Kimberly Alidio, Teeter

 

Everyone who happens to live where

my father’s family happened to live at the time of
naming has names beginning
with the same letter as mine. A name
cuts off the unruly sequence of
discovering a new thing topped off by
a moment of awareness one’s beholden to
something new. Of retrofitting one’s
classical senses: brown bag, al-Qamqám
in disregard of discovery’s
doctrine. Even reducing anomaly or
variation to naming is enchanting. An old
catalog of names is the old story of
mine. A dream is round & uncertain

The latest from Upper Hudson Valley, New York poet Kimberly Alidio, following after projects the resound (Black Radish Press, 2016), : once teeth bones coral : (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Why Letter Ellipses (Chicago Il: selva oscura press, 2020) [see my review of such here] is Teeter (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2023). The three sections that make up this collection—“HEARING,” “AMBIENT MOM” and “HISTORIES”—are built as self-contained structures, whether long poems or suites, all of which explore through different elements of patterns of sound and rhythm, bouncing across line breaks and long sentences. “the occasion to / try out consonants / is when the cry / cuts into / another language,” Alidio writes, as part of “AMBIENT MOM.” A bit further down the page, writing: “this composing / in unlearned / languages // prenatal perceiving + / processing prosodic patterns / a Pangasinan of the everyday / palpability of experience [.]” She writes a polyvocality; threads of history and language, existing as a kind of single, ongoing sentence. This work is expansive and experimental, including a cluster of “Autohistoriography” poems in the third section, which suggest a furthering of what Fred Wah once coined as “bio-text,” employing a life-writing, but one propelled, first and foremost, by language; or even, far earlier, as George Bowering wrote his first person language prose poems, Autobiology (1972). As Alidio’s “Autohistoriography of Arrival at a River” begins:

            Divorcing one’s queer partner is a chance to divorce one’s art community, one’s social circle who gives one visibility & cultural milieu. & this was both a nightmare & a dreamy comfort. “Why are malls so depressing?” asks S. We were queer children, in some kind of girlhood, in the suburban ‘80s, when it was the height of sociality & familial reproduction to be dead inside, to feel nothing, at least, to feel not much of anything. Isolation is not always the queer person’s precarity. As S explains, for such a being, isolation is a radical choice. We want an alternative to the binary that accounts for being a “woman” whose “community” once destroyed her. After all, one can love only one person at a time, someone says. & one must train one’s love toward the proper object, no one outright says. The romance plot is key to operations of brutal competition in public & private spaces. Varda’s Le bonheur is brilliant in showing the replaceability & interchangeability of blonde partners. Amacher’s “sound characters” & “sonic figures.”

There is such a propulsive language, in both cadence and purpose, and one that seems to incorporate elements of the lyric journal, whether the late American poet Bernadette Mayer, a poet referenced within, or the journal-lyric of Alidio’s partner, Stacy Szymaszek. Again, Alidio utilizes subject, but as a means to and even through an end. As the poem “The summer I was born” begins: “two artists made durational works // In NYC & MA, Bernadette Mayer conducted an ‘emotional science project,’ in which every day / of my birth month was spent shooting a roll of 35 mm film, recording audio & writing // On the day of my birth, she wrote // ‘I must have no respect for nothingness to photograph these scenes with sand or snow off / monument valley road the road in the valley of the same mountain monument mountain, a whole / series of them a whole series of photographs & one monument & I get a whole new picture of / myself, where is your driver’s license he said, you are drinking beer’ [.]” There is a durational feel to this particular work, at least one of a sense of ongoing thinking, or ongoingness, from one point forward, from one cover across to the next. As the poem “I might as well connect the dots between,” set amid her suite of prose-explorations that make up the third and final section:

the data flow of archives & internet algorithms & this anecdote. Generate text, language, drawings, associations around the odd detail, the clashing word, the weird thing that rubbed me against the grain like a pinhole onto large-scale contradictions & social thinking. Events, figures & even tactics of glitching radically disrupt both the flow of data & the binary categories of IRL & online. Activate the text. Get distracted but try to leave a trace of where your body-mind goes. My recall of sitting in running tights at the threshold of the archive is an affective mix of shame, disorientation & pleasure. That I was a kind of glitch. Intone it. Recall that many talismanic amulets are inscribed with spells that need to be read aloud to set the magic in motion. I walked into the house of the archeon, I was processed & regulated in its anterooms & I was then identifiably young, brown, a sweaty cis-woman, both a product of multiple colonialism & a U.S. historian. Let’s attune to the quiet & the noise

 

Kimberly Alidio, Why Letter Ellipses

 

I have been thirteen
frowned on        haunted for years
shadow spread myself
Cixous                 before or after

file my nails in poetry
she hangs in self-absorption
from her lovers        tend to edges
before they tear

unmanageable
palpebral fissure      what threat
clitoris run-on      slows down
in Camomille’s mouth

plausible surfaces       new
when seen           fingernail
by the italics        higher order
subterranean          eager astride (“DEAR ARCHON”)

I’m working through my copy of Arizona (currently relocating to New York State) poet Kimberly Alidio’s second 2020 title, Why Letter Ellipses (Chicago Il: selva oscura press, 2020), following : once teeth bones coral : (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2020) [see my review of such here] and her full-length debut, after projects the resound (Black Radish Press, 2016). As with her prior collection, Alidio’s is a lyric less broken than stitched, structured as a kind of collage-lyric, or coat of many colours. “stitch,” she writes, in the opening poem, “I saw seams / sparrows / fontanel / peonies / a mother wants to know                          neither of ours / speak from granite / optimist                     I have to get / poisoned by rock               you can’t / come with me I don’t want to / suffocate” (“stitch”). The book is organized in four sections—the shorter pieces that make up “ARCHIVE IS TOUSLED,” the longer sequence “DEAR ARCHON,” the poem-trio in “THINGHOOD CIRCULATION” and the final poem-section, “CODA.” The poems of Why Letter Ellipses examine the differences between people and language, and erasures through colonialism, writing and forcing her way into acknowledgment. As she writes as part of the poem “dearest, I’m writing from inside this place to you / who are in a totally different place,” “Geography after all is a modernist romance, a language for how / We diverged from one another. Writing is the fragment of a relation / Made possible by archival preservation and document’s promise. // You and I are here to unsettle.” Hers is a lyric informed by history and driven to, as she says, unsettle. Her poems are expansive, far-reaching and multiple, forming a pastiche of energy, language and sound. She writes the archive, and from the archive, as her extensive bibliography endnotes suggest, weaving in thoughts and phrases from writers such as John Dryden, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Stacy Szymaszek, Alice Notley, Amiri Baraka, Bernadette Mayer, Fred Moten and Edith Moses, as well as references from Filipino Pioneer and Filipino Student Bulletin. The poems exist as both a pulling apart and a gathering together. “Fragments her body into,” she writes, as part of the extended poem “a girl knows geopolitical strategy,” “someone historical      existence / All actions [.]”

In an article posted on the Poetry Foundation website last fall, “My Native Language Is Noise,” Alidio writes on the boundaries, secrets and possibilities of language, growing up in a household of three languages—English, Tagalog and Pangasinan—two of which she was never taught. “Why does Language Poetry soothe me? Because this is what I know: languages exceed our conception of them. They are more than complex forms of cultural activity, more than the material of poem-making, and more than their communicable and informational functions.” The first in her extended family born in the United States, and the first one of same raised monolingually, I’m fascinated with the way she describes absorbing and experiencing language. She writes of colonialism, immigration and assimilation, and how it inadvertently led her to a different kind of awareness:

I developed an ear for emotional prosody: variations in tone, pitch, volume, speed, and pauses. I became sensitized to proprioception, or the language of body positioning, gaze, gesture, muscular tension, and facial expression. The phatic patterns of vocal tics and flourishes came to me undifferentiated from word phonemes. I listened for honorifics that mirrored and performed a place in hierarchies. I wanted to catch someone forgetting to use one and then course-correcting. I wondered because I had no idea how one would learn to use an honorific in a way that did not seem like an extra limb.

The openly unstable and half-imagined sense-making of languages has created space and autonomy in my perception, interpretation, and affiliations. Into adulthood, I feel at home among people speaking any language I do not. While excluded in multiple ways from meaning-making, I am excused from obligations to pay attention and participate in any normative, culturally-specific ways. When people speak their own language around you, they neither police what they want you to hear nor enlist you into their particular rationalities. You are both apart from and a part of what’s going on. It’s an experience of intimate abstraction to be included through forms of sonic and somatic environments, the non-lexical elements of togetherness.

In Why Letter Ellipses, Alidio writes a documentary-collage poem, one that works to reconcile the different facets and factors of her own experiences and interactions around culture, language and history. As she writes to open the final poem-section:

Docupoetry? I was a historian first.
Or second.
Never at the same time 

            maybe a few years of overlap
            maybe just at the moment?

which has something to do with form

            not discourse
            although I might really mean discourse

the aesthetic experience of reading and writing the historical study

            the argumentative and over-cautiously cited narrative

within the closed circle
of historiography

 

Kimberly Alidio, : once teeth bones coral :

tree

            intimate

propername

            outer

                        transit

                                                                        household

            stir

shadow                                                            line

                                                                        duskedroom

heron

                        glows

                                                                        dusk

            downed

bat

            ominous                                              moundpath (“: nightstand rubberplant :”)

Self-described in the acknowledgements as a “linguistic queering of intimacies,” Tucson, Arizona poet Kimberly Alidio’s latest poetry title is : once teeth bones coral : (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2020). : once teeth bones coral : is her second full-length poetry title, after after projects the resound (Black Radish Press, 2016), she also has a further title out later this year: why letter ellipses (selva oscura press, 2020). I’m curious about this idea of “linguistic queering of intimacies,” an idea she expands a bit upon as part of her recent “12 or 20 questions” interview: “I have a tongue-in-cheek aim to reclaim Language Poetry, generally held to be antithetical to the expressive, subjective, and even experimental poetics of BIPOC/ LGBTQIA+ writers, for a poetics of queer-of-color, postcolonial, cross-lingual synesthesia.” Structured in seven poem-sections—“: rock neverended :,” “: nightstand rubberplant :,” “: pours pore :,” “: okra oat egg :,” “: wave reverse :,” “: continent reverence :” and “: hand axiom:”—the lyric cycle, or lyric suite, of : once teeth bones coral : is an expansive, fractured, fragmented, open lyric, comparable in structure to what Toronto poet Margaret Christakos worked in her recent suite charger (Talonbooks, 2020) [see my review of such here].

Alidio’s lyric cycle works as both sequence and accumulation of single points, stretched across the grid of the square page, directing connections of how words can’t help but mean, and how those meanings interact. She writes of landscape across a wide field, and scope via a sequence of threads. The colons she plays with in both book title and individual poem/section titles suggest an interconnectedness, how one piece fits easily and directly into the next. This is a singular, expansive poem across a wide field: one simply has to step back far enough to be able to see the whole piece at once. As she writes to open the “: notes :” at the end of the collection:

As an effort to undo in language the normative relations of self to lover, landscape, and loss, this book opens with a poem that arranges language from Lorine Niedecker’s journal, “Lake Superior Country ’66,” published in Lake Superior (Wave, 2013). “The journey of the rock is never ended. In every tiny part of any living thing are materials that once were rock that turned to soil. These materials are drawn out of the soil by plant roots and the plant used them to build leaves, stems, flowers and fruits. Plants are eaten by animals. In our blood is iron from plants that draw it out of the soil. Your teeth and bones were once coral.”