Ramsay Bell Breslin on BAM’s L@TE en route to the Reading Room
On January 27 BAM/PFA opened its first L@TE of the 2012 season with The Moon (Part One) programmed by Land and Sea. As lunar music filled the museum’s architectural recesses with sound, the building itself seemed at first to animate, then hypnotize, and finally release the people under its roof from whatever mental maze we normally find ourselves in. When I arrived, children were leaping across BAMscape. A little later, a community of museum-goers sat cross-legged on the floor, backs straight, staring into the Void. By the time I left at 9 pm, the grownups were dancing. Yes, yes, it was the music that did this, but it was the architecture that made it happen.
Built as a kuntsbunker to protect art from revolution in the 1960’s, BAM is a building many people think they should dislike—so cold, so concrete, so thick, so echo-ridden, so riddled with metal-filled holes. In actuality, most of us feel deeply attached. Me, I love the battered gleam of its floors, the zooming ramps, and radiating, cantilevered galleries. Even the ceiling, which looks like a labyrinth for giant lab rats turned upside down, excites me—with the irrationality of its form.
As an experience, the building demonstrates the artistic freedom to look and listen that is as inalienable as our right to speak our minds or sleep in a public place. Witness, lying side-by-side on Bamscape, a couple, eyes closed, their bodies aligned in parallel repose within the stylized orange wave forms that elsewhere seem to erupt. There’s a consciousness that inhabits the Berkeley Art Museum that makes the building itself a throw-back to art-as-revolution-for-the-people. This is a museum where you can move, make noise, and touch things; a place to be yourself in harmony with others.
On Friday, February 10, you can hear Part Two of The Moon, at L@TE. For continued enjoyment, on February 24, at 5:30 pm, you can hear Kelsey Street’s very own Monica Peck read from her work at the museum’s new reading series, called RE@DS (at L@TE). You’ll find Monica in The Reading Room, the Berkeley Art Museum’s tribute to the history of East Bay literary publishing.
– Ramsay Bell Breslin
November 10, 2011
how tents are bed appositives: reading waveform and saborami, and new work from melissa mack, yosefa raz, and laura woltag
The sudden repertoire of care.
***
My mattress is a fortress.
– Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto, Waveform
Yesterday evening, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge read at the University of San Francisco. Last Saturday, Melissa Mack, Yosefa Raz, and Laura Woltag read at Lauren Levin’s house. And, I have received copies of Cecilia Vicuña’s Saborami (Chain Links) and Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto’s Waveform (Kenning). Poetry is popping.
And this Monday, 11/14, Jen Benka and Lauren Shufran will read at Canessa Park. (Doors at 7pm. 708 Montgomery/Kearny, SF.)
***
Saborami, originally published in 1973, enters the present political/poetical scene as a shamanic guide: “politically, magically, and aesthetically” (12).
As Vicuña explains in the book’s introduction, “I decided to make an object every day in support of the chilean revolutionary process” (12). Saborami depicts the objects and “explanations” from this daily project that began as a celebration, but, with the violent military coup, ended in mourning. Heed.
Last night, police assaulted people on the UC Berkeley campus for setting up an occupy encampment, which in essence means gathering, pitching tents, and having conversations.
Tonight, the Occupy Oakland encampment will celebrate its one-month birthday.
Yes, “the sudden repertoire of care.” Yes, “my mattress is a fortress.”
My tent “is a fortress.”
Today was marked by sightings of several large birds of prey and golden-scallop clouds. And, low-lying fog held within forest.
Berssenbrugge read poems about fog last night, about how fog works. One of Michael Cross’ students asked during the Q&A what fog meant as a metaphor. Berssenbrugge talked about fog and how it relates to communication, how she used to believe that people couldn’t communicate, but now she does believe people can communicate.
When asked to speak about her long line, Berssenbrugge remarked that her emphasis on the horizontal demonstrates the equality of people and “animals, plants, and rocks.”
My notes from the reading are enmeshed with notes from exhibitions, research, dreams, schemes, and overheard conversations:
“desiring relatedness as it comes in the form of the weather” “vishnu sits on a pipal tree” “how to disarm without arms” “occupying the same sunset” “sky?” “sometimes using others’ materials helps me access what i want to say” “the heart has as many neurons as the brain” “freedom of info act to get stats on bart” “entranyas from lorca means deepest love” “a way of repeating a dream” “a way of spatializing the growing feelings of alterity between us” “something about instant communication of color – i still don’t get this” “when you see her you feel the impact of what visibility can mean” “the 15 mouths – some no gender or ungenderable – what makes me think about this? john coltrane’s easy to remember” “how to arrange things so they are difficult to count” “i’m here without you”
***
What happened when I got Waveform in the mail, is that I crushed out on the book and couldn’t stop reading it or /into/ it, rather. I keep spiraling around in it, but can’t seem to ever finish it; it’s a short book. At first, I blamed procrastination, lack of attention, or stress, but then I began to accept that this book actually was magically pulling me into the Fibonacci sequence of itself somehow and still I continue to eddy inside it.
“This is all happening at the same time” (Waveform).
Non-normative bodies in public spaces are political occupations that go to the grocery store, take the bus, look through glass at bank tellers … What happens when the private space (bed) is forced into the public (tent), as with demonstrations that pitch tents? How is the vulnerability intensified?
When the body lifts/ the corporeal curtain. / When we say ‘position,’ we mean ‘phantasm.’ Cold and damp neural alarm. The bed is a bed of fog. / The legs of my fog are not lifting. / Sheets bring both specter and spectral. / The oscillation string of an untheoretical / body in a body in an even deeper underneath. / The special nausea of not-this (Waveform).
“The struggle must be waged in cultural fronts” (Vicuña, 24)
The occupy encampments act as hyperbolic logos for the daily politics of non-normative embodiment. Tents demand visibility. The visibility of structures interrogates the non-horizontal (and attempting to remain invisible) power elite. Consider the salacious media rhetoric around the tents, to further outline how these tents are bed appositives.
“Invent your task, do it!” (Vicuña, 24)
I’ve been making buttons and handing them out at the Sunday noon readings at Occupy Oakland. the buttons say, “i occupy.” one person has argued that the button should say, “we.”
The “i” is important. As a queer non-cis-male, I don’t trust the “we.” I trust “i” statements. The “i” can also mean a group. Too often, “we” erases “me” (the Other).
And too often, the “we” evaporates, thinking other members of “we” will clean up the mess, do the dishes, take out the trash, show up, etc., whereas the “i” never goes away…!
So, “i” occupy I, also.
“In Chile before the coup, the “I” was experienced simultaneously as individual and collective. We felt it when a million people marched together in Santiago … “ (Vicuña, 161).
***
At Lauren Levin’s house reading last Saturday, with Laura Woltag’s inspiration and encouragement, I passed out “still digging” buttons. The history of social justice connects with the history of language. This is obvious.
Mack, Raz, & Woltag have sent me poems for you to read. I want you to see how their work connects the socio-political linguistics of “pronouncing” with the politics of occupation.
NIGHT AFTER GENERAL STRIKE
by Melissa Mack
“the messaging winds” Melville
How does the port of Oakland really work?
boys from Roxbury running
i was with each runner cinematically,
which was also experientially
I heard the Mass accents,
but I felt the fast ones’ flight,
and the panting ones’ pace
up a hill with three names
there was straw and stone, like
at the camp
a man, teacher betrayer
caretaker vision quest guide
handled my hands
rubbing into them a slick dirt like slip
how it made me
sick, not the dirt
not the material I knew it was made
from, but the feeling of it on my skin
when I thought/felt/knew it was
polluted.
we moved from site to site
at one point I woke up (still dreaming) I was reading
the story of my waking,
“tented” with larval bugs
(I only had to see one example
DON’T AFRAID
GO AHEAD
OCCUPY WALL STREET
OCCUPY OAKLAND
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
a place like a port
a place like a road
a long port road where the trucks got stopped
before they go to the boats
and the trains, wedding gown would do
as much good for girls (shake head)
I liked resting
I liked housing
“I like . . . Julie. I think I . . . love Julie.”
Tootsie taught me I could go in drag as myself,
but now I don’t have a decent handbag.
do we know what we’re doing?
some see the chronos far ahead like chess,
some the kairos, the Cairo, the climbing
on the signs and the cars
a silence went inside the thousands
for me pulled over and slept
with / my eyes /open
the fixed point of the
meditator was every point
I touched with my sight. into the sun.
brass band show tunes as I fall asleep.
***
MANIFESTO ON WEAKNESS
by Yosefa Raz
in these times and conditions I want to notice the smell of opening my tupperware which once carried rice and mung beans is also the smell of people occupying a plaza: it was only last week it seems occupying was the thing I was and it was a sad bad thing why the classics professor from hebrew university allowed himself to be dragged across the street in the eyes of his students one person can occupy what someone else once occupied at the café let’s talk about ambivalence but not get arch. The time for archery is apparently over waking up in the middle of the night was it the migraine or the helicopters that woke me are we in a war zone or a revolution zone either way I am left home like when I threw up for a fantastic holiday it was purim my father read me the holiday story as I shivered in the cold bathtub that was the way you used to bring the temperature down he had hepatitis why he was home taking care of me Y says he stayed in eye contact all that week with me in case I did need him though he was working hard drawing all night where were we the night of the police raid at home I think I made pasta and updated facebook constantly while chopping last year talked to M condesendingly I know what poetry is supposed to be about I’ve had it with all the poems of nursing and feeding I know five languages on paper they are dead languages what I could learn in the rest of my time if it wasn’t for the bruises on my arm I want to tell you about being a warrior the morphine wasn’t so bad they gave me oyster crackers and apple juice they asked has this interfered with your daily life oh yes it is a fever I am not myself but somehow still having to teach about the new futurity one guy with a scar across his wrist says it is ridiculous to consider time outside of linear time as if a pregnant woman and her trimester is an independent unit there’s biology I am counting days like a brocade with gold bells and also the usual count down of the semester then I’m counting the days I’ve been down I’d like to call it something else yes down as if struck and at the same time alongside us at the same time inside us the revolution is happening which my friends say is already happening or not at all and there is also the solemn and furtive counting of friendships somewhere between letting go hurt and terrible small scandals and at the same time you are going to die and I once thought friendships were worth more than anything my whole life and now it’s the revolution every day meeting literally hundreds of new people which is a good thing some poets writing about hammers and there are more asterix than I have ever seen previously but I just discovered the medium for revealing radical inequality it is not what you think it is in the doctor-nurse romances that came out of my neighbor’s garage or the “women’s weepies” if there’s no tearjerkers it’s not my revolution
***
GREYSWEAT
by Laura Woltag
deep’s machine posing as bell’s occluded tune
trill perk, dog
grey horse
evening blooms on top of
missing line of the lip
begging a little public water
from the beautiful fruit
the thin trail back under
and forest there, blocking it
Derived thus
about spinning,
some exemplary cocks
go into the weave clucking
bringing in the vegetable body and the trees
thus to be an old form, restrained in tragedy
all to protect the winds in vines
I can’t stand it
not knowing what ‘it’ is
‘it’ might be a table. Or a parrot.
It evades the erotic who I will appear with
on a coin
(flying fish surmounted by a ram)
The shape when letters live on top
or my maternal life appears as emancipatory
against the vacancies of the real
tombs and refreshers
which are a spot
pulling the body back out of the deep threat
to go after because of the threat it
represents
2.
Confusing sand with food.
Threading the loose table’s strings.
The women who would join me here are traded there.
new voice between fingers
waiting for water to leak out its long wait
then the logs hit
those survival arts
alternate air carriers
moonlighting on generators
3.
talking over attempting to mimic
another’s sibilant
so as to be called in private
What proposing dodges
voices the part of the chicken taken in
in the roots of the teeth or close to the teeth
Recomposition, dishes
Flanky noble & spherical
Stroked nature skirts inflection.
Hence sirens liberate fashions dethroned.
But what about the wind eggs, Brandon?
4.
life on the other side of the tincture
the religious metal inside food
comes into being, audible for some time, destroys
as if my hair actually hurts
Feeling that plants in the state’s night returned to mother
What ‘to animal’ is arms
in stages of readying
the most significant food
so ancient and dead, can’t even be one of us
5.
whale wind
whale wind to form
around a species of special concern
in a natural cloud the semi-floral
retreats into rock
pacing tissues
looking forward to the buzzing
The milky bird
distributing sounds to loyal believers
as air. Thanked on this machine and kissed it.
sounds roam sight’s vantage
but not the listener’s hope. Is this execution?
An electric shove vacates the currency body
6.
My underwater pig god is
evicting cops from our cells
as the fuzz begins to bloom
hummingbirds arrive in the margins of force
mark of the owl, a pregnant cat that makes you react
diversion is the rush aspect
These animals that return as words
Land folks a resounding action
Would you fly or would you vanish?
September 30, 2011
on the talk
Centering women changes the landscape.
– Aurora Levins Morales, Historian as Curandera
I want to talk about and look at the utility of feminism, specifically within the conversation that is called Poetry: the Talk.
What is useful about feminist discourse, as Morales points out, is that it “changes the landscape.” When we think about the landscape of Poetry, what is meant particularly, is what is valued within certain circles as worthy of attention. What, in other words, survives within the community discourse is the Talk.
Working poets feed off the plankton of conversation. What is talked about is digested and moved forward/excreted through the work of the moment. As such, omitting (or diminishing/dimming) genders/groups from Talk erases them from the near future, as in the now of tomorrow and next week.
Perhaps this is why, when someone kept from the Talk might be (“at long last,” so the cliché goes) included in the discourse, the loss is real and remains lost forever, actually.
If “poetry is the news that stays news,” as Ron Silliman quipped, then inclusion is irrelevant in the moment, just so long as eventually so-and-so’s work is valued. Their work will still be fresh, presumably. Although Silliman’s argument sounds good, it doesn’t actually make sense, especially to poets kept from the Talk.
Poetry can (and does) go stale. Poetry is not a Twinkie. Poetry is a baguette. Best fresh. Exceedingly useful when old.
Timely attention within the conversation is not only vital to the work, but also vital to the larger conversation. So, Kelsey Street, as one of the few surviving presses from that era, serves the present discourse, by providing access to the Talk. While much can and needs to be criticized about 70s feminism, I want to defend the utilitarian motive behind women’s presses, not so much for their legacy, but for what they do today, at this very moment, to support non-male voices in the Talk, and thus altering the landscape of discourse.
Which is why I can’t wait to get my copy of Waveform (Kenning Editions), Amber DePietra’s new book co-authored with Denise Leto, former KSP featured poet. Both will read at Canessa Park Gallery on December 12th with KSP guest blogger Jai Arun Ravine.
And please come to Canessa Park Gallery on October 10th at 7pm to hear giovanni singleton read with truong tran. Here’s the flyer:
I hope to see you there!
– MJP
August 29, 2011
a self-introduction & a look at the trees
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree’s shade…
– Thomas Grey’s Elegy on a Country Churchyard
… words flow from trees—so the fragmentation of the forest, the destruction of the forest, is the fragmentation of song.
— Cecilia Vicuna, an interview, Ecopoetics 2001
Dear Readers,
It’s been an odd summer. Looking southward from my balcony over the Excelsior Valley, there’s golden sunlight. Hazy distances. Soon the fog will roll in and the wind will rise. In all directions, trees fill the spaces between houses. The visible forest.
This summer a chunk of this visible forest was cut down. The Mission Playground on Valencia & 20th lost several trees. After a series of inquiries to “those in charge,” I learned that the trees were “in decline” or “not likely to improve” or having “a high risk factor for potential failure” (from an email from Meghan Tiernan, Project Manager of the Capital Improvement Division of the Parks & Recreation Department).
How I feel like the trees…! How often have I been “in decline” or “not likely to improve” or having “a high risk factor for potential failure.”
The same email reassured me that “although five trees are being removed 21 trees are being planted.”
How easy to remove those “at risk of failure” …! How sensible…!
But, why can’t we have “failing” trees in our city? Why must they all be sapling fresh? Isn’t a dead tree home to millions? Doesn’t a fallen log feed countless creatures? Is a dead tree really “unsafe” or perhaps just unsightly.
I found this list in the article “How is a dead tree good?”
- 19 birds of prey
- 9 kinds of woodpeckers
- 5 kinds of ducks
- 22 kinds of songbirds
- 15 kinds of small mammals (including bats)
- 3 kinds of furbearers
- 6 kinds of squirrels and chipmunks
All of these and more live in dead trees…! Give me an ugly old tree…!
***
I’ll be writing articles here, now that Amber’s moving on. She’s tapped me as her predecessor.
Bon voyage, mon amie!
I’ve been asked to introduce myself a bit, which is difficult for me … but here goes…!
I live in San Francisco. I’m a teacher & writer. Recently my work has appeared in a With+Stand, a chapbook Bower to Bower (Neo-baroque – write me if you want a copy), and David Brazil & Sara Larsen’s TRY! Magazine.
I’m hosting a “Three Year Anniversary Celebration” for TRY! at 7pm on September 12th at Canessa Park Gallery, 708 Montgomery/Kearny, SF. The readers list is TBA. Watch this space…! (I’m curating monthly readings at Canessa Park Gallery this fall on the second Monday of the month. All the readings start at 7pm. You should come!)
What else? I’m queer and very interested in exploring queerness/alterity through my creative work, which primarily occurs via literary arts, painting, video, and sound.
I’m currently working on a project related to “queer archives” that’s funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission. I may write about the project here from time to time, but if you’re interested in learning more about it, some of my “research” is public at www.queercity.org.
This project is performance oriented, meaning I “go out” and “wander/cruise” “the city” as a “queer researcher.” (Flaneur…) I take notes, dream, converse, and gather. I perform the “research activities” as an “essential task” that suggests a utopian city or perhaps enacts a utopian city, a place that self-archives itself as it arises.
I was in New York earlier this month and saw Lorna Simpson’s exhibition “Gathered” at the Brooklyn Museum. I feel very inspired by her approach towards archive and history; my most recent Queer City blog post is about that show.
I had a video art piece showing at Krowswork Gallery in Oakland this summer. The piece, entitled “Backyard Unicorn,” features performance artist Rebecca Park-Ramage wearing a soft-object sculpture. It’s part of a series I’m working on that looks at the invisible gendered body through video documentations of performance artists wearing naively constructed soft object sculptures (fabric, thread, stuffing, and spray paint). This “Soft Abject Series” interrogates notions of the gendered body, while exploring the beauty of absurd sensuality. The Series seeks to suggest or “point out” the multiplicity and irrepressibility of gender through shape and gesture.
Here’s a still:
Enough about me. Back to the trees.
Cecilia Vicuna, in an interview with Jonathon Skinner for Ecopoetics in 2001:
I believe that there is an ancient association, of course, between words and seeds, between words and plants. The shamans believe that the plants are the mothers of words, you know, especially the trees; they say that, the words flow from trees—so the fragmentation of the forest, the destruction of the forest, is the fragmentation of song. And I take it a bit further; I say that the weaving of the seed—because the seed is in itself a weaving—I say the weaving of the seed is an organ of sound. Because the seed for me, in itself, is a sound. And this sound unfolds in the growth of the plant. I believe that a word has a similar reality—a word is a seed of sound, a seed of sound that can unfold into many other sounds.
This summer, Futurepoem published Camille Roy’s latest book Sherwood Forest. I want to write about this amazing book. Reading Sherwood Forest is a deeply pleasurable experience, in part because of Roy’s generosity when it comes to the sensual.
For the past six months I’ve been studying Sanskrit with a few poet friends. One of the fascinating aspects of this “study group” activity has been the way the words I learn seem tremendously helpful in other arenas of my life and work, specifically in my other readings. So it came as no surprise that while reading Camille Roy’s latest book Sherwood Forest, I kept stumbling across words in my Sanskrit work that related to “thievery.” For instance, a Sanskrit word for “lover” translates as “heart thief.” And a word for a small pond can also mean “a hole in a wall made by a thief that resembles a pond” (Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit Dictionary).
Sherwood Forest, as the mythic home place of Robin Hood and other thieves, calls to mind the utopic safe haven of outlaws. Roy’s Sherwood Forest welcomes the “heart thief” queers who can sustain contradictions, resists catelogue-izations of genre/gender, or what genre/gender means nowadays.
The opening poem “My Play” invokes a poetics both instructive and cagey. Roy’s generosity opens the reader as writer or co-writer. The usual lines of power within the reading process are not so much erased as altered, or alterity-ed.
“Our audience arrives as voyeurs with a wish,” she writes and later continues with, “They seek an actual possibility, not an actualized one.” And further: “This isn’t shit, it’s poetry.”
Roy’s Forest teems with life’s fecundity. And, as a forest contains within its moldering floor the evidence of history via decomposition, the composing / composting past as present (soil), so too her narratives fold layers of personal history/archive with the pining needles of the present. Poems root into and rot into nutrients, as much connecting as redirecting resources & indications where they are most needed/desired.
The language here is wild; “wild” not meaning “untamable” but rather surviving on self-made grammars, as “forest dwellers” who insist on the erotic analogy to call forth desire and to contain it within the sphere of desire’s ecology: relationships & conversations.
Monica Peck
August 11, 2011
Study Writing with Camille Roy
Kelsey Street author Camille Roy will be offering an 8-week writing workshop this fall in San Francisco. The course will be, according to Roy, ” a mixed genre (poetry / fiction / hybrid forms) workshop, well-disposed to the experimental. We will be meeting bi-weekly for 8 sessions, starting 9/10.”
Here’s the announcement:
Camille Roy Workshop
‘Dahlia’s in the Night Garden’
This workshop has a long history, meeting on and off for nearly 15 years. It is descended from the workshop Bob Gluck led, beginning in the 1980’s. It continues to be a place for aesthetic exploration in the context of poetic community. It has facilitated the development of innovative form and content in an environment of deep engagement and respectful attention.
The workshop format is to read and comment on the work within the workshop itself, and written comments on the work of peers is not required.
If you are interested in participating (and I haven’t worked with you before) please send a work sample of 3 poems or 5 pages of prose to Camille.Roy.Workshop@gmail.com. If I know your work, please email that address to sign up.
Cost is $300 for eight sessions beginning on 9/10.
Workshop size will be between 7 and 12.
Those seeking more information click here or email Camille.Roy.Workshop@gmail.com.
July 22, 2011
A Tribute to Amber di Pietra
Amber wrote her first blog entry for Kelsey Street on January 20, 2008, and her last post on June 29, 2011. Sadly for us, but happily for her, she has now moved on from the press to devote more of her time and energy to writing, her own and others:
http://writetoconnect.blogspot.com/
Amber’s contributions to Kelsey Street are legion: For one thing, she produced our best-selling book of all time: Bhanu Kapil’s humanimal: A Project for Future Children — soon to be our first e-book! For another, she established and maintained our first ever blog, generating a steady stream of content for over three years. Most famously, in her blog post of July 25, 2008, she volleyed a series of questions Bhanu Kapil raised in Vertical Interogation of Stangers. She also wrote and posted reviews, most recently of Hazel White’s Peril As Architectural Enrichment (2011):
Peril lays down a topos of angles and decay; it offers what I most want in every poem—a substrate for grief and discovery, which rolls along nurturing motion and stillness, like a sky high over the weather. A few years ago, Hazel turned me on to the Alexander Technique, the idea of “letting the neck be free,” of tiny, relative spaces that could be cultivated between vertebrae. Alexander has to do with the body’s relationship to surface, measures and movements of increment and softness to allow more for the mineralized architecture of the bones. Radical ideas for one such as me, subject to constant ossification and with knees that prevent easy merging with landscape, such as flopping onto the grass.
We at Kelsey Street owe Amber more than we can possibly say in the few words we have penned below. To learn more about Amber, in her own words, read her May 7, 2011 blog entry.
Hazel:
Dear A: Who was afraid to “release and veer” (your last post)? You’re gone! Aargh! You’re brilliant. I love you, too.
H
Pat:
Amber has brought a consistent, grounded creative energy to KSP meetings – something special. For me, she will always be important for her part in the development of the Poetics of Healing – a contemporary renewal, in my way of thinking, of early body-,
weather-, and landscape-based poetry that brings me closer to the origins of language and my own experience. Thank you, Amber!
Tiff:
Amber itself, the substance, is like a time capsule made and placed into the earth by nature. Thank you Amber for creating (through our Kelsey Street Press blog) a memory-record of who we are and what we love.
Val:
It’s fair to say I would not be a Kelsey Street member if it weren’t for Amber. I met her in a class at SPD, and for some reason she thought I might be an appropriate choice as a potential KSP intern/member. And here I am. There are countless funny, insightful, provocative blog posts of Amber’s that I could reference here, but I trust that anyone reading this has been amused and moved by them in their time. So I will simply say that Amber’s contributions to KSP have certainly changed the Press for the better, and I am grateful for everything she put into it and to have worked with her for as long as I did. And now onward to new poetry (and life) projects . . .
Ramsay: “Go in where there is an opening,” Amber wrote, “with the intent to resurface gaze from the inside out.” I love your risky business, Amber, the way you hide your openness and open your hiddenness; it’s what makes you such a brilliant writer and deeply loving human being. In spirit, I am one of those children who hug your skirts and follow you around. Thank you for all you have given to Kelsey Street, of your time, your timeliness, your tolerance, your clarity, your hard work, humor and hugs. We will miss the ways in which you kept us all on course. And let us into your life.
June 29, 2011
Off the Axial, Amber DiPietra on Peril as Architectural Enrichment
When you think of an Englishwoman who writes guides to gardening, gives lectures on aesthetics to botanical societies, and makes delicious bacon scones, do you also think of a woman with indigo tights and fierce leather bags, one who rises at dawn to help her son prepare sticky rice for the sushi demo he is going to bring to show and tell? A woman who attends groups for families of transracial adoption and a woman who is an anti-racism activist? Do you also think of such a woman with purple bangs (which she had when I first met her nearly ten years ago in grad school) who often advises that “You must let things flump off the side sometimes”? If these images don’t come to mind when you think of a landscape writer from rural England, then you must someday meet Hazel White; I highly recommend it.
“Haze!” I lamented upon seeing her the other day, “I want to blog about Peril but everything that comes out of me is pure sentiment, is all about you as a friend, and is all about my sense of being ungrounded with my current life changes, my move…”
“Well, you write whatever you like, dear Amber. I want to hear Amber’s Peril.”
“But it is the internet,” I moaned, “and you can’t just put it all out there, and I also don’t want to mortify you by listing all your personal qualities—because I know in that way you are very English.”
To write about Hazel White’s new book—her very first book of poetry (she has published dozens of nonfiction books on landscape)—I must bring to you a little bit of the Hazel-of-this-world. Hazel who had an inbox on the farm in England where she lived as a girl, which meant a letterbox on a desk. And in which a favored chicken slept.
The eye and then the heart give themselves over to a soft bowl. A way of
opening wings without pain: reveal a broad, assertive breast (keep legs forward
and away) and uncurl musculature by patching with feverfew daisies that branch
and rebranch into plenty.
Whose prodigious son memorized all the San Francisco bus lines by the age of 5 (he and Haze spent a lot of time traversing the city landscape). Now a teenager, he butters her up with kisses in her palm so that he might catch a ride to the Vans store.
Once, Hazel said to me, after reading the work I had been doing on a manuscript-in-progress called Falling in Real Time, something to the effect of it being clear that my work was about trying not to fall and yet, couldn’t I, wouldn’t I consider letting the form “veer a bit.” To veer. I have never stopped thinking about what she said, about how I am afraid to veer, and yet that is what my work is made of. It is no accident that both Hazel and I have faced terrifying surgeries and different forms of illness as well as traumatic falls in the time before and since we have known each other.
The Hazel-of-this-world has been so instructive, to me, in great comfort and great risk. As in, the way these lines from Peril as Architectural Enrichment are comforting:
Switch:
Life/death
beetles
(inside).
“The inevitable horizontality” as I recently heard Hazel refer to it at a reading from Peril at The Green Arcade. For me, her book is a movement meditation through landscape, the dirt we return to and the perception of its scape as that which stretches sentience.
Another pleasure from up, aerially, to see along the tops of hedges and ski,
stunned, on top of it all, goodbye to all the damned crannies.
Having come from that dirt and going back to that, as being not separate from phenomenon, the reader gets opened outward, like one does in a yoga class or some such place.
Arboreal disturbance, an excess of form—the hydrologic cycle present at every
step and giant stumps abandoned—challenges the conception of ground as solid
earth: terra firma sinks into terra incognita. Pull your breath in.
The regular stuff, what you might expect to find in a collection of poems about landscape, is there. Childhood idylls, the relationship of the child’s body to trees, for instance.
Scale up and scuff this.
Shimmy, knot by
knot
into corolla.
pelvis, den/dell,
beneath the skirts.
Grow tall and tipping
into blue chicory-like flowers
so plural at the edge of fields.
Though this regular stuff functions as “plant material,” with a fetid underside:
When a potato arrives on the harvesting machine too ripe, it smells of animals from last night, sticky and glazed, makes one terrified of a sudden frost.
The unzipped fly under the bridge in the dampest field; overplump touching its own prickles. Horned, bulbous.
If you must, plow memory under and pretend it was a stolen crop.
When
Truant on the tree’s pinnacle. missing the last chance to go to school and socialize as normal.
as in wild, a child’s hiding place under siege or a child hides so well so high up that she risks a fall or a dispersal into vastness. There is a hyper-vigilance in the pastoral:
Peril can be pushed into the distance, into a consolidation, like a town, although it’s bound to have one messenger running.
Her child-in-a-tree lines open out and out to landscape beyond materiality, plant materiality. There is a getaway hatch that goes straight up, a post-traumatic body that holds emotion so precisely and yet, as fugue—that which constructs a rigid edifice for safety, a structure with no bend in it. And then, a sweeping curve, from the inside of the eye almost, not just from the outer scape of the land. Release and veer.
Isometrics will show the interior corridors, ways to habituate oneself to curvature.
And the text does curve into gorgeous, decrepit light:
Diseased with an ache, for a briefer narrative, one’s ragged gold marigolds are a native country without borders.
The book makes me wonder (as in, set about intending toward) about the type of risk that enriches one’s somatic (the body’s invisible/underlying architecture).
Panorama, equal to exile. Absurd therefore to nest here.
Or,
Permission to cry, since it is impervious—a flower’s infantile continuous feeding on/daylight, membranes suckling on synthesis to heal by architectural means.
Peril lays down a topos of angles and decay; it offers what I most want in every poem—a substrate for grief and discovery, which rolls along nurturing motion and stillness, like a sky high over the weather. A few years ago, Hazel turned me on to the Alexander Technique, the idea of “letting the neck be free,” of tiny, relative spaces that could be cultivated between vertebrae. Alexander has to do with the body’s relationship to surface, measures and movements of increment and softness to allow more for the mineralized architecture of the bones. Radical ideas for one such as me, subject to constant ossification and with knees that prevent easy merging with landscape, such as flopping onto the grass.
Proceeding through repetition of values, infinitely small distances create elasticity
and eventually clearing.
I’ve let this book review of sorts flump off the side a bit. I’ve wandered and hopefully veered through it. Mainly, I wanted to tell you how much I love Hazel White. And I wanted you to consider the expanse and the moss garden minutiae that await you in her book. What chances there are to go off the grid of your non-plant consciousness,
Cut away the middle ground of axial objects
to go pure vertical, pure horizontal, which is pure falling through Peril as Architectural Enrichment.
-Amber DiPietra
June 6, 2011
Reading: Rosenwasser & White
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 7:30pm
Green Arcade Books
A reading featuring two new books from Kelsey Street Press
Elevators by Rena Rosenwasser
“This passionate psalm poem is a labyrinth inside a travelogue inside a dream.”—Jane Miller
Elevators is Rena Rosenwasser’s latest book of poems. She co-founded Kelsey Street Press in 1974, and between 1987 and 2006, she initiated and produced a series of collaborations between poets and visual artists for Kelsey Street. Rosenwasser’s poetry publications include Dittany (Taking flight) (Mayacamas Press); Unplace.Place (Leave Books); and three collaborations with artist Kate Delos: Isle (Kelsey Street Press); Aviary (Limestone Press); and Simulacra (Kelsey Street Press). Rena is currently co-director of Kelsey Street Press and a board member of Small Press Distribution.
Peril as Architectural Enrichment by Hazel White
“I set this book down and wept. . . . It is the most beautiful piece of writing I have read in many years.”—Bhanu Kapil
Peril as Architectural Enrichment is Hazel White’s first book of poetry. She is the author of eleven gardening books, published by Sunset Books and Chronicle Books, and for several years wrote a monthly column, “Living in the Landscape,” published by The San Francisco Chronicle. Her poetry has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Tarpaulin Sky (online), and VERSE. A chapbook, Richter 14, was published in 2010 by Deconstructed Artichoke Press. She lives in San Francisco.
GREEN ARCADE, 1680 Market Street/Gough, San Francisco, (415) 431-6800, www.thegreenarcade.com
May 7, 2011
megafono which becomes the big swallowing thing with rage or love, confused between hard and soft
Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, editors.
I have nursed this blog post for so long. Why? There is some considerable embarrassment on my part about having been a member of a feminist press for six years—and feeling like I really don’t know what feminism is. What it is for me, in the place where my body (disabled), my heritage and class (working, Hispanic/Italian-American) and my way of negotiating gender (more on that later) meets. And there is further discomfort for me around the fact that, as a somatic writing teacher (working with others to teach myself a new somatic), I am steadily becoming utterly disinterested in making any kind of syntax that will sound like discourse. I get all crunchy when I start to try to make theory—and by “crunchy” I don’t mean Rainbow Grocery. I mean calcified, like stones in the kidneys.
So I’ve retained this post for so long because I felt like I should be able to say something terribly smart about A Megaphone. A book that started off as a collection of articles about the disparities that still exist for women in experimental publishing, a book that Spahr and Young started to compile as part of “how we might claim the feminist tradition of body art and durational performance as abstracted avant gardists”. I felt like I should be able to say something terribly “abstracted” and smart about this book, in spite of everything.
But what I most admire about A Megaphone is its earnest rushing-forth, beyond discursvity. The book opened out to include writings from women in dozens of countries about what it is like to be a woman, a poet, a feminist in the places where they live. Needless to say, many of their answers were built on anger, on lack of opportunity, on fear and oppression. While not without hope, without fire. And I dare say, if woman with disabilities, of certain races, in poor neighborhoods in the U.S. were asked these questions, the registry of replies would be similar. I am grateful for the language that Spahr and Young used to call out for these “listening enactments”. In their introduction, they write
“So we began with willful naiveness. We said to ourselves that we will put out some words saying that we have some ears. and we are wiling to listen and then see what comes to our ears. We are not saying educate us, give us a reading list, do some labor that we should be doing ourselves. We are not saying that all feminisms are the same. ”
This open, exuberant language pervades A Megaphone, yet still, I have hesitated to post anything about the book.
Recently, Spahr and Young were interviewed by Amanda Montei on the Ms.Blog. They said, about their own listening enactments. “We’re not sure listening is a crucial tool. But we did it anyway. Maybe a better way to phrase this would be to say that listening might be one tool among many. And, like all tools, it might have its moments. And it might have its limitations. Or what we mean is that if feminism ended with listening, or was mainly about listening, it would be–as many feminists have pointed out–somewhat limited to stories of women’s personal experience. And perhaps might lack a more structural analysis.”
I like these limits. I like pushing up against these limits without changing modes to see what gets pressed through the mesh. In the end, at the beginning, what I hold, what I have to give, what I want to be better and better at receiving is personal stories. In the weeks it took me to read A Megaphone, I started listening differently to the stories inside me and the stories I was hearing on the news and the stories coming to me from women I work with as a disability peer counselor.
These stories included:
The sound of my great-grandmother’s voice, Mercedes Diaz, a daughter of Asturian peasants, a nurse and primary breadwinner, wife to my Welo—a man who wept a lot, drove a taxi cab and drank. She’d beat him over the head when he came home drunk. I can see her shoving her two fingers upward, scissorlike. The words “balls’ and “cut”. They were married for decades. She was alone a lot. He was soft, peeled my grapes, called me his “little pigeon”. She was steel. The women in my family, always in control. Always needing to be hard. It is no wonder I get confused.
My client was a crack whore in the Fillmore in the 80’s. Getting multiple sclerosis saved her because her rich parents stepped in. She lives better than any of my clients because she doesn’t have to worry about rent, health care, etc. And because she can’t go sell her body for drugs, she hasn’t ODed. She is more alone than any of my clients because she has no particular goals. And there is no particular advice she seeks from me. She was swept from one kind of induced body trauma to another, stronger more incidental illness. She is alive, but there has been nothing to replace crack. We bond over having names that sound like pasta sauce. Her cat is named Gia, after the 80’s model who died of heroin and HIV. The one Angelina Jolie played in that HBO biopic. When I watched Gia, my body twitched in symmetry. Recalling how some drugs have made me feel better than any medicine or poetry or somatic classes. That old itch, how it’s a little bit OK if you are careful and beautiful. And I wan to tell her to go and think about maybe wanting something. But not really. We talk about Tu Pac and we like that together too. Our next tattoos. Want to say, Ok, time to leave my office because I need to be putting more energy into the client who can’t afford his wheelchair. When I talk to Gia, I feel rage. And envy.
Spanish woman being interviewed on the BBC. She is trying to get her mentally ill mother out of prison. Much work to do, petitions and publicity. Her mother is in prison for killing the daughter’s rapist. She lit him on fire at a local bar more than ten years after the fact. The daughter doesn’t talk about herself—or rather she does, in the most practical manner. About the facts of her rape, but that yes. her mother was wrong, but how she deserves to be free. I catch myself agreeing entirely, hearing Wela Meche in my mind. “Cut his balls off.” The dead, burned up man. Then I think about the daughter, how the trauma is forever fractalized for her, into her efforts to free her mother. Who has the right to fall apart, to act out in rage, when, if ever?
Here’s my red megaphone tee-shirt, smudged in white paint. When I was a grad student, getting an MFA in poetry, I was mostly focused on “dating” via Craigslist. Mainly, I was interested in what the body-as-a-sexual tool could do. Because I had been stigmatized out of that utility. I was taking a class with a bunch of art-happening-hipster types. They made a huge float and we paraded around the Mission, wearing our megaphone shirts, ushering people on to our flaot and cheering for them. One was a middle-aged Mexican woman with a developmental disability. It happened to be her birthday. This was the best moment. She had fun, surprised us with the songs she introduced to the float. A later project involved us trying to make a $100 as fast as possible with our art. I put an ad on CL. An aging hippe with a braid came and picked me up and drove me far far out of SF, to his home in Santa Rosa. He spent 30 minutes taking nude photos of me. It was not hard to get naked in bright lights, like a surgical suite. And he, I knew, after a while, was not at all dangerous. Though he did force on me an analogy I didn’t need. He told me, while I was naked, and the flash bulb was going off, about a Dear Abby column he had recently read. About a man with CP. His brother procured a sex worker for him, “so that he could have that experience”. The experience I had, with the hippie photographer, was the easiest $100 I ever made, and the photos still intrigue me. When I reported to the art-happening-hipsters in my class, they were shocked. They looked scared for me. I was kind of scared I had done something disgusting. Only M. understood. She was an albino, transgender, ex-child-game-show-prodigy from the Philippines. I wish I still knew her.
This other photo is of my best/man/friend. He is wearing my $1 DKNY cardigan I got at Out-of-the-Closet, a thrift store that supports AIDS research. I promptly shrank it into a grey fuzzball after throwing it in the dryer. He took the clothes shaver to it and kept it on all night to stretch it out. With us, it is a constant struggle between interdependence and codependence. To me, he smells like my mother and this is a truth I will never parse out.
And this last narrative, a class I am considering auditing this summer:
Women and Disability in Film and Stories, Professor Marsha Saxton
Marsha Saxton, Ph.D. teaches Disability Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and works as a principal investigator at the World Institute on Disability, in Oakland, CA, with special interests in women’s issues, genetic technologies and Personal Assistance Services.
This course will explore through documentary, foreign and Hollywood film, readings and discussion, the intersections of women’s experience and disability issues, as well as with a range of other issues such as race and class in the global context. We will investigate the social, political and personal impact of disability and chronic illness on relationships, identity, employment, health, body image, sexuality, reproduction, motherhood, aging and other issues.
Through stories of real women’s and girls lives which reached the media in the last decade through the last century, students will move toward a dynamic understanding of the impact of physical, emotional and mental disabilities in the context of current social forces and public policy, primarily in the U.S, but with some comparison with other countries. Using lectures, discussion, films, readings and assignments, we will explore feminist analyses of disability issues, historic perspectives and current trends in medicine, independent living, care-giving, insurance, public benefits, law, and community activism. We will look at how they affect and are affected by disabled women and girls and their families. Discussion will focus on controversial ethical issues such as prenatal screening, wrongful birth law suits, and physician-assisted suicide. Course readings will utilize the rich film and written literature of disabled women’s anthologies, biography and autobiography, scholarly and popular literature, feminist analyses, creative writing, women’s art and theatre.
This course will be offered during Session D, July 5-August 12, Tu W Th9-11:30am. For more information and to register go to
http://sis.berkeley.edu/OSOC/osoc?p_term=SU&p_dept=gws and look for GWS111.
I’ll end with a quote by Milli Graffi, an Italian poet from Italy who offered her words as one ofA Megaphone’s listening enactments
“Feminism is a different way of writing the present.”
Now find, listen, enact with A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism
Posted by Amber DiPietra
May 2, 2011
Denise Newman/Center for Psychoanalysis 5/1/11
–from the notebook of Valerie Witte
Being disoriented, uncertain relative to state of mind
when I start w/ a concrete project, it’s doomed.
I’m going against everything
dramatization of the soul, very interesting
in its artlessness, transformation
in life having a child
inner/outer rhythms – where does the personal being
and self as part of society converge
new way of looking at child -
when I had child, no inner life, that was the end
of thinking—then baby was inner life
took ego out and I could just be in it
shift from daily to spiritual
was catholic – I bought it all – went to church by myself:
richness of language, rituals, forms; but people running
things were very flawed – there were beatings
then read Jung, then started zen practice - everyone I meet is my teacher
writing is a way to pay attention – now is my expression of spirituality
a curtain of light out of nothing
just the strangeness of it, words that still have charge.
I saw the word windbag – and that got me writing.
Jolts in language and experience
or a word comes up and all the potential
being in public and having private feelings
I’m not always sure what the story is
Leslie Scalapino: The self as a guinea pig
I use myself like an exhibit to go to the edges
of that self – she writes beyond herself
do you write yourself out of the poem?
The poem is directing things/leading by then.
I write slowly, collecting…
I’ve been so shy and it’s quite a joy to share my work b/c it’s not about me
to be surprised—want to write what I don’t know, a sound I haven’t heard,
there’s a collection of new questions that go beyond
questions that started poem.
Jung: Lining up dream elements – dreaming all day
not just at night. I would like to write
one big dream – how fluid they are
I know where I am, I don’t know where I am
when are we saying too much, when are we saying too little?
The distance I need to go – trying to orient
writing about people w/o souls
accident/no accident
the strong man and the whack and the pee are still there
the path turns out to be quite a different path
I’m looking for a vehicle – the accident could be a vehicle –
one’s vulnerability –
we all have post and pending accidents
a poem must enact that coming to know/searching
to know (not just documentation)
poems are accidents – I don’t want to have control over it
– collaborating w/ so many things
exploring multiple selves
my writing
I’m not interested in telling stories, I’m not good at it.
My writing has gotten looser, there’s more breath in it
I’m interested in simpler writing – Clarice Lispector –
experiences the world as I imagine my cat experiences it – so daring
my first book – very free, stream of consciousness, no periods, lots of adventures:
you’ll work all your life trying to get back to writing how you wrote this book
shift levels – please hold to reflections St Jerome –
associative process – lets you change levels –
maybe less straightforward- swerves occurring
on a word, folding of all my material –
more will be coming into later poems of book.
A book has its own world, its own lexicon
of words and association and you are working in that.
Holding: To be able to be present w/ someone
and not commenting or trying to change, just holding
listening – not trying to figure things out, permits
it to unfold, just trying to experience
walking 2 inches off the ground –
everything is connected – I got it in my body
appetite and desire are part of the soul. So…
what is the soul? I thought I had left that Christian paradigm.
I was surprised looking at my friend’s composite photos –
future people – They don’t seem to have an invisible glue
that holds the parts together. What is the soul?
I’m a body going through the world.
Relax and greet – dispel a habit w/ a phrase
I’m making an invention to heighten a situation.
My body will decompose one day – a useful thought to keep near me
a scaffolding to hold onto – while dealing w/ the unknown
<
art can take you places but it can't show you how to live
spirituality can guide one thru tricky world
could I call writing meditation? Apparently not
difference of watching your thoughts
and making something thru poetry –
tho you are making something in a different way
than how most things are made
- to listen w/o memory or desire
to be in the present experiencing –
a little like unnaming an object – related to patience.
Helps w/ concentration and writers’ block.
Give it time and it will come.
Patterns that unconsciousness is permitting to emerge –
themes, shifts in state, something that makes me feel
there is something here in this moment that’s particularly alive
I started to feel a little crazy, in a good way. First I didn’t get them.
Then I got them too much. They’re very effective, I feel like I got inside your brain.
Excitability of awareness in the poems