Dear All -
Please keep the very interesting dialog going here, if you feel like responding, etc., regarding Tues. "lecture" / listening / con-current poetic ritual and the various problems and interests that have spun off from there. This call is simply a heads up to those interested and not meant as a turn away from the discussion. I deeply appreciate honesty of the dialog, the care with which you are all, at very least, putting into your writing (thinking aloud). I'm interested in this, from Paige (and many, many other things):
It will conclude with “you had to be there”. To read an interesting account of such is to read a fabrication. The ash ritual only interests people in its theatricality, its dragginess. The content bores them. The content stays safe.
I take "people" to mean those who were not there, or who did not participate. The "public." And yes, that is why I ask that one translate, or transport ("metaphore") one's experience of their own language's limits shared with (for a moment) friends at a fire, and again, this week, one's personal and felt-collective exhaustion and (perhaps) release, into an aesthetic interaction with those you don't know, or might not know. At the root of the poetic is always, even in the most "conceptual" of poetries that have no pretense to impress or be clever, this DESIRE for what might be wholly impossible--to give unanticipated care and to receive it thru (perhaps a future's) language (the limit of our world?), to code the silence and devalue solipsistic desire in favor of some strangely shared-and-not-shared desire (the "remainder of desire"). Which involves that risk of laying bare, turning outward the inward (private into public, or again, realize that inner/outer is often a false distinction), as wound or as shared ritual in a way which may, of course "fail," only wound you in a different and public way (at the mall, say), yes, or may only bore you/them, etc, but may not.
But aren't we always having to say "you had to be there"? Isn't one of poetry's myriad social functions the opening of possible futures, which if so, isn't that a relational partial erasure of "you had to be there"? Any poetics of the body, for example, or viz my body and its reclamation of a sliver of space: "you just had (have) to be there (here)." Or I have a tooth ache: "you just have to be there (you just have to be this body, with this mouth, or that tooth, to KNOW what I'm saying)," etc etc. Aren't "they" or the "you" in this construction there, to some significant extent? Why assume not? What odd looking/sounding language could serve as "for a future" in which the question of having to be there becomes itself strange looking--? The translation is a practice of formal attentiveness, or a spasm of form that is not for Now but for an undetermined future. The interest in and construction of that language is a leap of "infinite faith," I think. A sort of faith in the capacity of the signifier to embody, or to commons. It's also as a matter of honest intentionality, which is to say don't underestimate our own curiosity and its value (what will be the form of my response? = what the F__ will they have said/done/thought of this?).
I don't think that the content of the public rituals (our ashen gathering or our militant sound investigations), and their proceeding translations into poetic documentation, are banal or safe (the page may be, or its dross may be, but not its present process of construction)--from here I can tell that I don't think the translation of the experiences lit on Tuesday is safe, but perhaps safe-making. Theater has its double, and it's that middle distance, that between, that such transmission (antennae are always up, as Tyrone Williams reminds us, in echo of Duncan) maybe opens as potentiality for the curious stranger, or "should," if honesty were at the root of the transmission. Therein lies, at that moment one of laying bare, the potential to have "returned but returned transfigured" the care that you had, until that moment, kept to yourself, hoarded as sacred and "owned not rent."
From the post-public part of the ritual (written while wearing those breaths in public), as part of Occultations, book forthcoming:
Need less to say the say sound make-s-
In the hiding in the want-as need as lay
As soft under-the said to de-claim -skin-
Cover you-sound a full wound un-desolates
Your un-peeled body con-cept you asked it
Open asked if desire not need needs in -the-
In made-need in-the -shine- of this stuck tonic-
Clonic body para-meter if not-yet and if -now-
Then our shadows are fully not us not yet –yet-
reprinted from Cannot Exist Issue 6:
Now dreamt, this selves dreamed
Of Bodies, now that words like
This sudden flourishing of anti
Bodies swelling into the category
Three range, ranging over cata-
Strophic design flaws, if words
Make these things, then talk to me
Create your body part by part, start
With the lashes or end with the lashes
So that this body can sleep, dream up
New things: instead of count, down beats
Of a ponderous machine heart, a drowned Please consider sending something along in solidarity - once we have
enough work posted, we'll start sharing with media outlets - thanks.
Poets for Living Waters is a poetry action in response to the Gulf Oil
Disaster of April 20, 2010, one of the most profound man-made
ecological catastrophes in history. Former US poet laureate Robert
Pinsky describes the popularity of poetry after 9/11 as a turn away
from the disaster’s overwhelming enormity to a more manageable
individual scale. As we confront the magnitude of this recent tragedy,
such a return may well aid us.
The first law of ecology states that everything is connected to
everything else. An appreciation of this systemic connectivity
suggests a wide range of poetry will offer a meaningful response to
the current crisis, including work that harkens back to Hurricane
Katrina and the ongoing regional effects.
This online periodical is the first in a planned series of actions.
Further actions will include a print anthology and a public reading in
Washington DC.
If you would like to submit work for consideration, please send 1-3
poems, a short bio, and credits for any previously published
submissions to:
poetsforlivingwaters@yahoo.com
Editors: Amy King & Heidi Lynn Staples
~~
If you care, share -- Urgent Call -- http://poetsforlivingwaters.com/
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