KSP Featured Poet for May 2011: Denise Leto, 2 Poems.
“feminine fragments carry”
What she drew
she drew on you,
on field via margin to see
apart, break apart.
Sometimes they wander around the grounds. The remnants. People, I mean.
When words are no longer in mind or time—just gesture.
Birth: the most elegant
wreckage. Either way.
The slightest definition of form
becoming cadaverous.
She’d say, ‘Pick me up, twirl me.’ Now, if I hug her, I must reach gently.
It’s the same as not touching air.
“I” is always
dissolution. Meridian.
Lines emerge uneasy,
it’s who we can’t animal.
But anatomy, it’s my birthday! Love giving her all the things that make up charcoal.
The apartment exploded and her work, sensuous, rained in particulate.
If shape were a species
of everything.
Starfish on shore,
or the beginning of fingers.
“this woman falling is time tapering to a point”
She lands a backward
apex from then
on
*
Boneless starburst
*
Shifts in the condition
of air while toppling;
how the dirt describes her
eyes: more dirt. And her mouth,
strapless
*
The molecular disturbance
of height times next
stranded on pavement,
she is the chalk outline
never
*
Trapped motion
in a pink tissue scrum.
The pretense of rescue,
head-long like a
hook
*
Maybe plant a fig tree
in the grime streaming out
of her sockets
fruit dropping ripe from
iris
*
A long day’s gurney
*
A perpetual scanning of stairs
the impression of stasis
backlit
Denise Leto is a poet, writer, and Senior Editor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her selected poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in a number of journals and anthologies including Beauty is a Verb, Cinco Puntos Press, September 2011; “WaveForm,” a collaborative work, forthcoming from ChainLinks Book Series; and in Wildhorses on Fire: Other Letters; Drunken Boat; The Wolf Magazine, published by the Arts Council of England; Aufgabe; 26: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics; The Seneca Review; Xantippe: A Journal of Poetry & Literary Reviews; Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multi-Cultural Poetry, Penguin; MELUS: The Journal for the Society of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the US.
She was a Fellow for the University of Michigan’s Research & Practice Symposium on Movement, Somatics & Writing; a guest editor for Sinister Wisdom: A Journal for the Lesbian Imagination in the Arts and Politics; co-founder of Three Guineas Press; and is a past Honorary Fellow and Artist in Residence at Djerassi Resident Artist Program as well as a former Djerassi fellowship juror. She has presented her poetry and critical works at readings, conferences, multi-media art performances and other selected venues, most recently at “Breaking Ranks: Human/Nature,” at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California and at the Subterranean Art House for the event “Feminist Embodiment, Somatics, and Disability Poetics.”
This Easter, she blew up peep some-mores with her niece Antonia.
April 28, 2011
Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun conversation
Amanda Montei over at Ms. Blog interviews Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young on their new anthology, A Megaphone
I spoke with Spahr and Young about their relationship to “crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun” feminism:
How do you see the “playful dogmatism” and “enactments of listening” of the crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun tradition functioning outside of the poetry world?
In many ways, the “playful dogmatism” of a sort of crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun feminism is used more frequently outside of the experimental/avant-garde/etc poetry world. Two quick shout outs: Related to literature, VIDA [an organization promoting women in the arts] has done some important work in the last year tracking [the number of literary women reviewing and being reviewed] in mainstream publications, and has gotten coverage in large media outlets that probably reach far more readers than our poetry puddle ever will. And there is that blog Being a Woman in Philosophy. These are both interesting, even if somewhat limited attempts to gather information or to expose [attitudes toward women in the field]. And yet, at the same time, we always feel it is important to remember that nothing short of a total transformation of economic and political conditions is going to result in the more equitable world we hope for–something more meaningful than the representation of women in magazines or in philosophy departments at 50 percent.
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.
When we started the project of asking writers in other locations, we were, we confess, hoping for more structural analysis. We sent [the authors] a version of “Numbers Trouble,” [an essay on the paucity of women poets included in A Megaphone] and one thing we hoped to get were some numbers on how many women show up in the anthologies and [win] the prizes and stuff like that in their area. What we got back was a mixture of this sort of information, and a lot of personal stories about negotiating, with varying degrees of success, the structures and distribution networks that support literary production. Our first reaction was, I don’t know, disappointment? But our next reaction was to begin to question our endless desire for more structural analysis.
April 23, 2011
Press Release: Peril as Architectural Enrichment by Hazel White
Peril arrives next week! It is KSP member Hazel White’s first book of poems.
Press Release:
Title: Peril as Architectural Enrichment
Peril as Architectural Enrichment tests landscape as the subject of experience. Propelling awareness vertically and horizontally, it questions how limbs want to move in space, when convivial with treetops, views, and pollen. The poems greet danger—chopped narratives/crops, a fall, inundation—and the refuge of a familiar curvature: the turning of long lines becoming the same as building shelter in the wild where a peril can be seen and felt, and to write is to know what’s near. Like a designed landscape, Hazel White’s poetry delivers a new sense of orientation/a long-sought spatial fluency: “I want to ride in the fur of animals.”
“I set this book down and wept. . . . It is the most beautiful piece of writing I have read in many years.”
—Bhanu Kapil
Biography:
Hazel White grew up on farms in the southwest of England. After finishing undergraduate degrees in philosophy and literature at Warwick University, she studied crop agriculture at Bridgwater College Center for Land Based Studies, and then, through University of California, Berkeley, Extension, landscape architecture. She’s 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. White graduated from the MFA Writing program at California College of the Arts in 2005. 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.
Specifications:
Title: PERIL AS ARCHITECTURAL ENRICHMENT Author: Hazel White
Publisher: Kelsey Street Press
Specs: 96 pp. Pub date: May 2011
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-932716-76-7
April 13, 2011
Four Year Old Girl, past and present.
One of my favorite four-year-old girls has been become 5.
One of her mama’s favorite passages from Mei mei Berssenbrugge’s Four Year Old Girl is
The meaning she’s conscious of is contingent, a surface of water in an uninhabitable world, existing as/our eyes and ears/You wouldn’t think of her form by thinking about water./You can go in, if you don’t encounter anything./
It was important to mama to get a copy of Mei mei’s book before daughter slipped wildly, deliciously, from 4 to 5. Mama scooped up one of our last copies.
Meanwhile, I am more than certain that girl 5’s sister, Miss Opsrey, will make for a spectacular four-year-old girl.
And now, KSP has reprints!
Thanks to Mg Roberts and her girls for these photos. Buy Four Year Old Girl here: http://www.kelseyst.com/publications/four_year_old_girl.htm
–A. DiPietra
April 10, 2011
All I Wanted to Say—An Exploration of Communication in the Digital Era
I live in an era in which technology pervades nearly all aspects of daily communication.
I live in a place where technology forms the basis of the economy, supporting the livelihood of thousands of people.
I work for a company whose goal is to educate people on new tools and trends in technology so that they can build new platforms for communication and creation, to engage the world more fully.
In this landscape of immersive technology, which enables us to c
onnect with countless people in a matter of seconds, I sometimes wonder, are we becoming invisible?
This question is explored in innovative and poignant ways in “All I Wanted to Say,” a multimedia performance about technology and communication created and performed by San Francisco-based actress and director Silvia Girardi.
In audio recordings, a woman describes the anguish we all experience in this transition period wherein we regularly go in and out of the “network”—and the complexities this creates. She describes her daughter—so often in her room, on the computer, on her phone, communicating with vast numbers of people at any given moment—all the while “disappearing into the network.” Another voice hails Facebook as an extremely efficient mode of communication—but as the woman points out, it isn’t sensorial; it’s like eating SlimFast—you consume the protein of the drink, but you do not participate in the meal in the same way . . .
During one segment, Girardi takes on the persona of a flamboyant Web Goddess and rattles off a litany of popular social networks throughout the world while their interfaces pop up onscreen (the various “rooms” of the piece are also connected by series of beeps and flashing, colored dots onscreen—the kinds of “noise” we are virtually immersed in these days in our constant exchange of information and ideas). She wryly notes their emphasis on friends—you have 250 friends, you can connect to thousands of people through your friends . . . yet you have zero friends. With this frenzy of friend counts, she suggests, as probably anyone who has used a social network would attest—you can have countless “friends” in-network—but you can still be lonely. Where are you, she asks, raising the notion of invisibility once again.
But it isn’t all bleak—in Girardi’s show, we as audience members are both observers of the ways technology influences our lives and participants in the process of communication across media, with the performers, and with our fellow audience members. We experience the words of Thomas Jefferson, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare; we’re invited to write four-minute love poems, some of which are read aloud—allowing us all to connect to each other and a loved one. And in the end, we leave Girardi dancing in the Sun Room, joyous. She shows us we have many ways—both physical and virtual—to say what we want to say, what remains untold, to achieve the connections we long for.
“”All I Wanted to Say” is performed by Silvia Girardi on stage and Giuliano Pirotello on screen, and is a collaborative creation by international artists: poet Allison DeLauer, film production house Cinematique – Milan, choreographer Folawole, video artist Seng Chen, digital artist Tim Roseborough, and musician Matt Venuti. The performance premiered atThe Garage in San Francisco on April 1. Find out more on their websites . . . or on a social network near you.
-Posted by Val Witte
April 2, 2011
Press Release: New Book by KSP Co-Founder Rena Rosenwasser
Rena Rosenwasser’s latest book of poetry from Kelsey Street Press is a tour de force of story fragments whose lush layering of time, space, and consciousness provides a counterweight to the void that lies just beneath its smooth and textured surfaces. The poems are visually rich as the poet’s eye leaps to deftly land on sights and sites that traverse the white space of the page and down. These experimental poems seduce us with their verbal architectures as the book transports the reader visually and graphically across the globe, through time to the present, from Perugia to Egypt to Manhattan, where historical details mesh with real time haptic experiences of cathedral architecture, Egyptian monuments, and urban corridors that ignite the “wow” effect of the poet’s New York City childhood. Sparked by eros tempered by thought, the poet’s experience of travel comes to us through her reading of Walt Whitman and Rem Koolhaas, her memories, real and imagined, and her walking, while taking care not to displace, the dust of the ancient world.
“This passionate psalm poem is a labyrinth inside a travelogue inside a dream.” —Jane Miller
Biography:
Rena Rosenwasser was born in New York City in 1950. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1971, she moved to California, where, in 1974, she helped found Kelsey Street Press, where she continues to serve as its co-director. Between 1987 and 2006, Rosenwasser initiated and produced a series of collaborations between poets and visual artists that established Kelsey Street as the premiere and longest lived independent publisher of literature for women. Rosenwasser’s poetry publications include Dittany (Taking flight) (Mayacamas Press, 1993); Unplace.Place (Leave Books, 1992); and three collaborations with artist Kate Delos: Isle (Kelsey Street Press, 1992); Aviary (Limestone Press,1988); and Simulacra (Kelsey Street Press, 1986). Her first volume of poetry, Desert Flats, was published by Kelsey Street Press in 1979. Currently a board member of Small Press Distribution, Rosenwasser has also served on the Literary Panel for the California Arts Council. She and her partner Penny Cooper reside in Berkeley, California.
Specifications:
Title: ELEVATORS Author: Rena Rosenwasser Publisher: Kelsey Street PressSpecs: 72 pp. Pub date: May, 2011
Price: $17
ISBN: 978-0-932716-75-0
Library of Congress #: 2010943234 Cover Image: Richard Tuttle
April 1, 2011
KSP Featured Author, April 2011: Sandy Florian
excerpt from Boxing the Compass
0°
A wind rises, tramontana, levante, ostro, poniente, but the points come from the directions of the eight major, eight half, and sixteen quarter notes. The Chinese divide the compass by the signs of the Zodiac, rat, rabbit, horse, rooster, but for the more western apprentice, the first thing to know is the name. North is indicated by the spearhead above the t, but the t soon evolves into the lily-like fleur-de-lys. Then the l is replaced with a cross, linking east with the unambivalent direction of paradise, or at least to where Christ was born. Colors on the compass are the result of the need for clarity, rather than a mere cartographical whim. So on a rolling ship at night, by the light of the flickering yellow lamp, the figure in the distance becomes visible as she
unfolds her body the same way some people unfold letters from their lovers who set sail, slowly, with caution, minding the curled edges of the cracked pages, that fading blue ink of time. She unfolds herself from her middle, then she opens her yellowed arms and legs, one by one, as if the letter had been folded in halves, quarters, and eighths. She unfolds herself, opens her eyes, and focuses on the blurred pages. Words still. Mind clears. She reads.
Because the color stands out, the eight principle points are shown in black. Half winds are typically blue or green. Quarter-winds are depicted in ruby. So on a rolling ship at night, by the light of the flickering lamp, the figure in the distance unfolds her body the same way some people unfold sails, yes, minding the frayed edges of the fraying wind. She opens her canvas arms and legs as if the sail had been blown, tramontana, levante, ostro, poniente, but the wind keeps changing directions. Words still, mind clears, but the wind, greco, sirocco, libeccio, maestro, words still, mind clears, and she wants to be named by the lying down element, but it’s her name that keeps changing, her body. She lies in a bed that measures four leagues by eight leagues, she lies in a bed that measures thirty-two leagues squared. This is the box in which she beds.
Between each point and the next are quarters, but the pupil will see that the first is dead ahead, followed by a point on the starboard bow, followed by two points on the starboard bow, followed by three points on the starboard bow, followed by four. Words still, and her soliloquy, her silhouette is framed at the frame, framed in the window, framed in this box, framed in the bed, framed in that well of sleep, that shell, that hole, the spell of the dream she had of assembling the petals of a well-known flower, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, losing her rows of teeth. Her rotation defines her orientation, three-one-thousand, four, as she sits at the edge of her bed
now counting the bones in her mouth, five one-thousand, six-one-thousand, along with the cardinal directions that correspond to degrees and, here, there is no accomplishment more ephemeral than this image, here, and as she sits, frayed and framed at the well, at the hole, at the shell, not noticing through the window the spring tree covered in bottle green buds, counting again the bones in her mouth, seven one-thousand, eight, not noticing the white wings of an airborne plane against the bare blue sky, nine one-thousand, ten, not noticing the uncommon occurrence of a silver dove now fluttering its wings on a branch of the tree, through the framed box window facing north,
now weeping.
A Latina writer and scholar, Sandy Florian is the author of four full-length books of prose poetry – On Wonderland & Waste (Sidebrow Books), Prelude to Air From Water(Elixir Press) The Tree of No (Action Books), andTelescope (Action Boos) – and one chapbook – 32 Pedals & 47 Stops (Tarpaulin Sky Press). Her creative work has appeared in over 50 international journals includingBombay Gin, Gulf Coast, /nor, Gargoyle, Indiana Review, and New Orleans Review, and she has been awarded residencies at Caldera Arts and the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her current semi-autobiographical project focuses on the hybrid issue of postmodern identity.
March 19, 2011
Eternelle, Exhibition in Barcelona
Eternelle
Teresa Gómez-Martorell
Del 5 al 30 d’abril de 2011
Inauguració dia 5 d’abril a les 13 hores/Opening April 5th at 1pm.
L’Aparador d’art. Facultat de Veterinària.
Organitza: Vicerectorat d’estudiants I promoció cultural, Facultat de Veterinària,
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Primer fóren tots aquests petits elements. Aquests petits éssers han estat vius, pero d’alguna manera encara perduren, han adquirit aquesta categoria d’eternitat. Eternelle comença amb aquesta declaracio Jo sóc eterna. I veiem a continuació els ossos, les semprevives, els petits ocells. Vaig crear aquesta historia a partir dels meus esbossos al Museu de Zoologia, de dibuixos d’essers perennes que trobava i portava al meu estudi. En algun moment, aquests elements tenien una història per a explicar.
El llibre d’artista és un format que m’ha permès treballar al mateix temps amb les paraules, imatges i narrativa. En Eternelle, es mostren diferents maneres d’eternitat i fragilitat. L’elecció dels materials no ha estat al.leatòria sinò està relacionada amb el contingut, en allò que es diu i com es diu. Ha estat molt decissiu treballar amb papers japonesos com el gampi i el Okawara, que son al mateix temps delicats però resistents. La enquadernació en acordió ha estat tambe pensada per a donar una narrativa a un conjunt d’imatges i també crear un objecte tridimensional a la vegada.
Les coses tenen vida pròpia (las cosas tienen vida propia), deia el gità Melquiades en un dels meus llibres preferits, Cien años de soledad d’en Gabriel Garcia Márquez. La narració es una manera de donar significats extraordinaris als fets ordinaris de la nostra vida. No hi ha avorriment a la nostra vida, tot depèn si som capaços de veure com són d’especials les coses que tenim al nostre voltant. El llibre d’artista i la poesía visual ens permet treballar amb aquests elements humils i donar-los una nova dignitat. Les histories són un camp obert on l’espectador hi pot participar i crear la seva pròpia història.
Teresa Gómez-Martorell
It all began with those small elements. Those small beings had been alive but somehow they still remain, they have acquired this category of eternal. Eternelle starts with this declaration I am eternal. After this, we see the bones, the everlasting plants and the little birds. I created this story based on my sketches from the Museu de Zoologia, drawings from perennial found elements I brought to my studio. At some point, those beings had a story to explain.
Artist’s books has allowed me to work with words, images and storytelling at the same time. In Eternelle, eternity and fragility are shown in different ways. The choice of different materials has not been fortuitous but absolutely related with what is said and how to say it. To work with Japanese papers such as Gampi and Okawara has been a very decisive election, they are delicate but strong at the same time. The accordion bound gives a narrative sense to that set of images to create a tri-dimensional object.
Things have their own life (las cosas tienen vida propia), said the gipsy Melquiades in one of my favorite books One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad), from Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Storytelling is a way to give extraordinary meanings to ordinary facts of life. At last, there is no dullness in the every day life if we are capable to see how special and unique things are. It depends how we look our surroundings. Artist’s books and visual poetry allows to work with those humble elements and give them a new dignity. Stories are an open field where the viewer may participate and create their own story.
March 13, 2011
I was going to, Black Box Cutaway photo response, but
What I had meant to do today was go to the Photography Response Writing workshop, as part of the Nonsite residency & installation, COMMON/USE at SF Camerawork.
Here is what was going to/did happen
We will think about how an image-saturated landscape and constant camera use is a common space to observe and absorb. How are cell phone photos, photo sharing sites, and news photos changing the ownership of photographs and photographic memories? How does photography inside galleries and museums coexist with these multiplying photographies in downtown San Francisco?
We will meet in the SF Camerawork gallery to discuss the above topics then go on self-guided tours of the surrounding downtown area. The walks will have a loose script, focusing on how photography iterates itself as an act, and as artifacts. We will then reconvene in the gallery and write about what we performed/collected from our walks.
And I had this notion that I would take this piece from Susan Gevirtz’s Black Box Cutaway
I spend many long days unable
to do anything but be embodied
I send length to your times
for everything seen
the fallout times the unlooked at
unlocked refusal to look elsewhere
but the directed shot
multiplication place
of nothing
is no one’s afterglow
and use it as a mental loop to take pictures to as I scootered around the area. (The site of the workshop also being right next door to my place of work as disability advocate. My usual to- and from- loop to this part of the city being a scan of my inobx: “help me sue the ACLU for scanning my retinas”, “sarcoids flared up and water heater bsuted”, Asperger’s app for ipad…)
But it was the birthday of Ana Yoshida Garcia, who passed a few years back. My partner’s mother. So we had a different kind of afternoon, scanning photos and placing them on the altar. There was a need to stay home and be, quietly with old photos.
Dear KSP blog readers who went to the nonsite photo writing thing, please share..
–Posted by A. DiPietra
March 11, 2011
Feministing on TED Talks
In her new book Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists, Courtney E. Martin profiles eight young people doing social justice work. It’s a fascinating look at the generation of world-changers who are now stepping up to the plate. And as an editor at Feministing.com, the most highly read feminist publication in the world, Martin watches an evolving world of a feminism empowered by social media.
Martin’s first book was Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection Is Harming Young Women; an anthology Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists, co-edited with J. Courtney Sullivan, was released last year. Martin is also a Senior Correspondent forThe American Prospect; she’s appeared on Good Morning America, the TODAY Show, CNN and MSNBC, and held her own against Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham.
Watch the video of her talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/courtney_martin_reinventing_feminism.html