Small Press Traffic Reading Report: Susan Gevirtz and Eileen Tabios at SPT. By Jai Arun Ravine
Gevirtz and Tabios on communities and empires at Small pPess Traffic.
By KSP Guest Blogger Jai Arun Ravine
On May 7, 2010 a large white tent ballooned in front of the main entrance to the CCA building. Susan Gevirtz and Eileen Tabios were not reading inside this tent. Cloaked in a lecture hall tucked away in the back, every seat enabled with retractable desk tops and ethernet jacks, approaching the architecture of “empires” and “community” began for me with Susan’s hair.
Its shape fascinated me. Nudged against a partially obscured EXIT sign [“exit up, naked eye”], her hair was pinned into/around/as space much like fabric was pinned into/around/as a mannequin in the gallery and post office tray plastic was sculpted into/around/as the nearby stairwell. ———————————————————————————————— Here I drew a line to Eileen’s son’s fascination with viewing the night sky through a telescope. ———————– As a child I was also enthralled by stars and planets and volunteered in my hometown’s art and science museum, where I spent much time in the planetarium.
Leaning back in its slightly slanted seats, we focused intently on the space above our heads. The dome pulsed with a glowing ring of city lights, slowly fading into a deep black sky—and in it, all the stars there could be. In that dream-like night the many things I desired to learn and know, so vast as to be unknowable.
In witnessing Susan and Eileen’s performances adjacent to each other, I began to map the distances between “empire” and “community”—a sky/space traversed by matters of “control” — “translation” — “manipulation” — “attachment” — “transnational” — “adoption” — “adaptation” — “inertia” — “airplanes” — “transport” — “tornadoes” — “fury.”
Susan, in reading excerpts from AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger, charts the practices and trajectories of control and transport in air traffic, translating the sky into a place one can travel across and through, attaching fragments of sound to the landscape of the space above, the page becoming a tightrope of arrivals [“...tightrope...sew arm...seaweed...sun lag...”].
The practice of charting, naming and controlling the very air above you seems absurd, as does the idea of “owning” airspace above any given country [“no grammars find me”]. Here empires tower up into the sky, boundaries of breath are rigorously policed, as impossible as naming the stars. I found that some of the text of her latest book was performed as a sound and visual piece, words coming together within the temperature of music, the climate of sound [“not betwixt”], being enveloped by language like a sky.
Eileen, in reading a series of haybun from The Thorn Rosary, charts the practices and trajectories of adoption and adaptation in transnational translations enacted on the bodies of mother and child [“...froze back into another fist / mountain / smoke...”]. In sharing both successful and failed processes of adoption, Eileen opens up the space between government agencies and malnourishment, in which the inertia between a potential mother and child is interrupted by tornadoes and fury, catalogued disorders and inabilities of connection, —lines broken— [“shatter my once drawn heart”].
The orphanage becomes a constellation of disposable friendliness and second-hand toys, of surface presentations and meaningless gestures, where only a certain few have the power to connect the dots [“Dear Government Agency In Charge Of Children...”]. The form of Eileen’s “haybun,” a pairing of prose poem with hay(na)ku, becomes a vehicle that transports emotion and compresses it into compact fists [“...wind smolders song...silk sunders wind...”].
Under an umbrella-ed sky/space I began to think about the ways we are dictated and transformed by practices and movements we can’t fully understand—a bureaucratic system in another country or swimming in the Aegean Sea—large impermeable regimes or the air that continues to envelope us.
[“Sometimes the world cannot be fitted into the poem,”] says Eileen, but can we fit the world into the sky? The sky into a poem? We can agree to another attempt to engage, to attach in the action of our poetics. Maybe then hope will once again live, and we can lift a lip of space to reveal—————————————————————
–
Jai Arun Ravine is the author of the chapbook IS THIS JANUARY (Corollary Press, 2010) and a Kundiman fellow. Jai’s work appears most recently in Galatea Resurrects #14 and the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, and is forthcoming in Drunken Boat and Lantern Review. For more information, visit http://jaiarunravine.wordpress.com/
May 9, 2010
An evening with the Brown(e)s! SPT Reading Report by Mg Roberts.
Laynie Browne and Lee Ann Brown on bodies at Small Press Traffic.
KSP Guest Blogger: Mg Roberts
Art by Nascha Poole
I parallel park in less than two turns, somewhere my grandmother is smiling with lipstick smears at the edges of her mouth. It’s 7:49PM. Dinner. Juliana. Late. And I am early enough to find a seat on the couch across from a wooden vessel encased in glass. Take NOTE [of the] SLIGHT CHANGE IN VENUE. My pen dies. We explore the Brown(e)’s aura via an intro by CA Conrad.
Lee Ann Brown begins the reading; her southern lilt fills the Macky Room. She introduces a surrealist game, splitting the room in two. I am a series of interrogations, while the other half is the reply. Returning to the topic: On Bodies, Brown reads from her latest work—sonnets embodying the physical bodies of children, elementary education, and play—the interior and external appendages specific to children. Her daughter reads quietly. The reading nears its end with a ballad from Brown’s The Sleep That Changed Everything, but not before the audience gets to correspond and define exultation, daylight, a kiss, and I learn the answer to what an adjunct is: “duodenum—just say it”.
Yes, the replies to questions. The correct reply. A solution to the problem. A correct solution. Respond. Correspond.
Intermission is decided against and Laynie Browne continues the conversation: On Bodies by reading from The Desires of Letters, “She reads a mirror” and “lists prepositions as indistinct sound”. Once again I return to the night’s theme: On Bodies, but this time as a landscape and its relation to children—to scaffolding. I am most struck by Browne’s usage and description of the difficulty of space in the Bay Area typography, occurring as “lodged, fragmented, splintered without visible space,” which Browne correlates to the difficulty of raising children in such a landscape and the difficulty of community and avoiding utter self –righteousness, stemming from the physical attributes of living in a fractured space that demands we are “bodies enmeshed as coastlines,” subject to the ebb and flow of tides, broken I-bars, retrofitting, erosion.
Even several days after the reading I am still in conversation with the Brown(e)’s navigation of motherhood and its relation to the physical space of the body as architecture and geographic landscape. As I re-enter into my own household as wife, mother, writer how do I navigate this physical space connected by bridges and tunnels, how am I “to embrace you without infinite affection” at the interstice of this location? Where everyday, as my daughter likes to say, is earthquake weather.
MG Roberts was born in Subic Bay, Philippines. She is an MFA graduate of New College of California, where strange tricks were added to her bag. Currently, she teaches in the San Francisco Bay area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in How2, Wordriot, horse less review, and13:after. If she weren’t a poet she would be a snake handler, or maybe just a good speller.