When I said to Kevin that this… blog was a performance, he said he saw
it as an industry. When I asked him to elaborate, he said an industry is when you
have one thing and you make twenty things out of it. Like the Spicer industry,
all the material by and about poet Jack Spicer that just keeps spinning out and
out. “It’s not the same thing as during the Industrial Revolution. Look it up.”
Industry or not, I feel what I’m doing here resonates with the history of feminist
performance art. When I think of performativity in prose writing, I turn to Kathy
Acker, her aggro assertion of female subjectivity—aggro deconstruction of female
subjectivity—aggro fuck you to received notions of female subjectivity. From the
scroll Carolee Schneemann pulled from her cunt in her Interior Scroll performance:
“if you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed/ they will almost never
believe you really did it/(what you did do)/ they will worship you they will ignore
you/ they will malign you they will pamper you/ they will try to take what you did
as their own . . . .”) …That is his biggest betrayal, his judgment, his switch from cozy unconditionality
to condemning me, not only for what I did, but for things I never even thought
of doing. My mind goes over it and over it and over it, churning the past from
various angles that never align. I’m unable to come up with an official version
of what happened, of who he was. Did he love me? Did he reject me? Just these
overlapping, mechanistic flashes of memory blurred with interpretation. My
mind stutters like a series of Muybridge stills. When the buddhist ran towards me
with love in his eyes, did both feet ever leave the ground?

Dodie Bellamy

There is so much in this book that resonates with a certain kind of writing I am seeing a lot of right now (I Love Dick, Couer de Lion, etc) — there is something so interesting in the pushing of the personal out beyond grotesquerie/embarrassment/abjection and back into the noble/universal (or at least using the former to queer notions of the latter) seems so RICH and UNTAPPED and so very in line with what we all grew up doing semi- or unconsciously on livejournal–I find this incredibly personal and incredibly intellectual performance so COMPELLING and authentic and absolutely new, unlike most of the things I am always having to read all the time. The contracts between reader and author that genres such as poetry or lyric essay or novel or memoir dissolve, there is this unbelievably uneasy-making and also incredibly compelling and brave and intimate closeness created. I trust this writing, and I don’t often trust writing these days.

From The Buddhist

—to accept that one has to be strong, knowledgeable or responsible in order to speak is to assimilate Western capitalism’s narrative of progress; it denies otherness and represses vast arenas of human experience. This is what I was getting at in my post on public display and operatic suffering—an in-your-face owning of one’s vulnerability and fucked-upness to the point of embarrassing and offending tight-asses is a powerful feminist strategy. Writing is tough work, I don’t see how anyone can really write from a position of weakness. Sometimes I may start out in that position, but the act of commandeering words flips me into a position of power. To deny behaviors and experiences gendered as weak or “feminine” is not feminist or queer, it’s heteronormative to the hilt. Like Kathy Acker, I long to quiver and terrify in the same gasp.

Dodie Bellamy

Dirty-love.

Strangely, though I’ve written about it here quite a bit, I haven’t uttered a peep about the entire C debacle to my friends in Santa Fe. Just too tired, really, and too freaked, to open that wound up and look around inside it. Yesterday J and I had a discussion about it. We remembered together the many times one among our group of friends would get called out and temporarily ostracized by the others for being thoughtless, selfish, cruel, for lying, for generally being a shithead. I remember with particular clarity one exceptionally intense fight I had with Phil, who was tired of nursing me through months and months of breaking up and making up with the professor, who’d had it with my self-centered obnoxious teeth gnashing and chest beating, my demands, and told me so. The fight probably only lasted ten minutes, then I stormed out of the apartment. I walked back and forth in the arroyo behind the complex, then came immediately back. To apologize. Because he was right. I found him at my kitchen table, writing me a letter. He looked up from the paper and we both burst into tears, fell into each other’s arms and had a long and honest reckoning.

J reminded me that these are the people who’ve been in my life for almost half of it now because these are the people I trust to call me out, and the people who will love me even if (and eventually because) I call them out. The Franzen op-ed I posted yesterday has been very much in my mind of late. What my friends and I have nicknamed dirty-love: verb love, love the action, love the hard thing to do. Franzen writes:

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of… This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self. …To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.

According to Franzen’s idea, I think there must have been quite a lot of like between C and I, but just not enough bravery and courage to merit love. When the first reckoning came, we did not survive. Then subsequent reckonings came, and we did not survive. Still–and this is vital–I HAVE LOVE. I know how to love. I have BEEN knowing how to love for a long time now and the best parts of my life–my writing, my friends, my pets–those things are borne of and sustained by dirty-love, mucky love, every day even if it’s boring or inconvenient or it hurts love.

I have been writing letters to friends from this liminal space–a spiritual home, but in this context, just a respite from the project of my life, which is in Tuscaloosa. I have been writing to them about the way I have been sifting through the stuff of my life and finding little substance, little that’s stayed real over the past several months. Little that’s endured. Things keep dropping away. All the time it feels the way it felt, scaling that canyon wall, where I kept reaching out for a handhold, a foothold, and pulling away deadfall, or rocks that just toppled on down the mountain. Each time I found a young, rooted aspen, or a rock hidden under a patch of moss, I would thank it for being there, and for bearing my weight up the mountain. Perhaps one of the very few things I am emerging from this time of profound loss with is the conviction that real love, verb love, dirty-love, EXISTS. That I am capable of it and that it’s around me all the time and the giving and receiving of it is what keeps me alive and that I should accept nothing less.

If I do that and finish my book this month, it’ll have been the most productive of my life.

Happy dirty-love. I love you.

This again, because it’s so real.

Every morning before court and every night after I will take a long shower, as the shower is the only place I will have any privacy. In the stall I will get down on my knees and weep, letting the water run over my body, praying to get better, praying not to hurt myself any more than I’m already hurting, praying that this loss, that this whole time, will move over me, through me, like a dark storm passing over a great plain. A great plain which is, essentially, my soul. A soul which is neither light nor dark, neither wholly alone nor wholly with any other, certainly not with God, just flat, open, deathless and free. Curled up in a wet ball on the tile floor I will hear myself say Something in me is dying. I no longer know to whom I am talking.

Maggie Nelson

Prayer

Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water’s downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change–
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Jorie Graham

In defense of love

Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.

Tightrope

Accidentally brewed the coffee too strong this morning and am vibrating. Transitioned from editorial work to submitting my own writing. In a bit of a strange space with respect to my work. Have been working on the book doggedly for the past several months, so I don’t really have anything fresh to send out. I can’t send the book out in excerpts, unfortunately–it just won’t work. The thing is a solid (beautiful, amazing, grotesque, uneasy-making, lovely, spiteful, perfect) unit. It is SO TOTALLY my child. There are still plenty of good poems in rotation looking for homes, and those can go out, certainly. But I’m also torn– send out individual poems or focus on finishing the book and researching presses/contests to which I can submit the thing? (Also: what the hell do I title it? Jesus.)

The answer is, of course, BOTH YOU ARE SEQUESTERED FOR A MONTH SO YOU CAN DO BOTH/AND DUMMY. It’s a strange space, though. I think I now understand what it means when I solicit authors for work and they say “I just finished a book; I don’t think I have anything.”

Listening to Janelle Monae on repeat because her shit is FOR REAL.

Two more from dear old Uncle Ezra

“As to twentieth century poetry, and the poetry I expect to see written during the next decade or so, it will, I think, move against poppy-cock; it will be harder and saner…At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.”

“I’ve got a right to be severe. For one man I strike there are ten to strike back at me. I stand exposed. It hits me in my dinner invitations, in my weekends, in reviews of my own work. Nevertheless, it’s a good fight.”

Ezra Pound

Took the back roads home. Paused for a pair of coyotes, who emerged from the woods, jogged across Zia East and into a front yard on the other side. White magic.

I who have seen you amid the primal things
was angry when they spoke your name
in ordinary places

Ezra Pound