by H.K. Rainey, special to Kelsey Street Press

I see a confluence
& dream
a new relation appears

– Bernadette Mayer, The Ethics of Sleep

The mind is a connection  machine.

–      Jonah Lehrer, in an interview with Stephen Colbert

A Revolution Against Syntax

In her latest book, Bernadette Mayer offers us the gift of freedom. If the Greeks believed that true democracy was chaos, it is this particular incarnation of democracy that is most at work in The Ethics of Sleep. From her poems, Mayer removes any progression of ideas, any structural syntax that offers us a footing in “meaning” and serves us instead the cold soup of language: imagery without the restraint of patriarchal influence. In this war against patriarchal ideals she has chosen the idea of sleep as her weapon: her tank, her M-16, her hand grenade.

Whether we realize it or not, we have certain predisposed beliefs about sleep.

“Why do I want you to be a certain way, sleep,” Mayer asks. Sleep is expected at night, or during structured times of the day. Like traditional poetry, sleep is the slave of structure, considered more of an evil to the industrious human than a boon, if it is left to exist outside of structure. Patriarchy dictates that citizens need structure in order to become beneficial members of society. Thus, by patriarchal standards, poetry needs structure in order to get its point across. It requires hypotaxis and progression in order to make sense. Mayer despises and challenges this assumption, as evidenced by her conversation with Dave Brinks and Jamey Jones (included as an Afterward to the collection):

MAYER: Here’s a good question: is there a progression of things? Because as a human being, you get this illusion that there is. But probably there isn’t.

JONES: So to think that there’s a progression… maybe that’s what’s wrong with humanity?

MAYER: Well, you know whose fault it is, it’s Aristotle’s. Aristotle is to blame for all these matters. The whole cause and effect idea comes from Aristotle. I hate Aristotle. A lot of what he said is totally nonsense. It’s a whole way of thinking that a lot of people in the western world have adopted. It does nothing but harm. It’s the reason for wars. It’s the reason for patriarchy. It’s annoying.

So how does a poet relieve society from the bonds of patriarchy? Mayer eases us into the idea of this type of freedom with her first poem, “Max’s Dream.” The dream is being narrated outside of sleep, in retrospect, from memory. The sentence structure here differs from the other structures (or, rather, challenged structures) in the collection. The dream is related in full sentences, in a subject-verb-object model of construction; and from the narration, it is clear that the waking mind attempts to string ideas and images together so that they make “sense.” The poem’s images move smoothly from one to the next showing the previous item’s relation to the following one in a kind of hypotaxis:

…Then they said
they had built a psychiatrics ward. Soon
after a man who looked like Jack Nicholson
came running out. I shook his hand for
some reason and then he turned into a kid
and ran away. Then without knowing it I
stepped into the Alarm and went inside the
building. I looked around and I saw some
weird-looking people. They screamed when
they saw me but then they just kept asking
if I wanted to have dinner and all without
moving their mouths… (11)

The scaffolding of this poem resembles the structure of a dream (sleep) when the rules of patriarchy (awake) are applied. In this poem, the human brain “recalls” the content of the dream, and rehashes it using the syntax of accepted grammatical rules. The use of “then” to string the sentences together grants “meaning” to the poem. Structure dictates that one item must follow another item in order to give the mind closure. The other way in which the patriarchal model prevails is in the connections the human mind makes to the images in the poem. It is not difficult to imagine that “psychiatrics ward” and “Jack Nicholson” are ideas that can be connected by considering the film adaptation of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the concepts of book, movie and actor are all false structures: structures made to look real when, in fact, they are totally contrived. The book itself, while containing verisimilitude and realism, is still a fiction, the story’s outcome controlled by the authorial presence of Ken Kesey.  The film is not the book exactly as it was written, but an adaptation. Jack Nicholson is not R. P. McMurphy, but an actor portraying the written character. In reality, structure is a type of ventriloquism; speaking for us when the power of speaking for ourselves is taken away. This idea is mirrored in “Max’s Dream” by the people who “just kept asking/if I wanted to have dinner and all without/moving their mouths.”

But, Mayer argues, we do not have to be slaves to structure. We do not have to accept our loss of power. “The Buttered Key” removes the hypotaxis of “Max’s Dream”, replacing it with more liberating parataxis:

Philip’s workplace Marie’s workplace Peggy’s workplace Rosemary’s
workplace two arrested in appliance thefts a cross is
turning into words over the phone it is a sentence of information
about women’s freedom & everybody else’s too the
cross’s words make no sense (13).

Here in the second poem is our first glimpse of freedom. The reader unfamiliar with “language poetry” will undoubtedly feel uncomfortable with the shift that is occurring. The awake mind struggles in vain to make connections between the workplace and the arrests, between the cross and the words. Only it doesn’t mean anything. But in Mayer’s way of thinking, it does have meaning. Mayer gives us the key to understanding the rest of the text and the concept of freedom. The title, “The Buttered Key,” uses the word “key” outrightly to help us understand the importance of the poem. The word “buttered” can also indicate a smooth transition from one power structure (patriarchal) to the next (personal). The following statement suggests parataxis: “Philip’s Workplace Marie’s workplace Peggy’s workplace Rosemary’s workplace.” We are on our way to understanding that a revolution against Aristotelian syntax will ultimately free us. Following it up with the statement “words make no sense,” Mayer shows us that we can’t expect to find the same syntactical meaning in a world free of patriarchal influence. In this revolution, we may not even be able to figure out which “side” we are on, since it is patriarchy itself that requires “sides”: day and night, black and white, male and female:

“What side are we on?” I say
“I don’t know, the last cut on the first side I guess,”
he says (19).

A Revolution Against Meaning

What does it mean to mean? The human mind is great at making meaning. Even if the meaning is false, even if it is harmful, we still craft it until it feels right. “Everything happens for a reason,” we say, and we believe it. When the police in our television shows make a stomach-churning deal with a serial killer to find the buried bodies of other (usually female) victims, they justify their decision with statements like, “The family needed to gain some closure.” As if burying the body will remove the pain of the loved one’s passing and allow them to “move on.” Like Aristotelian logic, Mayer’s work seems to suggest that this idea of closure, of progression, is nonsense. Closure is a ventriloquism. The mind outside of sleep craves closure and meaning. But closure and meaning are weapons of the patriarchal model. They take away our freedom:

Does that mean meaning anyway? As in to give way?
Have we been charged with following? (23)

But, does removing all meaning make us truly free? Unlike Charles Bernstein’s The Sophist, Mayer’s attack isn’t purely to decry all meaning. It’s speaking out against the origination of that meaning. Mayer’s work advances the idea that the making of meaning relies upon the reader, not the author. Using structure indiscriminately, the author can (often unknowingly) influence the meaning gleaned by the reader. A declarative statement followed by a period encourages the reader to comply, while a question mark suggests that the reader has been granted the freedom to think for herself; to fill in the blanks with her own original thought. Everything belongs in its place. In patriarchal society, there is a time for the woman to speak and there is a time for her to be silent. (Politically, within the last several months we have seen this idea played out. Particularly, during conversation of contraception in which women were banned from speaking out, and those who did were punished with epithets and derision.) But how can the author encourage the reader to craft her own meaning? How can she encourage the reader to take the first step into challenging the usual language model? In her poems, Mayer solves this problem by forcing the reader to function like the human brain, making connections, accepting some and discarding others of the myriad of stimuli that bombard it each day. We do not perceive objects wholly along with their context. What we might eventually perceive as a sunset, comes to us first in individual elements: red, circle, violet, distance, night, year, Morocco. When we connect these elements together, we perceive the entirety of the sunset over a rubbled field in Morocco. But we just as easily forget what we were wearing when we viewed that sunset, the actual date, or whether or not it was a Wednesday. Similarly, structure and memory collide in “Golden Up The Glass”:

…to whom we don’t listen: ‘No form,
no structure’
I was thinking of these problems
just as I went back to the collapsing refrigerator
which has to be transported. Well the memory
of the part
is subject to but does not bring back the memory (49).

A Revolution Against Worry

Sleep allows us to relive our fears (dreams of being chased, teeth falling out, etc.) while protecting us from physical harm. Perhaps dreams even prepare us for the act of living daily. But living daily comes to us with its own set of worries. In “On Sleep,” Mayer struggles with these trepidations. The syntax of this poem, like “Max’s Dream,” shows it was written during waking. Syntax has re-emerged. Subject precedes verb. Verb follows object. One sentence more easily relates to the next. Mayer shares her views with us from her authorial voice. But, the poem is perceived by a poet on the verge of sleep. Not every statement makes literal sense. She weaves in and out of liminal space, but still, the ever-present worry seeps in, because sleep has not yet arrived to free her from context. While the obviously “awake” parts are fraught with negative words like worried, broken, stealing and killed, the parts that slip into meaninglessness are more likely to contain words like safely, healthily, successful and laughing. Mayer’s “awake” stanzas are lists of fears

that I will become a bitter person, that I am so unrealistic as to be surprised about what happens in nuclear power plants and NYC public schools, plus something I cant say here about love (58).

The poet desires sleep, not only to release her from worry,

knowing the dream
has no meaning
dream life the relief
from significance (77)

but also because worry is the one thing the patriarchal structure desires for her (and us):

After all if they want us all to move to the suburbs or to the country where it’s much quieter and cooler, there’s plenty of other nuclear power plants there we could live near so we could still worry homeopathically… (59)

The poet speaks of worry as something that, if we were prevented from doing it, we would be at a loss. In a patriarchal society, worrying keeps us in line.

Michael Moore, film-maker and critic, suggests in Bowling for Columbine that fear is what those who have the power in society want us to feel. News agencies and government agencies are constantly giving us something new to be afraid of in order to make us more tractable. Thus, dreams are our defense against this fear-mongering power structure. Dreams are the essence at the core of freedom:

I first studied them
as ways of surprising
a finding awake then truth
in the uses from sex
in the arms of
the forearm obsessionalist
relief from belief (70-71)

If we were to embrace what Mayer calls the “ethics of sleep,” perhaps the world we live in would be less fraught with conflict. There would be no haves and  have nots, no right and  wrong, no powerful and powerless. Perhaps these ethics would be used to create in us:

…the desire to sleep forever
in a big cold loft,
then later
as a way to end wars (71).

H.K. Rainey is the author of Memory House. She co-curates the Anger Management & Revenge reading series in San Francisco. She currently lives and writes in Hanceville, Alabama.

A First Visit to the Prelinger Library

by Erin Heath

Last week, I visited a little secret of San Francisco called The Prelinger Library for the first time. It’s still calling to me.

Institutional libraries have been a part of my life for the last eight years. As a student, and as a young member of the publishing world, the importance of the archive—of preservation— has been hammered into my working psyche. Having the privilege of working as a shelver and book processor within art libraries in my undergrad—and now graduate—work, the library has become a site of duty, of familiarity, and of comfort for me. A library is a place of order, routine, but paradoxically, of utter surprise and chance. (For instance, books are always going missing, but turn up in odd places and times. Someone remembers a book they forgot to turn in five years ago, and the library gains back a long lost child.)

The Prelinger Library has open stacks. (photo: Monica Peck)

Even more magical about libraries—institutional or not—no single person working there knows or comprehends the volume of its books and materials. Each tiny spine with a little white label taped to it has its own world of information, its own resources, networks of correspondents, and stories. There are thousands of these in any one library, and so a library is a mystery to everyone. Something is always undiscovered. I get a similar feeling of wonder when thinking or reading about outer space. A library is a space that expands infinitely beyond its walls.

While shelving I might find a book I know but haven’t seen in a long time. It’s especially heartening and sort of spooky when I find a book whose cover or pages or images I find very familiar, but would’ve never remembered its title or author. Whenever this happens, it feels as if they’re coming back to me for a reason. Maybe fated. It’s a good enough reason to give the book a second look—after all, it keeps finding me. A library is a place where a book’s position on the shelves has meaning: many times, it resides next to books with similar subjects. At the Prelinger, this exhilarating feeling of chance and discovery never goes away.

The Prelinger differs from institutional libraries in a few fascinating ways: it actively collects materials that are unavailable in (and literally discarded by—!) other, larger, city-funded libraries. Its unique organizational scheme has departed from the Dewey decimal call numbering system that we’re used to. Instead:

On our shelves, maps, government documents, books, periodicals, and ephemera are all shelved together within commonly-held subject headings. This promotes an integral approach to research and browsing, and opens wide the possibility of discovery.

Megan Prelinger, one of the owners and founders of the library, explains that the library began with “meditative road trips around the American west” in her college-age years:

I noticed in small towns, in old bookstores, in gas stations that had been converted to book stores, in the back aisles of hardware stores … that in all of these places all kinds of interesting literature could be found. Micro-local newspapers, zines, back issues of Popular Mechanics, old history books and Zane Grey novels that would cost real money in the city … all these kinds of things were circulating in this very cheap very informal economy of ephemeral literature. It was then that I got the idea of trying to investigate what kind of record of history would you have from developing a collecting practice that was based on the literature that populated these informal economies and accidental landscapes of books?

The amount of material I actually collected that way is not huge — a few boxes. But it gave me the idea, an idea that Rick [Prelinger] and I then implemented together and were able to scale up dramatically when we tapped in to the circulating universe of library discards.

What better metaphor for a place of infinite ideas—for it to have begun with an idea by picking up scraps of American history? While the Occupy Movement forges ahead, its emphasis on de-colonization, anti-capitalism, a world for the people whose voices have been silenced, a place like the Prelinger is of this time: it encourages and holds dear alternatives to the history we find the usual ways. It offers our cultural undercurrents.

Further intriguing was the Prelinger’s organizational system. Row One begins with “what’s in and on the land”: natural resources, maps, natural history, land use—it forms the U.S. landscape and mimics its geography from West to East, beginning with Alaska and Hawaii, landing on the west coast, and moving eastward. Row Two moves on to “what people do with the land,” industry, factories, infrastructure, and transportation (rail and automobile). Transportation is a means of traveling to new frontiers, to make new cities. This makes sense: in our collective memory, we know that the railroad created many new opportunities and new metropolises in the United States. Row Three moves to the home, the suburbs, design, to architecture, and Row Four leads to cultural history and media. As the rows progress, U.S. culture and history progresses, and so the map of the rows are a curated representation, in the Prelingers’ minds, of American history. (Well, isn’t this what all libraries are?)

In our library, you may be drawn toward a subject without knowing that a map of its related area would be relevant to your inquiry, until you arrive at the shelf and learn so for yourself.

The Prelinger is carefully curated; its items are thoughtfully shelved by subject, not by material type or by a numbering system. It pushes against the library model—but it also sets the stage to offer a library’s most precious gifts: discovery, serendipity, and chance. As the Prelingers pointed out during my visit, institutional libraries are beginning to hold their archives behind closed doors, so this prevents the kind of free browsing they want to encourage. In a closed library, a patron must search for an item and ask for a librarian to get it for them, with little idea of what else might be grouped with that item.

Like any other library, the Prelinger too discards items and actively seeks new ones. On their pamphlet available to the public, a hard-boiled description suffices:

Like a long-cooking pot of stew, it continuously takes in new ingredients while also reducing down, becoming richer and more concentrated with time.

When you’re an artist, the most obscure thing (in my case, the history of transportation in the East Bay) can be of interest, can inspire a huge investigation/project. Part of an artist’s job is to follow instincts or hunches: to set out answering one question that multiplies into several. A library is a primary place we can do that—sometimes it’s a starting place. For a writer like myself, this is even truer. Books are writers’ starting and ending points; they’re tools and they’re also (if you want them to be) the finished entity.

Because of the Prelinger’s ever-increasingly unique qualities—its collection’s searchability, its openness, it’s “appropriation friendly” policy (they provide a scanner and a photocopier for anything you want to copy), the Prelinger is an ideal tool for a writer: especially an American one. A writer interested in U.S. history can come to the Prelinger and create a fictional character about a coalmine worker in the Southwest (perhaps by searching their American Southwest section), and discover a news article about a drought that may have happened in the area during this character’s era.

In this vein, the Prelinger reflects the way that a writer selects information for his or her fictions more than a public library might. A public or institutional library attempts to house periodicals in one room, literary books in another, ephemera in yet another, and so one subject, one era of American history is catalogued and scattered throughout the building. The public library system is more set up for specific queries rather than exploration on an area or topic. Many writers don’t know what will happen to their characters before they sit down to write. The Prelinger as a mode of searching, of continuous discovery, supports the writing process in ways that other libraries can’t.

This place’s underlying strength for me is its embodiment of the way our minds truly work. It embodies how stories, poems, or other forms of literary works connect to our lives—how they come back to us after we’ve read them. The Prelinger touches on how a free, uninhibited search is supposed to happen. A question goes unanswered and leads to more, in the same way a great work of art leads us and leads us and leads us on to something else.

For more information on the Prelinger, visit http://www.prelingerlibrary.org/.

A recently-added member of Kelsey Street Press, Erin H. Heath is currently finishing her MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts. Her writing and photography has been published in The Creosote Journal, E-Ratio, Samizdat, Birdsong, and The Brooklyn Rail. During fall of 2011 she had a book art exhibition at The Beethoven Center in San Jose, CA. Visit her blog at erininthebay.tumblr.com.

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

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?

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

– 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

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.

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.

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.

“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

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