About mid book - the very one you are holding I
read about “Hazel Mayhall, lowly negative cutter,” then I search her and I
can’t find her anywhere at all. It’s Hazel
Marshall Stephanie later explains when my computer visits her computer. I
wrote it wrong and I decided not to change it. So I search her and there she is in a piece in the Times about the history of
stock footage in films and how Hazel Marshall invented the concept (& the
business) in the 1920s when she worked as an editor at Paramount. Since she was
always approached by people for what was essentially stock footage, B rolls she
told the studio that there could be some money in this and Hazel also created
the system for filing and organizing and preserving stock which they began
charging for by the ten-foot segment and in today in video it’s by ten seconds.
And to really think about what Stephanie Gray’s doing in this book I’m going to
leave Hazel right there at the center of things. Shorthand and Electric Language Stars I think is an alright title
(it’s growing on me) but I think it would be a great title for a film and much
of Stephanie Gray’s training is there. She asks brooding questions in her poems
and sometimes the question is her title. I don’t think it entirely matters
where her question lands. What if there
was another internet, is one such title and the comma is also there having
landed somehow as a fly. I don’t think these things are managed by disregard
nor would that describe Stephanie’s casualness in regards to Hazel’s name. Her
approach is more like an inexactness that holds intimacy close like we’re all
in Stephanie’s cutting room. I tried to find a picture of Hazel Marshall and
what I found instead (because of the misnaming) was a picture of Stephanie and
several full-faced women who could have been ay of the Hazel Mayhalls who died
in the 20th century in the Midwest or possibly Canada. Big women.
This endpoint of my search produced a kind of zany melancholy which is a nice
film mood to be wallowing in. And the notion of stock footage reminds me of
stock characters of which this book is also full. What abounds is the spouting
of stock characters:
You
didn’t stay till the end? I couldn’t get out of there…And I was like
OMIGOD…You
think I was born yesterday. (Eileen Myles, “‘To Crop the World a Million Times
Over’: Stephanie Gray”)
I
may be late to the game, finally going through my copy of New York poet and
filmmaker Stephanie Gray’s Shorthand and Electric Language Stars (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2015), a book that
exists in a space occupied by both writing and image. Subtitled “Poems, Film
Stills and Photographs,” Gray’s collage-project also includes both an
introduction to the book (by Eileen Myles) and an afterword, focused on Gray’s
filmmaking (by Ariel Goldberg), working to firmly place this collection, it
would seem, as an equal blend of poetry and film project, and to really
articulate how much the two genres are linked in Gray’s ongoing work. As
Goldberg writes; “This need to alter my environment in order to appreciate Gray’s
films speaks to how hard it is to do
what Gray does: to pick out from our various urban cacophonies, to write poems,
live, visually.”
your control
of the lower registers is flawless,
the static is enduring, the tracking is
scintillating, blurring your flawless lower registers, ka-ching, ka-ching,
ka-ching, suddenly all at once, a path is revealed, a window is opened, it got
me from point A to point BE is all you need to know, another level of the
sublime skirting through, more than the skirt that slipped through the subway
grated crack, the high heels you said you’d never wear ever again after the
grated teeth ate one and you went to work, snuck in, with pantyhose toes and
slipped on extra shoes under your desk, we opened up the instinct, we dragged
the palm key down to key of the lowest C, don’t you see, we controlled the
lowest of the low, the registers felt like Mt. St. Helens times twenty but
nothing moved, nothing shook, we knew it was flawless but had to do it without
lava, without ash, you know the bullhorn was what would carry you through
another day of this BS, BS meant to orchestrate yr flawless control of the
lower registers but you’d already carried them so high, their low-ness highness
would never fall down again
Self-described
as “diaristic,” Gray’s work appears deeply intimate and personal, and even
communal (of the community, moving throughout her neighbourhood and city), utilizing
material from her immediate, but managing to do so in a way that is both revealing
and sideways, bringing out elements that are entirely unexpected, twisted or
accumulative. The author of a small handful of poetry books and chapbooks prior
to this, including A Country Road Going Back in Your Direction (Argos Books, 2015), Place Your Orders Now! (Belladonna*, 2014), I Thought You Said It Was Sound/How Does That Sound? (Portable
Press at Y0-Yo Labs, 2012), and Heart
Stoner Bingo (Straw Gate Books, 2007), the Poetry Foundation website describes Stephanie Gray thusly: “Stephanie Gray is a poet and filmmaker known
for short Super 8 films that explore the experience of urban space and
gentrification, queer identity and feminism, and disability and class.”
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