“Writing is never wasted. I tell my students this, urging them to throw away a draft and start again…difficult to do, to trust. I have variously taken drafts and burned them, tore them into tiny shreds, let them go…the old drafts become the texture and resonances in the new.”  — Lemon Hound/Harriet comment stream. (Sina Queyras.)

“Anyway. I got the books in the post yesterday. I felt nothing looking at the book. Nothing. The books look beautiful. But I felt empty. Like these books were a refuse of my past, and them being printed and packaged and made into commodity objects is totally separate from why I created the work. I am looking forward to having new readers, that dialogue. But I looked at the books and I thought of matchsticks, yes that’s what I thought of, matchsticks. Maybe because the books are paper. And I thought of burning them, like Artaud writing about poems, meant to be read once and then burned.” — Frances Farmer Is My Sister. (Kate Zambreno.)

“Bhanu, the red, letting it soak back in (still thinking of Pamela Lu’s de-red-ing), I think of your earlier statement about killing the character in your project, but now with this idea of the rose, your impossibility of destruction, I am reminded of how, in physics, matter cannot be eliminated, just changed.” — Harriet comment stream. (Amy Catanzano.)

“The notebook is non-reproductive. You could say it is a mutation that is never seen and only becomes available, in a more formed condition, in the book. But the book depends upon the notebook.  What’s in the notebook.  In fact, the larger the non-reproductive store of a population is, then the more rapidly its outer limit, that dotted line, evolves. So for species, if you have a large number of mutations that don’t become built structures, that never emerge, that’s good.” – - E-mail.  (Andrea Spain.)

Then I met Jarvis Fosdick at the cafe.  Jarvis is someone I can text with the words PANTHER MARTINI? and he’ll text back YES.  Jarvis makes quilts; we became friends when it turned out he had Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge’s “Concordance” in his car.  We both had it in our cars.  In Colorado, you need a car. I hope this does not sound too boring if you are reading this in a city.  I once had a lover who texted me: NATURE KILLS AND SEPARATES.  A text I still have.  Jarvis said: “How do the words get to the page?“  We were talking about fire and water as purgative mediums.  About the painting, pre-quilt, that nobody sees, embedded beneath the layers of silver oil; the notebook – -a diagonal line across the page: its casual and brutal NO.  Jarvis said: “If you destroy the words, if they are never seen, what calls them back?” Luckily, Jarvis scrawled some rapid notes towards the end of our coffee (easily substituted for a drink) and so, apparently (according to his little yellow notebook), I replied:

“The page is an attractant.  It’s sticky.  For those of us who love theory, we get it, that the dirt and glitter of the border appears in these books in another form.  Displaced.  Projected.  So that we’re writing back to the page from these flecks.  This is not retrieval in a duration. It is entirely spatial.  So that part of it is aperture, stance…and part of it is an occult practice.  You have to prepare the page.  You have to empty it out or darken it.  And the book you write will not, perhaps, be verdant. This is not that book.  It is not “a book for you,” for example.”

……………..

The thing about theory sounds insane out of context.  Let’s just ignore that, if at all possible, and go with these questions instead:

1.How do the words get to the page?  2. What attracts them?  3. What did you burn? 4. What did you give to the river?  5. What book do you have in your car, rucksack, kitchen, suitcase, etc, in case of emergencies?  6.Where’s the aperture?  7. What regenerated?  8. What survived the fire?

: (Th.Donov. on Fr. Moten): “Translate to color.”  In the comment stream.  And looped up, like a baby.  Though if I had another baby, which would depend, quite frankly, upon meeting  a competent and ecstatic South-Asian medical professional in the next thirty days: I might put it down (the baby not a suitor) on a sheepskin rug to roll around a bit.  More than I did.

Though perhaps I’ll begin there, when I could not write. Nursing, I’d glance up at the window to the woods that pressed close around our house.  That Spring, the trees shed a thick gold powder from their thin cones.  I’d track this drift.  Once, I looked up and the whole pane was filled with a blur of wings, thirty or more  birds vibrating against the glass.  Migrating finches.  A solid color.  Yellow.

I guess, tonight, eight years later, I’ve just got these two things, which are less than notes, and if I can, as I write, I’ll convert them to questions.  For you:

1.a. Transgenerationally, what happens to the marks on a body, the marks a body received in the time or era that preceded this one?  I’ve been thinking about that silver color; how a pooling scar is in some sense genetic.  Becomes the quality of the body that passes between bodies.  Its ambience.

b. Poetry, like brainspotting/eye movement technologies, releases — in one version of a North American genre — an embedded stream of images.  These images leave the body in a session, in a sequence: which is neither witnessed nor reorganized in speech.  Stories, for example, are not repeated to another person who then recounts them, to make sure.  Make sure of what?

2.a. Color is/as a race mark.  I think of a country* as red, and diaspora as: well, perhaps you see it in your own mind at the instant I do.  That oil spill.  That wine stain.  That ink.  The acrylic paint tilting out of its container. Tracking color to its most distal fleck, questions of surveillance, carnal lithography or — love : arrived.  Not love.  Something else.  Similarly, I saw that saturation was a precursor to vibration: a red “dot,” which was not a dot, it was a body: breaking up.

b. I studied, from the psychiatric research of Dinesh Bhugra and Kamaldeep Bhui, on migration and mental illness, the strict, unexpected relationship between consistent, low-level racism (its tonal qualities, an almost imperceptible eye-roll when the Asian or Caribbean [origin] person/[British person] walks [walked] into the store) and psychosis. I tried to write an account.  My account failed.  Instead, I began to consider color, and the image, too, in a different way.  The long poem as a place, for example, to reverse the shards of ochre clay so that they re-formed an urn.

……….

“I want a book that heals as much as it separates.” — Cixous.

But the book breaks, as it always does, because it can’t be written.  What might a healing narrative look like?  And does this complicate an experimental aim, the desire to leave a place and never return?

We’re lucky to have them here for the start of the new year and the new decade.

Please check out their full bios after the jump and join us in wishing them a warm welcome.

Sotère Torregian is an American poet, born in Newark, New Jersey on June 25, 1941. He attended Rutgers University, and taught briefly at the Free University of New York and Stanford University, where he helped establish the Afro-American studies program in 1969. In the mid-1960s he was associated with the “New York School” of poets. At that time he proposed a kind of American “orthodox Surrealism” (following the dictates of André Breton), based on “reinterpretations of surrealist stands on Revolutionary perspectives in art, poetry, and theology.” He presently resides in Stockton, California.

Sina Queyras grew up on the road in western Canada and she has since lived in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, New York, Philadelphia and Calgary where she was Markin Flanagan Writer in Residence. She is the author most recently of Unleashed (BookThug), a selection of posts from the first four years of her blog. Her previous collection of poetry, Expressway (Coach House 2009) was nominated for a Governor General’s Award and a selection from that book won Gold in the National Magazine Awards. Lemon Hound (Coach House 2006) won a Lambda Award and the Pat Lowther Award. In 2005 she edited Open Field: 30 Contemporary Canadian Poets, for Persea Books. She is contributing editor at Drunken Boat where she has curated folios on Conceptual Writing and Visual Poetry. She has taught creative writing at Rutgers, Haverford and Concordia University in Montreal where she currently resides.

Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), is the co-founder of Achiote Press (www.achiotepress.com) and author of the poetry book from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). He received an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He blogs at craigsantosperez.wordpress.com.

Thom Donovan lives in New York City where he edits Wild Horses of Fire weblog (whof.blogspot.com) and coedits ON Contemporary Practice with Michael Cross and Kyle Schlesinger. He is a participant in the Nonsite Collective and a curator for the SEGUE reading series (NYC). He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University at Buffalo and teaches at Bard College, Baruch College, and School of Visual Arts. For an overview of his current projects and links to his poetry and criticism see Wild Horses of Fire.

Fred Moten lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he teaches English and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is author of Arkansas (Pressed Wafer), In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press), I ran from it but was still in it. (Cusp Books), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works) and B Jenkins (Duke University Press).

Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches writing and thinking at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, as well as Goddard College’s low-residency MFA. She has written three full-length works of poetry/prose: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works), and humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press)..

As we’ve noted before, the blog is an on-going experiment, and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve the experience.  To that end, we’re replacing the like/dislike function in the comments section with a “report this comment” button.  Moving forward, if you find a comment to be off-topic or abusive, please use the “report” button and the Harriet staff will be duly notified.  The general comments policy remains the same.

We appreciate your patience, and we look forward to a new year of fruitful discussion in 2010.

But before we get to the new year, let’s look back once more at the remarkable year that was.  Below, you’ll find the Top 10 most-viewed posts of the past year, along with the Top 10 most-viewed articles of the past year.  As you’ll see, we covered a lot of ground together.  Thank you.

Sincerely,
Catherine Halley and Travis Nichols


The Most-Viewed Posts on Harriet in 2009:

#1) “Craig Arnold” by Don Share

#2) “Plath As A Major Poet” by Annie Finch

#3) “Political Economy” by Eileen Myles

#4) “It’s Always a Bad Time for Poetry” by Kenneth Goldsmith

#5) “‘Poets Really They’re the Laziest Supidest People I Know’” by Kenneth Goldsmith

#6) “Hayden Carruth 1921-2008″ by Joel Brouwer

#7) “I Hate Poetry” by Eileen Myles

#8) “The Inaugural Poem” by Travis Nichols

#9) “Real Life” by Don Share

#10) “Post on the Post” by Eileen Myles


The Most-Viewed Articles in 2009:

#1) “Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.” by Kenneth Goldsmith

#2) “Show Your Work!” by Matthew Zapruder

#3) “Para Rumbiar” by Fernando Perez

#4) “Sex, Drugs, and Thom Gunn” by Tom Sleigh

#5) “Beat America” by Aram Saroyan

#6) “Keats in Space” by Molly Young

#7) “Only Connect” by Tao Lin

#8) “I Blame Blogs” by Allison Glock

#9) “The Hero and the Gunslinger” by Aram Saroyan

#10) “From a Notebook that Never Was” by Fernando Pessoa

I love blues music — singing the blues, listening to the blues. That’s why I was so excited to get a call from my friend Pierre Lacocque, a wicked blues harp player and the band leader of Mississippi Heat. Pierre asked me to work on lyrics for the band’s new album — and I couldn’t pass up the chance.

I had a blast working with Pierre on lyrics for the band’s last disc, Hattiesburg Blues (briefly #1 on the blues charts!). Part of what made the experience so much fun was the blues form — that insistent echo of repeating lines. Here’s an excerpt from Gone So Long:

I can hear the train
running down the track.
I can hear the train
running down the track.
Working any harder
Would give me a heart attack.

I also loved the story the songs tell (the unabashed narrative drive behind the songs). Here’s a glimpse from Forgot You Had a Home:

I tried to change you, but
You paid me no mind
You choose your job
Over family time
You forgot you had a home.
All you’ve got is a one track mind.

The title pretty much gives the story away in this one, but I like how this lyric updates the blues convention of a wandering man: here his eyes look only to work, not to another woman.

When Pierre writes music he has specific singers in mind. It’s cool — and challenging — to write from the perspective of other characters (in this case as a wronged woman), and even other singers (some singers like room at the end of phrases so they can create vocal “fills”; others like a cleaner line).

The new album is not yet titled, but the tracks have all been laid down. The CD should be ready in January.

Embedded mid-level to centurion’s height, one pupil, ever-seeing…nay the seers. Worming through rush hour. People…what a heave! Says the underground spray-maker while stenciling a baseball logo on a subway map. How much, son? Fifteen, pops…but this one’s got pinstripes in neon, like that gat on the moon. Snap, yo excuse me. Cell phone camera…graphic coloratura…perfect reproduction on a screen the size of twee. That’s nice, get one with ma man here. Grabs his new customer…like long-lost buds. Here ya go bro, two crazy enwhyceers. Click. Thanks man, later. Returns to biz-role. Now where was we. This one or this one. That one. Below the rumble, flickety rickster teems in survival mode. Seen many, I tell him, but this…one of a kind, beautiful. Thanks son. Thought you were, and I was. That’s right, pops. Not much younger though. Don’t tell. Later friend. Peace. Folded map in my pocket, dream catcher…stenciled in torrents (dies festus).

But I’ve got too many fires burning at one time. I’m not alone in my desire to do something old. Said pupil, levitating the anterior fontanel. When will you tell me, o Head Shrink Booty Dip? And I am scattered in the introduction of fire to hose, sir…replacing soak for light. How did you get that nit, son? Status burn, sir. Pegasus layered in entrails. Daylight on a camouflage shoe. Hoofed male-thing grunts and wants an answer. Neigh, fruity. Or to the now-release—the leave of power that finds the living animal (the truly alive) in the frame of its new. I am now venturing into the identity screw—the plug-up done in by erasure.

To sprecht-baum in the echo of a previous post…who goes fishing without a line once tethered by the catch? Tranny Schinkel (how’d ya do!). To become the coming prey aligned with quasar, serve meal for master while scrubbing hands fervently. Don’t off this, dare send incomplete surrento, del oso!  And yo, how was you gonna pay before leaving, sir. And what’s that you doing for the people, sir. And how many instants give you time, sir. And why can’t you sit with me when I’m riding on the same truck, sir. And how come the first car won’t open on my platform, sir. And when did all that grey make you safe, sir.

And who are you in the glow of the screen. Said pupil, hiding from can’t-get-a-handle-on-diamond-shaped-a-hole. No sleep, pops? Kinetic imperfections arouse inferior reflections. Lookit me, trying to get sommadat hope-closure on a brimstone. Or some ancient evenings sold below the living room, with the kitchen under the loft-bed and a curtain separating dinner from sleep. Comes the blond jet, jingo pucker. Said pupil telegrams occipital…love here, gaseous facsimile of Juno. How about one last taunt, bud? Okay. Serious? I’m sayin’...and grunt-maker bellows limbless fate. Gone, in a star’s shot. Mime bops on b-box d-lite. Irreparable witness…to base quote on litmus.

What now seems especially useful out of that experience was catching that the range of subjects in those chronicles was fairly wide, and the types of detail that Ashbery honed in on and thereby felt capable of articulating (that may sound like a simple statement, but I’ve found in my own attempts at review writing that the things one notices and the things one can get at effectively in the writing don’t always meet) were typically placed in terms of an experience of the work as opposed to an assessment. There also appeared to be a very fluid dynamic of juxtaposition running across the writing and seeing simultaneously. All of this was helpful in giving me a sense of a mind at work, one that had an especially porous barrier between diction and perception, and I took that into my reading of the poetry and found I could sustain a deeper level of attention to the choices being made syllable by syllable.

This past summer I had the good fortune of being present for an informal talk by the writer Renee Gladman that in part covered her own process of getting from the constellation that is mind into the linear progression that is a sentence. At one point she posed a question that I took to be usable in a number of internal and external conversations: “what are the conditions that make this writer relate to language in this particular way?” It’s a fabulous question, as I see it anyway, in no small part because it’s meant to allow for a gradual recognition of a mind at work without trampling on the sensibilities of writer or reader. The question also allows for open speculation as to what those “conditions” might be, which means, I think, that another body of knowledge does not have to be necessary to begin formulating an answer. The idea is to get back into the writing and re-center one’s attention on the dynamic present between mind and language.

It’s also an easier question to ask of somebody else’s work, as opposed to your own, though I suspect any kind of answer you’d get out of placing yourself under that microscope would be useful so long as you had your story right (if that’s possible). One real difficulty might be having to account for your own idiosyncrasies that are not part of some moment of programming, if you’re even aware of them (or your programming, for that matter).  Some writers have a way with upending questions meant to be searching and “fair”. I remember hearing the poet and translator Vyt Bakaitis respond to a question at a q-and-a as to whether he dreamed in English or Lithuanian by pausing for a moment, then saying, “I don’t know that I dream or think in language.” He was very serious, and I’ve been “in love” with that sentence even since.

The mass of suits and perfume crammed through corridors burrowed beneath concrete reminders, swimming the juice-pulse through the city’s membrane. Underneath all that motion, the subway vibrating all those spirits up through rock and metal. Creeley’s “Chasing the Bird”: ‘The sun sets unevenly and the people / go to bed. / The night has a thousand eyes. / The clouds are low, overhead. / Every night it is a little bit / more difficult, a little / harder. My mind / to me a mangle is.‘ My daily commute from the green of the Hudson Valley to the grey of Manhattan skyscrapers, accented during harvest time.

Our garden which began with such promise this Spring gradually suffered neglect over the summer. My wife and I, still getting our ‘green’ on after moving up here from the city, are learning a solar definition of time…at odds with the city definition I grew up with. After so many years walking to work, from the East Village to Soho, my separation anxiety from the city has settled into a complex groove, a sort of misplaced territory that has become the travel itself. The hope of permanence beyond the change…highlighted by the prospect of land, soil, earth in my fingernails. We have this huge fenced-in garden, inherited from the previous owners, which had a variety of veggies planted in the Spring, doing okay…until the exhaustion of weeding (clever tricksters how they assume shapes of neighboring plants, the easier to pass right over them) and watering proved overwhelming. And there was Tim, the lawn guy, with his giant machine mowing down the overgrown rupture for us. And there we were yesterday, looking at this dried-out wound, resolved to its conclusion, remembering that potatoes had been planted in the center. A spark of hope. Sun came out, as if saying, ‘go for it.’ The three of us, digging through the potato patch, unearthing spud after spud. Russian Fingerlings, Yukon Golds, Red Pontiacs, 80 potatoes in total…fantastic! What farmers we were…below the surface anyway. And then the crows.

Hundreds of them, a murder of crows. They’ve been gathering over the last month, in the trees and land in front of the house, just a few here and there. Until yesterday, before the potato episode, I looked out front in the morning and was shocked to see hundreds of them. A gang, I thought, before murder. I immediately recalled Ted Hughes’ book, Crow, and its alchemical allegories. One of the first books of poetry in my lunch bag thanks to Steve Cannon, who ran The Stoop workshops with Bob Holman before the Friday Night Slams at the Nuyorican…those workshops were my salve, a guiding light from stage to page. I’d forgotten about the poems in that book, how phantasmic the protaganist seemed. Battling the sun back ‘when  crow was white’ emerging defeated and black, yet managing ‘up there, where white is black and black is white, I won.’ A chilling declaration of will over being.

I worried that our home had attracted such a large number, investigated online to make sure their myth aligned with mine. One of, if not the smartest of all birds, deemed the Trickster in folk tales, signifying change. The keeper of sacred laws, able to bend the laws of the physical universe, asking you to “shapeshift” your current reality into one of your dreams. Heady stuff. So I guess they weren’t so bad, but the Hitchcock reality got me spooked. I went outside and flapped my arms a bit, just to scare them away. The intelligence of a six-foot scarecrow in a red hoodie, chasing the bird, doing my job to protect family, up here during harvest time.

Fall is here, which means ponderous Hollywood movies, funky potpourri, [W]ild [T]urkey, and of course, new bloggers on Harriet!

Today, we say our goodbyes to Joel Brouwer, Rebecca Wolff, and Eileen Myles.  They’ve done a wonderful job here on the blog, and we hope they’ll come back from time to time to share a thought or two.  From everyone here, let me offer a hearty thanks for your dedication and service.  Huzzah!

I know.  It is sad.  But all is not lost!  We still have Barbara Jane Reyes, Abigail Deutsch, and Tonya Foster to help transition us to this new season.  And!  We have five new great bloggers starting, well, right now, today:

Anselm Berrigan’s poetry collections include Zero Star Hotel,  Some Notes on My Programming (Edge Books 2002, 2006) and the most recent Free Cell (City Lights, 2009). The poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail, co-editor with Alice Notley and Edmund Berrigan of The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (California, 2005), and former director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Berrigan teaches at the Pratt Institute and Wesleyan, and directs the summer writing program at the Milton Avery Graduate School.

Amber Tamblyn, born and raised in Venice California,  has been a writer and actress since the age of 9.  In 2005, she published her debut poetry book, Free Stallion (Simon&Schuster).   She is the executive producer of  “The Drums Inside Your Chest”, an annual poetry concert event in Los Angeles   She is the co-founder of the non-profit, Write Now Poetry Society, which works to identify, inspire, record, and publish great poets, support poetry communities, produce poetry shows, increase poetry audiences and strengthen poetry organizations.  Her second book of poetry and prose, Bang Ditto (Manic D. Press) was released this Fall.  She currently lives in New York City.

Edwin Torres is the author of several books and chapbooks, including The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language, The All Union Day of the Shock Worker, Fractured Humorous, Lung Poetry and forthcoming from Nightboat Books, In The Function Of External Circumstances. He started creating text and performance work in 1988 under the banner “I.E. Interactive Eclecticism,” an invented ‘movement’ whose purposefully broad term gave his one-man variety shows a forum. In 1990, he discovered poetry at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe and The St. Marks Poetry Project. He has since collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that mingle poetry with vocal/physical improvisation, visual theater, music and sound. His CD, Holy Kid (which ’straddles a position somewhere between Finnegans Wake and I Love Lucy’-Kenneth Goldsmith) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. He’s received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. His current invention, “Noricua” (mid-wifed with the Bronx-based artist collective Spanic Attack), is a noh-boricua inspired non-movement seeped in non-ideology.

Melissa Friedling is a film and video maker.  Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in festivals, galleries, and museums.   She is the recipient of a Fulbright Award and artist’s grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA).   Her writing on film, art, and culture has also appeared in various publications, most recently as a regular reviews contributor to Flash Art International.  She currently teaches at The New School University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

John S. O’Connor is an instructor at New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Illinois.  He is the author of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing and Performing Poetry and Room Full of Chairs, a book of haiku.  He has worked with the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Penn State University, Holy Cross School in Brooklyn, and was director of the Hyde Park adult literacy program, Blue Gargoyle.

Howdy, folks.  Welcome to Harriet!