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Assemblage Sampler Editor: Brian Ang April 2023 Brian Ang Assemblage poetics is concerned with how words and things may connect, how assemblages and practices that articulate them may connect, a collective project for reassembling totality.
– Brian Ang, “Assemblage Poetics”1 “Assemblage Poetics” proposed a poetics through connecting ten practices.2 Assemblage Sampler develops assemblage poetics further. I asked people considered in “Assemblage Poetics” to contribute and each bring in another person to continue constituting assemblage poetics, my intention being to decenter my editorial authority. Work from fourteen people that resulted will be serialized in alphabetical order on weekdays through April on this page. 1 Brian Ang, “Assemblage Poetics,” Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry 36: Art (2022), 148. 2 Brian Ang, The Totality Cantos (Atelos, 2022); Caleb Beckwith, Political Subject (Roof, 2018); a.j. carruthers, AXIS Book 1: Areal (Vagabond Press, 2014); Tom Comitta, The Nature Book (Coffee House Press, 2023); alex cruse, CONTRAVERSE (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017); Paul Ebenkamp, Late Hiss (Desert Pavilion, 2021); Angela Hume, Interventions for Women (Omnidawn, 2021); Carrie Hunter, Vibratory Milieu (Nightboat Books, 2021); Michael Leong, Disorientations (forthcoming); Divya Victor, Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021). 3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 422-423. 4 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (Seabury Press, 1973), 147. 5 Anthony Braxton, Tri-Axium Writings 1 (Synthesis Music, 1985), 3. 6 a j carruthers, “How AXIS may relate to Brian Ang’s The Totality Cantos and the idea of an ‘assemblage poetics’,” in Assemblage Sampler, ed. Brian Ang (2023). |
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Brian Ang Totality of Music From A Thousand Records: 151-165 |
Caleb Beckwith Four Poems + Poetics |
a j carruthers How AXIS may relate to Brian Ang’s The Totality Cantos and the idea of an “assemblage poetics” From AXIS Z Book 3: 63. Zero 65. Zest 69. Zigzag |
Tom Comitta The Nature Book: Preface The Nature Book: Process |
alex cruse 0th Aubade |
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Lara Durback I Could Never Never Be Lonely. A Breakbeat Container |
Paul Ebenkamp Assemblage Poetics Statement Peace The Dead End That Just Wouldn’t Die |
Carrie Hunter “To an Absent Future Self” |
Michael Leong From “Disorientations” How I Sound |
Kevin CK Lo The Audience Plays Itself (2022) |
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Joseph Mosconi From Embarking Lot GOBLIN ASSAULT! |
Kate Robinson Plane : Frame : Sieve From Mean Body: Commie joke The tonal shape of my dream Water person Hands in the cultural tip jar |
Jamie Townsend Alter Poems Novelty (A Haunting) |
Jessica L. Wilkinson Poetics Statement [untitled schoolgirl] |
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Brian Ang A Thousand Records is open to the totality of music in five hundred sections. Some principles from The Totality Cantos are continued here: “Every line [is] a complete poem, a totalization, a singularity, a made thought.... [Every section consists] of lines of one through ten words long and aligned flush left and to nine indentations in order to produce dynamic durations and spacings. Every length and alignment [occurs] before being repeated in the next section. Arrangement of lines [are] determined by random numbers. In the transition between sections, equal lengths and alignments [are] prevented from being adjacent in order to maintain dynamic consistency. Any section [can] be excerpted and connected to any other as long as equal lengths and alignments are not adjacent.”1 1 Brian Ang, “Preface: Totality and Method,” The Totality Cantos (Atelos, 2022), 9. 2 Ibid., 9-10. |
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| 151 |
Ambient team baby archangel change potshots |
| 152 |
Name |
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Oversexed interconnected class-action guru smile banquet waltz |
| 154 |
Location |
| 155 |
Mental wire action beat continuum ratones |
| 156 |
Must |
| 157 |
Bridge shoulder spider song radio boy |
| 158 |
Sublime leveled dirty details |
| 159 |
Empty performance recording veteran’s heed courtesy crowd clichés |
| 160 |
Answer |
| 161 |
Perfectly tight-knit pitch-black universe chord identity statement sensibility out-of-towners |
| 162 |
Stilted freedom |
| 163 |
Class-conscious down-home superman support song century navigation intro invasion differences |
| 164 |
Disorienting mummy’s blues lines |
| 165 |
Transformative cranking burned lineup |
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Sections 156-160 were read at Brian Ang and Anne Lesley Selcer at Your Mood Gallery and 161-165 were read at Lone Glen: Utter Assemblage with Brian Ang, Aditya Bahl, and David Lau. Brian Ang wrote The Totality Cantos (Atelos 2022). totalitycantos.net includes the complete text and a generator that randomizes assemblages of its one thousand sections. Prose: “Assemblage Poetics”; editor: Assemblage Sampler and ASSEMBLAGE; current poetic project: A Thousand Records, open to the totality of music. |
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Caleb Beckwith familiar riff to chill with unnamed particulars framed angle played on repeat album at first dead by cloud but only if they reckon dreams planted trees neath my footless company stay based and target every trevor not properly managing their emotion pleats nicely as like units decline just try to forget everyday polyphony lost to hanger got great at gathering around swallow pigments hunted rusty from advance use disorder we hope obscurant always can’t make them help thinking twice more than three times as strong except fear of missing our contingent spent cycle surfs the plane of immanence their misreading broke heights by stone prepared an altar void twenty-five scrolling chariots roam your foghorn’s unbecoming enlighten converted zeal staring back at cyber cliche crests is it too neat to dangle screams or can we move past emotion to unseat their remembering the sun found my optic curve unmanly thou pronounced dead and burial ten counting give me your gains and I’ll take your hand off the cusp of meaning squats wink crepuscular not quite but already broken hands linked my friends splitting home and home away must have found out working tensions docs shaded by interpersonal slurry what vaguely flavor renders must be dissolved they did the second goat shrug at cancelled to kept pipeline towers gathering east refuge denied alarm with massive easing taken thru stoner quantities set below light sorry are believing again and yet already coping over two summers from now gearing up to dead half defeated by eminent stone buzz on quantitive east goink how’s it alarm when crisis cancels five minutes to ending whip of nisk by accident shaped like midwestern states of conscious tude max keeping urn grease valid critiques pause at bad actors on reading terminal face defeated like a buzz their indefinite referent licked salt back swallows in the foreground cast your hat aside and judgment / Collage as the central principle of a modernism we have yet to overcome Assemblage as an orientation toward collage that maintains the integrity of meaning Personhood in the material that finds us, not the stories we tell ourselves Opposed to narrative as subjective transformation for anyone but you Being aligned with form—what Kate might call the container—as an inevitable extension of singularity A basket into which signifiers are thrown The extent to which I inhabit the poem in relief / Caleb Beckwith lives in the Hudson Valley and publishes books as Dogpark with Kate Robinson 🤠 |
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a j carruthers |
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Now let us sing what is the cause that gives The stars their motions. First, if the great globe Of heaven revolves, then we must say that air Presses upon the axis at each end, And holds it from outside, closing it At both poles; also that there streams above Another current, moving the same way, In which the stars of the eternal world Roll glittering onward; or else that beneath There is another stream, to drive the sphere Upwards the opposite way, just as we see Rivers turn wheels round with their water-scoops. — Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura, Book 5 |
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It is true of AXIS that each book has for itself a discrete style or theme, but the unity of each in to a whole is a projection, that is of a projected whole, totality yet to come. As of yet there is no totality, no exclusive whole that is the final AXIS. Disk In a sense we are tempted to think the idea of totality is the end of process. Come totality all ends because process ends, movement and accretion end. All excludes to the discrete whole. Of AXIS what can be known is that it is an assemblage of parts that in themselves are whole, of books and books within books.  |
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V the nineteen sixties to the two thousands two thousand and one to two thousand and eleven two thousand and one to two thousand and five nineteen eighty seven to two thousand nineteen sixty two to two thousand and twelve |
IV two thousand and ten to two thousand and twelve nineteen fifty four to two thousand and five eighteen twenty four to eighteen thirty seven |
II thirteen fifty to sixteen hundred nineteen hundred and eight to nineteen twenty three nineteen hundred to nineteen fifty |
III eighteen fifty one to nineteen twelve eighteen fifteen to nineteen fifteen nineteen fifty one to nineteen sixty seven nineteen sixty one to two thousand two |
I seventeen eighty eight to eighteen eighty eight seventeen ninety six to nineteen forty five nineteen eighty seven to nineteen ninety one two thousand and three to two thousand and eight seventeen eighty nine to nineteen twenty three |
Downward procession of the lines, otherwise “vertical stanzas,” allows for longer lines, but in a sense the line is still horizontal, one word “per” line. In Eastern and other scripts it is very normal to write characters vertically downward, one character at a time, and some non-Eastern writing, like that of Robert Lax, has also developed the downward running of lines, though in Lax the separation between words is extreme. To return to a downward procession of single words now feels very natural and is how AXIS is written. II. Music In first book of AXIS, Book 1: Areal, I searched for an area and an areality of things, a necessary space for the poem. It is impossible to write a long poem without a feeling of geography and space, even if that space is that of the page, book, book within the book. I had taken an interest in music for the structuring of the poem more than as an incorporated element, more external than internal because I had not yet considered it prosodic. Other of my works, particularly stanzaic works inspired by Hopkins, have become a more intrinsic music. But between structural and symbolic music has come to do many things for AXIS. There is the use of music as a unifying structure, an harmony of the spheres that has come down to the poem and its Symbols. There is the sense of music as a capstone, a way to end, as the Zukofskys did with “A”, that is to end with music and finish the whole poem with it. In AXIS, music and notation appear at the end but also in the middle – m/n – as of the letters in the middle of the alphabeast. Music in the middle becomes an axial pole around which the disc turns. Brian Reed, writing on the music of AXIS, particularly a setting of a poem by Michael Dransfield called “Still Life,” argues that it is a meta-poetic statement about poetry in general and Australian poetry in particular. He takes a preexisting work by a canonical poet and sets it, that is, places it in a new location with additions and modifications. He gives readers guidelines for how they might interact with the poem; he does not attempt to “control” them. Agency, in this model, is fully distributed. A poet plays a part in a poem’s life, but he does not set himself up as exclusive origin or authority. Carruthers also contrasts this way of proceeding, of composing, to the version of authorship represented by Dransfield, who oscillated between self-assertion and self-undermining. Raphael Allison’s humanist and skeptical options. Carruthers’ poem proves that old binary to be obsolete. (14)
Though I cannot be certain of the exact dimensions of a meta-poetics, I do feel this on the whole to be true, for neither of these options – either humanist or skeptical – have I felt the need to plunge fully towards. As to totality, it may indeed be reached better by some healthy self-undermining, yet that cannot do for to reach an vaster sense of things either. One cannot hope that to retract oneself from everything will do the trick of finding a greater totality. To assert oneself at the centre of things is some way necessary for the long poem poet. Between inscape and outscape, between full presence and thrown detachment, surely somewhere there the vista of totality opens. Music has the distinction of being so far outside poetry and so far within it that the contradiction it sets forth charge these dualisms. Music is both an escape from poetry and a new location for it.   III. Poles Ang’s impetus for the political thinking of totality is the 2008 financial crisis. It should be known that because I am not an American poet, it is only natural that I will have a different experience of the political and geopolitical approach to totality, and a different perspective on it. I think in terms of those events that encapsulate our “present struggle,” the geopolitical beginnings of this far before, with the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, that featured the Australian military, and numerous other interventions both explicit and hidden, whose evental precursors are the long Fall of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (1989–) and the geopolitical imbalances thereafter. In short, there is no thinking of totality in our time without Empire and without thinking geopolitical materialism and the materiality of nations – not at all divorced from the question of classes. By Empire we mean the USAmerican Empire, and how its discourses, or probably more accurately, its ideologies – progressive or regressive – can permeate the globe in a flash. How we all consume the United States of America, how we all live in Americanisation, to use Samir Amin’s style of phrasing, is a concern of totality in light of the Imperial World-Interior of the USA. Nanjing, 2022-2023. Works Cited Allison, Raphael. Bodies on the Line: Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2014. Ang, Brian. “Assemblage Poetics.” Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry 36 (December 2022): 147-59. Ang, Brian. The Totality Cantos. Berkeley: Atelos, 2022. Carruthers, aj. AXIS Book 1: Areal. Sydney: Vagabond, 2014. Carruthers, aj. AXIS Book 2. Sydney: Vagabond, 2019. Reed, Brian. “Setting a Poem: A.J. Carruthers’ ‘Music, After Michael Dransfield.” Foreign Literature Studies (June 2017): 8-15. Williams, W.C. “Preface.” Poetry: The Australian International Quarterly of Verse. Ed. Flexmore Hudson. Adelaide: Economy Press, 1947. 1-12. 
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Tom Comitta This novel contains no words of my own. Through a process of collage and constraint, I have gathered nature descriptions from over three hundred novels and arranged them into a single book. Tom Comitta, “Preface,” The Nature Book (Coffee House Press, 2023), ix-x. The Nature Book: Process Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE, May-August 2016 |
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Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book, recently out from Coffee House Press. Their other books include 〇 (Ugly Duckling Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread), and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011–2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of forty “night novels,” art books, and poetry collections. In 2015, Royal Nonesuch Gallery installed these books in a multimedia exhibition containing drawings, video, vinyl window installation, and a sound poetry computer program. Comitta’s fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, BOMB, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They live in Brooklyn. |
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alex cruse 0th Aubade IMAGINES THE CORPORATE PLATFORM AS STAGE: FOR A POEM-PLAY, A SET OF INTERCHANGEABLE TASKS, A SPECULATIVE FANFICTION? ITS LANGUAGE IS ITS CHARACTERS: sascha NONEXTINCT_ENSIGN AND VERSTECK (SN_E’) SPEAK AS REMIXED DRAINAGE OF OUR FRACTURED COPRESENCE – ITS TENSIONS, IRONIES, CONTRADICTIONS, AFFECTS, TONE, AND PAIN. IT TAKES PLACE ALL THE TIME. 0th Aubade (2022 - ongoing) concludes the numb angel trilogy, preceded by ZERO ENERGY EXPERIMENTAL PILE (Compline, 2020) and Era of Zero (a chapbook self-released via dead drop in 2019). each installment encounters digitality not with but as philosophy, thinking with its constitutive lacks. the opposite of content, numb angels cypher the networked subject – as etymological messengers; as modern-day investors; as productive and mobile avatars having limited contact with the physical world. alex cruse works in and across poetry, sound, visual art, film, installation, movement, performance, and public assembly, on Chochenyo Ohlone land. cruse and Kevin CK Lo are DROUGHT SPA, an interdisciplinary experiment and anticapitalist research platform. They have exhibited and performed around the US and world. Writing and other work can be found in: Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Terrain: Art & Crisis in Downtown Oakland, baest, CLOG Journal, Tripwire, Social Text, SFMOMA Open Space, and at alexcruse.xyz. |
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Lara Durback The pleasure of listening to a Tim Reaper set when driving down Highway 1 in the rain. *title refers to the track “Lonely” by D’Cruze (1994) Lara Durback (she/they) is a writer living in Oakland, CA for 15+ years (unceded Chochenyo Ohlone land). Lara is a maker of many crafts, dancer, roller skater, kitchen witch, scrap collector, archivist, companion to plants, and loves interactions outside. She is thinking about her family of origin (factory workers indebted to the Catholic Church) and how their legacy influences present life force and health. She chooses lineages of plants, animals, and land to make life full. They try to incorporate making art into a network of people that continue to care for one another and make the dead and the unseen come forth to be reckoned with. |
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Paul Ebenkamp Three kinds of space: writing, summoning, assembling.  Peace
for thinner ruins
ran its voice out fed petalfolded to the new past swollen distance in the first place summer light like caution tape lumen naturae reason in its mouth licked in sand and eyes in aspens as shadows cast us louder than a new moon everywhere and once who loved government in its new look a heartbeat too far for bodywork dry to the touch in an eon honest-rumored absolution burning down the door took viscera and walked then I wasn’t now I’m not along the circle it took to get here a world made for disbelief trickle-down dualism in another half- wrecked culture crying with greed under the sun’s infected eye innovation-weary aching to be fucked to new flesh in ritual backlash difficulty swallowing a vacuum to what it thinks clean religious insides keep the aspect ratio stretched taut in the defacing thirst of its froth fedback haptic clickbait looking backwards both ways for time in anger and togetherness and music that seems only to recede  hey great spirit smiling through my lab skin backlit into a- tonal grayout a voiceover in power fed the air I knew I needed to be wrong or nothing happens my marrow my chrome hungered from the depths of a bloodclot as the selective evil of attention trembles off as pops and skips people laughing into view and a peace fell upon the media asleep at the top of its lungs sucking its loopholes thinking there’s time in the world wherein I’d spin back apart if we weren’t already walking through the bright side of what none know breeze of fixative anciently pixellated (continuity error) how to live what to do if I couldn’t maybe I would in wrought narrows of where’s this going where are you the sky a blue wall of silence high-concept minutiae in the shape of what I told the truth bleed it back lusted wincing written such that you could hear the world around me praying through its teeth a window’s defense the mirror in knots same difference too much to remember too much to forget to work like that to fit in the trap a heat lamp in broad daylight soul taped to the back of its head spinning threshold erasure’s guest in a chaos of worth light of day of in fear of enough and form and color and the more you dig the less there is “that told no tale and let no witness in” from the festive tesseract-fed police state teething its niche painkillers to miss the point right and wrong gnarl the wind goes the way it came not waving not drowning worn to brightness REJECT ENTERTAINMENT no death no analysis textures it no palliative endures the perfect though slayings are limitless and pain without distances it is possible to concentrate and still be useless wrong in one’s symmetry breath presets hieratic trailing-off into the casual cruelty of personal space and gory lamentations over public figures (neverending semicircle) GOD LEADS THE PAST by the strobelights of home from practice back to habit back to accident to wild waste made more sense the more I’m decreated into something else in this wind that doesn’t end somewhere comfort zone common problem heard down its throat the outside personal be why I’m here until supposedly final touches collapse in delirium middle begin again homespun dying for some singsong in its body art bit into the cusp follow the blindspot regalia loyal haters follow dusk burst like noise into law touch-starved and still I hesitated oh today won’t be yesterday for long and between deaths the permanence of life led me and when I lived what was the difference foundation crept in repeating sideways we never turn around stiffen and wane in the dead of spring time does not tell time does nothing |
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Paul Ebenkamp is author of The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015), Late Hiss (Desert Pavilion, 2021) and Regular Acid Consciousness (Despite Editions, 2022). As Position, he released the home-noise album Prism Trash in 2019 (paulebenkamp.bandcamp.com). The Bottom-Right Corner of All Things, a compendium of visual art, is in the works. |
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Carrie Hunter |
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“It’s called strategic ambiguity.”2 “Retrograde can bring in a lot of clarity.”3 “He had not at all the gusto my mother had.”4 I don’t know why I’m surprised coming across multiple bramble references while reading poetry.5 Jaime Saenz, pro-alcoholism.6 “You’re a bath reader.”7 “To change place is to change meaning, even when that which is changed remains unchanged, so to speak.”8 “Here, in TV Land, ‘arse’ is most definitely a swear word.”9 Language is becoming writing. I didn’t know Nashville had a nickname. There are no apples in my apartment. i know it’s kinda sorta the theme tonight, but i love how long it takes for everything to happen When you have a great desire for something, so great that it leads you to believe it will happen, and is even slightly likely to happen, or at least possible, but then it doesn’t and so your intuition was wrong and only a very strong desire.10 “The mystery as to the reasons behind his picks might be deliberately provocative. Or, he might just prefer songs in a minor key.”11 “How do you vacate language to get to the thing that matters?”12 “It’s that discomfort with our multiplicity that is actually about making us smaller.”13 “Seductively cohesive, glazed in experience.”14 The serial misuses of the central concept have not contributed to its legibility. “There’s a poetic history of talking about ‘opening the field’, but usually to more objects, not more people.”15 Rilke’s doubt that is a knowing. Whether I hurt myself in yoga or if my injury simply revealed itself to me. Juan Gonzalez is a Libra.16 It looks like the fish is talking. “Almost time for Beatrice Dalle Hyperdrive.” Sometimes I don’t want to see anyone, because I’ve finally figured out a way to focus during the day and they will fuck that up. “Commitment to absolute nonsense.”17 Collecting is not writing. “I’m getting many thoughts at the same time.”18 “Betraying the story out of laziness.”19 I relate to Emmanuel Carrère’s20 view of vrittis being not so bad, and very interesting to the writer, and kind of get his aversion to Ram Dass’s (maybe fake) gentleness vs Orwell’s orneriness. Always feeling split by something. The disguise of the writing. “echoey, unverifiable, distance-haunted”21 “People continue bringing up Ukrainian military self-defense while leaving out the fact that there is a draft and many people want to leave rather than fight. I think a good position is to encourage all draft-dodging & sabotage of the military industrial complex already happening.”22 “I’m going to push back on the premise of your question.”23 I’m handling it wonderfully. The fangs stay on during sex. I have 147 albums listed on my full albums to-listen-to playlist. The shadows of the trees on the freeway, mistaken for tire skid marks. “Is forgiveness that is forced upon us true forgiveness?”24 “Ruskin had written a long series of books called Modern Painters. The whole thesis of the series was, in the Dark Ages, there was no light on the canvas.”25 Borders export instability away from imperialistic countries.26 “Mathematics is not just an enclave.”27 “Cherry picked clips.”28 Is this wine or grape juice? The Dalai Lama says that if someone is rich or attractive it is because in a past life, maybe long, long ago they were generous or easy going. Even if they seem horrible now and we wonder how do they deserve their money or attractiveness, it may have come from long ago before they received the hurt they are currently enacting.29 “I know that the fact I’m making it makes me inseparable from it,” she explains. “But I want to be separated from it also.”30 Viperwave. “I go through them in a somewhat haphazard way from time to time if I’m looking for something. And when I do that, I stick labels on the cover that have lists of some of the material that I notice is in that notebook.”31 Deconstruction as the reinvention of religion.32 Morality tale about FOMO. My commute took 8% of The Satanic Verses long to drive to work. “The imperfections of the alphabetic writing.”33 “But when a song this woozy and evocative is on, it’s probably best to stop playing spot-the-influence and just let the thing pick you up and lift you away.”34 The Not-So-Holy Mountain. Should I think for myself or should I think for you? Therapy can be therapy. “I will say as a gen-Xer it’s a little surprising that while the ostensibly left-wing Morrissey and Lydon of the 80s have gone fash, the seemingly apolitical Robert Smith has gone full luxury communist.”35 “A poetics of wanting to set up a field.”36 “A spoonful of honey and a pickle.”37 “These ladybugs represent ghosts, or ancient ancestors.”38 I’m looking for a pet too. “The felicity of the so-called atonal.”39 “The text is a tissue of citations”40 I don’t love how so many movies must portray successful women as deeply insecure, it just doesn’t resonate with me. But maybe that is the truth of a lot of women’s experiences. I also thought the emotions at the end of this film were weirdly excessive; it’s a different type of drawing in to attention than action or suspense, but it does have the same effect of moving you outside of yourself.41 “The development of the practices of information retrieval extends the possibilities of the ‘message’ broadly.”42 “I will not get too heavy into the Memphis Rap Sigil lore here.”43 Like fully red strawberries. Me: *gathers as much elder wood as possible for reasons. “This feels kind of light and fluid, until Kierkegaard.”44 “I start every day with it, in front of the mirror. I say, Andoumboulouousness.”45 Sheets a wreck, a quilt on the floor that thinks it has defeated gender. I don’t want another lesson, I want the real deal. An absolutely normal thing to bring with you to an autopsy. Prosopopoiea. Yoga dream of a man in a white shirt and skinny black tie, sneezing. I didn’t know you could swipe right to see the duration. “Fear is a gift.”46Soul mates are so stressful. “a leg folder film” “You are more trustworthy to me than many of the other rinpochens.”47 Celebration of our end, of our downfall, but not our downfall. Squiggle on a music score. “Explain this unit of measurement.”48 “You’ve created a binge situation.”49 “The position of the United States has been to try to undermine possibilities of negotiations” (between Russia and Ukraine)50 Asana practice is about observation, not performance. The page is a secret. Like a past that never manifests, as if it’s night. Impatient, and don’t even want what’s being offered. “You can have females be XX and males be X (insects), you can have females be ZW and males be ZZ (birds), you can have females be females because they developed in a warm environment and males be males because they developed in a cool environment (reptiles),”51 I’ve been anti-family since I realized I was in one. “If he goes down, so will journalism.”52 Being free is iterative, a rehearsal. Imagist noodles. Just because it’s true, doesn’t mean its correct. Sordid stuff. Neither a law nor a vocation. Insomnia in solidarity. Disambiguation as a joke. Yoga teacher said the words “fleck,” “starfish,” and “proprioception.” I’m losing my light very quickly. I wish I had a favorite window. I feel like the math in this conversation is over my head. A fake bird surrounded by real birds. |
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1 An Event, Perhaps: A Biography of Jacques Derrida by Peter Salmon 2 Noam Chomsky 3 Empress Rose. Tarotscopes 9-14-22. https://youtu.be/JIO_uoV6sYo 4 Jessamyn West 5 Eric Sneathen’s poetry mailing postmarked October 3, 2022 6 The Night 7 Stephen Malkmus 8 Ned Rorem 9 Control (2007) 10 Desire for my roommate to not come home on a particular night 11 Rachel Alm 12 Ronaldo V Wilson in conversation with Tonya M Foster, Poetry Center, SFSU, October 20, 2022 13 Tonya M Foster in conversation with Ronaldo V Wilson, ibid. 14 Kate Hutchinson 15 Roxi Power, youtube user comment 16 Co-host of Democracy Now 17 Kathleen Walsh 18 Old (2021) 19 Elena Ferrante 20 Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère 21 Ben Ratliff 22 @ytnessisdeath (Twitter) 23 Mehdi Hasan 24 Women Talking (2022) 25 Ferlinghetti 26 Travelling While Black by Nanjala Nyabola 27 Of Grammatology by Derrida 28 Amy Goodman re: Tucker Carlson’s reporting on the January 6 Insurrection 29 Perfecting Patience: Buddhist Techniques to Overcome Anger by the Dalai Lama 30 Liz Harris 31 Lisa Robertson, https://spokenweb.ca/podcast/episodes/lisa-robertson-and-the-feminist-archive/ 32 “Keeping Faith with Reason in Derrida” by Neil Saccamano 33 Of Grammatology by Derrida 34 Tom Breihan 35 @BL_Balthaser (Twitter) 36 Sarah Rosenthal, writing group. notes 37 Democracy Now, re: Alaa Abd El-Fattah 38 Empress Rose. Collective Tarot Reading. https://youtu.be/hTSjAbwjH38. 39 Tár (2022) 40 Barthes quoted in Kate Zambreno 41 Sibyl (2019) 42 Of Grammatology by Derrida 43 BeachSloth’s Newsletter 02.05.2023 44 Mary Burger, writing group notes 45 Nathaniel Mackey 46 His Dark Materials, S3E1 47 Se Dol 48 Lisa Marie Basile 49 Derek Gedalecia 50 Noam Chomsky 51 @Jehannamama (Twitter) 52 John Shipton, on Assange Carrie Hunter received her MFA/MA in the Poetics program at New College of California, was on the editorial board of Black Radish Books, and for 11 years, edited the chapbook press, ypolita press. She has published around 15 chapbooks and has three full lengths, the most recent of which is Vibratory Milieu, out with Nightboat Books. She lives in San Francisco and curates the Your Mood Gallery readings series along with Selby Sohn. |
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Michael Leong [“Disorientations” collages together—and so “disorients”—two postmodern Orientalist texts: Kent Johnson’s Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, a yellowface simulation of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) literature, and Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs, a semiotic treatise based on an invented system Barthes calls “Japan.”]
One might say that the black leather sarcophagus is a marvelled point-of-affluence. Arched by paper cherry blossoms, it is only the preparatory substance which permits departure. Slanted upward, the package fulfills what is undone by the familiarity of fashion, the package itself being a kind of crossed-out ticket to the void. Once through this narrow door, you will discover a Zen priest and a painter from Ikebukuro looking skyward, shaking their empty maracas at the flash-point site of a thousand brittle meanings. Quite close by are extensive networks of novelistic essence corroborated by the howl of egrets, by a big and friendly map of the Moon. “Dress warmly,” say the young skiers, “the basins of sake are almost steaming.” To visit a place is thereby to question that the words and the song are one—or to interview the incessant centuries and then rush-off to the lower depths of another day only to find the monuments open-mouthed and sleeping. To pass to the other side of Summer, a good workman must keep the new and the brand-new entirely distinct as they must establish the sumptuous structure of India ink inside the prolonged corridors of chanting. Why waver over a rolled-up newspaper hung specifically for the occasion? We, who are without any goal but underground peace, are to become fuel for the commercial organism, our atomic bodies gleaming like the spit of a mongrel dog in the imperial begging bowl. The black granite hood is apparently lined as well as edged with fur. Can it absorb—like a landmark coming home at great speed—this dense instability of forgetting? My title makes an explicit nod to Amiri Baraka’s 1959 statement of poetics entitled “How You Sound??” in which he says, “You have to start and finish there... your own voice... how you sound.” In what follows, I’m going to explore the linkages between how I sound as an embodied speaker and how my “printed voice” sounds on the page. By analyzing my complicated relationship to the English language in both speech and writing, I hope to shed some light on why I—a writer marked by Asian ancestry—have committed to certain formal positions. I concur with Dorothy Wang, who argues in her study Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, “How... an Asian American poet situate[s] herself in an Anglo-American poetic tradition when she is marked as [...] alien and [...] excluded from the category of ‘native speaker’” “surface[s] as much in the formal structures as in the thematic content [of her poems].” This is to say I want to investigate how the history of my subjectivity has interfaced with the history of my formalisms. “... fictive correspondence from Jack Spicer to the Revue Asiatique, and well-known translations of World Literature that may occasionally reveal a reserve of politically symbolic recuperations or an unheard-of division of clouds.” Mercy! This fragment ends with a particularly ornate postmodifying clause that is, itself, peppered with modifiers. It’s too much: but that’s part of the point. If my speaking voice tends to a flat neutrality, my printed voice accents itself with a hyperbolic ornamentalism. By luxuriating in such convolutions, I want to turn hypotaxis against itself. The objective is not—to quote Jaswinder Bolina—to “write like a white guy” nor even to “outwrite” white people but to overwrite English with another kind of English, to deform the sentence by exaggerating the high English of hypotaxis, to exert syntactic strain on English’s joints and appendages—as if, by barraging it with enough discursive density, I could make the English language relent and make it say “Mercy.” Michael Leong’s most recent books are Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018), Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020), and Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven (co•im•press, 2020), a co-translation, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s operatic long poem. He is Robert P. Hubbard Assistant Professor of Poetry at Kenyon College. |
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Kevin CK Lo for double bassist, audience, and electronics First presented at The Lab, CNMAT in collaboration with SFCMP, December 4, 2022 |
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The Audience Plays Itself is a piece composed for Richard Worn (double bass) but can also feature any other solo instrumentalist. |
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Kevin CK Lo is a composer, choreographer, writer, artist and arts worker living on Chochenyo Ohlone land (Oakland). In his compositions for live performance and installation, he utilizes instruments, digital sound processing and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure and audience kinesthetic response while seeking to corrupt conventional compositional/performative/installative rationale. He is one half of the experimental interdisciplinary duo, DROUGHT SPA, alongside alex cruse. His chapbook, OKLDCAAN, was released on Eyelet Press in 2019. Writing can also be found online at SFMOMA Open Space and Cordite Journal. |
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Joseph Mosconi |
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Like the whole |
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at the Embarking Lot As a first principle (at first, in the beginning, once upon a time, etc.), I wanted to see what would happen to a narrative poem if I treated it like any other text-object from which data might be extracted. What kind of information could be derived from such a poem if I subjected it to the same kind of data manipulation that major online platforms perform on user-generated content? What types of patterns might be revealed? What would such patterns tell us about narrative storytelling, literary analysis, and platform markets? What type of texts might be created—or destroyed—by such processes and procedures? What poetic potentialities are lying, waiting to be discovered, in the latent space of a poem? This was primarily an aesthetic inquiry, but it was not devoid of political, philosophical, and scientific implications. 1 The first letters of the name of the literary group that I have long been involved with, the Poetic Research Bureau, form an acrostic (PRB), which corresponds to the first letters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). Furthermore, the Poetic Research Bureau was inaugurated in 1997 by editors Macgregor Card and Andrew Maxwell with the publication of a poetry journal they called The Germ, a direct reference to a Pre-Raphaelite journal also called The Germ, first published in 1850. 2 See Cunningham, Dawn (2009) “‘We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits’: The Politics of Feminine Consumption and Sexuality in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’,” Articulāte: Vol. 14 , Article 3. 3 See Tiziana Terranova, “Ordinary Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism,” in After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common, Semiotext(e), 2022: “In critical and philosophical terms, there is, as one should expect, a reduction of desire as a productive, connective, open process of world-creation to an economy of pleasure ‘as a repressive (negating) power’... decomposing and destroying desire by dissipating it into the reproductive circuits of communicative capitalism and thus creating ‘disassociated milieus’ of transindividuation... practically enacting the decomposition of libidinal energy in networked communication whereby users’ participation is reduced to a sterile act of consumption for which the subject is paid in worthless ‘tiny nuggets of pleasure.’” 4 See Brian Ang, “Assemblage Poetics,” Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry 36: Art (December 2022). Joseph Mosconi is a writer and taxonomist based in Los Angeles. A former Google computational linguist, he is currently the executive director of the Poetic Research Bureau, a co-founder and programmer at 2220 Arts+Archives, and an editor at Make Now Books. He is the author of several books, including Ashenfolk (Make Now Books, 2019), Fright Catalog (Insert Blanc Press, 2013), Demon Miso/Fashion In Child (Make Now Books, 2014), Renaissance Realism (Gauss PDF, 2016), and, with Pauline Beaudemont, an artist book called This Arrogant Envelope (FCAC Geneva, 2017). With Rita Gonzalez he edited the art and poetry journal Area Sneaks. His poems have been selected for the BAX: Best American Experimental Writing anthology for the years 2014 and 2015. With Andrew Maxwell, he curated an exhibition, THIS KNOWN WORLD: Spontaneous Particulars of the Poetic Research Bureau at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2017. |
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Kate Robinson Asked to write a poetics statement and I first start at the edges. With my writing being simply what it is, being different things to different people, working in multiple registers, useful, but for nothing in particular.
intersecting Horizontal organization: rhizomatic
Micro ↭ Macro
Personal ↭ Societal Inattentive ↭ Hyper-focused Ambient ↭ Localized Interior ↭ Exterior Interiority ↭ Aesthetics Reflection ↭ Commentary Diffuse ↭ Acute Psychedelic ↭ Ordinary Spiritual ↭ Material Resentment ↭ Letting go Looseness ↭ Composition 1 This could be another term for “assemblage,” or maybe another instantiation of assemblage, an aspect of assemblage, a method of assemblage... 2 Economy of word 3 Economy of ideas Commie joke I’ve recently been noticing how people throw things from their vehicles Almost always soft plastic A straw + lid hits the asphalt instantly A bag floats upward then sideways and upward and downward and upward again I don’t know where it finally rests forever or even if it does It’s possible it remains in motion for as long as it remains Maybe they’re right, the tossers they say we’re all on the precipice already Waiting in the rose garden someone’s always evoking turkeys here, tho Gerald was re-homed It smells like roses A man walks with a bouquet of roses from elsewhere A group of old guys gather and chat, maybe about roses I guess I’ll walk around Almost daily I marvel at the infinite permutations of the finite words lending themselves to expression through individuals and collectively In rejection of belief I emerge amphibious They go on growing and wild in the world Getting clearer as we go ***** Do you think maybe Stein had ADHD? Redness is not roundness Lungs are not gills My dreams have been reactivated and their residual feelings persist, compounding day after day Try and tell me they would Try and tell me the world is not seething Try and tell me the world is not seeing with a sort of grumpy hermeneutics81 Pure O alienated by success Accretion interrupting sleep, an unavoidable methodology Sedimentary pieces of an act of imagination82 A pile of what gets made ***** It’s not that I don’t mind the weather I still have no beginning Every opening a pass through without walls we arrive hungry sweep out through the edges “i have nothing to say and i am saying it and that is poetry as i need it. this space of time is organized; we need not fear these silences, we may love them. structure without life is dead, but life without structure is unseen. pure life expresses itself within and through structure, each moment is absolute, alive, and significant. blackbirds rise from a field making a sound delicious beyond compare.”83 Commie religion: what’s mine is yrself we give up skin for cloth, plastic, rhetoric is so good Expand our tent while beating the drum of collective grievance Most sentimental objects lost to images not even “real” ones not even NFTs Space “just” negative event Everything that we think of as nothing Upper happy Psychic reader Cordial emotion Good for a joke 81 Taylor Brady 82 Camille Roy, kinda 83 John Cage The tonal shape of my dream UR the classic Nationalist for hire Mambos for thee Poles Mambos for all of us In my dream she said something like “You aren’t as serious as I am” and for once she was smiling Or maybe it was “You have a sense of irreverence That I lack” They say you can not read in dreams but I have who knows if I was right I think it makes perfect sense, now, actually: mean body sidesteps direct address Percussive sublimation Lateral arabesque Salvation lost its meaning In a place to buy housewares Second coming Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire tornadoes crossing state lines obliterate Amazon, a candle factory Workers dead for commerce as always survivors pulled from the rubble dance and cry, return to work the next day ***** Against perfection Against availability New motive: flirting with two hands When I was a kid the beach was covered in desirable shells These days there’s almost nothing Is it different, beaches? Is it true? I forget about you long enough to forget why I needed to92 Our travails are wailing on a tiled bathroom floor, dodging sawhorse thrown through window of your employer while you’re working, 15 shillings or just barely scraping still “resilient” something about The Tower93 the failure of totality systems viable communication it’s one of my favorite mental illnesses An infinite dream ***** I wake from one wherein the symbols of vocation intermingle in generational tension The books were smol and full of holes constructed by flesh intriguing, but the babe keeps moving in there my groin feels pulled I can’t move without a sound How can someone say “awe” so frequently? I never say it A good friend has an inexhaustible depth94 I’ve penetrated ALL my girlfriends95 you want to access those pieces96 How can you think beyond anything that is currently knowable to you? I remember the tonal shape of my dream when I close my eyes for sleep the next night 92 Taylor Swift 93 the card 94 Leon Kass interviewed by David Brooks, The Ezra Klein Show, Dec 14, 2021 95 Wouldn’t YOU like to know 96 Conner Habib Water person What Zen tried to do ideally, is to be completely cool97 Whole Foods customer service worker shopping for boots This is what the ego is for: it tells you who pays98 “I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter, and audience?”99 ***** Driving home from House of Prime Rib, car full of parents and partner, bellies full of baby and beef, creamed spinach, potatoes, wine, martinis, happy I almost run a red light, a semi barrels through and we all consider death “Maybe if I die it’s not such a big deal”100 In some ways this is the perfect moment all of us pregnant with joyful expectation Nothing yet ruined Nothing not lived up to I didn’t run the light, tho And I don’t want to die now Nothing yet ruined But maybe if I die it’s not such a big deal with all of you at the same time Unification of concept + affect As they go from a water person to an air person101 Punishingly sincere, but the best of it hits ***** When you call everything you don’t like garbage, it starts to lose its impact Breathing in I imagine myself as still water Breathing out I reflect things as they are Breathing in, still water Breathing out, reflecting In Wtr Out Rflct102 Stop arranging the world for a bit103 The only little doggie here was me104 ***** After years spent unhollow105 I was cracked opened and depleted only to be refilled this time with garbage Cosmic GPS located us, cosmic businesspeople wanting to make a difference in history exploding the unhollow rocks making them hollow hollowing out a particular time How we show up in the long continuum matters, right? The third millennium matters, right? Different people that I know, or other people, as they’re known, matter, right? ***** Tell me a little about the prophecies that have been important to you She says slightly too enthusiastically, you know? Just slightly louder than she intended, but she plays it off, settles down into her seat a bit more deeply than she had been, sit bones expanding nicely to fill the cushion Is she manic? Maybe she’s manic The female wing you know how they can be keeping the bird of humanity afloat flying in circles fully expressed, if you will ***** I am interested in the moment in, just in you the fetus who sneaks out at night106 A level of ecstasy An untouchable level A vapor that seeps 97 Alan Watts 98 Terence McKenna 99 this bit from Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, via Sebastian Castillo 100 Brian Eno 101 Kaiser L&D 102 Disha Gupta’s Yin Yoga class, Barefoot Movement, Wednesdays, 6pm, Oakland 103 Connor Habib 104 Christopher Nelms 105 J. Gordon Faylor 106 A father’s story Hands in the cultural tip jar
Lisping Baby nipple skin tag I’m so sorry you can’t see what I see Love Modernity and the future gone off the rails ***** I am making $162/hour telecommuting I never imagined it honest to goodness yet my closest companion is earning $21 thousand a month by working on the web, that was truly shocking for me, she prescribed me to attempt it simply COPY AND OPEN THIS SITE: Richjobz.com ***** Something about me: I don’t need to feel good about myself Did they know it was a fly trap when they poured the wine?127 Isn’t the greatest freedom in the world the freedom to be wrong?128 When I say I want to move this chair I mean I want to destroy the powerful, or that which makes the powerful possible129 Buying things is killing people, hun, and yet we cannot stop Polynesian sauce, et al, so sticky Triangulated cheerleader Stop me if I did Nobody wants true love more than me ***** Stars untwinkle one by one130 He riffed it so I went with it131 I like to shoot from the hip Love is a classy process The bitterness becomes a botanical gain of function Do you want to feel something? Standing there like a rock You only have one life
Ornamented air I can’t stop stealing Intrepid capitalist spirit Just as Marx predicted At this point in time, normal pronation is taking place and the foot is referred to as a “bag of bones” due to its ability to adapt to the new walking or running surfaces. Part of this process of becoming a “bag of bones” is that the arch will start to flatten out and roll toward the ground.132 How many divorces do you think are over the garbage disposal? The flour sack you threw a little too on the nose, don’t you think? Polygamy133 or, another open crowd134 Who learns will love and not destroy the creatures life the flowers joy135 mean body will be great and the world will move on!!!! ***** Cultural tip jar Eyeroll body language A male alligator never stops growing Male in my force of will? Web3, save the Woman King Hands used to be orthodox, now paradox136 dress for the prophecy: total becoming137 any given goblin’s brunch blood administrative surgery cosplay138 Your face facing Pure experience Father, quencher139 news-pilled parenting At the same time, the distinctive energy. The same fingers that confer a blessing, stroke the expressive poten- tial, a child or, tend a wound, can smash a skull, drive emerging human consciousness, brought into hands like those that produced these realizations Idioms describe the manner in comparable images. which, symbolically, the hand exploits its power. Sin an object of fascination at dawn even-handed, underhanded, high-handed the intimacy of human sleight-of-hand. Tiny hands, tied hands or a lack of u the hand ditters only minimally from the constraints on one’s autonomy an incapacity to grasp and claim the world, make one’s opposable thumb desires real, form one’s matter the hand and its claim a vastly disproportionate representation in the brain. Along with the mouth and lips the hands have more neural innervation than all the rest of the body. can be seen as representing a feminine being-in-the-world that is psychically so bedeviled by the patriarchal attitude that, as if reflecting the preeminence of sounding and making, the emblematic hands of self-expression are rendered the Hand of God Or, alternatively, supreme, inexorable agency. As primary in- cidents of the creative, the hands imitate the mythic shaping of matter into140 ***** You’ll be hearing from my lawyers he says, as my breast nestles into the slowly expanding divot in my mattress, memory foam, at the edge of history I mean I’m writing history here! You said yes again! To the speaking invitation. Visibility is meaningless but look at me anyway naked on main is always a thirst trap I begrudgingly concede ***** Breathing in I imagine myself as a river Breathing out I am flowing Breathing in, river Breathing out, flowing In Rvrrrrrrr Out Fffflwwwwwwwggg141 126 dictation 127 That one trip 128 CK, I Love Dick 129 Jay Jay Mull 130 Roger McGough, “God Rest the Queen” 131 The Rehearsal 132 Morton’s Foot, https://www.physio-pedia.com/Morton%27s_Toe 133 Brian Ang, Totality Cantos 134 Brian Ang 135 Fonthill Castle via Oki on Insta 136 Estelle Frankel 137 Caleb Beckwith, new works read at Woolsey Heights, 09.25.22 138 mask in the office really hitting its annual humid face peak 139 Srsly Wrong 261, Papa and Boy IV 140 another kind of dictation, from The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images: “Hands” 141 Disha Gupta’s Yin Yoga class, Barefoot Movement, Wednesdays, 6pm, Oakland Kate Robinson is a writer, book artist, printer, and publisher who has spent the last 13 years working from Oakland, CA. She is the author of Mean Body (eyelet, 2022), This Woman’s Work (Gauss PDF Editions, 2019), and, with Ivy Johnson, The Third Thing (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2016). Her prints are housed in the collections of SUNY Buffalo, Mills College, SFMOMA, and Letterform Archive. |
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Jamie Townsend (for Assemblage Poetics) My partner Ivy and I make a lot of altars at home. Some are seasonal invocations or spur-of-the-moment energetic grids. Others are surreal, three-dimensional collages that slowly morph over long stretches of time. Over the last several years, I’ve found it to be both a creative and healing practice, one with an immediate focus as well as a time-release residual effect. Placing disparate things in correspondence feels restorative and has been a natural corrective to the flattening of bodily experience during lockdown. I mean, poetry performs this intervention with language all the time, creating a sort of windborn assemblage of sensory impressions, freely circulating their energies.
Poems can function as altars—consecrated, latent spaces where writing emphasizes itself as an act of energetic attentiveness. In the process of writing out the beginnings of a poem in a notebook our bodies are sensitized, open to chance meetings of various textures, the neighborly correspondences of unlike objects, the endless mutability of the whole visible world. Like the Delphic Oracle—a hallucinogenic cloud rising from the earth to commune with the sybil—the poem/altar is positioned to amplify the chemical discourse between everything. In the moments I am most present and aware of the experiential field I’m dissolved within, I am power-bottoming in the act of writing. I marshal my attention to the point of most concentrated energy and studiously attend to its direction.
At Elderly, the poetry and arts magazine I curate and edit with Nick DeBoer, the creation of digital and print collages is a ritual we perform for each issue. This is the first consistent visual art practice I’ve had in my adult life, lately patterned and mediated through a stack of second-hand design and science magazines from Creative Reuse in Temescal, or stack of vinyl album covers upon which a handful of objects are placed then photographed. These art-pieces are made alongside the arrangement and editing of the guest contributor work for forthcoming issues. Because of this they exist in both an ambient correspondence with the current poems, as well as the ongoing visual dialogues of previous Elderly artwork, some of it more than a decade old. I gather materials instinctually as I go that later self-dictate their own collective shape and visual narrative. Collage as an altar, an alteration, a Pythian cloud.
The poem/altar is that demarcated space of attentiveness, a focal point filled with materials, shapes, colors, energies, resonances, each lending something distinct to a larger, permissive collective. It is the place where communication between the vertical and the horizontal occurs, where poetry can shoot off in crooked lines across a whole grid of encounter. The possibility of an altar, the possibility of the altered poem space, is the possibility of unforeseen collaboration—a world emerging from the many languages of things. Worlds within worlds, words emerging from cracks in a world shell, nested like a matryoshka doll—where the act of writing a poem can be an exercise of rearrangement, uncovering, care, worship, attentiveness, sublimation, critique, strange inspiration, in the way it attempts to survey the sensations of its own existence.
Writing in altar spaces encourages me to reach toward correspondences I’m not normally attuned to. It has also sharpened the questioning my own borders, my understanding of porousness. I think of Sara Ahmed’s self-survey in Queer Phenomenology, of orientation as a way of looking as well as scattering the self, as she describes in a section about moving homes: “How I love unpacking. Taking things out, putting things around, [and] arranging myself all over the walls. I move around, trying to distribute myself evenly around the rooms.” I question this “myself,” not something solid exactly, but rather a relay point, an emotional technology. The “right place” or material is not fixed or predetermined, but rather defines itself in momentary relation to whatever’s nearest.
Drink the fermentation from the jar! Bury your face in every crotch that invites you! A complicated, non-binary life flowers out of collages—the brainy gut biome, the fruiting mycelial mat, the aeolian microbes in our lungs, the growing awareness of another subtle body, stretched like cheesecloth across the global psychic space of supply chain economics. We are already many things trying and often failing to find ways to live together, trying to find some measure of equilibrium. Poems emerge from this granular multiplicity out of necessity. They challenge static ideas of where things belong—if their edges can even be seen. They rub out the thin line between everywhere and nowhere. They lean against the altar. Loo emerges from the depths of a wardrobe, perfectly disheveled, amorous, hugging a thick pile of outfits to their chest, and sets them on the bed. The lamplight flickers, then fully cuts out. A Kasuma pumpkin print glows bright green on the wall. ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight’ begins to play on a blinking conical speaker. Loo undresses then begins dancing in the dark. Little pearlescent stars scattered across their bodysuit wink in and out as they twirl thru the blacklight and swell of Brill Building strings. The dressing mirror is a portal of swirling plasma, a storm of eyeshadow, a staggering polka dot, a prehistoric butterfly sequin. Loo slips into its vacuum, the voided suggestion of any clear meaning the song or morse code of design could offer. Imagine you had to write a preface for your lust. The preface would offer an apology for the intimacy of what follows. Imagine there was a piece of clothing that made you wet. Rewrite a history of your body in relation to that idealized form. Imagine a lesson you could learn from your own interpretation of someone else’s fantasy—daydream as mutual aid. Imagine you wrote your final requests on a jacket, like a seed—that you were dying and needed to make sure your intentions were crystal. Leave a part of your body on the doorstep of the state. Imagine your muscles are turning to diamond, your insides compressed under the pressure of an entire planet on the verge of collapse. Write a brand new description of glamour as planetary survival. Turns your inside into a screen for future ghosts to romance.
Have your cake |
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Jessica L. Wilkinson – poetry as a site for biographical assemblage – – the line as stitching, as method – – the segment and gap (DuPlessis) as ingredients for biographical disruption, stimulation, motivation, energy, transmutation – – the poem as playground, dancefloor, roundtable, dinner party: an invitation – This poem, ‘[untitled schoolgirl]’, is part of a work-in-progress manuscript, a poetic biography of French-Australian artist Mirka Mora. Mirka was born in Paris in 1928; she and her mother and two sisters narrowly escaped internment camps during the Holocaust—a letter dropped by her mother through a gap in the train enabled her father to locate them before they were taken to Auschwitz. Mirka married Georges Mora in 1947 and they moved to Melbourne in 1951, where they set up French restaurants and cafés, as well as art galleries, all of which became the most popular creative and conversational hubs for local and visiting artists of the mid-century; these bohemian gatherings provided the backdrop for the development of Mirka’s own artistic talents. She had a style all her own—her paintings, drawings, mosaic and sculptures depict bright colours and wide-eyed children, beasts and angels. A generous and eccentric woman, she was a community-minded spirit who supported and promoted the careers of numerous artists; she also liked to share her techniques with others, holding workshops with schoolchildren and adults to make versions of her infamous painted dolls (also known as ‘soft sculptures’). Mirka Mora, Untitled [Schoolgirl] (doll) c. 1970 casein paint on calico, 42 x 27 cm, Heide Museum of Modern Art. —Mirka Mora i. Doll —hat pulled over the wide, wide eyes have seen very much through gaps— —in the train, so many eyes widened so hard to breathe, to look beyond— —the forests of France, a childhood hiding with trees, on the look-out— —wounds are held on the inside, gauze thrust against quick stitches— —to bloom through non-sense, to fill up an absence, to close over hunger— —the doll draws a difficult past into space; might replace the departed— —might capture the soul— ii. Soft Sculpture Dear Charles, Dear Charles, Dear Charles, Dear Charles, iii. Friend/s
iv. Museum It takes a long time to get to the door in a vast hall of mirrors Betty and Alma, transitional long shadows hastening through the light like unsolved murders persuading fear loneliness alienation French literature and poetry Je regrette les temps de l’antique jeunesse curled up in a ball prone hiding floating fallen j’ai allongé mes jupes jusqu’aux chevilles the sky eats our chests the sun, our gait Je n’appartiens plus à l’humanité pushing at the exit into fresh, boundless air Italicised lines from Part iv drawn (in order) from: Charles Blackman (speaking with poet Thomas Shapcott), John Shaw Neilson’s poem ‘Schoolgirls Hastening,’ Arthur Rimbaud’s poem ‘Soleil et Chair,’ Colette’s novel Claudine à l’école, and Comte de Lautréamont’s poetic novel Les Chants de Maldoror. Jessica Wilkinson has published three poetic biographies, Marionette: A Biography of Miss Marion Davies (Vagabond 2012), Suite for Percy Grainger (Vagabond 2014) and Music Made Visible: A Biography of George Balanchine (Vagabond 2019). Jessica is the founding editor of Rabbit: a journal for nonfiction poetry and the Rabbit Poets Series of single-author collections by emerging poets. She co-edited the anthologies Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (2016) and Memory Book: Portraits of Older Australians in Poetry and Watercolours (2021). She teaches Creative Writing at RMIT University, Melbourne. |
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