ESSAYS
HOW TO BE HUMAN (THE BROOKLYN RAIL) | 2019
A REVIEW OF SOME BEHEADINGS BY ADITI MACHADO
In a metaphor, the vehicle is a stand-in for the tenor; we always know which term is “real,” which merely “figure.” Here the relationship between the routes and vistas of the natural world and those to be found in and through the sentence or line is not so hierarchical. Rather, world and word are mutually productive. Machado places herself between them, mediating and noting their interdependency.
THREE FUTURE DANCES, OR THE DANCE FEMINISTIC (JACKET2) | 2018
We are drawn together to march but because we are so many, we cannot march. We can only shuffle off balance, lean, wind our way, press or fall against one another, allow ourselves to be moved, give up our bodies to the swarm. And so we find we are not militant but in motion, a motion we can’t master. The speakers we can hardly hear, on a stage we cannot see, are saying what we expect but still need them to say: that we are outraged; that we will unite; that we will resist.
THE WIDTH OF THE LINE AT THE BORDER (TERRITORY) | 2017
Prior to the Swamp Land Act of 1850 nearly all of Northwest Ohio and much of Indiana’s top half lay under water, as did large portions of Indianapolis. The Swamp Land Act grants all wetlands to their respective states; the states then sell their wetlands to developers, such that what was once public land held in common is now rapidly privatized. In Indiana, speculators from the eastern states grab huge swaths, then rent to poor whites willing to drain the swamps (dig ditches headed river-wards), in the hope of pulling a crop from the mud.
To sell the swamp to drain the swamp. To drain the swamp to farm it.
WHAT IS ACTION? (JACKET2) | 2017
TWO COLLECTIVES: ANON AND NOT
In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt describes three central human activities: labor, work, and action. Labor “corresponds to the biological process,” and includes anything we do to keep ourselves and others alive: food production and preparation, cleaning, childbirth. Work is whatever contributes to the “world of things,” the made world: craftwork, construction, city planning, but also the creation of works of art and of laws. So what is action?
I BELIEVE THAT WE WILL WIN (JACKET2) | 2017
ON TEARS AND TRAINS
So, AWP happened. It sometimes seems a bit shameful, a little shameful, to go. Like a form of selling out that also includes fessing up to your departmental cash and admitting to your desire, that might be worse than everyone’s desire, for attention, but might be more kindly described, by you to yourself, as only the human longing for company.
TRANSLATION AND SOCIAL PROJECT - AUSTRIA AND ELSEWHERE
After the unfathomable swarm that was the Women’s March in D.C., I find it both difficult and necessary to return to thinking about the small, local, intimate actions that are the focus of this series of posts. Necessary because massive gatherings, though exhilarating, are also largely symbolic and affective (unless they actually shut things down), while the actions I am writing about are concrete, direct, and (inter)personal. Difficult because actions both small and slow provoke feelings of panic in a time of such painful crisis.
COUNTERPATH COMMUNITY GARDEN YEAR ONE (JACKET2) | 2017
GROWING FOOD/GIVING IT AWAY
In 2009, Tim Roberts and I opened Counterpath Gallery in downtown Denver in order to expand what we’d been doing as publishers of Counterpath Press. For four years we hosted readings, film screenings, installation and digital work, dance and performance, lectures, and workshops — often up to three events per week. In 2015, we lost our original space, and then, through the nonprofit Counterpath, we purchased and converted an automotive garage with a surrounding plot of land.
ON PROPERTY AND MONSTROSITY (PDF) | 2016
We bought an old garage surrounded by fruit trees—apple, pear, peach, plumb, apricot, and cherry—planted a decade ago by Dan, the previous owner, who, in addition to gardening, made soccer goals (“Goal Oriented” was the name of his business). Three years ago Dan’s wife died and after that, he let things go. Compass weed (an opiate) and thistle (good for tea) grew thigh high all around the trees
SOMEONE SHOT MY BOOK (PDF) | 2016
1. Bullet
Someone took my book out into the woods and shot it.3 The book is intimate with violence now in at least two ways: both as subject matter (violence is what it’s about), and as target. The book reaches the gun as its interlocutor. Or, now the book, with holes throughout, needs to be written again.
THE POET-SCHOLAR (JACKET2) | 2015
A LIST
As I am a poet-scholar, or, a person who reads and a person who writes, a person who researches and a person who invents — a person who teaches and a person who edits — I can only consider the question of the poet-scholar from the inside — and so, what follows is a subjective and gendered account of the position of the poet-scholar in the form of a list numbered 1–10.
LISA ROBERTSON: IMPROVISATION AND WANDERING (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2012
And so, having interviewed (and spent a few days with) one of the writers whose work I have most loved, most lived with, I now find myself faced with a loss and a gain. I gain a friend, but a person cannot stand for “poetry” if the person is now a person.
TIME AND THE POEM (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2012
This post is written on an Amtrak train careening from DC to NY.
Having just been at George Mason University where I gave a craft talk, a reading, and a talk about publishing, I offer the following:
“Craft” is not a word I use very much when I speak to myself about poetry. I don’t consider that I am crafting something, but rather that I am listening to something, allowing something, or at times, searching for something.
THE SHAPE OF THE I CONFERENCE: BOULDER AND DENVER (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2012
I haven’t recovered enough to attempt even a provisional a summary of what was said. Instead, I’ll say this:
We opened with Object Oriented Ontology represented by Tim Morton who spoke about the irreducible series of entities that go into the makeup of the podium (the actual podium), and who made the claim, with OOO, that “I” am no different in value than a frog, a quark, or a weather pattern.
SHAME AND THE SHAPE OF I (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2012
Maybe Rachel Zucker and Rodrigo Toscano are right. Maybe there are types of poets: those with powers (Bhanu Kapil and her divinations?) and those with weapons (Vanessa Place, reputed to have “killed” poetry?). The fuck-me poets (O’Hara in his tight pants?), and the fuck-you poets (no names).
ON NOT WRITING (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2012
On the day the computer broke
I was with my family at the beach and had no notebook. Writing on scraps of paper seemed so pointless I didn’t do it. For about a week I didn’t write.
There was a pond, an ocean, some smallish trees, bushes, an otter in the pond, that sun.
IT’S NOT CONCEPTUAL, IT’S CONSENSUAL (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2012
I figured if I put "conceptual" in the title of my post, I'd get more readers. Did it work? I'll never know. But the topic of this blog post is "consensual" poetics, not conceptual—whether or not conceptual poetry is dead, dying, moving into middle age, or still in its young adulthood.
APRIL FOOLS (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2012
All poets are fools.
The word comes from Latin, “follis,” which means a leather bag, or a bellows. It comes to mean mad or insane or just plain stupid (I suppose) because of this image of an empty bag, a bag filled only with air whose only purpose is to blow more air.
RESPONSE, WITH JOHN-MICHAEL RIVERA (ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES) | 2012
The essential point in all response is the desire to control the environment. Columbus did not seek a new route to the Indies in response to a majority directive. One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter. Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts. Love is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one's own values in the person of another. What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.
THE WITCH'S HOUSE: POETICS (THE VOLTA) | 2011
When Hansel and Gretel are truly lost, have almost given up hope, they are saved not because they stumble unwittingly upon the house (as I’d remembered it), but because a bird sang. The bird, then, might be the poet, delivering the children toward what seems to be an answer, a miraculous solution to their suffering—a world beyond this one in which there is no more hunger.
ON TRANSLATING APOLLINAIRE: PILGRIMS OF PERDITION (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2011
For almost a year I’ve been working on a co-translation of Apollinaire’s Alcools with Jennifer Pap, a close friend and a scholar of twentieth-century French poetry. Our motivations for this project are manifold. First, we simply wanted to work together on something exciting and difficult.
THE MAKING OF THIS: PART II (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2011
November: I went home, typed up most of what I’d written in New York, edited it, sent it to K.J. A long silence followed. I wasn’t too worried. But then I was. Maybe she didn’t like it? Maybe I should start over? I was going back to New York in December, and was longing for some direction by then. As it turned out, the dance had hit a crossroads.
THE MAKING OF THIS: PART I (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2011
Last summer dance artist K.J. Holmes invited me to work with her on a piece she’d been commissioned to make for The Chocolate Factory, a performance space in Queens. What follows is a description of the process of writing the text that would become part of the sound score for this dance.
SPIRIT DITTIES (POETRY FOUNDATION) | 2011
Last summer I was listening. To poets read, but not to the poems, to the things they said before, after, between, and to the introductions. I was curious about that between language: “OK, Charles, I’ll just jump right in.” Or, “The poem’s speaker loves obsolescence.” I was listening too to academic talks, their particular banter: “pinching and elliptical grammar,” said someone