Welcome new subscribers who found their way here from Helen Nde’s Mythological Africans—welcome to this little corner of the Substack stacks where I talk writing, art, menstruation (real & symbolic), and occasionally pedagogy.
Today in our writing group, K. gave up a prompt to write about the body as a vessel of metamorphosis. I think we were supposed to write poems, but instead, I thought when writing a poem, the poem itself is a vessel for metamorphosis and changes within the act of writing/unwriting/revising/scrapping.
Last week, I wrote about the cringe-inducing experience of sending the wrong file to a small press editor and crafting a brief apology note. The editor generously said to send over the correct file when it was ready. I’m taking note of this lesson—sometimes asking for what you want doesn’t have dire consequences, even in the creative world. Maybe the editor finds pleasure in book layouts. Maybe I spend to much time conflating obligation with pleasure. I often find it hard to make demands (or self-advocate), particularly in arts institutions. I wish there were a fairytale to remedy this malady.
So, line by line, I’m copying the manuscript from PDF into Word and reformatting it. I like that it feels a little like setting lead type without getting my hands dirty. I thought I could not focus more deeply on the words of this manuscript that I’ve agonized over for a few years, except now, here I am word-by-word or as Lamott would say bird-by-bird giving the book my attention. A book, too is a site for metamorphosis. It was a very menstrual prompt—the body, a metamorphosis.
This week, Naropa’s Summer Writing Program wrapped up the historic 50th summer season with workshops, readings, and a bit of silkscreening.
I made 3 screens, first with vinyl stencils and then with drawing fluid and screen filler, hoping folks would be so into the DIY ethos of experimental poetry that they’d strip and screenprint whatever it was they wore to class that day. One person did. I taught another person to iron. Several admitted they didn’t have ironing skills. I think next year I’ll propose a class on domestic practical skills for poets. It will include darning socks, sewing buttons, ironing, stain removal, and extending the life of well-loved-affordable vintage clothes. Because poet attire matters.
Someone laughed when I said “press cloth”. Which now sounds like a rag to clean a letterpress more than a piece of clean cotton to protect delicate fabric from heat.
The tote bag became a site of metamorphosis to fill with books. Next year, I’ll make a screen with better kerning.
This year, I was a late addition to the faculty reading program. I spent days in California agonizing over the performance. I began three animations of Persephone swallowed by the Earth. I hated them all and felt overwhelmed by visual ambition. I thought about the fact that J’lyn Chapman once told me something akin to “Start it, and if you hate doing it, abandon it.” So I gave up, watched Bridgerton and suddenly found myself inundated with freelance work, summer school, and new syllabi for fall. I became too busy to care. In an economy built on busyness, I think sometimes we lose sight of how being busy can support the creative process by forcing you to drop expectations. I realized running out of time can help the artistic process. This realization used to be both clearer and more complex when I worked in theater. The show must go on is an undeniable truth. The limiting factor of time can help release any sort of perfection, expectation, and plan. That is where the magic happens.
When I arrived in Colorado last week with a cold, it was clear my reading would be whatever I could scrape together. I just knew two things—I wanted to break the invisible (fourth) wall that exists between faculty, staff, students, and alumni by inviting others to perform with me and I wanted to work with the cut-up poems I began in January about Suffrage, labor, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
This summer, I’m working with Introduction to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Approaches, for an upcoming class. I chose the book because it is cross-disciplinary and all the reviews said “This doesn’t read like a textbook.” It doesn’t. However, sometimes one needs the structure/container/crutch of a textbook. (Let’s reduce our adjunct laboring, shall we?)
Anyway, the book features two pieces on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Theresa Serber Malkiel’s 1910 Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker, and The New York Times account of the fire. I enjoy newspaper archives because they read with a peculiar poetics, and reveal how our use of language in print evolves. The NYT reporter wrote:
There was a plate glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it, wrecking it and breaking her body into a thousand pieces.
I can’t ignore this image—the idea of a body shattering while remaining contained (to some degree) within the skin, the idea of bones and glass breaking in tandem. I wanted to create a piece that mimicked the breaking apart of a body/multiple bodies (146 deaths in all) while using performance and collective poetry as a device to reassemble and honor the dead.
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