Open Space Checks in With Cedar Sigo

Last week we delivered the news that the SFMoMA's Open Space launched a new website. While rolling out the new site, they took a break and got caught up with their old friend Cedar Sigo, who contributed to Open Space from 2008 to 2012, and who also contributed to Harriet in and around those same years. Cedar gets the editors up to speed on his latest book Language Arts, his teaching and travels, and exhibitions he's visited. A sample:

So, Cedar, what have you been up to lately?

This year I have been travelling, once a month it seems, for readings, lectures, and residencies. I just finished up a two-week residency for The Shandaken Project, which was hosted by Storm King Art Center in upstate NY. It was incredible to have this huge sculpture park right near my studio to wander around in. It was the perfect release from the more cerebral aspects of writing poetry.

It was my first residency ever, so I was a little apprehensive going in, but the other artists who overlapped with me were so relaxed and charming, and in most cases it was their first residency too, so everyone was intensely considerate. Earlier in the year I taught my first semester-long workshop at St. Mary’s College in Orinda. It was great to finally have to take responsibility for what I know about the line, to have to assemble the writings of others (mostly poets) into a cosmology in order to share them with others. We did a lot of reading aloud of other poets in class. So often, I feel poets are taught how to write their own perfect, dead on arrival, airless verse, and then are asked to share it aloud and that’s that. I always want to be ripped out of whichever measure my voice comes to rest in. I get so sick of my own voice. I want to hear my favorite poets being read aloud in a variety of voices. There were 12 students in my class and so we got to hear several takes on the same voice and how different bodies negotiate the simultaneity enacted in the work of Barbara Guest, Alfred Starr Hamilton, and Joanne Kyger. My students were totally game for this approach and we had fun.

This year seems to be about finally exploring the various kinds of work that are available to artists to keep them afloat. I had always thought I required a shaded kind of privacy in order to do my work, but these forms of professionalism seem just as available now as those I call upon to suit my poetry. I guess I feel like my life and my work are finally catching up to each other. I think the poet John Wieners covers this sensation best in the last stanza of his 1969 poem Supplication,

“Return me to the men who teach
and above all, cure the
hurts of wanting the impossible
through this suspended vacuum.”

Head to Open Space to learn more!