold in front of them.

The Interactive Mode in Poetry: Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and Fitzpatrick’s Zamboangueña

First, I want to say that it is striking to me how much poetry does not employ this mode. Most poets are not, it seems, interested in journalism training and interviewing techniques and technologies to acquire materials for their poems!

But two texts do come to mind as possible examples. One example is Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers that eventually reads more like a fiction—the surreal overtakes any answers you might expect to hear to the questions Kapil lays out at the onset. Another book that relies on interview, and signals the presence of the interview relationship through use of a cover illustration and beginning note, is Corrine Fitzpatrick’s Zamboangueña. Fitzpatrick and an older woman—presumably her grandmother—are featured on the cover in a line drawing where they walk arm and arm over a map of the Philippines.

As Nichols points out, one of the driving ideas behind the interactive mode is to “let the subject’s voice be heard.” But almost ironically, what ends up happening in the interactive mode is that audience members begin to interrogate the filmmaker’s voice as they listen for answers to questions, asking “Who is this person who wants to know?”

Kapil’s text seems to admit this, or at least exploit this inevitable result—the “answers” to the set of evocative questions she asked Indian women in her travels, are so poeticized, stylized, and are so “worked on” as answers go, that we are left to read not just the “subjects” who answered questions, but we read a sense of mysterious relationship between the author and subject. As the text progresses, readers are aware that something that began with transcripts and interviews has turned into something quite different in the author’s hands.

This presence of fiction within documentary reminds me of the film, “Looking for Langston” from director Isaac Julien. Julien uses actors and shoots “faux” documentary footage of gay men socializing—referencing the period, and referencing this rather undocumented and suppressed detail of the life of Langston Hughes.

In the face of documentary and its limits, fiction fills out the truth.

In a nearly opposite compositional approach based on interview, Corrine Fitzpatrick’s tactic is, as she states at the beginning of the chapbook, to leave her grandmother’s interview answers completely intact as she transcribed them. Fitzpatrick completely removes herself from the text except for introductory remarks at the beginning of the book (similar to Kapil’s). But she does not disappear. She arranges her grandmother’s speech as cells, as units that float on a page and this framing choice treats each utterance with care, allows for an “other” presence marked by white space, and so we can imply that Fitzpatrick, “off the page,” residing in between her grandmother’s speech, is listening with great care.

Both Kapil and Fitzpatrick circumvent one of this mode’s primary ethical challenges: the interview as hierarchical discourse where the interviewer has more power than the interviewed.

I believe that Kapil’s text sets up a new hierarchy: author and interviewees have set up a private space, a nearly private language that requires interpretation: this act of reading puts the reader in a destabilized non-authoritarian position. Kapil also overturns the social science and oral history tradition of interviewing women of color for the sake of developing a transcript of “knowledge of the other.”

Fitzpatrick also messes with the power of the oral history transcript: she destabilizes this interviewer/interviewee power relationship by expunging her voice entirely from the text, except to signal her keen listening, highlighting this important contextual detail: it is a family story, and Fitzpatrick indicates a cultural tradition of respect—to ask questions and receive an elder’s story.

I do not think it is a coincidence that Kapil and Fitzpatrick signify and revise the interactive mode: gender and ethnicity perform a revision of an historically oppressive social science rhetorical regime.

Still, how much control, how much involvement and intervention did the interviewed have? What ethical responsibility does the author have to obtain permissions for quoting even one phrase uttered by another in such a work? What are the ethics of provoking memories and stories that might be difficult and consternating in order to make art? Did these encounters upset or help the subjects?

I believe that Kapil and Fitzpatrick answer these questions through very different means: fiction and deference. But they also share a tactic: beauty. In a sense, the emphasis on beauty in both of these texts communicates something I would call “authorial grace.” Through their treatment of this material and their subjects, readers may sense that these authors also acted beautifully, gracefully, with their subjects.

I might also conclude by asking if these works are documentary—they begin with that impulse or construct, but via composition, a belief in beauty as being as important as a non-fiction “discourse of sobriety,” the texts become something new: perhaps “post-documentary poems.”

The Reflexive Mode: Is All Documentary Poetry Reflexive?

The last mode, the reflexive, is the mode that calls the very formation of knowledge, the very existence of the text—film or book—into question by letting the viewer/reader know that what they are seeing is, even if it is concerned with non-ficiton, a fabrication.

Nichols identifies two kinds of reflexivity: political—the information we are learning about is so politically new and pressing—and stylistic—the filmmaker uses incredibly constructed means to structure or compose a film. Reflexive work aims not to stand in for “real” by presenting content that is hyper-real, or by presenting content in a why that calls attention to itself as a film, or both.

As I review Nichols propositions for this category, I realize that I have seen reflexive qualities in all of the works discussed thus far. It occurs to me that anything called “poetry” even within the discourse of “documentary poetry” is reflexive.

Still, nearing the close of this essay, I will hang on to the notion that compositional tactics inform the ethical challenges and the way a work is received. So even though we can call all documentary poetry reflexive, I still think it is useful to parse out some comparisons with Nichols’ ideas, also keeping in mind that Nichols admits the permeability of these categories, these modes.

The Reflexive Mode in Poetry: Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary and Philip’s Zong

It may be useful to consider Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary a reflexive documentary text in that Nowak is obviously making an argument about a particular social ill: the dangers of mining and multi-national corporate interests persisting over the interests of the workers. Further, Nowak has composed a highly reflexive, stylized and consistently ordered collage of documents: miners’ testimonies from West Virginia, newspaper articles from mining disasters in China, photographs of the West Virginia landscape, photos of Chinese miners by photographer Ian Teh, and coal curriculum guide excerpts. There is a ping-pong structure established as the book maintains a predictable sequence of these elements.

Unlike Muriel Rukeyeser’s “The Book of the Dead” poem sequence, set also in West Virginia and around a mining disaster of the 1930s, Nowak does not insert himself explicitly as poet and seer into this landscape. This lacuna in Nowak’s text is curious to me. I am thinking of how Nichols points out the possible similarities between pornography and documentary:

Distance, a separation between subject and object, is the prerequisite for sight, realism, desire, and power. It is necessary for the imaginary relationships of identity and opposition, duality and stereotype, hierarchy and control; it is also necessary to the imaginary coherence of realism when it invites us to overhear and look in, unacknowledged.

Poets, as word-workers with the ability to “telescope” in quite close, can make themselves as much the subject of study as the professed object of study. I believe this is what Rukeyeser establishes in her work; it is interesting that decades later, Nowak does not.

Is it possible that the utopian ideal of a global party of workers is persistent and provides enough justification for Nowak’s opaque stance toward his subject matter? Is it possible that he believes that the injustices are so overwhelming that only “the facts” about the content and not about his authorship are necessary?

Questions about gaze and subjectivity, particularly because photographs are present, persist. I wondered, why are the photos Nowak takes devoid of people entirely? Is this possibly borne out of a reluctance to re-inscribe the Appalachian “other” as WPA-era documentary photos did? Does the presence of the Chinese miners’ bodies and faces, versus the West Virginia landscapes devoid of people, re-inscribe something about the racial other, about who can choose not to be photographed, about which bodies are remarkable? What did Nowak experience, going to that place to make photographs, to make a book? What was his relationship to the people he quotes and the landscape he photographs before he arrived? And after?

A final point on Coal Mountain Elementary, reflexivity, and irony: Nichols warns about the use of irony in the reflexive mode: “Ironic representations inevitably have the appearance of insincerity since what is overtly said is not what is actually meant.”

The presence of coal curriculum language in Nowak’s text is highly ironic, and while I think Nowak meant to critique the West Virginia school system, I want to ask, how would we want an elementary school in West Virginia to teach children about coal and mining? Are we to believe that children and mining families do not have a critical consciousness about what their parents do? Do Nowak’s lesson plan sections make fun of elementary school teachers? Are there songs or dinner table conversations where “the real” education happens? Are we to believe all West Virginians and miners have been duped?

A final example of a text that is both politically reflexive, as well as compositionally reflexive: M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong, a book written collaboratively between Philip and an ancestor voice, Setaey Adamu Boateng. (I reviewed Philip’s book for the Poetry Project Newsletter Feb/March 2010 issue, and that writing can be found in pdf form on the web, so my discussion of the work will be a bit truncated.)

Zong contains a transcript of the historical record—the 18^th century court case—that begins her inquiry; the work contains several sections of poetry in various forms derived from the language of this court case; there is a fictional ship manifest; there is a glossary of non-English words used; and finally, the book contains a thorough process essay describing not only how Philip wrote the book, asking why and should it be written—Philip tells the story of whether or not she had the right to tell this story. Her discussion of the ethics of this is contained within the book.

Philip is thorough in her approach and I believe has co-authored with Adamu Boateng a highly successful reflexive documentary work—and brings me to a good ending place for this essay:

Because the book is a form that is not time-based, or is multiple with regard to time, because within its covers readers can move in any direction, can re-read, can take their time or go quickly in total absorption or avoidance, a documentary poem has some advantages over the documentary film. There are opportunities to present many things—including source documents, poetics, purpose—for study, not just looking. By removing the set sequence and the limits of the frame, as well as the visual nearness of “the real,” documentary poetry has the capacity to deliver discourses of knowledge that can:

1. respect and make space for doubt,

2. give readers time to develop conclusions and responses of their own, on their own time,

3. and most importantly, as poetry, this work invites readers to access non-fiction in an embodied way—a participatory practice of perception—reading with breath, pause, white space, music, fragment, excess, illegibility even. Reading, as Freire might say, the word and the world.

Final Disclaimer: Destroy this Essay!

After exploring Nichols’ ideas and modes, applying them to poetry, I may safely say this: it may not matter if we use the words “documentary” and “poetry” in the same breath, and it doesn’t matter which poem fits what mode. Nichols’ work provides a scaffold around “poetry, narrative, and ethics” and I believe it is possible to get there without this particular scaffold.

Dear Poet: If you believe you have readers, then what are the ethical implications of the narrative tactics you choose?

“Go to rest, our result”: Imminent Returns and Reading Deborah Meadows’ Goodbye Tissues

When Deborah Meadows read her poems in March at the Shearsman Reading in New York, I sat listening, knowing that some learning was happening. What did my feeling mean? What was her work preparing me for?

I felt something strongly enough to say to Deborah, at dinner later, “I want to write about your work.” Later that spring, Deborah sent me two of her books: Depleted Burden Down (Factory School 2009) and Goodbye Tissues (Shearsman 2009).

The word “Tissues” held me in the months after March: something strong in the body, but something fragile and tenuous if I am thinking of paper. So I read into this book with tissues in the title, beginning with its beginning, first noticing that the text accrues tentatively at the bottom of pages. As if a net has been pulled up, words and phrases caught in the gravity of a page. Information stored in tissues. Lifting, reading, what am I learning?

Now is a time for rich reading—now, in my life—of open and vulnerable receptivity while so many life events around me feel closed and frightening. In this state of magical living—of contrast between gift and deep need—I hover just over her authored surfaces that resist easy entrance. This hovering: a pull, a gravitational field. I stay with that image of a net and notice that my breathing quickens as I witness Deborah Meadow’s intense commitment to an arrangement of synapses—leaps between complete/visible and obscured/partial. As if everything I have heard, read, and seen in the last months is gathering steam toward a moment of understanding beyond totalities, I remember Homi Bhabha’s electric talk in September and the word “imminence.” “Art is imminent.”

In Deborah Meadow’s arranged pages, I am experiencing meaning about-to-happen, a reading in which my body is involved, swinging from word to word, and this continual feeling of arrival, this imminence quickens my senses. Underneath the airy space of exposition, this, instead, is poetry: embodied learning, a forward motion like walking without a destination:

from “American Possessions”

(The strange technical situation of needing to scan these pages: retyping would not allow for the gaps [caesuras] and so another print is made in the telling of my reading.)

In my notebook, I wrote this note after reading this first page: What gets caught in the net of the page if we allow the body free reign over/into language? An answer: the pages will face America. The only possible “lyric” is to get underneath attempts at seamless speech, seamless text, ideology of seamless totality.

This is the location of the pulse of the body, the how to “convey the stepped day.” How? By both drilling down and taking the leap: following a question’s line—and finding it may not be the right question—and so moving laterally, catching the language spun off as the drilling down goes deeper. The language spun off containing a quivering pulse of electricity. Each word or phrase, disconnected on the page from the possible source or seed question, disconnected from the pressure of a false conclusion, is allowed to vibrate with its own excitement: its freedom of release. Can I stay there?

Deborah Meadows performs the feeling of meaning made in this energizing evidence of gap and new life for the remnant. To repeat: evidence of gap, new life for the remnant. I want to learn this courage—the courage to follow the body down into deep composition, to have faith in this kind of legibility. As if reading a dream, nothing on these pages is meant to stand for anything else.

Last week Alice Notley said, in her talk on dreams and poems, “my dreaming self surprises me” and “the poem isn’t where the words are; it is between the words and the reader” and “the poem and the dream both have an odd relation to time.”

I sat next to her around a table at the University of Chicago, neither able to make small talk nor to ask the big questions after—I sat too close, in her periphery, outside her field of vision, possibly hiding there. I wrote down what she said: “Take dreams very seriously; do the same with poetry.”

In Goodbye Tissues there is no wasted time; time is pressing, urgent. The themes spread: politics, material realities, frustration with the speech writer, desire, goodness, God. I want all of this from poetry—I respond well to these meshed themes: moving in and out of private rooms, television screens, cathedrals, texts. And if the themes in this book constitute a house, then the walls are made of gauze. As if Deborah Meadows is saying, if you are given this space, dear writer, take the risk—take on the big themes—seriously—and let the layers seep:

“After Hölderlin”

Enter, printmaking! Enter: process of layering, stencils, imprints from a grain of wood, a life.

from “On Goodness in General”

Printmaking: see Deborah Meadows’ page on the LA Printmaking Society’s site: tracing the evidence of the unseen, but felt and known, because the ear always open. Nightingales, heartbeats, Japan’s earthquake.

What is a print? A process, first, of intention, then pulling back the paper and witnessing what the ink has decided to do with the mark. Something hoped for, and a door is opened to let something escape: this charged moment leaves a new, unimagined mark.

This attempt is the print, is poetry. Who layers and repeats, attuned to what is underneath and between, is poetry meshing with living, making for a life that is tender while potent, distilled not calcified, the “Goodbye” of the title which is the energy of a continuous departure, arrival implied.

I want to memorize this last poem to take me into winter. Here, in this post, the poem is pasted in, wrongly sized, misaligned. The screen has failed to tell the truth of what I see. A tissue slipped in between things that are typeset and known. A ragged engraving onto which these days may imprint.

“Coda”

(after Celan)

Trembling Clarity: Poems by Walter Butts, Winter Weeds Drawn by Lauren Brown, Dance and Erick Hawkins, and a Gift from Jonathan Jones

On September 9 of this year, I wrote the above in my notebook: a diagram of notes from Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness, a book I bought in 2008 and only read this summer—I appeared not to be ready for its ideas until now.

Today I am reading and re-reading, trembling because of the text’s registers of compassion, the book of my colleague and friend, Walter E. Butts. His Radio Time has been a companion of mine this fall, sitting on a shelf to the right of my desk, a shelf reserved for books that are being read or for books that need to be close to me. It sits next to Wildflowers and Winter Weeds (Norton) written and illustrated by Lauren Brown, The Body is a Clear Place and Other Statements on Dance by Erick Hawkins (Dance Horizons/Princeton), and a mysterious small chapbook entitled the library of last resort sent to me from Belgium by a person named Jonathan Jones who runs The Sticky Pages Press. These books are a gathering I made this fall without knowing why. I went to my shelves and collected some things I needed, brought them in next to my desk, ready for . . . for something.

Last week I opened Walter’s book. I remember his sure and fluent reading in Vermont this fall: his voiced pitched with urgency, the poems delivered with care because he has cared for each word, I think—he has shaped words to tremble.

The beginnings of Walter’s poems press on me—urge me to take in these histories—important internal and external landscapes—the reality of work and of struggle and dignity, families and economies—such as:

I don’t know how Father managed

that summer I was five,

on his factory pay,

and

That spring I dropped out of college

and took a factory job back in the small town

I had been so certain I’d never return to,

and as I read I see the winter weeds of upstate New York, factory towns, former-factory-and-still towns, nearly the New England of Lauren Brown’s delicate words and sketches, and I see that you can’t write off Walter’s words as “sad” or “melancholy”—for there is subtlety in winter, in stark lines and contrast. Lauren Brown warns us:

Dried plants are not as easy to identify as green ones. We often tell live plants apart by the color of their flowers and their season of blooming, but neither of these characteristics is much help for gray-brown stalks that are dead from October to April.

If the entrance into Walter’s work is through the dried weeds of winter, the grace of “Testament” is not far away and the relief of art and poetry as lived experience stirs me:

I’ve come to believe in the living

and their sacrament of speech; how each word,

in the telling, is its own necessary story,

which is yours, which is mine.

Instinctively, I open Erick Hawkins’ book—a book I have held on to and taken as a guide through my twenties, thirties, and now—and land on this page, an interview with Erick, which I am thinking now could also be an interview with Walter and an interview with my deepest desire for art at the moment:

What do you consider the most beautiful dance?

Dance that is violent clarity.

Dance that is effortless.

Dance that can at all times reveal a tender breastbone.

Dance that lets itself happen.

[…]

I go back to Walter’s book, reading, again trembling:

Today

Today is your lover, asleep

and dreaming the continuous fountain.

It is your body

dying without you.

It is the darkness

of distant trees

poised on the horizon,

like those strange shadows

of small animals

that danced across the moonlit ceiling

of your childhood.

It is a long-tailed kite,

or random bird.

It is a child

grasping the tenuous cord

of delight.

Today is the desire

of sudden rain, or it is you

driving through that rain,

not knowing the difference

between curved road and sky.

I close Walter’s book. In front of me, this tiny chapbook by Jonathan Jones, a gift, sent to me in a beautiful brown envelope that I am sure you can only find in Europe:

night has its rainbows

and a line which seems to explain how poetry is coming to me these days:

a brushed glance

In the hush of this delicate invocation by Jonathan printed in small letters on a piece of paper that appears to have been either caught in the printer, and so slubbed to the point of tearing, or printed out on a piece of paper meant to be thrown away, a question comes to me:

How to access this place of clarity, this body and language listening, who gives, who invites the complication of winter weeds:

Dear Winter Thimbleweed, Mullein, Yarrow: who are you, stalky remnant from summer?

I trace your lines and the remainders of two or three leaves, hanging on. This is the work for now. Art, teaching me to live. Life, teaching me the art borne of sheer trembling—compassion. Thank you Erick Hawkins, thank you Lauren Brown, thank you Jonathan Jones, thank you Walter Butts.

“Writing takes a lot of confidence.”: A Virtual Visit with Johannah Rodgers via Her Book, sentences

(sentences, Red Dust 2007)

Holding open this book, sentences, the book of my dear friend, Johannah Rodgers, the book slips. I do not want to press down too hard on the spine in order to be able to see the words I am quoting, typing. So to quote from the book, I stop typing, peer under its cover, taking one phrase at a time, memorizing, carefully, then return for another look.

I have given myself forty-five minutes to write this because I want to respond decisively, in the now—into this pressurized space, the book’s fifty-five pages, I write. This summer I moved away from Johannah who is in Brooklyn and I am in Chicago. So I write across to her through her book—better than a phone call because I think right now the distance in a phone conversation would leave me sad. A conversation in forty-five minutes. I remember another project of Johannah's: Writing is a Conversation.

“You must write with desire.” She encourages me. I have not known what or how to write lately.

“Writing as marking, marking time, where we are. This is important.” Also good advice. What are my marks at present? My notebook is filled with a line, then many empty lines, and another line eventually. I am writing to get to the end of something—yet there is no point—or I am writing a new sense of space. My red notebook now: there is more between than text.

“I don’t think that stories need to be progressive and it is my desire to get away from this aspect of story telling that has lead me to experiment with different ways of putting stories together.” This is good advice for how to lead a life. And patterning: patterns tell a story. Recently, Johannah told me, “I am interested in patterns.” Last night in my dream I wore a blouse adorned with tiny cross stitches all over. Johannah has made a drawing entitled “Embroidery.” It is a grid; boxes repeat. I think her drawing is a story, a life.

Today I read these sentences from my friend on a day when I wrote these instructions to myself: “It is time to start the change, drastic realignment—it is time to make the vessels you crave. You can put the books inside, the coil will be built around them—or you might slice the vessels open before firing so as to insert each book which has left you so painfully disappointed—it is time to put them away—a sequence of vessels—engraved on the insides—can you fire a vessel with a book inside or will it explode?”

I have only ten minutes remaining. I turn back to my friend’s book and her handwriting.

The handwritten writing/drawing sequences are what drew me toward sentences today—toward the spot on the shelf where this book sits. A gift: this book, helping me to remember the beauty of the mark, the hand, the skin of touch, the sound of the part of the hand that moves along the field of paper as it goes, a soft shuffle. A gift from a friend who is my writer friend.

How to write about friendship? I don’t know—except to say that maybe no matter what gets written, it should be written by hand.

What do Johannah’s writing/drawings say? I catch the following in my net of vision:

“one—small—step—can—change—

your—life—”

I push away from the desk, but too soon—I still have more time! Inside these pages, time is slowing. And I crave more, so I go back into the book, deciphering:

“winter—

how—to—preserve—

a—lemon—”

These drawings are transcribed on the verso side of the page, but I shun the translations, and sit with each line, her marks, one unit, one word, and then another: a word can’t help but continue on and grab another one to hold onto.

Johannah Rodgers writes fiction. But of the type that allows the reader to notice the mark of the author. For example, she takes historical texts whose rhetorical register is quite high and important, and lays them out in blocks that float on the page to be read as scenes, mixed in with other blocks of text—mundane narrative musings about money, the seasons, whatever. For example: “A man and woman meet and fall in love” is blandly entitled “story” with a lowercase “s.” This, next to a passage that begins, “Equinotical storms on Lake Michigan can be violent. . .” I read this juxtaposition with a chuckle; I am happily taking the Johannah Rodgers tour of the region in which I now live. I live one kilometer from this lake; I live inside writing.

Time is drawing to a close and to fulfill my duty to her as a person responding to her book, I go to the beginning of sentences—its starting place. From the first story in this book, “Woman,” here is its last sentence:

“In certain situations she felt like a bird, there to be admired but incapable of speaking.”

But because I am certain that this book is not resigned to sadness, any kind of moody or oppressed silence, but rather to the ebb and flow of language, to endless grids of choice and possibility, writing as pattern, I travel the loop of this book and turn to the last writing/drawing in order to read an invitation into breath and movement, a bounty, a continuance—

“here—life—

comes—

getting—it—getting—”