Ongoing notes: mid-September 2022: Andy Martrich/Nicole Raziya Fong + Dakotah Jennifer,

Can you believe there’s another small press fair in Toronto this weekend? On Saturday, come by Toronto’s Harbourfront for the Small Press Market curated by Kate Siklosi and hosted by the Toronto International Festival of Authors! I’ll be there with above/ground press, naturally, alongside InPrint Collective, Anstruther Press, Dumagrad Books, Knife Fork Book, Guernica Editions, Simulacrum Press, Proper Tales Press, Gordon Hill Press, Invisible Publishing, Baseline Press, Book*hug Press, Gap Riot Press, Teama Publishing, Puddles of Sky Press, nOIR:Z and Serif of Nottingham. And did you see the report I posted recently from the Fisher Small and Fine Press Fair?

Calgary AB: I’m just now going through Leguminosae Delusion Athletics (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021) by Andy Martrich and Nicole Raziya Fong, a lovely hand-sewn chapbook produced in an edition of sixty copies. Leguminosae Delusion Athletics exists as a collaboration between Martrich, an American writer living in France, and Fong, a poet based in Montreal. Moving through the assemblage of text and image, the long poem is set as a sequence of untitled and seemingly self-contained bursts of text, one per page, writing a thread referencing a particular family of plants (beans, legumes). There is a curious way both the text and the artwork curl in and around, wrapping meaning and image around and across a sequence of accumulating threads. “Ready to create a family and shelter to cache,” one section begins, “preservation and canned goods // Constructing a snow fort / nodding and grinning with nonverbal / understanding of the day // Attempting to wake the kids with a bullhorn / while bright and coiled in packed ice / Spy vs. Spy where one begins the end of the other / bordering spoiled iconography [.]”

According to a note on the chapbook included on Fong’s website: “Leguminosae Delusion Athletics is a collaborative poetry and art project about representative absence. Dynamism is treated as a form of ritual delusion throughout the long poem, composed by Andy Martrich, lingering on the cusp of afflictions that can’t be undone. The accompanying art, by Nicole Raziya Fong, draws from cues in the text, corresponding to different sections of the poem and mirroring the disassemblage of apparent forms and figures.” As the opening piece reads:

From the point of view of the safety
the physical safety of our leguminosae
better to fan than to compress 

From the view of accessibility
cutting-edge methods make division practicable
gratuitous molting glimpses imago 

Catalogs preceding recognition foster evil wished
upon the egg
shedding omniscient bloodsucker 

Poised toothless
photomapping by robotic helicopter
spreading wings as a material ear through
suspended weather

To know when to drop into the unincorporated
area where you were born
accentuate a very high temperature without the
relief of melting

A ring-around-the-erotica public seafront where
the docks come alive with electric pulse

New Jersey: Behind on everything, but just now getting to Dakotah Jennifer’s chapbook debut, FOG (Bloof Books, 2019). According to the author biography at the back of the collection (information three years out of date now, obviously), “Dakotah Jennifer is an eighteen-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis.” There is an impressive clarity and liveliness to the work here, no matter how old the author might be. This is a lyric that strikes, in part, for its directness. “How do you travel from south carolina to New York in bare feet.” she writes, as part of “The American Protection Against Black Violence Act,” the poem that opens the small collection. “Who was the president in 1863. / Why did he free the slaves. / What is the definition of an ally. / Do you know what the paper bag test is. Do you approve.” She writes how history impacts the present, writing on race, politics and social issues. As her author biography continues: “Jennifer writes about race, class, and gender, stretching her emotions into tangible things. She strives to write things that grow.” Given the strength of the poems assembled here, I am expecting great things from Dakotah Jennifer, and not simply just the possibility of a full-length debut; there is a powerful, passionate and patient resolve to these poems, one that works to document and articulate, in not just an abstract hope but a pointed demand for something better.

Proof

You want to know why they ask you for proof,
For evidence in the case,
You know they’ll never indict a man they see themselves in
But you try anyway.
You want to know why you don’t cry when they boys are dead
    but when they are alive.
Why you mourn the country and not the fallen.
You count stars as if they are not already dead.
You tell oblivious boys you love them and then run away with it.
You know only what you have been told about the struggle,
But also what you trek through every day.
You don’t believe the reports until you see the footage.
You cringe at the gunshot before you realize they did too.
You write poems about boys that aren’t dead or dying,
You make them immortal when they already are.
You write down black and it turns to dust.
You hope to exist but disappear in the mirror.
You research hate crimes to give them the numbers.

They don’t believe you.

K. Lorraine Graham, The Rest is Censored

 

I want to dress like Cal Worthington and hoola hoop across the country somehow in tribute to Peace Pilgrim.

The rest of this poem is censored.

Or we can just make this the poem / floor plan / teacher.

As I am perpetually behind on everything, I am just now getting to Washington D.C. poet K. Lorraine Graham’s The Rest is Censored (Lambertville NJ: Bloof Books, 2017), a book-length accumulation of short lyric fragments that encompass the length and breadth of those lived moments that exist between or around what might otherwise get recorded. “Sit next to someone,” she writes, early on in the collection, “who doesn’t want / Next to                           / Yes  but is this interesting?” The Rest is Censored shifts the notion of the day book, a daily archive composed through the lens of the lyric, into a book of moments, framed within the boundaries daily life, opening as the body and the narrator wake. The narrator wakes, and the poem begins, suggesting less a “day book” than the book of a single day (although this temporal presumption on my part might be both missing the point and completely irrelevant). Composed as nine sections and a brief coda across one hundred or so pages, Graham composes short bursts as a sketchbook; composed of threads and moments, a poem of connection, fragment, sentences and disconnection. “insert bland / excited comment about landscape.” she writes. As part of her February 2019 “12 or 20 questions” interview, she references the compositional structure The Rest is Censored, as well as that of her debut, Terminal Humming (New York NY: Edge Books, 2009):

It felt good to have my first book, Terminal Humming, in the world as something I could celebrate and share with others, but it didn’t change my life. I used to think that the The Rest Is Censored, my second book, was very different from the first. Formally, it is. Terminal Humming is dense. The Rest Is Censored is spacious. But they both emerged through interventions into my daily routine. I wrote Terminal Humming when I was research assistant at a think tank in Washington researching US-China-Taiwan relations and missile defense systems. I’d read Vallejo’s Trilce on lunch break and then write for a while in my cubicle or outside. I wrote The Rest Is Censored on my daily bus commute between Carlsbad, CA and UC San Diego. It was a beautiful, miserable, hour-plus ride along the Pacific Ocean. I’d write until I was too nauseous to continue.

There is almost a way in which Graham writes boredom and down-time, sketching notes during a daily commute, finding the poem from within those spaces during which nothing “important” happens or occurs. There is nothing out of the ordinary to see, but for the remarkably ordinary. “If you’d throw more parties,” she writes, around the mid-point of the collection, “I’d take up surfing, / be more gracious with small talk. Nothing is discrete— / number, person, house, poem—sitting on the balcony as the / sun goes by, one bus goes by, not enough people on balconies / or buses.” There is something quite remarkable about the minutae she records; the mundane activities and discrete, wandering thoughts, revealing what is worthwhile in those moments of inactivity, even during those moments one works through, desperately waiting to get to what comes next.

I am supposed to keep a record throughout the day of anytime I feel a certain emotion. I am supposed to keep my emotions simple, for example: “glad,” “sad,” “mad,” or “bad.” I can also include “afraid” and “guilty.” Anytime I feel one of these emotions, I am supposed to note the time of day, the emotion I’m feeling and what was going on when I felt that emotion.

Later, with my partner, trusted friend or therapist, I am supposed to go through my list and share what I’ve written down. I should try to describe how the emotion felt within my body. I am supposed to talk about how it feels to share my emotional feelings with another person.

Ongoing notes: late March, 2021: Cody-Rose Clevidence + Ana Hurtado,

Is it spring yet? Our wee monsters are in the backyard every day, returning to the house all covered in mud, so it would certainly seem to be. They are very, very pleased.

It also means there are far more baths than usual. They seem not to mind this, either.

I’ve been, unrelatedly, in an above/ground press publishing frenzy lately. Have you noticed?

Ridgewood NY: Recently I received a copy of Cody-Rose Clevidence’s chapbook, “BEHOLD A MAN” (Ridgewood NY: auric press, 2020), a small item produced by Tessa Bolsover and Michael Cavuto in spring 2020. I’m not sure if Clevidence is working a slant reference to Christina Rossetti (“Behold The Man!”) or even a sly reference to Robert Creeley (“I Know a Man”) with their title, but this chapbook-length poem, subtitled “THORACIC CAVITY | EXPERIMENT / m notes on form,” writes out a sequence of ninety-nine short exploratory bursts of lyric, exposition, theory and language nodes, working to form, together, a way in which to speak of writing, language, the body, story and myth.

3.         homo digitalis
            homo erectus
            homo dentata
            homo phalarope & ibid.
            homo longitudinal &
            morphism & pineal & of
            longing.    << home
            is where// home is
            where 

                        || & I, I curve 2 th
                        earth, my son, Oedipus
                        of form || & so
                        conceived & so
                        to conceive it is done
                        , when u
                        kiss’t it  << chimera,
                        opticon, this is
                        so weird, heave yr
                        tentacles forward
                        my inkling yr noun
                        & spring—

The “notes on form” reminds of some of the stunning chapbooks that ugly duckling presse has been producing around such lately as well [see my review of one of them here], as Clevidence [see their interview at Touch the Donkey here] writes on form and formation in fascinating ways, connecting writing to the body, queerness and queer theory, and writing the body to references of transitioning. I’ve long been an admirer of the explosive, expansive and fragmentary nature of Clevidence’s work, but the stretch of this certainly provides new elements of clarity in their work, writing a language and thinking slant and staggered, parsed and staccatoed into an accumulation far more than the sum of such works. Clevidence writes of how the world began, new beginnings and begun, referencing William Blake, pearls and castration, “a hundred / thousand crocuses / fuck you / in yr mouth / gently, / sweet friend” (“14.”). “should I go up to a hundred?” they write, as section seventeen.

66.        th body makes do with what it is
            th body improvises tools from its environment
            th mind constructs for th body another body
            body body body body
            lieu lieu lieu lieu
            th broken tool
            / reveals— 

                              [my magnets, wrench & bluebird of my soul
                              Renounce!  what fear is this— ? I kiss yr swan,
                              I Capitulate— I dis-assemble
                              I don’t even have any horses
                              for these reins, not even one
                              single horse just these two tiny, tiny
                              bluebirds
                              of my soul—

th revelation of th broken tool ] in me

Quito Ecuador: I was immediately struck by the sleek and nuanced prose poems by Ana Hurtado, from her chapbook Miedo al Olvido: Poems from an Uprooted Girl (Bloof Books, 2020). Hurtado’s poems are composed as dreamlike prose, unfolding lyric scenes. Her poems are set in short section/groupings, which is curious for a chapbook-length collection: the four poems of “Chamita, Venezuela, 1991,” the six poems of “Wava, Ecuador, 1997,” the four poems of “Maracaibo, Apart,” and the five poems “A Quito of Me,” most of which extend no longer than a page each. Her short narratives are curious, blending storytelling elements of memoir and the postcard story, writing out elements of dislocation, location and connection. “The shadows below our bodies,” she writes, as part of “MY FATHER,” “turned into permanent figures of us: three South American children, / bewildered by sharp American grass, Floridian tornadoes, and prying / worms.” There is a delicate care to these stories, these sentences, one that allows her narratives to unfold with a lovely curiosity and slowness. These are poems of belonging, and beautifully so. I am wondering: might there be a longer, larger manuscript of these pieces? I would certainly hope.

OUR SCHOOL SECURITY GUARD ANGELITO ONCE TOLD ME A STORY ABOUT HIS MOTHER AS I WAITED FOR MINE TO PICK ME UP FROM SCHOOL.

His mother kept two cockatoos in her bedroom. They sometimes shat on her bed, nightstand, on framed pictures of Angelito’s grandfather. But they were her family. He once walked in on her cuddling with the birds, feathers covering her sound-asleep body. My mother is a bird, he realized. He asked me if mine was, too. Tal vez, I responded. Mami finally showed up in her giant truck, an hour late, and Angelito held the car door open for me. We both knew she wasn’t. Today I was told he died by lightning. El guardia Angelito tapped our school’s power lines with a wooden broom, trying to save a bird’s nest from falling. Two blue eggs never cracked or hatched. They stayed whole or dead. Kids didn’t know the difference. The entire tenth grade of Colegio Menor now knew man could ignite electricity with kindness.