Jill Magi's Blog

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

2012-01-17T14:15:00.015-06:00

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

2012-01-10T11:08:00.009-06:00

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

2011-12-09T15:44:00.014-06:00

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

2011-11-28T11:37:00.026-06:00

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

2011-11-23T19:24:00.006-06:00

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

2011-11-16T09:38:00.014-06:00

(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. . .

2011-11-09T14:10:00.011-06:00

. . . . 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

2011-11-01T14:14:00.006-05:00

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”)

Shaking Up Documentary Poetry & Documentary Poetics In Light of Film Theory

2011-10-26T09:48:00.002-05:00

In the spirit of friendly, mostly like-mindedness, I would like to shake up conversations about documentary poetry.

In her essay “Documentary Uncertainty” Hito Steyerl asserts that “(p)oststructuralism has taught us how ‘reality,’ ‘truth’ and other basic notions on which possible definitions of documentary rest are at best as solid as the fleeting reflections on a troubled surface of water.” I agree. And so I want to invite documentary poets to meet our work’s fleeting reflections.

Welcoming this watery surface of uncertainty into the conversation about documentary poetry injects the conversation with the energy of important complications. Steyerl continues: “Let me suggest that this uncertainty is not some shameful lack, which has to be hidden, but instead constitutes the core quality of contemporary documentary modes as such.” Given this “core quality,” most practitioners of the documentary mode find themselves falling into two camps—the realists and the constructivists—and both are problematic according to Steyerl. The realists naively believe in “an objectivity that, more often than not, turns out to be extremely subjective” and the constructivists risk “sliding into opportunistic and cynical relativism.”

I want to relinquish the desire to define documentary poetry and relinquish any battle between realist vs. constructivist tendencies in order to meet, eye to eye, the hybrid text and potent future engagements with representation, fact, and the book itself.

How I Arrived at this Desire

Years ago, when I was a bit nearer to my old identity as sociologist-in-training, I had questions about “investigative poetry” and two terms I heard used in mostly experimental poetry circles: documentary poetry and documentary poetics.

In response to these swirling and untethered terms, as I perceived them, I was asking:

If Ed Sanders coined the term “investigative poetry” to encourage poets to think of themselves as journalists working in verse, what would a documentary poetry approach encourage? What does it mean for poetry that “the image” lurks behind the term “documentary”? If I taught documentary poetry, what theory would I teach alongside the poems? I am a poet who uses found text, and I am a visual artist who manipulates historical documents to destabilize the authority of the book and the document. How useful is it for me to call my work documentary? Were there generative frameworks accompanying this nomenclature?

At the time of these questions, I was a writer-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council sharing studio space with visual artists. In conversations with Sara Jordenö and Nanna Dubois Buhl and others about art that engages history, fact, and subjectivity, the term “documentary” came up more than once. I learned that Hito Steyerl identifies the rise of “documentarism in the field of art” alongside developments in cultural studies in the 1990s. As a former student of the social sciences, this made sense to me. She writes of the heightened “awareness of power relations within not only documentary articulations, but all forms of representation” resulting in the transformation of narrative modes within art. I also came across Bill Nichols’ Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Indiana University Press), a text often referred to in documentary film classes and writings. And so I found a foothold into some theory that was generative; Nichols’ writings in particular impacted my poetics and the books I have written since then.

Now, about five years later, it is my impression that few of the recorded conversations about documentary poetry have touched on some of the beautiful complexities at hand in film theory and the visual arts. Hence, this two-part blog entry.

Two Proposals

I want to propose two things for poets who find themselves in or around the term “documentary”:

1. documentary is a discourse and any documentary art is best understood this way instead of trying to establish fixed characteristics, compositional tactics, and results;

2. poets might contribute to this discourse most effectively by examining how reading poetry differs from other kinds of reading and also differs from viewing images.

Under the heading “Defining Documentary,” Nichols writes,

Documentary as a concept or practice occupies no fixed territory. It mobilizes no finite inventory of techniques, addresses to no set number of issues, and adopts no completely known taxonomy of forms, styles, or modes.

This echoes Steyerl’s ideas. Nichols goes on to state,

Of greater importance than the ontological finality of a definition—how well it captures the “thingness” of the documentary—is the purpose to which a definition is put and the facility with which it locates and addresses important questions, those that remain unsettled from the past and those posed by the present.

Because the word “discourse” implies an investigation of how we construct meaning, we have the exciting possibility to examine, as Nichols suggests, the purpose behind the drive to define documentary poetry.

I believe that the quest to define documentary poetry may be subterfuge for these anxious and problematic questions: “Do poems matter and if they do, do some matter more than others, and if that’s true, how do I make the poem that matters most?”

These anxieties, as I have experienced and witnessed them, attempt to compare the art of poetry not only against other arts, but also against other human activities, such as activism or politics or education. Examining the “false problem” of these questions invites us poets to actually give up those anxieties. (See Deleuze in Bergsonism: “. . . conceiving everything in terms of more and less, seeing nothing but differences in degree or differences in intensity where, more profoundly, there are differences in kind is perhaps the most general error of thought, the error common to science and metaphysics.”) So after shedding false comparisons and definitional anxieties, admitting that a documentary poem is a kind of poem that differs in its discursive frameworks from other poems, what new questions are “unsettled from the past”? I want to dig around and see. I have some hopes for the future of documentary poetry and will discuss these hopes in what follows.

A Sampling of Current Conversations on Documentary Poetry

First, here are some examples of statements on documentary poetry that I think are rife with interesting and rich subtexts:

In a September 2011 Coldfront interview with Mark Nowak entitled “Documentary Poetics: Sort of Uncharacterizable,” interviewer Seth Graves begins by stating, “I want to talk about documentary poetics—and really to try and come up with even a definition for it.” Rather than help build a definition, perhaps sensing the lack of energy in this task, and wary of drawing exclusive boundaries, Nowak comments that he believes documentary is a “modality within contemporary poetry rather than a new kind of genre.” He then relates his experience of an AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Conference panel on “research poetics” where the conversation become quickly quite flat, everyone agreeing that all poets conduct research, and so Nowak admits: what is really at question or worth discussing? He later goes on to comment that he finds solidarity with many documentary filmmakers because of the content they work with, but he does not discuss the representational issues inherent in film, or how his own compositional tactics might find an echo in some nonfiction film tactics.

Yet Nowak’s honorable impulse to shy away from the term may actually create an inadvertent eclipse: eclipsing how poets might learn from documentary film’s considerations, or how poets might even contribute to documentary discourses in film and art. In an earlier post for Harriet, the blog of the Poetry Foundation, Nowak writes, “ . . .documentary poetics, though present in poetry, is currently more widely and, in my view, fully leveraged in visual culture (film, photography) than the language arts (which has a lot to learn from its praxis in other fields).” This post, which also links to Harriet’s “Documentary Poetry and the Language Surge” by Martin Earl surely signals some future work to be done, including, I would argue, collapsing the debate between the tactics of Nowak and Kenneth Goldsmith—a debate that Earl eventually rests on. Perhaps Steyerl would say they are both documentarians of sorts and differ in that one is a “realist” and the other, a “constructivist,” and both employ conceptual tools “which are neither clear nor transparent themselves.”

In a description of a “Documentary Poetics” panel at School of the Visual Arts in the spring of 2011, the authors of the description tap the energy of documentary discourse to a good degree, stating, “Clearly ‘information’ is not a neutral category, especially when we are dealing with problematic or difficult information. If we honor the (at times dubious) claims of documentary as a genre, is it possible for us to ‘lie with statistics’ in an ethical way?” I am sorry I could not attend this panel, so I am not sure where the conversation ended up, but it is interesting to me that while this description captures some of the energy of documentary’s discourse, it does not mention the documentary turn in the arts and the ways that problems of information and representation have been addressed many times—in theory and in artworks themselves. If we look at the body of documentary work, we would see this panel’s initial claim, that “documentary draws its authority from a claim to be nonfiction or to be a recording external reality” has been repeatedly problematized.

One of the first articles that comes up for a web-based “documentary poetry” search is the Poetry Foundation article “From Reznikoff to Public Enemy: The poet as journalist, historian, agitator” by Philip Metres. Metres locates the possible origins of documentary poetry in modernism: “Drawing from the ballad tradition and from Modernist poets’ experiments with collage, these poets frequently employed documentary materials to give voice to stories of people and movements that the mass media tend to ignore or misrepresent.” He continues, “documentary poems constantly court their own collapse, testing a poem’s tensile boundaries in the face of what Wallace Stevens called ‘the pressure of reality.’” I agree, but it may be useful to point out that all documentary forms, in light of poststructuralism, “court their own collapse.” It might be interesting to explore how a poem collapses or shows evidence of collapse in ways that differ from documentary film or visual art.

Metres goes on to create a list of books and titles that might count as “documentary poetry.” I found this listing activity to be quite common in the existing discourse. Several other lists of this kind exist, as well as syllabi, which are lists usually at the service of one kind of definition over another. And because lists by their very nature are definition oriented, the existence of so many of them signals the discursive rut in which I think we might be stuck.

To get out of the definition rut and on to more interesting questions, I believe we poets must explicitly admit this:

The ethical challenge of marrying fact and art has been long debated and disputed, and gets attempted again and again by a whole community of documentarians and artists who grow in ranks every year. As a discourse, documentary doesn’t answer the question “what is a documentary?” but rather documentary becomes a discursive site for ethical and representational considerations. Even with mutable defining characteristics, documentary poems also constitute a site of discourse.

Questions for Poets Because of Poetry

Therefore, interesting questions for poets would be: What would poetry have to offer that is new to documentary? What unique discursive offerings can poets provide because the work is not a film, video, or installation with their attendant modes of display: the museum, the gallery, the theater, the wall?

In the writing that follows, I present Nichols’ ideas of documentary as a discourse with a certain set of concerns and attributes in order to uncover generative implications for poetry.

First, Nichols argues that documentary is a community of practitioners with “an institutional formation.” There is an Academy Award for documentary film and filmmakers. Documentary filmmakers are “in dialogue with that [documentary] tradition and with their cohorts.”

I interpret various attempts at defining “documentary poetry”—articles, interviews, panels, courses and syllabi, lists, poets’ statements, book blurbs and reviews, conference presentations, Nowak’s mention of a forthcoming anthology from Wesleyan—as indicative, at least in part, of a desire for a cohort. Yet perhaps the community of practitioners of documentary poetry is focused, to a fault, on justifying the need for a cohort. In so doing, they have become stuck on the most basic, yet least supportive, least interesting quest: a definition and a defense.

What if practitioners of documentary poetry insisted that theirs is no longer an innovation or intervention into the world of poetry, but is an accepted and acceptable practice that has a relationship to the larger community of documentary practitioners? Perhaps more interesting and complex questions about ethics and practices and genre would replace the “what is it?” question.

Nichols suggests that as an “institutional practice,” documentary film enjoys material support in the form of festivals, conferences, companies, entire departments within schools, as well as news networks. He points out that even with institutional support, documentary film is far from being policed to a detrimental degree.

Is there an equivalent institutional practice in poetry? What if we who taught were to admit that our courses on “documentary poetry” are part of an institutional conversation about truth, text, and representation? Would this be an admonition of our potential demise, or would admitting institutional support foster perhaps more rigorous conversation about documentary poetry?

Nichols also suggests that documentaries constitute “a corpus of texts.” Considering the documentary film as a text means considering how a film “take(s) shape around an informing logic.” Nichols suggests that documentary logic lies within the realm of problem solving: documentary films begin with a problem, it presents a case, and even, at times, offers a solution.

Can a comparison be made to the documentary poem? If so, would this comparison free documentary poets up to admit that theirs is a problem-based or interventionist text? And if so, then perhaps the issue of how to narrate the problem and represent its agents and/or its victims (a particularly challenging and problematic task) is then open for analysis. Perhaps the idea of poetry’s potential to propose solutions—which may seem radical or, to those wary of propaganda, dangerous—is an idea that can be fleshed out in lively discourse.

Then, documentary film exists, suggests Nichols, because there exists “a constituency of viewers.”

Do we agree, as poets—even as documentary poets—that we have readers? I sometimes sense a subtext, if not a voiced proclamation, that we are “only” reading each other. I question this and think there is a constituency of readers of poetry, and of what could be called documentary poetry as well. If, after all, documentary film is a form that is rising in popularity, why wouldn’t a person be interested in a documentary poem? An example of wider-than-we-realize readership and popular media’s mention of documentary and poetry in the same breath: C. D. Wright’s One With Others receives the National Book Award in 2010, and The New Yorker review states: “An affecting element of this book is the way its elegiac impulses accord with, even as they chafe against, the documentary impulses.” In fact, the term “documentary” and “documentary convention” is referred to more than once in this review.

Recognizing that a constituency of readers exists may lead us away from the impossible-to-answer who is reading? question and toward the more interesting how does reading happen? How do readers of documentary poetry make inferences? Do readers expect the work to function as poetry in general, or do they expect to encounter it as they would a documentary film? What is this particular experience of reading like?

Finally, somewhat related to the above, and most importantly for me, is this:

Nichols suggests that documentary film is a “discourse of sobriety,” a non-fictional system, and that as such, the viewer comes to expect a history lesson, a life lesson, a window into a possibly “unknown” but relevant world which they will end up knowing at the end of their viewing experience. “Documentary convention spawns an epistephilia. It posits an organizing agency that possesses information and knowledge, a text that conveys it, and a subject who will gain it,” writes Nichols.

Perhaps this is where poetry can make a tremendous contribution to the discourse of documentary!

Just as the poet, and subsequently the reader, involve themselves in a subject matter which begins with facts, or contains the trace element of fact, so do poetry’s textual disturbances present themselves: white space, line breaks, alternative syntax, lyrical soundings, point of view confusion, narration slippage, font anomolies. But: a reader can re-read. What do we make of this choice presented in the form of a physical book? Mastery is alternately suspended and achieved because poetry and the book ask for a unique relationship to fact, to text. Even if confusion regarding content or form presents itself, a reader believes this might be a temporary state. This idea excites me: readers of poetry are practiced, perhaps, in the sometimes slow, sometimes fast shifts between confusion and understanding; poetry is an exercise in faith in both states. What does this have to do with representations of reality? I think there is something powerful there in the experience of self-directed epiphany. But I am not sure—so I’ll ask another question: Because poetry alters time and is private, and the book is not public and a “time-based” media like film, video, or images placed on a gallery wall, how might the reception of fact and history be different for the reader of documentary poetry?

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others comes to mind, particularly her culminating claim that historical fiction and the inclusion of fiction in photography—she discusses a staged photograph by Jeff Wall—are forms that hold great potential for the development of empathy. Sontag posits that the slowness of reading is powerful. Deciphering someone’s imaginative creation does not allow us to “shorthand” the looking with something we think we’ve already seen. The form requires the reader to insert much-needed time into the act of “witness,” fostering what she argues is a truer understanding of the subject matter. Perhaps documentary poetry also asks for this slowness, this co-imaginative creation.

Side question for further research: is acoustic ecology and sound art that features the field recording documentary poetry’s sibling practice? Because the listener encounters a mediated, perhaps disembodied (or is “relocated” a more accurate term?) experience of sound, what is their experience of knowing? What actually is the subject at hand when listeners are intentionally opening their ears—organs of perception that founding acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer points out are never closed—to something “other”? How are facts transmitted through audio recordings?

Back to documentary and knowledge:

Steyerl warns that documentary art, even with its intentions to critique structures of power and even its intentions toward a greater good “reek(s) of authority, certification, expertise” and that the white cube in which this art is often displayed, with its “clinical constellation of gazes” replicates the problems of power in conventional documentary. Nichols also warns that documentary knowledge “becomes a source of pleasure that is far from innocent.”

So perhaps the documentary poem at least borders on the “post-representational,” a facet of affect more so than image, and similar to the unfocussed images of contemporary war displayed by CNN. Is documentary poetry what Steyerl would call “abstract documentarism” where “the closer to reality we get, the less intelligible it becomes”?

Perhaps a documentary poem provides this:

how to feel to speak the language

of the truth of the discomfort

of knowing and the texture

and pleasure of not knowing;

of oscillating

between concept and mystery

the legible and the blur

the motion between propels

a reader toward a future

coming in and out of focus—

Stay Tuned . . .

. . . .for my next blog post: on Nichols’ modes of documentary (expository, observational, interactive, reflexive [with many reflexive sub-modes]) and the possibility that these modes inspire new reading frameworks for documentary poetry, as well as inspire the documentary poet to make new kinds of works. If each mode has its own ethical blind spots, even as some modes attempt to address existing problems of representation, what can we poets learn from these formal tactics employed by documentary film?

Hofer and Sonnevi, then Cixous: "Who is your other?"

2011-10-18T11:50:00.000-05:00

There were two books I did not pack when I moved to Chicago from New York this summer. I kept them out on the floor when my desk was packed away, then in a tote bag, then on a hotel nightstand, within reach, driving west, until I arrived: Jen Hofer’s one (Palm Press) and Göran Sonnevi’s Mozart’s Third Brain (translated by Rika Lesser; Yale University Press). Two books impossible for me to say “I am finished reading them.” These books rest together in the same fold—writing this, I want to see how I have braided these two long poems together.

One poet, younger, a friend, from L.A. and almost local: Jen Hofer, a person who is my co-worker, who I have taken long walks with; we have fiercely agreed, sometimes disagreed, and we have sat and stitched together in Brooklyn. The second poet, Swedish, whose A Child is Not a Knife I took and studied as a handbook of poetics after hearing his difficult stutter in English, reading. We may never meet, but he often writes looking east, across the Baltic toward my father’s birth country and possibly he says something I wish my father could.

Hofer, calling out her country’s use of words as weapons and the so-called evidence to justify mechanical terror, to fuel a state’s overly-developed mechanisms of death. What to do about this? Sonnevi, from a seemingly mild socialist locale, questions his country’s alleged neutrality. He digs under a constructed innocence, turning what seem to be lovely rocks over and over again. Yet will his awareness, this Swedish “coming clean,” conquer evil? Each poet asks.

Here, in this field of writing, I mark off an experiment: Take a passage from each (technology alert: I am unable to place the caesura in Sonnevi's verse) . . .

there is no before or there is only before

not to ask unaccompanied as yet unsung

we do not know what we do not know

we eclipse recognition or turn our faces

whether wanting (or wanting) or hammered

into a shape as if to say a curt “thank you, ma’am”

as we retreat, salute, harness the cliff edge

softly jagged not solid melodically expressed

(Hofer)

Time has its instrumentarium But we

pass through it As if we passed

through all the interstices among notes

Things look at us, quietly vibrating

All things tremble, in fear or in joy;

or in a cry of pain, its penetrating sound

Your rose looks at me now; the one you gave me

Never will it vanish in the rushing of time—

How can I widen the interplay of strata, surfaces, networks,

spaces

(Sonnevi)

how much pause fragment fracture scripture shrapnel

scatter surgery flint spread shatter scrap can our conversation

sustain? how much fact to interrupt our dream? how much

de facto information, post facto notification, deployment detonated

prior to permits or ploys to posit purpose? how much sleuthing slinking

skulking scattershot buckshot shotgun shot before we pause to reload or reconsider?

(Hofer)

And if the song becomes atrocious? It has the right to be

No part of what is human can be censored

I gaze into petrifaction’s eyes Is this also

a part of me? Am I a part of atrocity?

Yes! Without a doubt! There’s no wax I can plug

my ears with The ropes of the winds bind me, even if

with a wind of mirrors Continual Whirling shards

[ . . .]

Beauty Repulsion I must not deny any feelings

I have a right to my disbelief I pledge allegiance to the contaminated

world, such as it is, in its luminous right . . .

What sort of imaginary community do I seek? Which one

is active, est agens, within me? I project the collective Sade!

The collective Mozart! As if there were no difference!

Summed up in the Gödel-face, dark Beneath the real Gödel’s

shy gray shadow In which group do I seek protection? Whom am I

excluding? Which flame of self-forgiveness consumes me?

Societies float gently, like ashes An architecture of smoke

(Sonnevi)

. . . . and stay in the between.

Between indictment, outward, and the enemy inside. Between the newspaper and the diary. Between an avalanche of words, where sounds lead to the next word beyond logic, beyond thought, so the totality is necessarily crushing and the only way out is to continue reading until the end, and unadorned sentences that do not tumble but plot a course into terror’s heart: the poet’s own. Both ask: can a poem be an essay? Yes. Between the beauty of art and pressing injustice. Between disgust at a home country who has declared war, and a voice from a country aloof with rightness, aloof with an idea of a peaceful Europe, amputating places like Bosnia into a “them” in order to create an innocent “I.” Between a rant—fast, pulsing, accumulating speed—and the music that maps slowly as it reveals. Between being in your late thirties and being of an age when your friends begin to die and death feels near. Between a shout-out record of military violence and the recognition of violence inside all borders, even those places without armies. Between lists of atomic test sites, naming them, voicing them, risking what could be heard as a beautiful music in the listing, and the folds of one person’s brain as it encounters the other, incorporates this into a third body who is not innocent, a creature who also risks being called “beautiful.” Between a document against wars and another document enfolding wars within.

Reading, I feel this Between in both books. A dizzying pendulum. Question: How not to cave into the desire to choose one territory over another? Answer: Re-read, which may be called “writing.” Asking:

“Who is your other?”

At a faculty meeting during the first week of fall we were asked to answer this question. A goal was declared on newsprint at the start, posted in the front of the room: “Multicultural Competency.” A book was passed around the room, the title was something like this: 40 Offensive Things Well-meaning People Say.

I retreated into poetry, aware that “How competent are you?” is a question perched above people, patrolling. Patrolling language, patrolling thought in order not to hurt, but ironically fostering fear. Resisting this patrol, this disciplining, I sat upright, trying to open my shoulders, my heart to this fear of being hurt now circulating around the room, everyone touching the book, some looking inside. Wondering if they were the subject or object of the book, wondering if they were innocent or guilty, some wondering if they could slip between both positions: the terror of that totality. I shuddered with this idea of myself, slipping, touching the cover, then opening to the following infraction, “you speak the language so well” and recognizing my father’s suppressed mother tongue, a tongue I have yearned for, a tongue I have been ashamed of. My immigrant grandfather’s body odor. My father’s stutter: his search for the right word while we would make fun of him. His sharp critiques of the mechanics of my writings, when I really just wanted him to read me. Mastery equaled citizenship and the daughter must enter. At school they asked me, “What kind of name is that?” and “Are you Russian?” But this pain is no one person’s fault, it is even beautiful, a source of poetry, and in an instant I knew that nothing so generative could hinge on one sentence from a near stranger. And there were jokes, too: he said, “don’t make fun of the poor refugee” as he paraded around our kitchen in a shirt with holes, my mother shaking her head and we laughed. Aware of rivers running deeper than prescriptive warnings, re-framings, and translations (if they/you say this, it actually means that; better not say that), I passed the book to my left, wondering how others sitting in the circle experience the regenerative beauty that cannot be traced to one wound.

I also wondered: are we addicted to our roles: the innocent one or the guilty one? The one who falters? The one who succeeds? The one who is “above it all” and the one who is “down in the trenches”? The one who accuses, the one who confesses? Aware of the social scientist’s and activist’s beautiful desire for reform and prevention, I know that art can point out our addictions to paradigms—asking “who are you?”—without judging.

Hofer and Sonnevi: indictment and acceptance. Violence from without, violence from within. Hofer takes newspaper quotes and ingests them into her lexicon, making music. Sonnevi takes Europe’s notions of unity, says “no,” yet still asks, “what is the meaning of my ‘no’?”

So much at stake—such vulnerability—such loneliness as they ask, “where is community?” Both poets, asking, are we willing to stay in the space between “sameness” and “difference” in order to meet “the other” and commune without the pressure of ideological conversion?

My other: falling in love with an idea of my own competency and then getting knocked off that pedestal. To know and to not know. My other: having been hurt and I hurt: recipient and perpetrator. Even if I do not want to hurt anyone, I hope to never be competent. And so I chase down the beloved, the beloved named “justice” or “lover” or “the self who writes.” My enemy: are you also my beloved? Poetry—a poetry that hunts down the sentence—is the only container I know that will hold up. Other: I hold her, penned in, for one day. I master her. She coaxes me in closer. Pure desire, pure repulsion. I meet myself. Then she slips out. Just when I think peace reigns, violence enters. Cycles of tension and release. Hearty laughter when you are supposed to sob. This is my other. I am fenced in and I hold the key. Soldier and pacifist. Beauty still encircles everything, bow pulled back ready to take aim: this space of expectation and pause, marking: this is art.

On the day before these meetings, at the end of a year of struggle, of hauntings, of grace, a year of carrying around Hofer and Sonnevi’s books, I wandered the college’s library shelves and found Hélène Cixous’ Coming to Writing (translated by Cornell, Jenson, Liddle, Sellers; Harvard University Press). Cixous begins,

In the beginning, I adored. What I adored was human. Not persons; not totalities, not defined and named beings. But signs. Flashes of being that glanced off me, kindling me. Lightning-like bursts that came to me: Look! I blazed up. And the sign withdrew. Vanished. While I burned on and consumed myself wholly. What had reached me, so powerfully cast from a human body, was Beauty: there was a face, with all the mysteries inscribed and preserved on it; I was before it, I sensed that there was a beyond, to which I did not have access, an unlimited place. The look incited me and also forbade me to enter; I was outside, in a state of animal watchfulness. A desire was seeking its home. I was that desire. I was the question. The question with this strange destiny: to seek, to pursue the answers that will appease it, that will annul it. What prompts it, animates it, makes it want to be asked, is the feeling that the other is there, so close, exists, so far away; the feeling that somewhere, in some part of the world, once it is through the door, there is the face that promises, the answer for which one continues to move onward, because of which one can never rest, for the love of which one holds back from renouncing, from giving in—to death. Yet what misfortune if the question should happen to meet its answer! Its end!

So I carried this book with me throughout the week and gradually the image of the face, of love and desire at eye level (not above judging, and not below kneeling in mea culpa), came into clarity, insisting on saying, “I meet you.” I carried her book like a talisman, and trying to teach, I re-read and re-wrote this between—between Hofer, Sonnevi, my self, the other who desires to falter, to speak, the beloved.

On Art, Imminence, Fonts/Letters, Survival, Compassion: Jitish Kallat and Homi Bhabha

2011-09-09T15:31:00.000-05:00

jottings after “Art and Imminence,” a lecture by Homi Bhabha, Art Institue/School of Art Institute of Chicago, September 8, 2011—written on September 9, after Johannah Rodgers, my good friend in Brooklyn, asked me, during our phone conversation, about what I took from last night:

Here are some of the most interesting, to me, things that Bhabha said—I will quote and paraphrase and interpret a little:

Art is imminent—

it is "the about to happen." Constant shifts. From one foundation to another: this shifting is possible, is art. Discovery of another foundation brings new possibilities, allowing for the disavowal of previous meanings.

“New interpretations are not an erasure” of other interpretations—the viewer/reader reconstructs the work as they view/read, not an act of deconstruction. Powerful works of art are powerful not for their "progress"—pedagogical marching toward betterment—but because they provide new foundations for new possibilities based on new interpretations.

“The best readings are revisionary.”

Art is most powerful for its creation of “want, need, desire.” Bhabha quotes Guston: “I paint what I need to see.”

The possibility of coming upon “a global ethics”—(not based on ideas of "rights" and a "nation" that protects) can be found, according to Bhabha, within “the time-lag of meaning”—

moving between one moment and another—as in art—

the importance of staying in this space—this space as productive space (but not necessarily "productive/progressive" as in the liberal political sense of the word).

[This reminds me of reading Gandhi and how he would contradict himself often—so much so that it had to have been on purpose, certainly noticeable to him—so that his writings ((he was trained in law)) show that unity of argument doesn't neceearily suit the modern moment/speaker: just as unity of identity does not have to be the ideal outcome.]

Art's ambiguity—

is not depressing, or “indecisive,” or does not invite a huge mushy “pluralism” of saying, “it means whatever I want it to mean”; rather, art's ambiguity requires slowness, is evidence that creativity (borne of ambiguity and feeding ambiguity) surges on its own time and toward its own ends; art/creativity “does not necessarily save us,” but is a form of “survival.”

Homi Bhabha said “survival” is underrated and misunderstood as a concept—feared, almost. (We are supposed to thrive: as in, a thriving economy.) But survival, he said, can be a very vital concept and signal energy “to endure, day by day,” and signals “courage to act upon the world” without necessarily knowing the outcome.

Bhabha’s talk centered around this installation by Jitish Kallat at the Art Institute of Chicago.

This work re-frames—by marching the sentences up the stairs in LED lettering, lit in the colors of various security alerts of the post-9/11 color-coded world—the work re-frames a speech given by an Swami Vivekananda in the nineteen century, interestingly, on September 11 of that year, in Chicago, on the art institute’s steps.

Closely reading the work, ascending the staircase slowly, we come upon the word “remnant” referring to groups thought of as “other-than-Hindu" in India. Bhabha’s lecture gained all the momentum of a freight train at this point—

Bhabha points out that in light of current political situations in India, one could read this speech as a rationale for Hindu nationalism. And you can: so if your first reading was one of multi-cultural pleasure and satisfaction, of “tolerance” and peace, a historical-yet-timeless moment of coming together—and many want this idea now, nearing the 10th anniversary of 9/11—

upon closer reading, slowly, going up the stairs, you are reading a speech whose logic revolves around the idea that Hinduism has absorbed and may eventually absorb all "remnant” populations into itself (so that's referring to the Jews, Farsi populations [and Bhabha himself is a Farsi-speaking person]). “Remnant” as “left-over,” “substandard,” “weak” and not the ideal citizen in the nation’s gaze: Bhabha explains that this remnant who refuses or can not choose assimilation is the perpetual “other” even as liberalism would smile upon this subject in self-defining welcoming (all are welcome here in our state) or pity (soon you will come to your senses and give up your ways).

This reminds me again of the Gandhi course I took at the New School for Social Research taught by professors Devji and Rao; mid-way through I was bombarded by the truth of my professors claims from the onset: that by looking to India, tremendous light may be shed on the contemporary US situation and global situations—the problematics of "melting pot" rhetoric, class/caste and affirmative action, the perpetual “othering” underbelly of a discourse of liberal tolerance, how democracy rule by its own math can't take care of the minority, ritualized violence vs. terror.

Back to art: in light of these politics and new contexts, shifting:

Bhabha then talked with much passion about the importance in Kallat's work of the attention to each individual letter. (Kallat has installed other speeches by reforming each letter out of bones.)

I was excited by this point—the reverberations stirring in me—now I was taking notes quickly, feeling, “I am a poet” and “I am a person who stitches” so clearly: an intensified ringing purpose now to my listening: my life meshing with Bhabha’s words, and of course he would never know this, and I was a little embarrassed at my private comparison to the accomplished Kallat.

Bhabha said, of Kallat’s work, "reforming the fonts revitalize the contexts"—

this action upon each and every letter of the historical speech points to the purpose of art—re-casting, slowly re-reading, re-membering. “Great works of art are not easy to re-member.”

Images of my embroidery work from this summer came streaming in: my panels of stitched partial phrases from my notebook: displaying, though recast, jottings to try and make sense of my LABOR, a self-made archive of work and money: was, in fact, what I took for self-censoring more accurately re-creation?

“The symbolic recasting of letters"—the power of that smallness—small reverberations (I got several migraines this summer even in my stitching delight), small movements acting on the very component of the sign—the individual letter—

Others I can think of now whose work recasts each letter: Brendan Fernandes, Kamau Brathwaite, Cecilia Vicuña, Ernest Concepcion’s font drawings of Paolo Javier’s poems.

I left the lecture hall cataloging the components of that power of smallness intrinsic to art in its imminence:

joy and desire:

actions of survival and not an invitation to pity or advocacy but rather an invitation to new foundations: energetic and compassionate renewal.

Making the leap to compassion, though I am not sure just how, I will sign off—

Upcoming posts:

Robin D. G. Kelley on Monk and Franya Berkman on Alice Coltrane
Jen Hofer’s one and Göran Sonnevi’s Mozart’s Third Brain
The work of Deborah Meadows; the work of Melissa Buzzeo
Bill Nichols’ documentary frameworks and “documentary poetry”

Kristen Kosmas’ Hello Failure: Notes on Setting, Relationship, and Speaking

2010-08-06T10:27:00.000-05:00

[Hello Failure by Kristen Kosmas, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009.]

The premise of Kosmas’ play—a play that wonderfully flirts with poetry and takes realism to task—is that the wives of submarine captains gather in a support group to provide each other, presumably, with comfort and advice. The haunting failure of a particular marine engineer, Horace Hunley, inventor of early submarines, begins the play—Hunley’s submersible boat “was the first submarine in the history of naval warfare to attack and sink a shop. Unfortunately, shortly after the attack, the Hunley sank, for the fourth time, and everyone on board died . . .” Hence, “Hello Failure.”

Against this backdrop, the following things strike me about the play: the use of banal, liminal, and contested settings—conference rooms, museums, and when it’s a house, the room that is featured is the bathroom; speech is revised as it is spoken—this challenges traditional literary surfaces; comfort and programmatic “self help” structures are fleeting, maybe even failing, but, as Kosmas insists in the culminating production notes: “. . . it is important that the women are friends. They like each other. They are not miserable, crazy, or mean.”

Most settings in this play are liminal spaces. Most of the dialogue takes place in a conference room complete with a large plant, in a museum for submarines, and present also are fluorescent lights and what Kosmas identifies as “room tone.” I love this attention to sounds—something that dramatic writing insists on, so that spaces are very complete, even if staged minimally. Other spaces include a bathroom where one character, Rebecca, does all of her talking—either to her absent husband Jack, and then to Horace Hunley who appears with a movie for them to watch. Rebecca is happy to see him and suggests that they can bring the TV and VCR into the bathroom. Rebecca is agoraphobic, and so the image of her conducting a life within what might be the smallest room in the house—and contemplating submarines, talking to an historical figure who designed them—makes tremendous sense. And all this sense is achieved by placing Rebecca in the bathroom—a wonderful setting choice.

Speaking is an important part of this play—and stating this seems almost redundant: after all, this is dramatic writing. But as Kosmas writes, at the end of play, “While at first glance this script might resemble a traditional play . . .it is not intended to function as a literary drama. It is a text for speaking.” To me, the speech acts are where beautiful moments of failure happen again and again. For as Kosmas instructs, “There are errors or speech and logic in the play. Best not to dwell on them.” A character begins down a road of thought, but her speech falls short: “I’m sorry I—I’m sorry.” A clear statement is made and then instantly revised: “I like to have sex. I think.” Sentences are left incomplete and flow without punctuation: “I am trying with all my might to pull back the curtains Jack or at least.”

These markers of doubt within the speech act abound throughout the play. But the kind of doubt that’s expressed is not of the texture of the French feminist or typical narrative-application-of-semiotics variety—this writing is not like Duras or Sarraute’s narrators languishing over how to tell, struggling self-consciously over how to remember. Rather, the unsure surfaces and voices in Hello Failure come clipped, fast, and in conversation. The characters live in the present, in relationship—not in the web of individual memory reconstituted through writing. Again, I think of Kosmas’ note: “They are not miserable . . .” Yes, the struggle to speak persists—and language might evade or come apart—and though the play is a hello to failure, maybe this is a kind of new feminist text: women are presently working things out, in collaboration, in speech, and not alone.

For my current writing project called LABOR—a project that has moved me from poetry toward fiction—I take the following ideas from Kosmas’ Hello Failure:

First, move characters in and out of settings at will. Even though I don’t think I’m writing a “realistic” text, it always amazes me to see the way a playwright can simply draw the lines of the stage and then drop characters in and out of that space. The lesson is in simultaneity.

Second, when my characters in LABOR speak, they need not be precise. I have noticed that my characters don’t speak that often, actually. Reading Kosmas, I wonder if my hesitation is because I have somewhere come to believe that “dialogue” equals realism, stable voices, clever and fully formed sentences. Kosmas has opened up that door: what does doubt sound like and how often does our speech revise itself as it goes?

Last, on relationships. I love this idea of characters interacting not necessarily out of conflict, but toward comfort. I don’t know why literary works tend to magnify conflict—I suppose it is a very familiar and maybe even “natural” tendency. But I loved reading Kosmas’ characters negotiate, through speaking, big ideas and small ideas as well, with no easily identifiable enemy in sight.

Christa Wolf’s The Quest for Christa T.: Writing the I through the Other

2010-08-03T13:41:00.000-05:00

The Quest for Christa T. is the narrator’s quest to understand another woman who is possibly the narrator’s friend, but more likely is a version of Wolf herself, which makes this novel a complicated narration of self and other.

At this moment in my writing, I am coming from poetry toward fiction. The whole idea of “characters” and their relationship to the self has been an object of my interest, consideration, and joy lately. My current project, entitled LABOR, requires bodies moving around inside institutions—and I need a variation of responses, a range of possibilities. I need bodies to also do things that are impossible for me to imagine doing. So, in comes fiction, but from what I can tell, autobiography still lurks.

Broadly, reading The Quest helped to reinforce the idea that characters are often versions of ourselves. Christa T. is a writer; Christa T. shares Wolf’s first name; Christa struggles explicitly with writing the “I.” All of these are clues to one of the most important aspects of fiction: the possibility that through imagination, we create versions of ourselves and new windows into self-awareness. I can say with absolute certainty that the characters in my book, LABOR, are versions of myself, my own psyche. Yet imagination also allows me to have these characters perform acts and display certain responses that seem impossible or unlikely for the realistic “me.” This reminds me of something Susan Sontag said—and I am paraphrasing: “Art strengthens the adversarial consciousness.”

For me, in the face of power at the workplace, fiction has been a liberating and expansive tool, helping me to decide literally how I want to be, how to create myself, my work life, my responses. I wonder about Wolf: in East Germany, it is quite likely that fiction would provide a kind of veil between the writer and her story, a veil as a place of fiction in which to express the doubts of the artist, the purpose of art, and a woman writer interacting with state institutions—The Quest performs these interactions with subtlety. Fiction, I would argue, allows for this.

But Wolf’s approach to this narration—using the 1^st person to relate to another character without building long and realistic scenes of interaction—is useful to me and my project, a project where up until now, I have struggled with the narrative act of having characters relate to each other. I am not interested in a linear, realistic, “real time” narrative. Yet I want moments of contact between characters in my book. Wolf’s novel gives me a way forward.

Following are what I take to be five key elements of Wolf’s narrative approach, as well as narrative structure:

1. Using documents to speculate about Christa T. The narrator mentions her diaries, manuscripts, short stories left behind, and certain passages indicate that she is researching Christa actively: “The institute sent me the thesis” (94). This is very compatible with “going in to the archive” to learn about a character, or perhaps even to conjure a sense of a person, beyond what writings they leave behind. This is very applicable to my project that started in the archive, and began, really, with a discovery of a labor activist named Sadie Van Amter.

2. Using death as a narrative device that drives the quest. In the very first pages of the book, the reader learns that Christa T. will die a somewhat early death. This serves as a motivation, almost, for the reader as well as the narrator to learn what they can, to try to understand where her life meant, even if it seems to be “a film of shadows” (4).

3. One event, one action, can structure a book. In chapter 1, the narrator notes an action that attracted her to Christa, that made her want to get to know her: “she blew her trumpet” (9) and again, much later in the book, this event is a touch stone, a way of marking the narrator’s interest in a woman who makes such a loud noise. This might also be a metaphor for writing, for saying something that breaks through the hum of everyday life, for authorship.

4. Touching lightly on the larger social context and the individual’s relationship to state power and ideology. I enjoyed The Quest for this lesson. The context, at the onset, is war—and this is clear in the earlier, childhood portions of the book, in the very arrival of this new person, Christa T., in the village. The event of her arrival points to the larger trend of folks needing to move about during war. And when Christa T. announces that “the forest” is her favorite subject, Wolf later describes a scene where a “rotting gas mask in the forest” is found (22). I think this is brilliant—a light touch, a delicate way to provide social, historical context—but with an image that is quite memorable and astounding. Later in the novel, posters on walls are featured (42), and the building’s “falling masonry” could be read as a critique of institutions or the institution embodying an ideology (46).

5. The narrator speculating about a character; folding this speculative language into the book itself. The narrator actually addresses Christa, her creation, directly, asking, “What are you going to be?” (34). There are times, also, that the narrator revisits her own memory, and questions the way she has constructed Christa T. in the writing itself. For example:

When I got up I saw the sheet of paper there with my own eyes; but now it has disappeared. Writing means making things large. Yes, it’s possibly so: she didn’t say it, I read it. (169)

This quote is also a key into the text that merges autobiography and fiction—and of a narrative stance that questions the solidity of the position of “I.” In fact, “The Difficulty of Saying I” appears as a phrase again and again toward the end of the book, and seemed to be one of Christa T.’s central intellectual problems as a writer—a quest that the narrator then takes up, via Christa. In the East German context, Wolf might be undertaking something political; that within communism, the indulgence of autobiography is something to question, and yet Wolf has created a text where a woman engages in the discovery of self, through writing, and through “the other.”

When an Artist Writes: Poetry and Nanna Debois Buhl’s Journey in Two Directions

2010-06-24T08:03:00.001-05:00

What happens when an artist writes? Here is one possibility:

An artist’s book cover features a lone donkey as subject—but not really, because the donkey isn’t looking at the camera, or caught in a particularly cute or compelling pose. The donkey is grazing, calmly, and placed in a small part of the upper right part of the compositional field. And where the line of dark green represents the forest, the sliver of a background, into which this donkey might fade, the emphasis is on the glowing yellow foreground, a foreground that comprises more than three quarters of the space. With a generous space between the photographer and the subject, this cover image privileges the approach. But not just visually.

Enter: writing. In an important counterpoint to the subject, who might be the donkey we can see, artist Nanna Debois Buhl marks herself as present: book title and author name rests on the bottom left. Artist and author are part of the same field as the subject upon which she fixes her gaze and investigation.

Two directions: watcher and watched are both animated and figured, composed and constructed, known and questioned. How is this performance possible when the image, often signaling arrival and captured knowledge, persists?

One answer: through writing. The presence of the artist’s text and voice throughout Nanna’s projects, I want to say, facilitates this intersubjectivity.

Susan Sontag’s thesis in Regarding the Pain of Others is a revision of her earlier thesis in On Photography. She argues we are not, in fact, desensitized by the preponderance of images. Sontag does not call for the end of the image, but for an expanded narrative space—a cultural space that requires the viewer to engage in thinking, in slower contemplation. She argues that the movement of time in a novel, for example, is more apt than a single image to create empathy and a shifting awareness, a shift in perception.

Integrated into her visual projects, Nanna’s writings create a wider narrative space than a visual frame can provide.

In her book’s introduction, Nanna explains: “A Journey in Two Directions concerns Denmark’s colonial past in what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands and the ensuing intersection of Afro-Caribbean, American, and Danish histories.” She continues: “The title of the book thus refers to the movement between geographic locations, but also to a movement across time, among past, present, and future.” We learn that the donkey is not just any animal, but an abandoned Danish colonizer’s work animal that now populated the island of St. John’s and roam, feral.

I want to suggest that the two directions in Nanna’s work might also be thought of as between text and image.

I write hybrid texts and work with images sometimes. I often think about the impact of visual and textual modes on each other. I am particularly interested in the following possibilities for text, possibilities that Nanna’s work exploits:

1. Denaturalizing a language given to you by altering its context.
2. Using language to indicate a feeling of not-knowing, or about-to-know.
3. Using the formal strategies of poetry to embody knowledge.

I will write about Nanna’s work as a poet, with a poetics in mind. (Note: A Journey in Two Directions contains fine essays that explicate Nanna’s work and discuss related topics—essays by Thomas J. Lax, Edgar O. Lake, Louise Wolthers, and Johanna Burton. There are also two urgent prose poems by Greenlander Naja Marie Aidt. The book is very complete. Therefore, the ideas I bring up in this essay are based on my responses to Nanna’s projects, the first two thirds of the book and while some of my ideas may dovetail or slightly contrast with ideas in the essays, I am not writing in response to those works.)

I met Nanna three years ago during an LMCC Workspace residency—she was an artist in residence and I had just finished my year as one of two writers in residence. I stayed on as a studio assistant and in a curious simultaneity, Nanna was assigned the same desk and space where I had worked on my writing the year before.

1. Denaturalizing language by altering its context.

On the first salon evening of the residency, Nanna presented her series of lightbox drawings installed in Copenhagen’s streets—drawings that lay bare the Orientalist/Colonialist architectures of that city’s iconic 19th century amusement park, Tivoli. Nanna used the language of architecture, stripped down, re-presented in a different space to call attention to the history of cultural import and “otherness” in Copenhagen.

I wanted to talk to Nanna right away about the way poets do this kind of re-presenting with found text, and with the language of everyday prose. She was immediately interested and so began our work together. We met every Tuesday afternoon of that year to write, look, and talk. I provided exercises for writing and working with text; Nanna gave me lists of artists to research and text-image experiments to try. To play with language, to uncover its own workings and possibilities: this was Nanna’s quest.

Made during that residency year, Nanna’s film “From the Guidebook” performs the same kind of denaturalization as her Tivoli project—but the denaturalization is not only visual, it is conducted with text from a Danish guidebook to the Virgin Islands.

A polite awareness of Danish colonial history seems to be commonplace in the guidebook, yet compartmentalized, almost “written off.” But in Nanna’s work, the found text, re-presented in startling decontextualized single sentences, strips the present-tense colonialist ideology bare. The subtitles include: “The friendliness concerning the Danish past is apparent, also at an official level.” Followed by: “We must have done something right” and “. . .we are attracted to a fascinating and thrilling chapter of our past.”

The erasure, conducted by the guidebook’s discourse, of the horrors and present-day effects of the Triangle Slave Trade form a kind of capsule around historical experience and freeze the white consciousness and body in an amnesia—actually, an informed amnesia—something Nanna discusses in the book’s excellent, Danish-context-setting conversation with curator Tone Olaf Nielsen. In “From the Guidebook” Nanna uses the denaturalized guidebook language to indicate one way this informed amnesia is perpetuated.

2. Using language to indicate a feeling of not-knowing, or about-to-know.

Photo collages, in black and white, lead up to the book’s Table of Contents. These collages seem to be snapshots of Nanna’s notes, her work table and writing desk. The word “anthropology” is written in a notebook page and this is not surprising.

While studying “the other” and then writing home about it is one of the conqueror’s traditions, Nanna uses language to claim suppressed knowledge—and she is explicit about wanting to educate her fellow Danish citizens—but she also uses language to indicate moments of “being in arrival,” preparing for a knowledge about to come, a knowledge that might be beyond words and might rest inside the body.

Poetry, I want to point out, is the kind of language that can map, via metaphor, this important domain.

For example, this, from Nanna’s short film “There is this House,” footage of an abandoned 19th century colonial house in St. Croix: “There are these pigeons./There are these pigeons flapping,/as I enter/these beliefs.”

As Nanna enters the house, she marks off, in language, the intention of her project. Not just to capture what might be thought of as “beautiful”—an abandoned house and its pigeons, a kind of ultimate static subject for a filmmaker. Rather, Nanna is filming and writing because she intends, with her body, to try to enter the beliefs that made colonialism possible. The house is her metaphor for the structures that made colonialism possible. The house has slipped into “beliefs” as she announces an entrance to the film’s text.

The language of prose—the “straight” sentence—announces knowledge. “Good writers” of history, we’re told, avoid the passive tense, build paragraphs from a thesis, and conduct a coherent argument. These markers of fluency are meant to show expertise and deliver knowledge from the-one-who-knows to the-one-who-reads-and-learns.

While Nanna’s writing often includes the facts of Danish colonialism, there are an equal number of sentences that express doubt, thus challenging the supposed neutrality of acquiring knowledge. For example, the voice in “Looking for Donkeys” announces this: “I feel uncomfortable pointing my camera at other people./On my film, the island looks deserted.”

In fact, there is quite a bit of uncertainty and distance throughout this book. This distance is indicated not just in the text and image content, but in Nanna’s text form choices.

3. Using the formal strategies of poetry to embody knowledge.

Nanna often uses the quatrain in her writings—four lines that are end stopped, that appear to be “simple” subject/verb/object sentences. But the appearance of these units of language indicates to the reader that something else is going on: the text indicates is own constructedness. There are no full paragraphs, no fluent or complete narraqtion—hers is a language of stops and starts. And so we read, reminded that there is an author, an author who does not intend for us to take her language, her learnings, as natural or neutral.

In the “Maroon Mountain” series, Nanna uses textual juxtaposition—another poetry maneuver—to insert her present-tense body into a history of island plants and how escaped slaves used botanicals. Sidestepping traditional botanical drawings and classification texts, Nanna moves between providing scientific, factual information about the properties of plants, with sentences such as “Slowly, we climb down the cliff” and “My Guide says everything will be okay” and finally, “I hold on to the scattered tufts of grass as we descend.”

To me, this moment of physical contact—Nanna touching the plant life, nearly touching the earth, speaking with her guide, doubting her guide—are gorgeous moments when the language shimmers with relational tension.

And, throughout her book, the text is not really autobiographical and confessional, not only history or “fact,” and not quite poetry—yet Nanna has used all of these modes to keep the voice low, quiet, not too authoritarian, but also not willing, either, to give over to poetry’s sometimes hermetic language. And she is not willing, as well, to leave the image without annotation, to leave it too open to uninformed interpretation.

Finally, on race:

As Nell Irvin Painter points out in The History of White People, the word “race” is usually conceptualized as “non-white.” Yet more than once, Nanna uses text to identify her “pale skin,” her “Danish-ness.” Therefore, I believe her book gives us an example of how art-making turns out when the white artist does not presume that hers is a naturalized gaze. Text is one way to destabilize assumptions about who is behind the camera.

And the future?

I hope that Nanna’s work stirs up some dialogue about what is next. I know it is difficult to ask an artist for explicit wishes for the future, as if it is the artist’s responsibility to oversee some kind of outcome for their projects. I do not believe in this “activist” imperative for artists. Still, Nanna’s work begs the question: beyond the function of “to inform,” how might we imagine the shape of things that result from encountering such text image works, such suppressed content in innovative form?

In other words, now that the white subject can locate her relatedness to the wrongs of history, to the composite nature of a place, of an identity—including her own, now that she can identify how global capital has a past, and how that past is retained and carried forward, then does this subjectivity stop at the culmination of this expertise? How does bringing home this method of awareness impact future cultural actions?

Partial answers to my questions:

First, the educator in me plans on using Nanna’s book in my classes on literature, colonialism, documentary theory, art, cultural studies. Perhaps others will do the same.

Then, and maybe more subtly, there is a certain “between space” that Nanna’s book leaves me with. And this is one of the strengths, I want to say, of her work. As a subject who clearly does not identify with the colonizer’s values, Nanna also does not move from there into a so-called progressive “we are all the same” rhetoric either.

Therefore, while Nanna’s book speaks of two directions, I am most excited by the psychological and cultural between-space she maps out. Nanna instructs, by example, to research, go, stay, re-visit home, and notice. There is great beauty in such steady and deliberate action and the loving, open-ended recordings that result.

(Note: Nanna will be reading from her book and showing one of her films at PS1MoMA bookstore on Saturday, June 26, 2010. A Journey in Two Directions is published by Revolver Publishing, Berlin.)

Mentoring: Kiki Smith’s “Sojourn,” Firestone and Lomax’s Letters to Poets Project, and the Printmaker’s Matrix

2010-06-18T11:26:00.001-05:00

Lightbulbs signal ideas. Ideas birth more ideas, and shared, the light grows. Kiki Smith hangs lightbulbs above the drawings in her show currently at Brooklyn Museum entitled “Sojourn.” Lightbulbs find their way into her drawings of women. And lightbulbs are also the shape of wombs.

“I am now a woman old enough now to be considered a mentor,” I thought, on my 42nd birthday, walking through the museum’s exhibit rooms, through the landscape of the woman as an artist—a woman whose mother receives omens from birds, who looks out the window, who offers a gift of flowers for the person walking through the gallery, and who is tethered just slightly to another woman, possibly her mother, from whom her body stretches out, kite-string like.

The drawings are large, almost like murals, but they are more feminine than a mural in that they are tentative: the inked images float on thin sheets of Nepal paper that move a little with the room’s drafts, as doors open and close, as people walk by. Pieced together, the surfaces seem like cloth, something you might wrap yourself in, fashioned to hold a narrative, nearly a quilt, but fragile and translucent, more like a veil than a blanket.

Though I had never seen these images before, I felt at home in this sea of women, some young and tattooed, some older and dying, with paper eyelids fastened over eyes once drawn open. In each room I felt taken care of, even in the last room—a room filled with renderings of large black caskets surrounding a three-dimensional pine wood casket, slightly open, and in which were placed delicate, blooming glass flowers.

I said to myself, “this is political and feminist but it makes no statement about patriarchy or oppression.”

Last week I learned that a human egg can repair a damaged sperm. Having decided not to have children, I am not interested in fertility of this kind—but what a metaphor!

A message for any gender: intimacy, delicate surfaces, and repair are not only possible, but the chemistries of our bodies are equipped to show us the way. There are many ways a body can ask another body to change toward something productive, to make something new, to transform.

The desire for one body to help another—for mentoring—for comfort and advice—these desires abound in The Odyssey, a supremely domestic tale, where not only is Odysseus striving to return home, but where Penelope, the wife who never leaves home, opens up the narrative space for the entire epic by stalling time: she unravels her weaving at night.

The book also contains one of the first ideas of “mentor.” Athena, goddess of wisdom, shape-shifts into the figure of Mentor, the old Ithacan friend of Odysseus. In the form of Mentor, Athena is able to inspire Odysseus to fight off the suitors who have invaded his house. Hence, mentoring is about invention, change, and shifting identity.

But what a dance Athena must do: she somehow figures out that Odysseus will best take her advice if she appears familiar, and if she is male. I love this idea about just how difficult mentoring is and how sneaky Athena has to be in order to do it well.

And what about us? Without the magic of goddesses and gods, all we have is imagination, faith in this biological fact of repair, and language.

In one particularly moving work, Smith draws an older woman holding out her hand toward the head of a younger woman. Following this older woman’s hand and its trajectory into the white space next to her, my eye is lead to a jumbled mass of sticks hovering over the younger woman. The sticks are adorned with glitter. Shining, light-filled, gathering and emitting energy. These sticks, also realized elsewhere in the exhibit as three-dimensional sculptures that hover over the drawings, casting shadows and holding birds who may be about to nest, seemed to me to be like long lines of words, thoughts. They seem to me like hovering sentences, sentences as materials for a nest.

Five years ago I participated in a project conceived by Jennifer Firestone and Dana Lomax entitled Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community. I wrote letters to Cecilia Vicuña and, thrillingly, she wrote back. I admire Cecilia’s work and had studied with her for one week at Naropa. To be heard by someone I admired, and for her to engage my ideas and for me to have a chance to respond to her work was a privilege. I knew the intensity of the privilege in the hesitation and nervousness I felt, answering her letters, trying to throw some meaningful “sticks” or sentences back her way.

I think that this tension and nervousness of relationship is important to point out. The fabric of connection is not always sure and stable, thick and comforting. It is sometimes tenuous and delicate, more associated with a rapid heartbeat than a calm body.

When Cecilia wrote to me that she chose not to answer a question I had raised, I realized that there was a certain weight to being “the established” or “mentoring” poet. The flow of our relationship included moments like these, when I realized that mentoring can also mean saying “no” to certain thought pathways that the eager younger artist wants to travel down.

Jennifer and Dana put together fourteen pairs of poets. The book is courageous. It is a book like nothing else because it is not organized by any theme, but by relationship only. And the relationship happens in the encounter of writing, reading, and exchange. Not in conversation, not in a classroom, at a bar, through email, but through sentences, paragraphs, in attempts at as-complete-as-possible thoughts and responses.

Who knew that from the letter project, as if it had been my laboratory, I would go on to work at Goddard College where I write letters back to students who design their own programs and don’t attend class. This past spring, I came to use letter writing in my other work site, the more traditional classroom. I distributed occasional letters: dispatches from my writing desk to the group of earnest students who would gather each Friday to talk about poetry. Where the performative space of the classroom felt limiting and, frankly, exhausting, I placed inside of this space a letter, something almost personal, but not contingent on my performance in the moment. At the end of the semester, some students chose to write culminating poetics statements in the form of a letter back to me. I found their statements, fashioned in this way, less sure, more open to possibility, more ready to admit confusion and doubt.

At the Kiki Smith show, what came rushing in at me, was the impact—somewhere under my sternum, a pounding heart almost ready to explode with intense joy and emotion—of all the sentences about art and writing that I have written and received. In classrooms, emails, in letters, on the margins of a manuscript, in conversation.

It is a fact that artists and poets, and especially women, are spread thin. Artists make less money, on average, than other professionals. Women in all professions make less, on average, than men. How can a woman have time to make art, to be mentored? And even more outrageous: how can she possibly mentor others?

I remember my favorite childhood book: Harold and the Purple Crayon. Harold draws himself into scenes, in and out of adventure, into scenes of comfort and joy. And though Harold is a “he,” he is bald-headed, as any baby of any gender might be. And he drew with purple, a color I declared was my favorite, a color somewhere between blue and pink. A lesson from Harold: an artist draws her mentors toward her, maybe even creating her own self-fashioned mentor, at times.

Finally, from the world of printmaking: this week I learned that the base onto which paper is pressed in order to make an image is called “the matrix.” This glossary went on to say that “matrix” is from the Latin for “mother.” I thought of all of the possibility, then, for writing and art that comes from a nurturing energy of available surfaces. And I think about Bhanu Kapil's idea of the book as a space for envisioning and imagining, imprinting something that we can not exactly predict, but that we know has never existed before. A mentoring space, peopled with others and the selves we create.