“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—”

Feminized Language Collected at the Sound Art Theories Symposium: Twenty-one Findings from Notebook Entries. . .

. . . . made on November 5 & 6, 2011, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago symposium organized by Lou Mallozzi, SAIC faculty and executive director of the Experimental Sound Studio.

1. “Sick,” by Haroon Mirza is a “sonic intrusion” (Eng, reporting on the NY Times description of the piece) at the Venice Biennale. An intrusion, like a woman with heels who enters the lunchroom, whose presence suggests that the conversation should shift away from voice leading or the weekend’s sexual exploits.

2. Sound art creates “sonic leakage” (Eng); the feminized body whose fluids drain as waste, passively, not as seed. But like the ear, she won’t close; sound won’t go away.

3. Small soundings, taciturn, close friend of silence: an annoying display of power in the face of music: “Well, say something!” yells the boss/master/protester/composer and Melville’s Bartleby says, “I’d rather not” (Migone). See James Scott: the feminized space of hidden transcripts of resistance. See Robin D. G. Kelley’s Race Rebels on the black worker in subtle protest.

4. “Nature is full of recording surfaces” (Cox). Environmentalism’s “scars upon the land” and nature is gendered “woman.” The susceptibility of the woman’s body to the mark: Hester’s scarlet letter, the stretch mark, the dangerous wrinkle: even as her wisdom grows, her time might soon be up. Listening privileged over speaking=a good feminine upbringing. Receptors ready to collect.

5. Or “body as recording surface” (Cox); the gift of impressionable surfaces. A monk sits, waiting. Anyone or any space so available is a woman, regardless of the scientific gender—though this science is slippery—of the one who is imprinted.

6. “To sense is to contract something from a flow” (Cox). Who knows contractions; who is familiar with monthly flows.

7. Or, laughter bursts out of the symposium audience when a slide is shown of Claude Wampler who is knitting a dress from the dress she is wearing and at this point in her performance, her source dress has unraveled to show her bare bottom and this is projected into the auditorium (Migone). As example of “the DJ’s mix, the continuous, the loop, and non-teleological” and a way of “keeping silences” (Migone). Alfonso Lingis: “Anything unadapted or unworkable produces laughter.” Into the symposium the female body has arrived. “Adrift in a moment that no longer makes sense—no longer has to make sense—we feel giddy freedom” (Lingis). Laughter as sound result as contraction in the possibly unworkable and reticent discursive flow.

8. “Sound art is a symptom of music” (Cox [was this his own supposition, or one he was interrogating?—it was a hard philosophical discourse to follow at times]). As “woman” is symptom of “man.” The “slave” as symptom of “human.” “Other” as symptom of “Citizen.” Sound art recovering our senses from enlightenment dulling.

9. “Sound is unending change—is necessarily queer” (Evans). Her cycles won’t stop until menopause when her ovaries produce hormones toward pleasure: the erotics of non-productive desire: queer. What would be a non-reproductive sound?

10. Sound art’s “jouissance” evades representation (Kim-Cohen). Enter: Écriture Féminine. Now, in 2011, we don’t have to believe that there is “a woman’s writing” or that “sound art is a woman” but we may say it is gendered, feminized, especially if this jouissance is not necessarily phallocentric (achievement oriented) in its intensities or particularly concerned with lack but rather repetitive, additive frameworks, the “and, and, and” of rock and roll intensity (Kim Cohen). We all stare at the slide of Iggy Pop’s nearly feminine body: skinny, exposed, a martyr for the show of it.

11. The Max Neuhaus sound installation in Times Square becomes a storage area, and so sound reminds us that “territory is a process” (Stjerna). Sound art as particularly pedagogical: teaching us as much about the city around it as sound and art itself.

12. “Attention to the sonic field is attention to all matter generally” (Perez). Possible parallel: the “from margins to center” methodology of the Theories of Feminism course I took in 1989 with Minnie-Bruce Pratt. Locate the most marginal and you locate certain hidden truths about everything on the page.

13. Sound art students desire an accompanying image, installation, maybe even something to sell, but this visibility may render the sound art inaudible (Voegelin). What is an artist to do? Woman, a between person. Sound art, at the moment, as between, but becoming and insisting on the audible—not necessarily attached to the visual arts—could “complexify the music scene” (Voegelin). She walks into the lunchroom again.

14. Some arts and archives become “gifts” (Grubbs quoting Goldsmith of ubu web) which may be like feminized professions that carry high honors but low pay: teaching, for example. The pin on this badge of honor pricks her skin annoyingly but as a soldier of the avant-garde, the sound artist is encouraged to volunteer and buck up. See: Robin D. G. Kelley on Monk, who insisted on innovation but never wanted to, couldn’t afford to give it away for free.

15. Take “thinking sonically as a methodology” (Perez) and add “thinking gender as methodology” and find what is feminized in the language of sound art. You will be studying power, resistance, a frame that slips. “Sound undoes fixed relations of power” (Perez).

Then, to recognize that “power, in short, is force directed to securing a future in the face of its inherent openness” (Grosz), is to ask:

What future do sound artists want to secure and would it be possible to preserve an openness?

Study sound art and you will be studying potential, but not necessarily progress.

Sound art, a perhaps willful turn from “progression” or “secured future”: a turn from lullaby to composition, baby talk to poetry, infant to adult, notebook to book. Against the sophisticated, focused, legible, scored, IV-V-I chord progression.

16. Because “sound art collapses” the mind/body split and the passive/active split (Korrick). A feminine sexuality is sex all over. See Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One.

17. Because sound art “forces us to be self-reflexive about seeing” (Korrick) as a woman or person of color or person who codes queer sees oneself being seen by others on certain streets.

18. Because Echo is rejected by Narcissus (Gee). What will she find in the woods where she is banished? She has left the discursive frame but she is not completely gone.

19. Because to conceptualize sound art is to enter “a philosophical space that is always moving—this is like sound itself” (Korrick). To construct race, to construct gender, to construct “the other”—because these subjects are always on the move and won’t stay put—requires categories. The archive will always structure the enemy (Feldman), asking: Who are we up against?

Antidote for the anxiety of motion, refugee status, the anxiety of archive: to cease searching for a landing pad. What would the properties of such a cessation look like? Walk away from the definitional paradigm prone to aesthetic arguments, and the nervous habit of historical timelines. Where do the riches lie?

Two Disclaimers:

First, I am not a sound artist so I am writing about this symposium from what Elizabeth Grosz would define as the position of outsider. To borrow her words: “I don’t want to suggest that the position of the outsider is always or only negative, or necessarily critical, or bound up in envy, a yearning for an inside position. The outside is capable of great positivity and innovation. The outside of one field is the inside of another.” I hope I offer here some positive thing.

I am an experimental poet who sometimes finds shelter under the wing of an English department here and there, but mostly I crave to sit at a table with historians, scientists, policy makers, other artists, anthropologists, librarians, designers, and watch the very terms of any contemporary question or inquiry change.

20. I have tried to "write sound" (Cascella) and I have heard myself say "a poem is not a poem until it is said out loud" which is a version of Robert Pinsky's idea about poetry and breath.

Second, I base these writings on my notebook—things heard—all inaccuracies are my fault: the errors inherent in recordings.

Conclusions:

To trace and meet the feminized language of the discourse of sound art would be a process of slow touch: curiosity, no revolutions, no shame, few manifestos, and the word “community” would be banished from the lexicon to avoid any traumatic flashbacks.

A tracing—think delicate paper, the attention of a pencil, or of a fingertip—a certain quality of paying attention. Not to re-form the discourse, but to see how, in its feminized state, sound art may be beautifully susceptible to all the generative moves borne of “other than.” “Making room for the other part of myself who is the other, who can only exist, of course, if I am there to receive” (Cixous).

How sound art may make the most of the evolutionary potential of its at least slightly “degenerate” status—not quite white and certainly not pure—surfaces which risk “sterilization” campaigns—the threat to cleanse, discipline, make straight, to put something to use in service of defining “normal” (Painter).

How a symposium toward sound art theories might even rough up the surfaces further: Can sound art teach us how to speak from the whole body Cixous is referring to?

Alliances may develop, as the one who traces eventually wants to look for another body of knowledge with this same self-awareness: outsider-not-victim.

What, from hip-hop, might sound art learn? See: Tricia Rose’s Black Noise. Note the fact that there is a college, part of a public university system, in Harlem, whose faculty still ask, “but is it music?” and they are not only referring to John Cage but also to hip-hop. How does this happen and what are the potentials in this dismissal, this doubt, these property lines? Sound art: meet your friends if you haven’t already.

What are the limits to an art historical discourse? See many examples from literary studies, including Lorenzo Thomas’ idea of Afrocentric modernism. The “make it new” has been, for many, footnoted by the absolute need to “look to the old.” See also Toni Morrison on how Africa civilized Greece and how “to know” lineages is to trust your intuition and never banish memory.

What is very old about sound art? The sonic space of the cathedral? Canyon? The chant? A healer who murmurs? The mantra that, in vibration, encompasses everything? See Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred.

21. Speaking in tongues, internal voices, soundtrack of a contemporary danse macabre (Weiss). Lunacy, hysteria. The womb as first sonic space; death as nonsense (Weiss).

List every instance of intentional soundings that precede “modernism” or western art music. Look over the wall of each border as it pops up.

Who else has fallen off the trail called “mastery” either willfully or by birth and might be a companion?

How does the hybrid, the mongrel crash against the logic of aesthetic argument and make a very interesting future possible?

Source Lectures

Cascella, Daniela. "Something missing: notes on Writing Sound as Landscape."

Cox, Christoph. “Hearing-Things: Sound Art, Phonography, and Materialism.”

Evans, T. Brandon. “Sympathetic Resonances: Towards an Affective Model of Listenership.”

Eng, Michael. “From an Aesthetics of the Real to the Reality of the Aesthetic: Rancière, Sick, and the Politics of Sound Art.”

Gee, Erin. “Repetition as Radical Referral: Echo and Narcissus in the Digital Environment.”

Grubbs, David. “ ‘Remove the Records from Texas’: Parsing Online Archives.”

Kim-Cohen, Seth. “Burden Bangs Joy: Rock and Roll Aesthetics vs. Sound Art.”

Korrick, Leslie. “Sound Art Transcendent.”

Migone, Christof. “Taciturntablism: techniques of hairline fractures and tiny displacements.”

Perez, David Michael. “Vibrational Futures: The sonic field beyond perception, sound, and art.”

Stjerna, Åsa Helena. “Aspects on duration: the temporary and the permanent as ontological constructs in site-specific sound art.”

Voegelin, Salomé. “Sonic Possible Worlds.”

Weiss, Allen S. “Sonic Danse Macabre.”

Other Sources

Cixous, Hélène and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing. Eric Prenowitz, Trans.

Feldman, Allen. “The Structuring Enemy and Archival War.” The New School for Social Research, New York. 5 March 2010. Lecture.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space.

Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class.

---. Theolonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

Lingis, Alfonso. Body Transformations: Evolutions and Atavisms in Culture.

Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, Eds.

Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Muisc and Black Culture in Contemporary America.

Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.

Technicians of the Sacred. Rothenberg, Jerome, Ed.

Thomas, Lorenzo. Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

Buzzeo, Seldess, du Bouchet: Pages Revising Horizons

I wanted to say something about Melissa Buzzeo’s writing but somehow I had to hear Jesse Seldess read on October 29, 2011 in Chicago in order to do so.

Then, looking for a way to write about these two books—Face by Buzzeo and Left Having by Seldess—I searched for another book to find a tether or to find a third thing so as not to compare. Or to access a reading moment when I felt particularly receptive, felt as if I was learning. Buzzeo and Seldess are asking this of me.

So I went to my shelves and found what I found in the late 90s, before I imagined any of the books I have written: a book published by Sun & Moon Press. (I used to comb the shelves at St. Mark’s Bookstore for their insignia and buy anything I found.) Where Heat Looms by Andre du Bouchet and translated by David Mus.

“We started out looking, beyond the book in our hands, for beginnings. And we arrive, astonishingly, at the book in our hands: white pages lit by sunlight spread open awaiting our gaze; prosodic feet traveling their route across it, aligned with a known road or not; receptive space going on about its business at white heat; dark print starting from the white, generated by it, curling around it letter by letter; the depth of air, light-filled, carrying the page to our eyes, into them and beyond.”

“The arts of language like the others, when practiced in probity, do not offer either a counter-world or a counterfeit image of world; but speaking directly for forces which show up elsewhere otherwise, they lead us there.”

(from the essay by David Mus)

This second quote I typed up, printed out, and hung on my office wall behind my IBM computer when I worked full time as a Higher Education Officer for the City University of New York. Back when I could say I knew nothing about experimental poetry except for a pulse in my body that resisted narrative, my office. I was dreaming of writing into an unknown space, so I turned my IBM computer monitor around so that the back with all its cables faced the doorway. I secretly filled each crack in the work day with my desire: do you remember the Dalkey Archive interviews on line? Or Duration Press and its virtual gatherings? Or the Teachers and Writers Collaborative interviews with experimental poets? There was a window that looked down to Hudson Street behind me and this screen in front of me. I mapped everything I could.

“What lapses here answering for breath I lack begins

again to fall like a fall of snow on paper. Night

seeming over deepens. I write as far as you can go

from self.”

(du Bouchet’s “In Midair”)

“Until I can describe something to you, until I can

develop some dimension to this space, what I am writing

will lack color.

I am writing this in black and

I get the feeling that

had it been colder

I would have seen the silent aspect

come across to me

the silent aspect come

across to me.”

(from Seldess’ “The Silent Aspect”)

“I unname you as, you are.

I find you in water and I feed you water. I

unanswer what is left.

Disconnected disconcerted. We are missing

direction. There is no place to go between our

letters.

There is the woman with the pomegranate, arms

outstretched, body. Still. There is a rising steam

and upswept circulation. This is my effort to talk

to you. My effort outstretched. My effort miming,

empty.

From here to there this letter.”

(from Buzzeo’s “I Unname You”)

I now write a record of a fallow state—pulled open as if content-less, I find myself in the gaps I have just transcribed. In the space of the page looming until you get to the first line of du Bouchet’s poem—he has written me into midair by not starting until you get to the bottom. I am throwing into question the sense of writing purpose I had—because what if at the moment my mother died, everything about writing changed? Can a life pivot this way?

“If you wait, a gift will come.” Who said that? I don’t know. Or this is the sentence I felt this week, listening to and then reading Seldess, re-reading Buzzeo, re-reading du Bouchet.

Memory of her face muscles going completely relaxed. There were three geese flying east after that moment. Now I am at zero and await the new. We wanted her to relax. She was always turning toward the window.

A turn toward book work—“you will tire of the press of book work”—a prophetess once wrote this but hers is no longer my religion.

Idea: make a blank book and write an essay toward its blankness. “Dear Blank Book:” Fold this essay into quarters and nestle it at the bottom. This book is covered in fur, as I picture it, and its pages would be bright green. Influence: Ann Hamilton. Currently: I am not involved in a book project. All files have been filled, forwarded, and archived.

Craving: a stack of small papers held down by one palm-sized stone. Stones: companions for the stacks. About ten stones, ten stacks. Grey stones with white veins. This summer, in Brooklyn where I used to live, a good friend gave me a stone like this.

Guidebooks: enter the works of Melissa Buzzeo and Jesse Seldess, writing companions as I go down the road. Enter the idea of a portable horizon, a gathering of slips of blue paper, in slightly different shades, kept in an envelope to be pulled out and arranged whenever needed. This portable horizon can be mailed.

A page revises a horizon, over and over, working down. First: the sentence, made of units like blue lining up against more blue, working across. Walking next to a lake that is more like an ocean. Then back in my room one kilometer from this lake, I transcribe this memory of the lake in my notebook and notice small shifts in syntax and word choice, going closer to the bottom. Meaning as accrual, as revision. An invitation if you wait.

Turning to Melissa Buzzeo’s book sitting next to my notebook, I meet the body and this body is a woman. A body as the writing: tense, then release—an idea to do something or say something or make something, then abandoned—in the months since, I map this rhythm of approach and retreat—

“Today running strong

risk the new day

now plunging into its

cold, white current

hard on

the engine wheeling

out loud

like a knife shifted by air a hair’s-breadth

mountains barely lifting clear of ground

if the road wear and break

shift your weight

the roadway is surfaced with snowfall, today.”

(du Bouchet’s “Over the Mountains”)

“If I left the ending for you

Until the others present can find it

The sun will already have gone down

At a slow pace refraining the ending

Starting off but not coming to an end

Beginning with a sound but not ending”

(from Seldess’ “Left Having”)

“In all the gathering, the collecting there is also

another kind of collapse. Even as distance is made

irrelevant.

We tried to stay where we began. We tried to point

from where we began. It was impossible.

Near a body of water quite far from the earth he

reaches out: body.

Because we cannot continue. As such. I write you

in space.

As though one could strain through cloth. To say

it evenly.

Remarks at entry: to move from sky and from

where your body is. Beneath sky. To move away

and into reentry. Towards a place that has barely

been. But that is, already. At block.”

(from Buzzeo’s “We Look at Star”)