Manifesto of a Modern Woman

I did not set out to write about 9/11. In fact, I have been studiously avoiding it and all references. But still it comes out, even when trying to write about something else! So here are my thoughts, as usual, interspersed with other things, on the 10th anniversary of the event.

I have been experimenting with using strikethoughs to show choices that I have made in the text, so I am using that technique publicly for the first time.



I am made up feelings, not memories. I do not live in the
past if pressed
I can summon(s)
the memories, remember the moment the men
in suits covered in soot slow as statues in hardening cement
walked up the streets the
disappearance of a building the
long lines to use the anachronistic pay phone in the park
see and says strung together like tin cans
across states a continent but I prefer to let memories
fade in favor of feelings the tears that come forcefully on hearing
siren after siren after siren song the sun shining in my eyes
the darkness in my lungs the feeling of not taking abreath after breath.

I am made up of feelings that don't fade, of love anger courage.

I am a woman who is made of feelings once attached to memories that must fade, shed like an extra skin, an old layer, no so much to make me new but a skin shed no longer needed so that I can livebreathe.

Authencity. Bah!

Ok, so this is why I don't get very many books read, especially when I am trying to do research. I read 3 or 4 pages and then I have to stop and write 3 or 4 pages of commentary that turns into a blog. This time, it is about the return, always the return, to that infernal word:

Authenticity.

I can't tell you how many times I have read about poetry slam and the authenticity of the author/poet's voice and how the strength of poetry slam is from that authenticity.

Humbug.

I thought that we had long ago abandoned the modernist notion of an authentic self, a holistic sense of identify that you could point to and say "this is me." I thought that long ago, for example, black feminists had said I'm black and I'm a woman and I come from a certain socioeconomic class and I have an urban or a rural and a northern or southern upbringing and all of these things go into making me the multifaceted person that I am and sometimes several of these things come into conflict so I sometimes have divided loyalties and so I don't really have a stable subject position from which I can speak. Then again, about 150 years ago, Walt Whitman wrote Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself. For I am large and contain multitudes.

This was my problem with poetry slam 15 years ago, when I dabbled in it. I saw this functioning as well. People pimping out their identities as a woman, as an angry (or depressed - take your pick) college student, as a gay man, as a grandma, as a Latino, etc. etc., giving the audience what they want to hear, spewing out cliches in the process. When I did my bitch feminist poems I placed. I took home money. When I did poems that were not only more complex, filled with more original images, were metaphorical and lyrical and also were performed every bit as well, I got lukewarm scores. (Not responses however. The responses I got after the slam was over, were generally very positive, dare I say, fantastic.)

Besides which, it's a poetry slam. Poetry. Poetry is about imagination and images and language. What you write about is not as important as the way you write about it. You can go ahead and write identity work, write political work, write about -- heaven help us -- flowers. I love to quote Bryon Gysin. Writing is 50 years behind painting. As long as we insist on some kind of authenticity of the writer's voice and experience instead of on the actual work, daring to do abstraction perhaps, or at least mess with the conventions as visual artists have done, we will continue to be 50 years behind painting.

I did a project a few years ago on the Iranian-American artist/photographer/filmmaker Shirin Neshat. I read a quote from a Turkish artists who said that the non-western artist, the "other", is always playing catch-up. It is assumed that they will always be one step behind. When artists in the west had already moved on to abstract work in painting, they were at the same time praising middle eastern artists for painting nudes. This is the assumption that there is a natural evolution to art and culture, so nonwestern artists must paint nudes, their culture must be advanced enough that they can paint nudes, before they can do abstraction.

This would seem to be the case with poetry slam. Many in academia praise poetry slam for getting young people to care about poetry, praising it for giving a voice to "marginalized groups." Fine. Good. But I think the problem with getting young people to care about poetry has been the presence of poetry teachers who were somewhat lacking. Who looked at poetry as a higher art and too good for the common person. You were supposed to read poetry for the same reason you were supposed to eat broccoli. You could have been doing ass-kicking poetry readings for years and it would have encouraged students to read poetry.

But we are perpetuating and praising poets for doing what post-modernism (and in some cases, it's parallel movement post-colonialism) have said is not possible. If there is always a doubled consciousness in post-colonialism, what self is the most authentic? And ultimately, does it really matter? The exploration of the fractured, doubled, shattered self, in fractured, doubled language, in imagery, is so much more interesting than trying to create and perform an "authentic self" for the masses. And how condescending to the audiences of poetry slam to assume that creating a populist poetry means that we have to give people what we think they want from us, to assume that we have to "dumb down" our poetry for them and save our good, "literary" poetry for editors of literary magazines, for people who can appreciate them. I have seen more than one poet who has good, difficult, beautiful poetry refuse to read those poems before a slam audience, choosing instead to do easily digested work that they know will go over well.

My critique is not of the poets themselves (at least not entirely), but of the people who perpetuate that system -- the academic, the promoters of authenticity in the form of slams, Def Poetry Jam, those who perpetuate a worn out system of reference that condescends to audience and poet alike, that continues to keep them at arm's length, always one step behind the "innovators," rather than encouraging poets to do what poets ought to do best: to create new and fresh images for our time, using our references, rather than cliches of what they see on television of what they think the audience expects them to be, which is someone else's version of authenticity anyway. Poets should be experimenting with language, taking us to new levels of seeing and understanding, rather than to perpetuate the old, the given, that which we have already been living with.

Exquisite Corpse from my creative writing class at MCTC

After spreading pencil shavings like ashes
upon the desks like altars,
giant altars of onyx and silver
melted down into an amorphous, mingling, microscopic
amoeba, dancing and twisting this way and that
hoping to find a cause worth fighting for,
one that sticks to your ribs, like
airbag hearty steak dinner over candlelight
christening stars, fallen angels we lay.

The Drunken Bus

Growing up is the realization
that you've outlived all your tragic idols.
Dead poets, rock stars
make you lose yourself in their myths
until one day jade and disgust
stain you like mud splashed
by speeding thoughtless passersby
driving drunken
busloads of once-dreamers
like the trains to Auschwitz
these fenced with white picket not wire barbs
no literal death torture unspeakable horrors
wait you now but the cattle call
life laid out neatly like a child's first school clothes
souldeath numb endless days waiting for the call
the bell the thing that brings this to an end
expect no future
hope for no future
fear any future offered
in a slick salesman's smile or a politician's
promisory paper--
kill time until
you'll-know-it-when-you-see-it
shows up, wags its ass in your face
and says i'm here now. what?
now what? now
what took you so long?

It's not too late.
Let's go back
before the days when
it was open season on our hopes
and we had to shelter them like cold shivering refugees,
before we counted time backwards from the end
of history.

Let's be audacious. Let's remember that
the right song can still save us
from the world,
shout dirty limericks in the museum
brown bag it to the opera,
sit on the floor in lavish hotel lobbies
in tie-dye evening gowns
eating french fries and debating dead
German philosophers as if we
understood them,
make snide comments to rude overeducated
art snob ticket takers and rabble removing
doormen, disgruntled security guards with
inert toy guns
without feeling the pressure
to make apologies we don't mean
let's jump off the drunken bus
clean ourselves up
and walk home together.

Dustbowl (a poem)

who will mark the day
when you've been dead longer than you were alive
the chickens have come home to roost and the cock
cannot stop crowing his lungs burst as they strain to summon the day


teach a man to farm teach him to march in rows stand straight when ordered and hide among the crops during the hunt and his napalmed hands will fertilize soft baby skulls, tattoo plaid and pastel flowers onto flimsy flesh hammers and anvils and drums make music more pleasing than a funeral march the unfamiliar streets will swallow you up before you can build your myth epic by epic before your tasks are finished and the stables are cleared


the prophet saw huge metal birds and resurrected monsters, how we burn ourselves up inside brick and steel solid structures the pyramids will outlive our bleached bones muscle by muscle I melt pulled apart like a wishbone my empty ribcage still moves by habit after my head flies off


there are not enough hands to cover all of your shameful parts


the kevorkian babies cry all night chase pigeons with fat pink faces not born of sand and rice paddies their pictures play in courtrooms the playground becomes a tragic mecca outlined at ground zero, a pinata full of scorpions burn down your temples and churches


your god no longer lives there

Fractured Love Song

Written from random words I jotted down from a song played overhead:

Insomniac
sheep
asleep
fireflies
goodbyes
breathe
jar


Fractured Love Song

Insomniac sheep breath rhythmically unison of air. Fireflies flitter asleep their goodbyes as they sink inside jars to their airless graves.

Little jottings

The candles in the red jar flicker like an ambulance siren in my peripheral vision.

I stubbornly let beautiful strans of words go by, refusing to write them down, refusing to try and catch them, in and out of my consciousness the float, weave, flit, pass, pausing, expecting to be appreciated, remembered, committed to paper or memory. I thoughtlessly watch them go . . .

Two poems literally written with my eyes closed (and yet were still legible!)

Creativity begets itself begetting begetting beginning (again).
Once I write I don't want to stop, maybe
it's the spring
springing up inside
me, sprung, springing
me from the
winter jail I didn't
know I was in until
I was freed,
sprung.

__________________________________

Close my eyes and
write, writing with my eyes
closed I can only feel
the physical act of writing
I don't know if I am
writing on top of writing
on top of writing on top
of writing on top. I
have become the blind
Gertrude Stein, playing with
words I cannot say and
maybe cannot read either

______________________

Reflection:

It is odd how with my eyes closed and writing continuously for 1-2 minutes, I do turn into Gertrude Stein when I do these eyes closed writing excercises, but I also think it's because I CANNOT stop or I will lose my place on the page. So it seems to me, from my experience, that Stein's repetitions come, at least in part, as a kind of breath, a breather, a holding pattern while you think of something else, that it's a consequence of not stopping and not coming up for air. It pauses you to think while still not stopping. It's like a skip in a record that goes on until the records bumps out of that groove.

I am really sold on this as a quick, fun form of automatic writing that also focuses your senses because it takes away the visual element while you are writing.

Story written out of spam

The video changed his life.

Someone discovered it lying in a box of trash.

They thought it was dirty.

If not only for the fact that it was shared with all, they wouldn't have known the very top secret code.

I was shocked to learn the group's members knew nothing of it.

Excess of Containment: a brief, partial manifesto of avant garde artistic and literary practices that is belied by its excessively long title

For all of the criticism from English teachers that it is difficult to teach the writing of avant-garde poetry and literature, it is not if you have the right approach. The avant garde is playful. It is only when you are trying to create something perfect, beautiful, it's a chore: a chore to write, a chore to "try" to be avant-garde, to think up the next new great technique when we all know (this is for you Rosalind Krauss et al) that the avant-garde is all about stealing to make art, appropriating, not originality. The true avant-garde artist it would seem should strive to be the least original (but then there is an art to being creatively unoriginal or uncreatively original but then we get back to trying too hard). Appropriating not originality. That frees you up to actually be creative, if creativity is within you, and it is. Some may just have to excavate more, be more unoriginal more often that others in order to dredge up a remnant of creativity from the dregs of anti- non- un-creative subconscious. It will be unlocked. The form creates the container, the structure that will allow its own excess to bubble up like a cesspool of creativity, an excess of containment, an excess of form that enables a glorious excess of content, that feeling that I can put anything into this structure, not the drudgery of a blank page, but the excitement of a child towards an empty box that could be a house, a train, a robot head, infinite possibities lie in the empty container, not on the blank page.