Stephanie Gray, Shorthand and Electric Language Stars

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 20^th 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.”

Erika Staiti, The Undying Present

I haven’t consulted the map. I didn’t know there was a map until after they returned to the car at the beginning and spread it over their laps. I know I am trying to get to the magnified view as indicated. I will have to go through many rooms. In some cases I might have to stay overnight. It all depends.

Oakland, California writer Erika Staiti’s striking first full-length book, The Undying Present (San Francisco, CA: Krupskaya, 2015), exists in the nebulous space between prose poetry and novel. Constructed as a collage-work, The Undying Present is a pastiche of scene-sections, including scenes presented from multiple perspectives, a set of semi-travel narratives, multiple examples of overlap, deliberate obfuscation and occasional contradition. Writing out a series of movements without specific details, the narrative allows itself to not be limited by a single trajectory or reading. As Ariel Goldberg and Rachel Levitsky wrote in their “Conversation about Erika Staiti’s ‘The Undying Present,’” as part of their “Social reading” series in Jacket2: “Under erasure, constant revision: questions left by Staiti’s outlines and silhouettes must only be answered in multiples, of bodies, desires, expirations hiding from each other, revealed in the reading, by the readers: for how long can a hand be held?” They continue:

In a narrative that is about an underground replete with unspoken dynamics that are probably sado-masochistic, the open field of the mystery is significant. The narrative is not master of its own mystery. The narrator is not in control.

“False harmony warms the network. Secrets eat through the spaces between bodies.”

There is something going on in The Undying Present but it’s a secret. There is a necessity of uncovering the mystery, the structural body of the scene that can’t be addressed singularly by the author who is included in it. How are we going to be asked to question the surface? To get to the matter, when intimacy lapses. The reader is being asked to help.

Narrative, one might argue, is as arbitrary as any other idea upon which to hang a story. Staiti’s narrator is not in control, they write, and yet, it takes a remarkable amount of control to allow such a space for the narrator to drift so artfully, highlighting a comparison and difference between this and, say, Richard Brautigan’s novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976), in which narrator, narrative and, supposedly, author erode simultaneously. Staiti’s montage of prose-sections accumulate in such a way that are reminiscent of the novels of Toronto writer Ken Sparling, yet writing out longer scenes than his novels often include. Both writers, somehow, manage to create full-length prose-works that suggest that the order of the sections aren’t fixed, but simply one way of reading; might The Undying Present be equally readable if the sections were re-ordered? Would it make for an entirely different, yet equally satisfying, experience?

Staiti is also the author of the chapbooks Verse/Switch & Stop-Motion (2008), In the Stitches (Trafficker Press, 2010) and Between the Seas (Aggregate Space & Featherboard Writing Series, 2014), and in an interview conduced by Ariel Goldberg, Staiti discusses In the Stitches in a way that seems to connect to this current work: “There is some kind of world in which this language is existing but I don’t really know what it is. It’s partly an imagined/fantasized world but it steals objects and ideas from our world. I don’t feel so literate in this world at all. I feel pretty removed from it. In the earliest version, I was trying to write lines that would negate themselves. I wanted to see what something looked like if it could be itself and also its own negation. I was writing longhand, which I almost never do. As the piece over time transformed into this thing, I realized that something kind of ambient but real came out in the attempt to negate. I thought a lot about ambience. I wanted to see a world in which ambience dominated. It’s interesting about the different voices you mentioned because I’ve been hearing it as un-voiced, as a humming or something.” In remarkably precise prose, Staiti appears very much to be creating a world through halved information, presenting just enough to create an incomplete portrait, and make the reader aware of what might be missing. One might say that this new work is just as much ambient than setting or narrative, suggesting what another writer would have fleshed out more fully, yet most likely lessening the effect.

I walk through the City of Margins. Tall angular buildings shimmer in the sun. Dozens of people move past me walking in straight lines with conviction. I am moving in this way too. The streets push us to our destinations efficiently. We push ourselves there.

A narrow alleyway appears. I turn and walk down the torn street. I reach an empty parking lot. I feel the Second City beneath me. The shell of a burned out car sits at the edge of the frame. An abandoned and deteriorating building sags into the ground. This is where we enter.

I open the doors of the building and walk around peering in each room. The rooms hold remnants of the past, forgotten objects slathered in dust and rodent feces. I climb the stairs dragging knobby fingers over a dusty banister. A young woman is crumpled in the corner at the end of the hallway. Her body is a mouth, a dark open hole telling a story. Speaking not speaking.

Aufgabe 11

What am I doing—catless—here,

level-headed and certain,

without cause to judge?

What am I doing without my own face,

without either feet or staggering? Who is it that seeks me out

and doesn’t discover my telephone on its tiny coffee table?

    I am but scarcely

the description of someone that knows me,

an identity card that has cast off first one foot

and then the other

and who will sleep until it is far too early.

(My flesh does not know of flesh. The saliva

coagulates and, oh, once again it is mid-afternoon

and the rain has not arrived.)

What time will I be born, that I don’t remember the light?

What time will I be dead, that my hands don’t hurt? (“Untitled,” Rafael Menjivar Ochoa, trans. Emily Abendroth)

I recently received a copy of the eleventh annual Aufgabe, a journal produced out of Brooklyn, New York through Litmus Press, and edited by an editorial board of E.Tracy Grinnell, Julian Talamentez Brolaski, erica kaufman, Jen Hofer and Canadian poet Nathanaël. Along with their usual generous amount of poetry and “essays, notes, reviews,” this issue features a section of Salvadoran poetry, guest edited by Christian Nagler, including translations from the Spanish by Emily Abendroth, Karen Lepri, Christian Nagler, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Brian Whitener. In Nagler’s lengthy introduction to the section on Salvadoran poetry, he writes:

‘The quest for identity’ is a concept that perhaps signifies anachronistically in the intellectual climate of North America, where a ‘post-identity’ discourse provides some semblance of a contemporary mood, even if is not embraced or fully elaborated. We—some of us—are perhaps experiencing a milder form of what Huezo-Mixco cites as the presiding trend of the 1970s and 80s in El Salvador, when the “collision of social movements with entrenched power tend[ed] to displace identity issues.” In his lecture, Huezo-Mixco tracks the continued vitality of the concept of identity with regards to mass-events that have served to vitally confuse the idea of interior and exterior, namely a thirty year mass migration that now locates a quarter to a third of Salvadoran citizens outside the national borders. At the end of his lecture, Huezo-Mixco, arrives at a provocative conclusion that the younger generation of writers “re-creates the catastrophe of a fragmented and impoverished society.” It’s a gernation that does not write with “any enthusiasm for the political gains wrested from one of the bloodiest periods in Latin America.”

I’m impressed that a journal would so heavily and regularly be involved with translation, interested in engaging with other poetries, poetics and cultures, and in seeing the differences of subject matter, cadence and the line, as the issue features not only the special section but translated works within the section of general works. Some of the highlights of the issue include works by Noah Eli Gordon and j/j hastain, as well as Mathieu Bergeron (translated by Nathanaël). The pieces by Gordon are from a work-in-progress I’ve seen sections from before, his “The Problem,” which feature drawings by Sommer Browning. Given the drawings appear to be tailor-made for the work, one can only hope that a trade edition of the finished work might also include drawings?

What is to be done? A note on a page torn from a notebook says: a note in a defused cage. Further along, as a matter of fact, the grey skeleton of a human cage: a whole series of sawed, twisted bars. At the back, in the hay, as they say, lies a page torn from a notebook. From here, it is impossible to read it, but the repeated patterns trick the field: we are holding the page in our hand, we have already, necessarily, entered. On the front, we read: Turn the page; on the back: Turn around. Do you follow me? (“The Unformed Suite,” Mathieu Bergeron)

From the previous issue [see my review of such here] to this current one, there seems an entire different flavour, a different cadence of the works presented, and I’m uncertain if this is accident of submissions or a deliberate attempt to shape different issues (or if the difference is entirely in my own mind). 

Still, a particularly interesting feature of the current issue is an essay by Ariel Goldberg, “Selections from The Estrangement Principle: A Poetic Criticism,” which questions a number of different directions of art and writing, in regards to definition, self-definition and the question of “queer,” writing “NPR tells the news with clips from an old interview, with no mention Ryan is a lesbian. If there is nothing about being a dyke in her poetry then should the word lesbian be uttered? Is Kay Ryan making history as the first out lesbian Poet Laureate with a Pulitzer Prize, or is this actively not being treated as history?” The piece continues:

The term “queer art” is both persisting and failing at a rapid pace, and for multiple reasons. Mostly the anti-definition catchall capability of the word “queer” sets the stage. For instance, I am resistant to a dead on defining of the word. Different queernesses float up here, and more specific identifiers inside of the “LGBTQ” acronym come in to sharper focus. I am working backwards, piecing together scraps. There is a sort of pact, in the word queer, anyway, to resist the task of definition. I am identifying with it, but also varying from it, throwing back to lesbian, or dyke. I pluck and examine. I am inconsistent. As important as it is to identify a gender or sexuality, so is it to name my race, my white privilege. My excellent education privilege. Being Jewish, whatever that means. The identifiers don’t exactly end. Being gender queer or a dyke or both collapses in this long exhale where it’s not important that I know the answer to a question someone is always asking.