i took down the canopy above my bed. last december, i created a square of thread, held taut between hooks in the walls. then i used about ten spools of thread, weaving it around this square and from hook to hook.
i need room for new work. so i’ll just have to make a new one soon. i think i want the next one to be more deliberate with multiple layers and weaving between the different layers.
well, i told myself i would write tonight. it didn’t happen. and now i am going to a winter solstice gathering. argh. tomorrow is my last day of work and then vacation and then i will write. and craft. and draw. and re-weave my canopy. and order the metal for my pennants. and make a video. and write letters. and every other fucking thing i’ve been putting off for weeks (and months.) argh. mas adelante.
We are launching a new reading series! The first reading of From Here to the Corner will be Tuesday, December 8, 7:00pm at 25CPW, an artist-run storefront gallery at 25 Central Park West on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This series will gather poets and witnesses for incessant conversation, a nonlinear movement forward into the past, and storytelling to break the nerves.
The reading will feature three poets, Ari Banias, Joy Ladin, and Grey Vild. It will be followed by an after party to celebrate the release of Joy Ladin’s latest book Transmigration.
Joy Ladin is the author of three books of poetry from Sheep Meadow Press: the just-published Transmigration, The Book of Anna (as J. Ladin) and Alternatives to History (as Jay Ladin). Her poems and essays have been widely published, and have recently appeared in or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Parnassus, to which she is a regular contributor, and other publications. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University, and has also taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Princeton University, Tel Aviv University, Reed College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Ari Banias has poems in recent or upcoming issues of Aufgabe, Love Among the Ruins, EOAGH, The Cincinnati Review, Field, The Portable Boog Reader, and elsewhere. He co-hosts the queer series Uncalled-for Readings at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn.
Grey Vild is part of the writing group behind From Here to the Corner. Most of his writing life has been spent searching for the ancestor. He is currently most obsessed with James Baldwin, family, cat gut, shame, and Michael Jackson.
25CPW is a storefront that has been vacant for the past two years. Early this fall a group of ten artists moved into the 3,000 square foot space viewing it as an opportunity to share their ideas and work with a broad audience. The space is called 25CPW. Its members seek to create a common platform for artists, curators, writers, educators, and the general public to engage with contemporary art. 25CPW will maintain a calendar of diverse events featuring lectures, discussions, film screenings, poetry readings, performances, workshops and exhibitions.
i was exiled to my room by the tv
and all i think about is the word courage
and maps
i just found your poems in my inbox
and they brought me back to a place
where tears draw river lines
where it all happened before i even knew
and it feels like the place that i trip on
when i let my face hang too long in the sun
if i let myself feel happy
then i forget the edges
it’s all sun in the middle
all sun in the middle
and the edges are charred like the edges of a map being burnt
so if he really wants to come find it, he will
the trails that lead home
to your fingers tracing the lines
on my back, the ghosts,
all that ever mattered
nothing that will ever hold
tears that stain then dry
you knew were there
she never knew or knew why
(the you here is myself)
you could never find the voice
to tell her the right tone the pitch strong enough
that it would never leave her
like a song haunting in the hall
like a chorus in her hair
why is nothing ever enough?
(the you, someone else)
your lips to my ear
i can’t save you.
i can’t save you.
like the poplars cut down
in the morning
i slept through the decapitation
my impotence
and on the map there was a bridge
and on the bridge there was a woman
and she fell to die
i called out
for
the old woman
was my love and
my lover
i worry you’ll never know
and all that will stand in the way
—
i found late summer
pressed between two poems
a wish blown
caught and flattened
the white burst stuck where
‘the stars will come out over and over’
and ‘the hyacinths rise like flames’
—
she told me to cry her a river
so i drew her a map
but the map made me cry
all over the dead riverbed
the one that was carved
like the crow’s feet at my eye
—
(the ability to do something frightening) (strength when faced with pain or grief)
(an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger) (perceived danger)
and then what if i burn the maps
take them out of my backpocket
finger the softened paper
the creases folded and refolded
how we respond to the struggles that affect our lives.
‘…this calls for a certain amount of delving into the past, and for preparedness to meet the unexpected.’
when does the memory have a pulse? how many collaborators must it have?
the collective nature of the activity of remembering
i haven’t dug my well deep enough
no means for proper assessments
perhaps annette kuhn’s layout for memory work and a photograph but as a poem
1. consider the human subject(s) of the photograph. start with a simple description, and then move into an account in which you take up the position of the subject. In this part of the exercise, it is helpful to use the 3rd person (’she,’ rather than ‘I’, for instance). To bring out the feelings associated with the photograph, you may visualize yourself as the subject as she was at that moment, in the picture: this can be done in turn with all of the photograph’s human subjects, if there is more than one, and even with animals and inanimate objects in the picture.
(david’s writing about the photographs of men together)
2. consider the picture’s context of production. where, when, how, by whom and why was the photograph taken?
3. consider the context in which an image of this sort would have been made. what photographic technologies were used? what are the aesthetics of the image? does it conform with certain photographic conventions?
4. consider the photograph’s currency in its context or contexts of reception. who or what was the photograph made for? who has it now, and where is it kept? who saw it then, and who sees it now?
he’s my last grandparent
but i can’t sentimentalize him
or make him the lesson i have learned
can’t be urgent chasing life, death
but maybe this is my excuse
often chasing secrets, mysteries, trying to reveal, uncover, travel deeper results much like the surface of a photograph. all grain and fiber, dust and scratches. a surface revealed more closely as the surface. and nothing more beneath.
Mais avec Baudelaire, la poésie française… s’impose comme la poésie meme de la modernité. But with Baudelaire French poetry imposes itself as the very poetry of modernity.– Paul Valéry, 1924
La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose. Poetry no longer imposes, it exposes itself.– Paul Celan, March 26, 1969
“If Celan’s recourse to French constitutes the double gesture of at once amending Valéry’s estimation of Baudelaire and skirting Heidegger’s notion of the poet as the founder of the sacred word and a nation’s historical destiny, then Celan hopes to avoid on the levels of both theme and language, the gesture of authority and imposition that drives the tradition from within. He does not suggest that the poetry of his time, and thus his own poetry, is more imposing than the work of his precursors. A poetry of exposition does not inaugurate, institute or found— it does not impose— a new tradition or genre. Rather, it sets out and exposes itself in a way that leaves the effects of this exposition radically open and suspended. To belong to a poetry of exposition, a poem must expose itself also to the possibility that it may cease being poetry; become external, or other, to poetry; stop making sense; and no longer be either poetry or exposition at all. The gesture of the poem must be disruptive and break with existing traditions, genres, and histories. In order to be such a beginning and an exposition, every poem must open itself to the possibility that it will no longer be a poem, or that nothing at all will follow, or that the poem will so radically expose and unground itself as to suspend the possibility of its comprehension and its historicization. ‘To expose’ may mean, ‘to abandon,’ as someone in need may be abandoned. But to expose may also transcend this negative valence and signify an act of revelation. The very word ‘expose,’ in fact, seems to renounce any claim to a single unified meaning and surrender itself to a kind of centrifugal semantics. Celan’s poetry, which is the poetry of his and our time, is inescapable because it exposes, and abandons us to, an openness— or reveals an already existing openness to us— that demands response. As poetry of exposition, Celan’s poetry seems to suspend the distinction between the openness of an abyss and the openness of existence.”
p 162-163 from Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, Ulrich Baer
though it is 61 degrees in brooklyn today, it still feels wintry. the light is definitely winter light and i just bought a handful of teas to fulfill one of my desires of late. to hole up in my room as i drink a steady flow of hot tea and write or draw (just create work.)
—
i left g’s house this morning to go to the doctor to have seven vials of blood drawn on an empty stomach. woozily i walked home. i don’t understand how people who are chronically ill can function. i am incredibly impressed by those who can. for whatever reason, when i think about this, i imagine nietzsche. locked away. writing.
—
i have poems coming to the surface but i can’t bring myself to write them. i won’t even open the blank page. hence the second blog post of the day. it is nice to have the morning and afternoon all to myself.
—
k. gave me pu’erh 普洱茶 tea after her stewards of the lost lands reading at c-space (jan 12, 2008 to be exact!) it is a fermented green tea and it is amazing. the tea is rust colored when steeped and it has a smoky flavor. it is amazing. i could chain-drink it for days. i haven’t been able to find (ok, i have only looked in a few places) good pu’erh tea in the city. but i did just find this tea called russian caravan, a pine-smoked black tea. it is really good. not puerh but still really good. i love smoked tea i have realized. it is hardy and pungent and a nice counterbalance to another favorite tea- egyptian licorice.
—
PRO-DUC-TIV-ITY. oh you haunt me. i do NOT want to function out of anxiety about productivity. but at the same time i need a good kick in the ass. perhaps our writing assemblage should be doing more writing exercises. i find that to be fruitful. the expectation of presenting new work on a weekly basis. i feel the need to be writing ::
self-portraits; about ‘living as a temporary condition;’ ancestors and mom and sister and me; about farmlands; architecture and space; ritual; (open)relationships; sex&trauma
—
if you were here, you would note that i am double-fisting. coffee and tea. i cannot choose.
the day i decided i could no longer choose was the day i was told to believe violation believe it like a rumor believe my mother or my sister and i couldn’t so i held both, as close as i could until i couldn’t see anything (or anything clearly) anymore.ca conrad is a poet from philly and i love love love his work. check out his blog and his (soma)tic poetry exercises
my mom loved elvis. a predictable sort of love for my white trash momma who hails from the hills of west virginia. what is not so predictable is that my grandmother also loved elvis. my dad’s mom. my new york jewish grandma from southern brooklyn. she told me that on august 16, 1977, when elvis died, she was working on a late-life master’s degree in education. the story in my brain is that she never finished this master’s degree. that she messed up her boards or something because she was so distraught over the death of elvis. is this the stuff of mythology? or is this too good a story that it must be true? why can’t i remember?
we unveiled my grandmother’s headstone november 25, 2005. i should really head out to queens, to the jewish cemetary, to see her. here grandma. i’ll honor you on my blog. i think the space for the living partner on the gravestone is one of the saddest things in the world. while in ohio, we started talking about our friend o’s grandparents. how his grandmother died and then his grandfather died a week later. how one couldn’t continue to live without the other. there was an older couple at the diner where we ate breakfast. the woman was dressed in the finest assortment of costume jewelry. her partner helped her rise from her seat, get her cane, walk to the door. i got all teary eyed. that’s how we started talking about o’s grandparents. i remembered playing cards with them and laughing at the same jokes over and over. how much o cared about them. how old age does and doesn’t feel to me. how close i do or don’t let it in. the old couple from the diner drove by the window. they pulled out of the parking lot in a red convertible. amazing. i need to go see my grandpa. bring g. to cook him some fish. ask him for some stories.
That is one of grandma's self-portraits, painted in watercolor.
That's my cousin with the stone and my grandma's self-portrait.
it’s funny what is stuck in our brains that we don’t really think about, don’t really piece apart to understand. like the song lyrics of a song we have always known. like jailhouse rock (this is so homo! – thanks conrad.) ::
Number forty-seven said to number three: "You're the cutest jailbird I ever did see. I sure would be delighted with your company, come on and do the Jailhouse Rock with me." Let's rock, everybody, let's rock. Everybody in the whole cell block was dancin' to the Jailhouse Rock.
anyways, this was to be a post about elvis! but it has slipped into a land responsive to ancestors & m & g & k. g was reading his poems last night to our assemblage in my bed. and talking about ancestry and self and body and on and on and on. and i sort of floated away. i was thinking about what linford said when over the rhine played the other night (so amazing by the way). about writers writing from their piece of land. the land that they are from. and i think about this island of concrete crust formed over squashed earth. the graveyard that was so filled with bodies that the armaments sank into them. so they paved over it and made it washington square park. the way the largest and oldest tree there was a gallows. the way so much sinks and swirls beneath us, sways above us. the way we walk over it and sing quietly the lyrics of a song so lodged in our subconscious that we don’t think about earth or the words or what flows under and in and through. meanings constructed. and/or broken down and re-built. bit by bit with our new tribes. new assemblages. what am i doing where i am? my lands are ohio. are that swath of land tumbling down from the western slopes of the appalachian mountains. how much i couldn’t extract from me, couldn’t extract myself from it. it is in me like splinters like buckshot like needles&ink. when i was lost last night, i began thinking of my mother. a poem floating to the surface. what is it ohio?? what i simultaneously can’t shake but can’t bear. sitting in my mom’s house for the holidays. unable to hold her for too long in my eyes. or my sister. or anyone for that matter. unable to hold myself. left feeling dead. leaving everything there for dead. waiting for some sliver of connecting between grabbing at the food g and i spent so long making, between the television programs and commercials. just before my mom was going to go to bed, she brought up how the 27th was my grandpa’s birthday. how he died in november. i couldn’t pull myself out enough to feel her. i heard her. i asked her some questions. if she missed him, what year it was that he died, what she remembered most about him. but i couldn’t really be present. so last night talking in my bed. talking about the church song. about music. about what is held in the lyrics. the songs we have held for so long. the ones that we choose to turn back to, to read the lines. to really try to understand them. i remembered my mom standing over the kitchen sink and amazing grace came on. and my mom started crying. cuz it reminded her of my grandpa. how g. was talking about knowing someone so well that you know when they are going to fall apart. or knowing them so well you can’t predict. and i remember it being so shocking. my mother falling apart over the sink. i remember not knowing what to do. i hope i held her in my arms… i don’t remember how old i was. god i hope someone held her in their arms. dish soap dripping to the floor.
december 13th sacred harp sing. i hope this will help me back to my mom. back to ohio. back to those lands in west virginia. back through the silence and paralysis, the trauma and the fear.
this will lead into writing about what k and i were talking about. about ritual. which feels like an amazing turning out of so much that i have been mulling over, god, since i was 16. a religion-less child trying to find something magic, something beyond, the something more that i felt. we started talking about those things that we have only tapped in at the surface. and i started talking about singing. because i feel like there is so much power there. but that i don’t think i have ever quite allowed myself to go there. one day over the summer when my roommates were away, i spent the day singing. spent the day recording and singing. i honestly don’t think i’ve ever done that. i was so amazed by how singing over so much time stretched my voice out. particularly my capacity to consciously steer my voice. that felt like such a beginning but i haven’t gone anywhere with it yet.
we have no maps.
no ancestors to tell us what their world was. how they met it. how they shaped it.
what (or if) they thought would come of us here now in their future world.
k. told me this definition of magic ::
“the art and practice of changing consciousness at will” – Starhawk
i feel like i feel this quite often. answering a situation with one vision and set of emotional responses. then consciously changing my outlook. how this shifts the look and feel of the world. what could it mean to push this out further and further? like stretching a voice? together with others? like massaging a palm into the depths of your back? pressing your life’s maps into my hands, pressing them together with my own…
i think there are a lot of choices about embodying and/or displaying queerness beyond identity politics or hiding. there’s a place i have found for myself only very recently.
to preface this with some background. i came out initially as bisexual in high school. probably when i was 15. it is hard to remember how extensively i was out. i was definitely writing about it in my journal. i was definitely arguing with my parents about it. i was definitely hanging out with a lot of queers. i definitely made out with a lot of girls in high school.
my first year of college, i got involved with the queer group and went to my first queer bar. in bangor maine no less! i went on a birthday date with this girl when my boyfriend was in mexico. by 2000 i was out to most and dating a girl for the first time. while i experimented in high school… fishnets, plastic skirts, piercing, cutting, making out with boys and girls, this really tapered off my senior year of high school. i became increasingly political and decided political expression was more important than personal expression(!)
i grew up in a political household, commie parents, started my first organization in 5th grade. but it took on new dimensions. and in the realm of mostly male, mostly straight activists, i basically gave up a lot of myself to prove my priorities. i think this was a massive mistake. because caring about stuff meant passing. it meant not making ‘the people’ uncomfortable by my eccentricities. also code for my queerness.
i eventually left politics. too much bullshit. to many people i knew sexually assaulted by activists. too much talk and action and little confrontation of fears and prejudices that prevent community. the feeling that i couldn’t mesh my political life with my life, my family life. the feeling of hypocrisy.
i eventually ended up working as a secretary in an incredibly hetero-normative hospital. this combined with my girlfriend’s semi self-hating relationship to her queerness and queer presentation led to me really passing. finally losing much of myself there. it took a good 2 years to start to recover.
i was at idapalooza in 2008 and again in 2009. ida is queer land in tennessee near short mountain, a radical faerie community. each year they host a weeklong queer music festival. it was while there that somethings began to come together for me. my relationship w g., working w nayland. working for visual aids, having so many queer teachers in my mfa program (learning simultaneously about contemporary photography, my practice/life/self, and radical queer NYC history), etc.
i had this amazing conversation with this person at Ida. we were talking about family and community. he grew up with radical parents and his father is gay (i’m not sure how he identified when his son was younger). his parents hated the culture of his grandparents so they moved him faraway from them to Texas. he didn’t know them until he requested to meet them. he grew up really isolated with just him and his parents.
we began talking about what it means to strike out on a path different (dramatically or slightly?) from the life of our parents. and there is a big difference between a path chosen or a new path forced… or perhaps then it is the choice regarding what you were forced to change in your life.
my father grew up in a middle class, educated jewish family in brooklyn. i gather that my grandparents had fairly high expectations for the children. though it seems with a lot of room to determine what that means given that one became an artist (my grandma was an artist as well), one an acupuncturist, one a labor organizer. my father began school at city college, studying astronomy, but dropped out halfway through to work full time protesting the vietnam war (with the youth wing of the communist party, the web dubois club.) it is complicated what ended up happening… but i would say that the vision was to NOT do what my grandparents had done. but what would that look like? i don’t think my father really had much of a vision for a radically different path. which makes it really easy especially once you have children or face poverty or trauma… i mean perhaps these things could also spur a radically new way but it is also equally or even moreso possible that there will be a default into the comfort of what had come before.
my mother was one if 13 children from an extremely poor farming/coal mining family in central west Virginia. she along with half my aunts and uncles fled the lands of silent coal shafts and dead industry for ohio. to work in a factory! all my uncles have professions- mechanics, factory workers, rental car managers. almost all my aunts are wives and mothers. my mom and aunt j. are the only two to finish high school (many quit at 6th, 8th grade). they are also the only two women with professions. my mom is a housekeeper (until she retires thankfully from a thankless job next spring!) and my aunt j. is a medical assistant. i am fairly certain that my siblings and i are the only cousins to go to college. fairly certain that i am the first on that side to get a master’s degree.
anyways, my mom had her first kid at 21. was chased out of the house by her husband who was wielding a shotgun, took my 10 month old sister and never went back. she raised my sister for eight years alone. til she met my dad.
it is sad to me to see my mom who is definitely a rural woman at heart… with no way back. stuck. as so many women who were not raised to guide their own way. to make the choices for a life of our own. i see myself at times not sticking up enough for a life i could love. i understand. especially if nothing ever showed you that you would have a better life if you fought for it. and even moreso when you have to fight just to survive.
i think it is not enough to not want what came before. you have to develop a sense of what you do want, a very personal idea of what you want (even if it is bound up in larger political spiritual etc ideas) and find the ways to commit your self to it. fight for it, make it, not just survive it.
so i swear this circles back to where i began this post.
when i was at ida, i met radical faeries from short mountain. i also began researching radical fairie land once i returned home. a lot of these lands have existed in some form for thirty years or more! then there is lesbian land and queer land and feminist land. many created around the time that my father was choosing something else, when so many were choosing something other than what came before. but my father had a lot going for him. a hetero normative culture to welcome him and his relationships. whiteness. education.
queer people did not have a cultural space given over or as a given. it had to be created. it doesn’t mean that all hets have it all or that white people do or men but that there is a privilege there that allows easier movement or taking up of space. it also makes it easier to find or make what you want. if you don’t choose something radically different then it can be easier to find your place and comfort.
even now with so much lgbt representation in mainstream pop culture. who does that really represent? who is that providing space for? the class nature of the L Word is appalling. where are our multivalent sexualities and sexual practices and complex representations that could start to get at the complexity that is queer?
i see another road around identity. it is not so much about identity politics as it is about family and tribe.
wearing signifiers on our bodies has been the way for queer visibility since early closeted times. not to show our queerness to straight people but to find each other! (buzz cuts, mullets, earrings, hankies, etc)
i used to downplay dress and expression. but i’ve come to realize that it may help me live more the life i want to live.
if i feel more loved, supported, challenged, moved, inspired etc by queerness then the best way to find it is to display my own queerness. it of course is not clear cut. there are infinite ways to be or display queer. and not all queer people are my people. not all straight people are excluded. but i have found at times that it can be really hard to find ‘my people.’ if i am passing as straight, it is all that less likely. and it isn’t easy because i am often coded as more feminine so i have to find ways like piercings and shaved hair and butch touches to put it out there.
and i decided his simultaneous to wanting to make collective queer space/land. to live off of. make art. hold gatherings. build the life i want.
it is just something i’ve found might help me collect those around me that i want to work with in life. at least it is the place, queerness, where i’ve found the most.
and far better the way to ‘my people’ than to this mythology of ‘the people’
from Conversations with James Baldwin, University Press of Mississippi (May 1, 1989)
‘This collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961-1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names, his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him.’
fragment from –
James Baldwin, an Interview with Wolfgang Binder, 1980, from Revista/Review Interamericana, 10 (Fall 1980), 326-41
Binder: In A Rap on Race, your dialogue with Margaret Mead, you state that no people nor individual can really escape, if that person is honest, history and the effects of history.
Baldwin: Well, it is impossible.
Binder: In what sense does this apply to whites and blacks in America?
Baldwin: I have been living with those questions for a long time. You see, the trouble I am having right now is with the word itself. History means one thing in a European head. It actually means something else in an American head, and yet again something else in a black man’s head. To leave it at that is enough for openness. I am not sure any longer what the word means. Especially as the white world now is calling on what it calls history to justify its dilemma without having the remotest sense of how they got to where they are. In spite of their adulation of history. So history in the context in which the French, or the English, or the Germans are operating is an enormous dead letter. Because if history means something, it means that you have learned something from it. If you haven’t then the word has got to be changed. History in England, or France, or Germany, or indeed in Europe is now meant as an enormous cloak to cover past crimes and errors and present danger and despair. In short, it has become a useless concept. Except that it can be used as a stick to beat the people without history, like myself, over the head. That worked as long as I believed that you had history and I did not. And now that it is clear that that is not so, another kind of dilemma, another kind of confrontation, begins. Perhaps history has got to be born for the first time. It is certainly true that all the identities coming out of history with a capital H are proven to be false, to be bankrupt. We cannot live with them for another five minutes, they are going to carry us from here to the corner. And no one knows how we got here, from Maggie Thatcher in London to Ronald Reagan in America. If that is not the bottom of the barrel! And in terms of America, the Americans are even more abject than the Europeans who are stifling among their artifacts, their icons, which they call history. The Americans have never even heard of history, they still believe that legend created about the Far West, and cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers, and black and white, and good and evil. There is a reason that the most simple-minded men, Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan, who might be considered to run a post-office, are the only candidates America can find to run the world. If the Europeans are afflicted by history, Americans are afflicted by innocence.
