TEN THOUSAND BY THE FOURTH OF JULY

posted by poet CAConrad @ 12:15 PM 0 comments

HOMOPHOBIA and a Lexicon for Violence: A Conversation With Jonas Slonacker 10 Years After Matthew Shepard

Jonas Slonacker is my cousin, and someone I always looked up to when I was a kid, and is the cousin at the top of the Dear Mr. President poem. We grew up in a repressive, isolated rural community in Pennsylvania where our family worked at the coffin factory, the tire factory, dental floss and cardboard box factories. We escaped the homophobic confines as soon as we could. Our other queer cousin Dolly Conrad didn't leave, even when she had gender reassignment surgery to become our cousin David Conrad. David lived out the horror we had escaped, working at the coffin factory through the process of becoming David. The women no longer wanted him to use their restroom at the factory, and the men wouldn't allow the new David in the men's room, leaving David with a hole in the floor of the janitor's closet which drained to the sewer. Jonas moved to Laramie, Wyoming many years ago where he met his boyfriend Bill, and where they still live today. When Matthew Shepard was murdered in Laramie by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, writer/director Moises Kaufman interviewed over 200 citizens of Laramie to create what is now known as The Laramie Project. If you see the film version (IT'S A MUST SEE!), actor John McAdams plays the role of Jonas. The following is an e-mail conversation I had with Jonas over the month of October, 2008. This month marks the 10th anniversary of Matthew Shepard's brutal torture and murder. When you read Jonas's letter to the editor of Laramie's local newspaper The Laramie Boomerang toward the end of the conversation you'll see how some things are saddly unchanged in our world today. The newspaper refused to print his letter responding to their views of the 10th anniversary of Shepard's murder, but you can read it here.
CAConrad
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CACONRAD:
Ten years ago when Matthew Shepard's father spoke in court to ask the judge to show mercy against his son's murderers, Dennis Shepard said he imagined what his son sensed as he struggled to survive while tied to the fence on the outskirts of Laramie that cold night. He imagined the Wyoming wind in his ears, and the sparkling lights of Laramie in the distance. Jonas you've lived in Laramie for a good many years now. Please tell us what you see out there at night, what you hear, what you feel? What's the Laramie you can share with us, the Laramie that is and isn't galvanized by the murder ten years ago.

JONAS SLONACKER:
Laramie sits on the high plains and prairie with foothills to the east and snow-capped mountains to the west. The spot where Matthew Shepard was tied faces the snow-capped mountains to the west. The wind -- we get lots of it -- generally comes from the SW so it is very likely that the wind was blowing in his ears. If you are in town or near town at night, the lights of Laramie dominate the sky and radiate very far due to the vast expanse of prairie. Outside of Laramie, the sky is peppered thickly with stars and if the wind isn't blowing, the silence swallows you up. I remember moving to Laramie with pain and anger about my boyfriend Michael's death and how people reacted to it, and the open spaces, the vastness was able to absorb and dissolve my pain. In Pennsylvania, it felt like my pain bounced off of the buildings and back onto me.

So when I am out and about in Nature around Laramie, I feel free from the bondage and limitations of my small form and am connected to something greater than myself. When I weigh things on the scales in my mind concerning where I want to be and live, the space and nature around Laramie is always number one on the list. I can drive in any direction from town and in 10-30 minutes be all alone out on the prairie, in the foothills, or in the mountains by a lake or stream, under a tree, or in the full force of the wind. I didn't know Matthew so I don't know what his connection to the land of Wyoming was or if he felt a strong bond to it like I do. However, I do know that the land, the space, and the wind was able to absorb and disperse his pain.

CONRAD:
Someone who did know Matthew Shepard, and also knew his murderers Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, was quoted as saying about Henderson and McKinney, "My secret hope was that they were from somewhere else, so we could create a distance, you know, like, 'We don't grow children like that here.' Well it's pretty clear WE DO grow children like that here!" When I think about this realization with its implications of OWNING hatred as a community and as a culture, I like to let it spiral to its widest points to investigate homophobia. Matthew Shepard wasn't just "robbed" and killed by some hot-headed, angry, wreckless guys, he was beaten and he was tortured for being queer. Then he was tied to a fence beneath that beautiful Wyoming sky and beaten and tortured again, and then left there to suffer until someone found him many hours later. For thousands of years our religious and cultural heritage of homophobia have given way to men fearing their desires and their bodies to the point that they hate and kill men who are not afraid of their desires and bodies. There are very direct ways this fear is sanctioned.

Years ago I saw a documentary where a dozen prisoners were interviewed about the queer men they had each killed. Every one of these prisoners admitted to having sex with their victims before killing them. It reminded me of an incident of near-violence I went through in the rural Pennsylvania town you and I grew up in Jonas. I was up by the coffin factory reading a book, waiting for my boyfriend to meet me when a group of five classmates surprised me. We were all about seventeen at the time. But these guys started calling me Faggot (at that time I was called Faggot more often than my other name, real name). I stood up and was looking for a way to get the hell out of there, and they started making motions to punch me, and saying they were going to knock my teeth out. But the thing I remember the most, the thing that disturbed me the most, was that they all grabbed their cocks through their pants while saying YOU WANT SOME OF THIS DON'T YOU FAGGOT!? And it was very clear that they had hardons, and the one guy developed a stain through his pants which was probably pre-cum. An old man from the factory opened a window and yelled, which sent them running.

The reason I bring this up, the prisoners, and the guys who wanted to rape me or beat me or both, is because all of this was on my mind when I first found out that Aaron McKinney -- the young man who gave Matthew Shepard the brunt of the torture and beatings which killed him -- later went BACK INTO TOWN, got into a fight at a bar, and was himself beaten so badly that he wound up in the hospital. In fact the doctor from the ER that night said that Matthew was fighting for his life (a fight he lost five days later) a few beds down from Aaron's very own bed. And while I know there is NO EVIDENCE that Aaron nor Russell had had sex with Matthew, I DO wonder about Aaron's need to fight with another man later that night, another man he probably realized was stronger, since he wound up in the hospital himself. It sounded to me like he was trading off sexual tensions: beating a fag and then being beaten for feeling like a fag. And whether or not Aaron had a hardon that night while he was beating Matthew to death, or when he himself was getting his ass kicked into the ER, I'm sure by now he's surrendered to the taste of cock, having been in prison these past ten years. I sincerely hope he's found a nice boyfriend in there who can help him find the answers he needs.

BUT WHAT IS THIS MADNESS WHICH drives so much hatred!? How do we stop it? Governments have come and gone, all kinds of governments, but the ONE THING which has been a constant is our monotheistic religions. And ALL OF THEM have homophobia blasting through them at some point. Don't get me wrong there are plenty of clergy who are marvelous people and who MAKE CLEAR that homosexuals are real people and deserve support and compassion, but still, there are A LOT of clergy who dehumanize us, and make us easy targets to be set upon.

A group of teachers conducted an experiment a few years ago where they wrote onto index cards names of people from Germany during World War II. Their goal was to line up with their cards from "most guilty" to "least guilty" for the crimes against the millions murdered in the concentration camps. Someone had the Hitler card, there was a card for soldiers, etc., etc., but the person who had the card representing clergy who had used the pulpit to instill hatred against Jews, homosexuals, and others in order to galvanize the culture and fuel the way to the trains driving to the camps, THAT person went to the front of the line and refused to budge. The argument was that THESE men of the holy scripture were entrusted to be mediums to the highest spiritual intent of their congregations, and therefore had the most ability to corrupt and to rally support around the hatred and murder of the Nazi regime. WHENEVER I hear clergy being homophobic I know I am hearing THOSE MOST RESPONSIBLE for gay bashing, murder, even suicide of queers. The queer community still has the highest suicide rate. And there is not a day that goes by where queers are not murdered for being queer. To keep track of this carnage I'm positive would destroy me, but my friend kari edwards did exactly this on her blogs up to the day she died.

SLONACKER:
Wow, yes, I have often wondered if our own worst enemies aren't sometimes one of us living in a repressive cage or if some of our worst enemies also aren't men who wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat with cum all over their belly after having an erotic homo dream. When I came out at Berea College, a small liberal arts college in Kentucky -- yes, I really am a country gay mouse -- anyhow, I came out and a friend of mine told me he was uncomfortable being with me once he knew that, so I told him not to flatter himself, I wasn't attracted to him so he need not worry. He immediately shot back: "Why not?! What is wrong with me? Why aren't you attracted to me?!" Eccck. I pointed out his ridiculous behavior to him and then we started laughing and then he admitted to having a sexual dream about me. Once he admitted it, it was not an issue anymore and we moved on and he married a woman friend of ours and they are still happy 30 years later as far as I know.

So, I think having a erotic queer dream or attraction isn't unusual or unnatural and it doesn't even mean you are queer, sometimes it does, of course, but it may just mean you are human, you have hormones, you are a natural animal and why wouldn't someone be curious about what it would be like to have sex with someone of the same sex? To express that curiosity verbally or even physically is the healthy choice and to deny it and bury it deep inside makes it fester and become ugly and insane until you explode one day and beat up a "FAG" or kill one and then your karma sucks for a really long time. The straight men I know who are most comfortable with gay men are secure in themselves and are conscious of who they are, including their curiosity.

That's what happened with McKinney. I personally believe that Russell Henderson was mostly just a guilty bystander. There have been rumors that McKinney and Shepard may have known each other or that they at least met and I think there may be some truth hidden there. McKinney and Shepard both knew Doc O'Conner (another character in the play) who drove Matthew and friends to a gay bar in Ft. Collins, CO. in one of his limos and McKinney and his girlfriend had lived with Doc. Doc did an interview once and said that a couple of times when McKinney's girlfriend was gone that he and McKinney got it on. I believe that. Doc had a store north of Laramie in a ghost town named Bosler where he sold mattresses and furniture. Tom Horn lived for a short time in Bosler. (For you Western aficionados.) I went to Doc's store about 20 years ago, and he hit on me really hard. He talked like he wanted some rough action. By the way, Doc is originally from a small town in Pennsylvania as well. I met him years later at the small Laramie airport but he didn't remember me and he didn't hit on me again. Darn. The second time I met him he told me in person how he had gotten it on with McKinney and that Aaron liked getting it up the ass. It was an interesting and somewhat creepy conversation. Doc grew up in Pa. like I said and married and had a mess of kids and eventually divorced and moved to Wyoming. At one point in the conversation he became emotional telling me about a Catholic priest who had buggered him when he was an altar boy long ago in that small Pennsylvania town. It was in one of the coal counties in northeast Pa., I think… It was sad.

So, yes, the preachers, the modern day Pharisees condemning us and then waking up from a dream about fucking us and maybe there is cum on their bellies. Shame on them. Look at Rev. Phelps. I saw him when he was here in Laramie, doing one of his protests and I studied him for a few minutes and that man really wants to get it on with a man and have some kinky sadomasochistic sex but instead of doing that, he spews vile homophobic crap. After the protests, he goes home and beats up his wife and children. If he could just get it on with a man, maybe even just once, he would probably be a nicer person, maybe not likeable but definitely easier to be near. I did a Google search on Phelps and two of his sons left the family and live in the Pacific NW--I think that is the right location and they have opened up and spoken about the domestic abuse they experienced as children. While I was searching Phelps via Google I also went to his website and watched a video. In the video, Phelps and all of his family members were singing a song entitled: "God hates the World." At least they're honest.

CONRAD:
GOD HATES THE WORLD!? The Phelps family has always frightened me, but in some ways not as much as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who preach hatred of queers with more civility. I much prefer Phelps frothing at the mouth because he turns people off, even many homophobes. But Falwell is now dead, and I'm glad he is, and he was working my last nerve when he came to Philadelphia last year to preach his anti-gay sermon at the Exodus Baptist Church. Robertson is far more dangerous, like the present pope at the Vatican, as they use homophobia as a shield to protect the good christian families of the world by being the good gray, wise fathers.

But Jonas, this information about McKinney having had sex with men is EXACTLY the kind of information I was fishing for. The transcript of his initial interview with the police after they picked him up made me sick to my stomach BECAUSE of how he claimed to have blacked out. Yet he had full details of what he did for someone who had blacked out. It made me sick mostly because it was clearer and clearer the deeper you got into the transcript that he was hiding MUCH MORE than the so-called black out. This man really seemed to have a deep pathological response to Shepard being queer. The documentary of the prisoners who had all killed queer men, as well as the documentary with the murderers of Brandon Teena have made me just as sick, really physically sick, and I keep mentioning feeling sick because the visceral part of it is my body saying THIS IS from a world lacking its ability to Love openly!

It's the lack of autonomy, it seems to me, which drives this violence. And the casual nature that these men talk about their murdering queers is even more evidence that there's a HUGE connection between the sanctioned allowance, the great unsaid, the subtext to our culture of silent hate, our culture of religious fanatacism, and the cycle of repressing the scapegoat to relieve the tensions. Killing the goat for sacrifice seems to have relieved these men, even though they're in prison. One prisoner ate apple sauce while talking about the queer man he had fucked then stabbed to death. It's all been figured out by the greater cultural imprints for this man that (secretly) what he did was OK! When it's OK to dehumanize a group of people there's very little to prevent unapologetic murder.

At the same time it's VERY IMPORTANT that we are always honest when the world is on our side. I say this because you told me years ago that the gay press and the straight press had differing ways of reporting on the things you said to them in interviews. Can you share that experience with us? It's very interesting as well as still surprising all these years later.

SLONAKER:
When Shepard was killed--as a gay man in Wyoming, I was contacted by a lot reporters for gay and straight newspapers, magazines, etc. I can't remember all the specific details, this having happened 10 years ago. I just know that I don't trust what I read anymore. I often wonder how much of what I am reading is true. I say that because almost everyone who interviewed me ended up editing my words to fit their take on the whole incident and it always felt strange when I would read my words and see a sentence put together with another sentence when the two utterances were sometimes a half an hour apart but they were put together to make a different statement, one I didn't really make or they would edit my words like, well, let's say that I told you I hated Apples that have spoiled and are rotten and then you quoted me as saying—Jonas Slonaker said; "I hate Apples!" See the difference? It was so annoying to see that happen over and over again and eventually I stopped returning the calls when newspaper reporters left me a message. I was like—fuck this.

I really like the way you are doing this interview because I know everything I write will be in context. Even the folks who came and interviewed me and then edited maybe 8 hours of my speaking and answering questions to a few lines that my character utters in the Laramie Project—well, yeah, I said those lines but to me they feel naked. The first time I saw the play, my character felt like one of those heads in Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In—remember that show? Like my head popped out and said: BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. It felt strange because I knew the whole context of everything I said then just one line would pop out on stage and of course, they had to edit my words otherwise, the whole play would have been about me. Hmmmm, why the fuck not! Not the Laramie Project, The Jonas Project. Anyhow, when I think about this issue and also ponder how my partner of ten years and I can be in the same place at the same time and end up with different stories, I can understand why there are misunderstandings and fights and wars. Sometimes we see what we want to see and not what is really there and that is what the reporters did with my words. Perhaps they meant no ill will. I really wonder if they just had their own way of understanding the Shepard Murder and then rearranged my words to fit their own story.

And yes, we do need to be honest when the world or some of it is on our side. There is a straight woman in Laramie, Beth Loffreda, who is working tirelessly to get the University of Wyoming to have partner benefits. She really wants the gay community to have that and she is amazing. She is working harder on the issue than any queer person in Laramie. I applaud her and there are some other non queer gems out here that are fighting for us in the same way. Anyway, just for the record--I do hate apples, all of them, yellow, red, rotten, and fresh.

CONRAD:
ALL APPLES!? What about their worms? Do you hate their worms? But we have relatives who live on an apple orchard! HAHAHA!

How did you feel about actor John McAdams's portrayal of you in the film version of The Laramie Project? Did he meet with you at all? And what about Steve Buscemi's portrayal of Doc O'Conner, did Buscemi get that down? Do you know the young woman Christina Ricci played? Or the Janeane Garofalo character? Or any of the other people played by actors that you may know? I'm trying to get a gauge about how serious the actors were, outside of writer/director Moises Kaufman's take on the story.

SLONACKER:
Okay, Cuzzin, Hock Dich Hie as our Pennsylvania Dutch Nana used to say which translates basically as Sit yourself there, or if you understood her tone of voice and body language, it meant: sit your ass there and keep it there until I tell you you can move it! Ya! No, I don't hate the worms in the apples. John McAdam's portrayal of me was really quite good but maybe not queer enough. He spent a day with me once to watch me and my moves and at one point I asked him: "Are you sure you are up to this?" He laughed. Steve Buscemi's rendition of Doc was a bit too nice plus he didn't have the big six inch belly hanging over the front like Doc…Okay, me thinks now I am in trouble. Dunno who Christina Ricci's character is or Janeane Garofalo's. I thought about googling them but screw it. I probably should know who they are and might recognize them if I saw their faces but I am not big on pop culture. Yeah, I have been threatened several times that my Gay card was going to be taken away especially when I told a room full of queers once that I really don't care for musicals. God, did they ever shriek. I think all the actors made an effort to study their characters and then play them accordingly but you know, here is what I think:

I get emails now and again from folks who are going to play me in the Laramie Project and they want to know things about me so they can play me better. I tell them that they are the artist and it doesn't matter because no one in Kokomo, Indiana knows me. Once someone emailed me and asked all those questions and one question was: On a scale of one to ten with one being femme and ten being butch, what number are you? I told him I was a five. HA. Seriously, I then told him to play me femme or butch, it didn't matter.

CONRAD:
You're a five Jonas? Well some days I'm a two, some days an eight!

The bartender was the key eyewitness at the trial, and he made crystal clear that Matthew Shepard sat at the bar by himself, not approaching others or engaging others for any reason. According to the bartender Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were playing pool in the back of the bar and THEY approached Shepard and talked to him as he sat in his seat, then later left with him. Despite these FACTS from the bartender who would know more than anyone, some people in Laramie when interviewed had their minds made up that Shepard somehow DESERVED the torture and murder. One man said he had "heard" that he came onto McKinney and Henderson, and added, "Well HELL you don't come onto regular people!" I LOVE the "regular people" part by the way. A woman said that McKinney and Henderson wanted to teach him a lesson about coming onto straight people. Another woman said the media was acting "like it was ten murders instead of one!" The sheriff said he lost some friends when trying to point out the FACTS of the case to them. What was your experience talking with others in town, or things you overheard others saying?

SLONACKER:
ARG. A fucking RG. This question is volatile for me at this point in time. With the tenth year anniversary of the Shepard murder just passing us by, the local paper called The Boomerang has been full of the most ignorant ass shit possible. Now, enlightened people have also countered most of the BS but still it is aggravating. Bill and I just got a subscription to the damn paper and wonder if it was a mistake because we live in our nice cool neighborhood here and work in our cool department at the University and forget that there are ignorant asses all over the place. We just never meet them I guess. So, the worst thing was that the owner of the paper, a born again X-ian, wrote an editorial a week ago and he called the Shepard incident a murder gone bad and called it galling that people have called it a homophobic attack and said that many readers wondered why the anniversary was newsworthy?!?!? and some people asked to have their papers held until it was over!!! I wrote a response but they refused to print it so if you don't mind I am going to attach it on to here so that some people can read it. My blood is boiling as I think about this and I think my hair is going to start on fire soon.

Yes, people say that Shepard deserved it for coming on to them and then others say it wasn't a homophobic attack. Straight women friends of mine here say that if women get to beat the shit out of men every time they came on to them when they don't want it, well, a lot of men would get the shit kicked out of them! One woman wrote that to the newspaper ten years ago when this all happened. Other people write to the paper wondering why Daphne Salk, a woman who got killed here a year or so before Shepard, didn't get the same kind of media coverage. I contend that if the situations were reversed and Daphne got attention and Shepard didn't, they would NOT fucking lament that fact.

Folks who think it was a robbery gone bad, or that Shepard deserved it are just deceiving themselves and that is easy to do! I had a conversation with a Mormon recently and as we all know their church is working to undo the California Marriage thing. This man, who I like a lot, told me that they (Mormons) were against Gay Marriage because the government was going to force them to do things they didn’t believe it. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not a big fan of the gay marriage thing but I said: "HUH? Force who to do what? They are just going to allow gays who want to marry, to marry and it won't be at your church. We will go do it where we can and they won't force Mormon churches to marry gay people and no one is going to force you to marry a man! If you don't believe in Gay Marriage, don't marry someone of the same sex." I really think he got it, it is that whole deception thing. The right wing X-ians do it when they say we want special rights. Special Rights? To do what? Not pay taxes? Legally drive over the speed limit? Not wear clothing in public? Hmmmm.

Okay, here is the letter I sent to the editor of our paper:

It was depressing to read Sunday's editorial, Laramie is a Community, Not a Project, which said that many subscribers didn't understand why the anniversary of Matthew Shepard's murder qualified as news and that some even requested their newspaper delivery be stopped until that reporting was over. The editorial also said: "that police reports certainly seem to indicate that this was a robbery that went very bad." and "it was galling because the crime was portrayed as a homophobic attack."

Is it customary when robbing someone to drive the victim down a dirt road, tie him to a fence, brutally beat him and leave him to slowly die? Surely there was a powerful emotion like hatred behind the beating of Matthew Shepard. For God's sake, they broke his skull. A popular story is that drugs made McKinney and Henderson do it. Even if drugs were involved, drugs don't make you hate; they simply magnify what already exists. I remember reading that both the perpetrators said homophobic things when they were interrogated and it is public record that McKinney tried to use Gay Panic Defense in his trial.

Many citizens of Laramie want to move on but denial isn't the best way to accomplish that. Understanding, love, honesty, and bravery might be better paths to that end and numerous people in Laramie have responded that way. There is no disgrace for Laramie in acknowledging that part or all of the motivation was homophobia. NO, the crime certainly does not define Laramie. How we react to the crime, how we talk about it, and if we do or don't do anything to prevent this from happening again does define Laramie. If someone paints a swastika on the home of a Jewish family, is it graffiti that went bad or hatred? If someone burns a cross on the lawn of an African American while robbing them, is it a robbery that went very bad or a hate crime? When a gay man is tied to a fence and viciously beaten, is it just a robbery that went very bad or perhaps something more?

CONRAD:
Jonas, that letter is marvelous, and I'm glad it gets to see the light here, even if the newspaper refused to publish it. It's sad news that suppresses the news!

One of the things in McKinney's taped confession with the sheriff that is most common with gay bashing is the language used when talking about their victims. When the sheriff asked him what Shepard looked like he answered, "Like a queer," "Yeah, like a fag." When the sheriff asks how he met Shepard, McKinney asks, "The fag?" Father Roger Schmit from Laramie -- who appears to be an extraordinary human being whose foremost concern seems to be helping us all attain compassion -- was very interested in making part of the sentencing of McKinney and Henderson be that they tell us their stories. That they tell us WHAT drove them to do what they did. Asking the murderers to be our teachers to show us what and how our culture we all perpetuate encourages such hatred. SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT IDEA!

One of the things you and I know firsthand Jonas from growing up in an isolated rural culture is that people are HELL-BENT on judging and hating groups of people they don't even know. There is so much FICTION created from unnecessary and unprovoked fears surrounding the distant Other. Building on Father Schmit's call for learning what drives us, how marvelous would it be to have young elementary school children learning compassion by having classes which explore and explain homosexuality, as well as different racial and religious groups. Where we grew up and went to school THE MOST homophobic teacher taught sex-ed. He was so blatantly homophobic, and encouraged laughter when talking about how sick he thought a man would have to be to want something shoved up his ass. He empowered the ridicule and physical abuse my boyfriend and I endured in school, and made us feel like complete ZEROES! The sex-ed class literally taught hatred.

Language can easily set the mechanisms of fear or compassion of young minds in motion when coming from teachers and other authority figures. But wanting compassion taught to children ultimately flies in the face of our very nation's governmental treatment of its citizens and military solutions in dealing with other nations. But we have to start somewhere.

In teaching compassion we would also need to teach the history of racism, homophobia, genocide. For instance, in battling the use of dehumanizing language of homophobia, let's LOOK to the origin of "faggot." Kids need to know and DESERVE to know that when they use that word they're using a word whose origins are from the Inquisition. Homosexuals were burned alive, their flesh synonymous with and no better than the very sticks -- or faggots, as faggots means sticks or kindling -- that burned them to death. We're so used to the word faggot meaning a homosexual, but have no idea of the countless tortuous deaths that created it. It's important to define the origins of common hateful slang. Learning such things helps us in many ways to grow toward tolerance and compassion.

SLONACKER:
Father Schmit was an amazing man. I remember thinking that if I was forced to be a Catholic, I would want him as my priest but thank god that never happened. YES, YES, YES, the perpetrators should have been able to tell their stories so we could learn from it but as far as I remember Matthew Shepard's parents didn't want them to be able to do so and a few of us wonder if there wasn't something that had to be hidden like maybe McKinney and Shepard did know each other but so what if they did? There was a woman who wrote a story for Harpers and her name was Joanne Wypijevski. I am positive I spelled her name wrong. In any event, she wrote an amazing article ten years ago shortly after the murder and it was the most right on article of all of the ones I read. She basically said that McKinney and Henderson did what they did because they were taught to be men in a traditional American way that meant they hated the feminine. Nothing worse than a man being feminine, you know! Much better that he be tough and kick ass and kill people especially effeminate men.

I love your whole idea above about compassion and how to learn it and that means dealing with racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, genocide, all of that. Any time we create a Them and Us situation, there are going to be problems. And I know that I also do this when I talk about the religious right and really the better way to get to them is to get to know them and talk to them and so forth. I have a friend here on campus who works in an office with a right wing born again and she takes her to task for hurtful things she says. Recently she introduced her born again office mate to me and she liked me cause sometimes I'm funny and shit, you know. When this woman said homophobic things later on, my friend told her I was gay and she looked puzzled and stopped saying those kinds of things because homosexuality finally had a face...

CONRAD:
Homosexuality has a face indeed, thanks so much cousin Jonas with the homosexual face. This has been a valuable conversation for me, and I hope so too for others.

posted by poet CAConrad @ 11:15 PM 0 comments

Book Review by CAConrad

Shamanism has the distinction in many ancient cultures as being the practice of Great Seers and healers. Shaman were those men and women who survived near death experiences or other tragic circumstances and came back with stories and visions from the abyss which in turn served the tribe. Surviving shifts the axis, remaps perspective, and awakens the senses as though they had never really been awake.

After hurricane Katrina devastated the much loved and celebrated city of New Orleans the city itself seemed near death before our eyes, and her citizens found themselves abused and neglected by their American superpower federal government, which shocked the world to see people left to suffer and die of exposure, and see African Americans seeking refuge in nearby towns held at gunpoint by white police officers to prevent them from leaving the connecting bridges to safety. Our modern day American race and class war was silent no more to those who had willed themselves into denial. Even president Bush's own rich white mother made clear her contempt and complete lack of empathy for the suffering thousands who lost family, friends, homes and communities. No demon's mask remained.

But like all Shaman, the city and many of her survivors took the brutal obstacles back to life, and some of that Olympic spiritual conquest is sung at perfect pitch in Ready-to-Eat Individual by poets Frank Sherlock and Brett Evans. A native of New Orleans, Evans stayed behind during the storm to protect his dogs and help friends. PhillySound poet Frank Sherlock went down to work with the activist collective Common Ground in the recovery work. Good friends for many years, Sherlock and Evans wrote this disturbing and BRILLIANT book during what they refer to as 1AK: Year One After Katrina. The book's title is based on the laminated food pouches produced by the Defense Department with the same name. Ready-to-Eat Individuals were originally designed by the Space Program for astronauts, but were dropped on New Orleans after the storm and resulting flood.

         The post-apocalyptic mufaletta
         resembling a comeback city
         is seasoned w/ graffiti
         on abandoned refrigerators

These opening lines set the tone the title promises. 2008 New Orleans travel guide books make no mention of hurricane Katrina, nor the struggle the citizens of New Orleans continue to face. The best martinis and what kind of furniture to expect in your deluxe suite will be mentioned, but in order to discover what landmarks were destroyed by the storm you need to compare your 2008 guide with a 2005 edition and figure it out for yourself. To read the truth of pain and resurrection you will need to bring Ready-to-Eat Individual with you on the plane.

         & he said it best when he said
         I've learned there is Life
           even in the darkest of dark
           places I dance
          to escape from pacing

And later on the same page:

         at any moment it feels like this space
         where "to relax" we continue the Year of Magical
         Drinking
           could play host
             to a hold up...."

This makes reference to Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, her own memoir of inconsolable grief and madness, and learning to somehow rise and LIVE! Sherlock and Evans press against us an honesty which leaves its grill marks and shadows, but never an emptiness, and not the easy retreat from what they see.

         I appreciate the instructor
         deeply but I've already mastered
         the lessons of misunderstanding

         The city is too dirty
         for you     You're right
         you might be too clean

         for me though my doubts
         are arousing     I want you dirty
         enough to be comfortable

         & relax     How did I get
         so at-home in
         the post-apocalypse?

In an age where we find ourselves at the mercy of all the neglect our elected governing bodies have been denying and spinning, and in an age where too many poets lack the loyalty to their own convictions and sidestep the courage it takes to take a stand with such passive statements as, "Oh, I don't like overt political content in my poems," THIS BOOK by THESE TWO POETS returns poetry to the center of poetry's sharp edges to CARE about this world, and CARE to risk taking a stand!

         A trinity of medals conduct
                 this dull hum of energy     relics of a faith
                    you almost lost     Basta! then Basta!
                    Let us be this new city &
                    liberate ourselves     We can swear
                    ourselves into a parallel government
                    while the sun is coming up

                 I just want to act as your companion
              species since rulers are for losers
         This moment in the history of history

If Shamanism is a leadership procured through discovering the magic that bends the light of this world and blends its infinite chemical motors, then poets are Shamans, at least poets worth the salt in their veins. The storm is burning in effigy in these pages, and that really happened, and so did the storm despite editors and publishers of travel guide books. Forget the corporate publishing bullshit and give trust to Bill Lavender, publisher of Lavender Ink, and his pair of living Virgils -- Sherlock and Evans -- who lead us to our own ample declarations for the stark smells of love and survival.

-------------
CAConrad is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull, 2006), The Book of Frank (Chax, 2008), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX, 2008), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School, 2008). He can be found at CAConrad.blogspot.com

posted by poet CAConrad @ 7:32 PM 0 comments

a conversation with DODIE BELLAMY on writing through the object, the body, Kathy Acker, and more

This e-mail conversation with Dodie Bellamy, CAConrad, Christina Strong, and Erica Kaufman took place in June, 2007

CAConrad:
Dodie what can you tell us about writing through objects? Your essay "Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff" is digging through my every cell right now, having just given it another read. Not since Maryse Holder's Give Sorrow Words (later given life on the screen by Jackie Burroughs in A Winter Tan) have I found a writer as open to explore the consciousness of THINGS pressed as vulnerable against observant, awakened flesh. Where you write of Acker's Gaultier dress sitting on your dresser while you masturbate nearby creates a watermark for this, freeing you, getting you into your own juices and breath, your pussy and hands your ship and rudder. What did the power of this act ultimately make for you? Were you internalizing information along the way? It's a finger on the way to epiphany, "writhing and grunting" a larger part of yourself loose in order to build a newer frame. At the point of orgasm you hear the dress -- contact finally made, and something's made more whole along the way. I feel like the School of Dodie Bellamy is all over this essay while discussing the School of Kathy Acker, taking our human need for knowledge and making flesh and mind work together. When did you first know Acker's clothes were going to push you into writing this?

DODIE BELLAMY:
Your question is so big and so awesome I feel humbled before it. Objects are, indeed, important to my writing. I love to sit down with an object and write a sort of meditation on it. There's an eroticism to that—the object as a fetish—but more in the sense of its magical hold rather than some simplistic Masters and Johnson drivel. I do believe that "things" have energy. Writing is so abstract—writing on an object is a way to hold onto the world, to insert the world into the mental zooming about.

What you got out of the Kathy dress/sex sequence is interesting to me. The wording of the dress/sex sequence is "I have sex," and I was thinking about sex with Kevin, not the I am woman/I am strong masturbation interpretation—but I like it. In this segment of "Digging Through Kathy Acker's Stuff," I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too. I keep trying to stage these interactions with the dress that would be fun to write about—such as having sex while the dress sits on my dresser—but nothing happens—the dress refuses to open up its meaning for me. By putting in the failed stagings, I still get to write about them. The point of that section emerges when I go to hear Alicia Cohen's talk on orphic poetry:

Then I find my notes from Alicia Cohen's talk on orphic poetry at Small Press Traffic. My journal is dated March 24, in green ink. Beneath that is written:

Levinas—the philosopher never attempts to reveal/penetrate/grasp otherness. Then more fragments about how orphic poetry implies an openness to listening, to what speaks through you. The point is to greet rather than capture and contain the self.

It's at that point I stop trying to force a narrative onto the object/dress and to allow myself to be open to what the dress is trying to tell me. There's a big difference to being open to something/someone and claiming to "understand" them. Understanding is a colonizing position, always reeking of ownership. I see the whole Acker piece as me trying to have sex with the dress, but not in a limited orgasm-goal-oriented way. It's a more pervasive realm of arousal, allowing myself to be possessed by the object, by its emptiness and its embodiment. I wasn't planning to write about the dress—I had plenty of other projects that were higher priority—but the dress wouldn't let me alone, so I went for it, and since it was summer break, I did little else for a month but write this piece. It was glorious.

I've been going through a similar humbling process with my own body. I'm not seriously ill, as far as I know, but my body has gone haywire. I've been obsessing and spending tons of money and doing all sorts of interventions, but nothing would solve the problem. This semester's been a disaster in that I was losing it and getting behind in everything, but finally I became broken to the point where I had no choice but to begin accepting my body on its own terms. Getting to that acceptance has been frustrating and painful, but it's opened up amazing possibilities. I've read the online excerpts from Kathy's last journal over and over again: http://vv.arts.ucla.edu/terminals/acker/acker.html. That last year of her life, she was kicking and screaming, her body was pulling her under, but she opened up to ecstasy. A while ago I went to the de Young museum here in San Francisco to hear an artist's talk by my friend Elliot Anderson, and he began by quoting Edmund Burke on the sublime: "The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror." Again, the tearing away of the ego, the link to horror. Writing for me is a portal to otherness. It's all consuming. I wish I were one of these people who could say, here I'm blocking out 2 hours to write and then I'm returning to the necessities of daily life. I can't do that, and figuring how to stay with that otherness in my overbooked schedule is driving me crazy.

A couple of weeks ago I was again staying in Los Angeles with Matias Viegener, Kathy's executor, and I got really sick—was running to the bathroom for hours—and Matias was into taking care of me, which I couldn't handle—I was all, leave me alone, let me crawl into a corner and die. But, ultimately I did let him take care of me, and he was so caring, so tender. I couldn't help but think back to his caring for Kathy when she was dying—and that resonance, when he'd pat my back, for instance, was so intense, eerie even. Back to the dress: my inability to understand, possess the dress comes to mirror my inability to posses Acker and ultimately death itself. It's a return to incomprehensibility. The irrational. From Acker's novel My Mother Demonology: "In my first school I had been taught that through rationality humans can know and control otherness, our histories and environments." Of course, Acker's whole writing project was against this stance, creating uncontrollable texts that at every turn subvert impositions of rationality. Acker doesn't allow us to rest in the safe ladylike distance favored in of much experimental women's writing. She submerges us in the shit of the primal; she taints us.

Christina Strong:
What a great response and you made me think more about "the body" and specifically your body, which you write about in Academonia, your bulimia, for example, and your essay "Body Language" and how do you juxtapose the theory behind what we speak/say/write/think and our physical presence and how one incorporates the two. I thought of two things: Kathy Acker's tattoo, a now hip form of body modification, but at one point in history was relegated to sailors and the "underbelly" of society. It wasn't ladylike at all. The second thing I thought of was your conversation with Kevin and Chris Stroffolino after seeing the movie Fahrenheit 9/11. I too have been in many conversations after watching movies like that, or been to many readings after where we have avoided "the thing" and talked obliquely about the subject by using references that are abstracted from the subject. Our current culture subscribes to this. Many of us are on the computer so often we think of ourselves as machines. And emotions, or even having a spark of an emotion is a shame in itself. And yet, in spite of all this dishonesty and outright lying and corruption in our culture, I still prefer, as you mentioned about Acker's writing, "uncontrollable texts" or the "horror" and is writing poetry really a way to make sense of it all. I can see where one would say that but I'm more interested in "failed stagings". Could you say more about this?

DODIE BELLAMY:
I'm so uncool, I don't have any tattoos, but I was planning to get one on my 30th birthday—a heart on my hip. Back then tattoos were still déclassé and I'd have had to go to North Beach to a place sailors and bikers went to. Unfortunately by the time my 30th birthday came round, I was feeling down and isolated, and the tattoo was forgotten about. I wish I'd gotten it, it would be like a note from my younger self—an uncontestable sign that she did in fact exist. A student recently told me how when she was 10 she wrote a letter to herself when she was 25, and she kept the letter and waited until she was 25 to open and read it. I thought this was beautiful, but at the same time I was a bit frightened by her—like what kind of person has that kind of self control? Acker talked about her tattoos as a form of writing—inscribing the body. I keep trying to think of something to say about that—but nothing comes to mind. It was Kathy's thing. Though she and I are polar opposites in so many ways, her pursuit of the body in her writing continues to be an inspiration to me. Because her texts are so open, my understanding and appreciation of them keeps shifting and growing. This is true for everything—but particularly for her—when I'm reading Acker's texts I'm also reading myself. Her texts create a portal for that self reading.

Your mention of the shame of emotion is so poignant. The disenfranchisement of emotion in intellectual circles leads back to the body. Emotion, like porn, operates on the body—those hormones squirting, pupils dilating, blood pressure raising, those changes in heart rhythm are very messy in a system that privileges abstraction. When I was a kid, writing's abstraction was what drew me to it—it was a way to escape my hatred of my body and the pain of my social dysfunction. I didn't want to be in my body. I wanted to be in fantasy land. I clung to the intellect as a state of rarified, disembodied arousal. James Joyce with his spectacles reading Greek, how thrilling, how not nerdy girl in Indiana. But these days I'm obsessed with my own embodiment. I've been getting Chi Nei Tsang treatments, which is a form of deep organ massage. During the treatment, while this woman is poking around in my abdomen, I go into a trance and all these images from my past, fragments of memories, many of which I've forgotten, flash before me rapid-fire. Emotions also well up, but they tend to not be connected to any particular content. And, like I said, all this woman is doing is pressing on my belly, sometimes only with one finger. For years I've heard all the New Age-isms about how we hold trauma in our bodies—but I never really believed it. A lot of the stuff that comes up for me is traumatic, but today I also remembered the red dotted swiss curtains in the kitchen of my apartment in 1980. I found them at a vintage clothing store and I liked their redness and their dots and their ruffles—that's it—nothing intense about those curtain, yet there they were—bubbling out of my body. I'm fascinated by this fusion of viscerality and memory. I don't know what I'll do with it in terms of writing, but it's got to have an impact.

I copied a quote into my journal the other day—from Donna Eden's Energy Medicine—a book I'm a bit embarrassed to admit I'm reading: "When you watch a log burning in a fireplace, you are seeing the congealed energy that is the log transformed into the roaring energy that is the flame." Perhaps this is a metaphor for the connection between embodiment and writing—lived experience/the body would be congealed energy and writing the roaring flame.

Failed stagings. Failure is certainly healthier than perfection. I still struggle with the belief that somehow my writing should be perfect—that belief is so inhibiting—not only does it take the play out of writing, it can stop me from writing anything at all. When I was a student, and a teacher would point out something I could change in a poem, I always saw it that I had done something wrong, made a mistake. Now I'm trying to focus on simply keeping it interesting, in engaging the reader, in riding the interplay between form and content. Messiness and flaws—in people as well as writing—can create openings for tenderness.

ERICA KAUFMAN:
I'm really enjoying your responses, Dodie. I too have been thinking a lot about the "body in words" and how emotion plays a role in this triangle as well. I admire your comment that, "Acker doesn't allow us to rest in the safe ladylike distance favored in much experimental women's writing." What is the "safe ladylike distance" and is that a place of disembodiment (because it is easy, because it is not challenging)? This also raises a question I think about all the time—how does one define or characterize a contemporary "feminist avante garde?" Is there even such a thing? In your piece "Delinquent" (from Pink Steam) you write, "Feminism failed because women are thieves. Never having owned anything, not even their selves, they filch texts…souls…dreams…space. The text has no power over its own violation, thus its name is WOMAN." I find this passage to be phenomenally empowering. I'd be curious to hear more about the idea of seeing text as WOMAN, as well as any comments you might have on the idea of physicality of a text.

DODIE BELLAMY:
Ladylike is a pejorative I sometimes sling around mostly because of my frustration with a surface primness in the predominantly hetero middle class white experimental women's scene I encountered in San Francisco in the 80s. I, the working class raunchy bull, sometimes horned my way into the china shop, sometimes the shopkeepers invited me in, but it was an uneasy fit all around. Kevin recently came home with Erica Jong's Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life, a how to write manual/memoir. "You have to read this," he demanded, "it is so fantastic and so demented." So I got about halfway through it before I hurled it on the floor. Erica basically says that if she writes something and it doesn't piss some people off, she hasn't done her job. I wish I had her gall. You have some of her spirit, Erica. Were you named after her? While it's always been important to me to make people (including myself) uncomfortable in my writing, when someone does act uncomfortable with it I get all wounded. That said, the safe ladylike distance is not necessarily easy and it can be challenging—and one could argue that it really isn't all that safe.

My "safe ladylike distance" jab—I didn't intend it to be about embodiment or its lack. There are few women (I wonder if there are any) whose writing doesn't somehow address their own bodies or embodiment in a broader sense. But I do think that younger women writing in the experimental—what a horrible word, "experimental," but I'm using it because there is no good word—when I was director of Small Press Traffic, I wrote grants and given the aesthetics of funding organizations, which tended to be towards literary social work, few places I wrote grants for would fund what SPT stands for, so how to kind of whitewash our programming without out and out lying—I came up with the term "innovative" writing. Innovative is wonderfully vague—"experimental" sounds downright scientific beside it—plus innovative sounds so American pick yourself up by the bootstraps, like Henry Ford was innovative. Anyway, from what I've seen, the younger generation(s) of experimental women writers have rebelled against the whole ladylike thing and are producing work that’s more in your face.

In April I participated in CalArts' Feminaissance Women's Writing Conference, held at LA's Museum of Contemporary Art in conjunction with "WACK!" the epochal exhibition of women's art from the 1970s. The presenters were a mixture of academics, poets, and a dash of fiction writers. The poets included Caroline Bergvall, Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, and Stephanie Young. What I saw there was really exciting—lots of sex, body, abjection—and a privileging of misbehaving as an aesthetic strategy. I felt that my writing project was accepted and valued, like there was a community out there that I made sense in. It was thrilling to experience radical female aesthetics outside of the queer/transgendered scene. The queer/trans scene has been vital to my survival as a writer, but it's had little overlap with the experimental writing scene. (That's why Tim Peterson's recent "Queering Language" issue of the on-line journal EOAGH was so exciting, such a breakthrough.) Feminaissance made me hopeful for the new wave of a feminist avant garde. Women certainly weren't shying away from using the word feminism, from coming out as pro-feminist. The feminist stance we saw emerging was one of inclusivity—that while addressing political concerns in writing is vital, it is not a requirement for feminist writing, that it's also valid for a woman to play around with language if that's what she's into. Proscriptiveness damned 70s feminism, maybe this time around we can do better, go further. Les Figues, the LA-based poetry press, is publishing a book of the conference proceedings that should be fabulous, and I urge my readers to look for it.

Feminaissance had a refreshingly egalitarian spirit. I didn't see much of that dismal posturing for dominance that can happen in groups, and at the end, the organizers arranged an old school session of consciousness raising, and it had a theme, the mother. We approached this session skeptically, with a post -ironic "whatever" stance. There were three tables set up in the main gallery of LACE, the alternative performance and art space in downtown LA. Eileen chaired one, Bhanu another, and the novelist Chris Kraus the third. Kevin and I sat at Eileen's table. Anyone could come, male or female, young or old, published or not, audience as well as speakers. We began by going around the table and stating our names as well as our mothers' names. The longer we talked—and we talked for hours—the more moving the experience was, and the more we escaped what I see as the trap of "she's this kind of writer," "she's that kind of writer." I found, for instance, that hearing about Caroline Bergvall's complex multi-lingual relationships with her parents, opened up the multi-lingual polyvocality of her writing, and what's more, gave it heart. We all walked away at the end of the day saying there should be a consciousness raising after every poetry event.

Now on to your question about the passage from "Delinquent." I was writing in a rather ecstatic, oracular voice, so I don't want to hammer it down too much. For one thing, I was analogizing the instability of a text's meaning—the Barthesian idea that the reader reinvents the text—with the instability of the female persona. Thus the text is WOMAN. I had in mind Acker's project of collaging together other texts/selves, but also my own inability to project any consistent persona. In the experimental poetry scene I've been seen as crass. Among the wild grrrls of the queer scene, I'm kind of staid and conservative. I walk into a faculty meeting, there's yet another projection. So what am I—a bull or a lady? Maybe I'm the whole fucking china shop. And then sometimes, thank god, it hits me that people aren't thinking of me at all.

CAConrad:
There's nothing safe about you. And recently I was thinking "WHAT WOULD DODIE SAY?" while watching a video tape of an old interview with Gloria Steinem. It's maybe ten (maybe more?) years old. But at one point she says "the one group who gets more radical with age is women." She then explains that after a certain age women are no longer considered important, meaning they can no longer produce children, are no longer attractive to men, and so on. She says it's a freedom. What do you have to say about this Dodie? What's your experience, and what are your thoughts and feelings about this? You took interest in my recent CALL TO ARMS for Baby Boomers to rise up and make aging SEXY without Botox and surgery, so I'm wondering what you might think about this statement from Steinem.

DODIE BELLAMY:
I had your question in the back of my mind when I went to see the WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution show at LA's MOCA. When I walked past Faith Wilding's 1972 "Waiting" video I stopped dead in my tracks. Wilding was dressed school-marmishly, her hair pulled back, and she was rocking back and forth, droning, "Waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly. Waiting for my flesh to sag." When you watch the video from the beginning, Wilding's critiquing passivity in all eras of a woman's life from birth on, but I walked in on the aging woman section, and I was reminded of your desire for images of aging that make aging sexy. It sounds good on the surface, but when one is confronted with a body that's breaking down, sexy can feel beside the point. Aging is scary, Conrad, there's no way around that. I get excited by women writers who stare that scariness in the face—Catherine Lord, for instance in The Summer of Her Baldness, a really smart, multi-layered examination of her confrontations with mortality and the psychological and physical disfigurements of chemo. And Eileen Myles in her as yet unpublished novel, The Inferno. Eileen recently read from it in San Francisco while I happened to be in LA teaching. But Kevin went, and on the phone he was raving about her blunt portrayal of her own aging. "Eileen said she was ruined!" Kevin said he wouldn't be able to approach the subject with such honesty. So I emailed Eileen and by the following afternoon I had a copy of what she read. The "ruined" it turns out is something Jane DeLynn once told her: "Let's face it, Eileen, we are ruined." Eileen then riffs magnificently on her own ruinedness:

But probably she [Jane] was just being contrary or ironic. Or wanted to tell me that I was ruined and she didn't think I could handle it alone. I was actually pretty hard working and nervous in my forties and still thought it was possible to be good, to get it right, to win.

Nope, I am destroyed. A shattered boat of a person. A broken window here, a lousy bell there. An old crappy dyke with half a brain leaking a book. A drippy excrescence. A schmear. [ . . . ] I wrote the first chapter of this book, fucking my inferno, and New York blew up. If I died tomorrow I could really care less. I'd be relieved. Look at me: My face is an old catcher's mitt. Blam. Thunk. Reactions and dents. A cold bent lighthouse. Brrr. A melancholy lava lamp. A woman. A man. A butch. A bitch. Rots of ruck. Watching the fragments float by for years. I'm done. . . H'wo. It's me.

Eileen, of course, is totally sexy and much of that sexiness comes from her in-your-face-ness, a presence so uncompromising, it's like a fist. It takes your breath away.

I'm not like that—and I think that what I've gained in all these years of surviving as a woman and a writer is to stop wishing I were Eileen or anybody else and to be more okay with who I am—"who I am," that sounds so juvenile and reductive, like Paris Hilton in her post-jail Larry King interview. In New York last winter, Bruce Benderson was advising me on how to pose for photos, and he said it's all about looking at the camera, really confronting it, as if to say, "This is me, take it or leave it." This body, this constellation of drives known as Dodie is as much a mystery to me as anybody else. For instance, as I walked through the WACK! exhibit I flashed back to how obsessed with feminism I was in my 20s. It was startling, almost uncanny, to be immersed in these influences—I knew were there, but I had forgotten their impact. Everywhere I looked I saw blatant politicized bodies and art objects referencing or made out of dismissed aspects of female lives. In Senda Nengudi's formalist sculpture, a series of previously worn pantyhose, panties are filled with sand and the legs are stretched taut, so they become cords that form an array of splayed Vs. In the WACK! online audio tour, Nengudi addresses her materials: "I'm consistently drawn to discarded and humble, utilitarian objects such as pantyhose that 'get no respect' because I believe in the transformative qualities in everything and everybody. I believe discarded humans, like discarded and everyday materials, have transformative abilities and potential that can amaze, that can show their poetry, that can stretch far beyond what seems possible." Even though I'd never seen Nengudi's work before, I felt a pang of recognition. I spun around and thought these images, these values made me, and I felt proud that I had stayed true to them in my work.
In the paper I presented at Feminaissance, I describe a photo of the feminist publishing collective I was a member of in the late 70s: "My eyes are round and vacant, I'm staring but don't seem to be seeing anything, so caught up in my own interiority I'm impenetrable. Such withdrawal is my knee-jerk response to group situations. One therapist told me I had 'reverse charisma.'" My social phobia and outsiderness have been huge areas of pain—to be able to publicly declare them (and to get a laugh from the audience) is big for me. To not be ashamed of what I've gone through in life. In some ways aging is easier for me than a lot of women. I've never been attractive to men in a general way, so I'm not losing much there—in fact since I no longer give a fuck, it feels like a gain. Anytime a woman can remove herself from the tyranny of the male gaze it's great. I love surprising subversions, like the controversy around Kelly Clarkson's new album, My December, the rage expressed over an American Idol winner refusing to listen to her record company and putting out a dark, depressing album. Kelly's darkness scares the shit out of some people—to have this piece of fluff embracing her monstrousness and wresting her soul back out of the bubblegum machine. I don't care if the album's good or bad, I can't wait to hear it. My friend, the young poet Julia Bloch, has been theorizing Kelly's subjectivity in an ongoing poem cycle for years, but I don't know what she has made of this latest turn of events. I suspect she finds it as delicious as I do, especially since her longing practically predicated it!

I like myself now in a way that was impossible when I was younger. We live in a culture that breeds self-loathing in women. Whenever I become close to a younger woman, no matter how beautiful or aggressive or highly functioning she seems, she'll moan about her self-loathing. It's sad—and I can say to her, "you're wonderful," up the wazoo, but I know it's a process she has to go through, and hopefully one day she'll claw her way out the other side. Now that I'm older, I feel less of a need to seek external validation in my personal life and in my writing. I've digested a lot of ideas and I've come to the place where I can just say what I think without having to footnote it with some authority figure.

I've always had problems with the public performance of "sexy." Partially because it was so far beyond my capabilities. Sex has always been a private, problematized thing for me—I suspect sex is problematized for most of us—and I've always felt it important, politically and personally, to allow sex to remain problematized in my writing. In this regard, Kevin's writing has been an inspiration, the way he mucks around with sexual expectations. When I taught his story "Spurt," which involves cutting sex gone bad, one student said that "Spurt" contained all the tropes of cutting porn—such as the person getting cut more than they ask for—but with none of the payoffs. When Kevin writes about sex, you can never complacently slip into the position of turned-on, he subverts that. Or if you find yourself turned on, you feel really uncomfortable about it. Discomfort is powerful.

I hate the mandate that writers, in their public persona, be sexy. Look at Stephen King's creepily groomed picture for his Entertainment Weekly column. Ugh! Writers should be allowed to embody their dysfunctional geekdom, to be frumpy with cokebottle glasses, to hide away in rooms and have sex with rats, be sloppy drunks, to grow faces ravaged as catcher's mitts.

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PHOTO CREDITS
1. Dodie Bellamy self-portrait
2. Dodie Bellamy and Kathy Acker's clothes, photo by Kevin Killian
3. Kathy Acker, photo on Zamir.net
4. Pink Steam jacket photo, published by Suspect Thoughts Press
5. Caroline Bergvall, photo on the Salt Press site
6. Eileen Myles, photo by Jack Pierson
7. Senda Nengudi's exhibit at LA's MOCA, photo from the MOCA site

posted by poet CAConrad @ 9:30 PM 0 comments

anti-queer Arab actions about to take place! PLEASE READ THIS RIGHT NOW! OUR ACTIONS NEEDED NOW!

Anyone involved with FACEBOOK please read this! The group "ArabLBTG" is on the verge of being SHUT DOWN because the Saudi, Egyptian, Kuwaiti and Emirati governments are insisting that FACEBOOK not allow any queer FACEBOOK groups which mention, or have anything to do with citizens of their countries.

Anyone who is a member of FACEBOOK and would like me to send the link to vote against, and tell FACEBOOK to back down, please write to me VERY SOON! Timing is everything, as this is literally on the verge of happening. Our swift, collective actions against this are needed! Contact me at CAConrad13@aol.com NOW, BELOW are some of the discussions and info from the petition page:

(THIS IS THE DISCUSSION I AM REFERRING TO)
Violating terms of conduct
Between You and Adminstrator Josh
Adminstrator Josh

10:15am April 24th
Report MessageDear Subscriber,

You have violated the terms of conduct you agreed upon when you signed up with Facebook.com. Your violations fall in the following criteria:

1. Advertising\spam, you have posted in the group advertisements concerning a website. You do have the right to refer to websites but not advertise them.

2. Creating a global group that is not allowed in some regions. Your group "Arab LBTGAY(Lesbian,bisexual,transexual and gay)" has put facebook in trouble as we received an official complaint from the Saudi government, the Egyptian government and other Arab governments that do not want to be mentioned.

Your Group must be shut down or a new Group with a specified network other than the two mentioned may be created. We are very sorry as we support any group but the countries mentioned are threatening to block our server from their side, therefore please comply.

Thank you for understanding
The Facebook Team

4:15pm April 25th
hey i have a question. i understand it says it must be shut down but is it possible to make it a"closed group" or i have to make it a secret?

Adminstrator Josh

5:25pm April 25th
Report MessageWell, If you turn it into a closed group you must be more than sure that no Saudis or Egyptians join the group. This is very hard, but if you chose to do this we do not mind.

In case of chosing to close the group you will have to kick any Saudi, Egyptian, Kuwaiti or even Emirati that happens to join or we pick out for you. Is that fair enough?

The Facebook Team
-------------

(AND THIS IS FROM THE PETITION PAGE)
The official Petition to prevent Arab LBTG from being shut down.

Dear Facebook users:

We represent the group "ArabLBTG". We are posting this as a plea for your support in an act of resistance against Facebook's request of shutting down the group because they have received several complaints from particular Arab governments. If we do not shut down the group, according to Facebook, we have to make it a closed group that excludes specific Arab citizens, such as Saudi and Egyptian. This is not conducive to a queer-positive Facebook environment, but an exclusivist, discriminatory, racist environment that threatens our right to free speech.

We would like to encourage everyone to contact Facebook and reject their oppressive, homophobic request towards a specific minority of the queer community.

Thank you for all your support
In hopes of victory,

ArabLBTG Admin

posted by poet CAConrad @ 3:49 PM 0 comments

a conversation with ALICE NOTLEY on trance, tarot and poetry

CAConrad:
Back when Mysteries of Small Houses first came out you had briefly mentioned going into trance to create those poems. When you read in Philadelphia recently from Grave of Light I had asked you about this, and you remarked about going into trance for all your poems. Was it different with Mysteries of Small Houses? I mean, did you trance through time to each of those homes of your past in order to write? In that book you are writing poems about (and from) each location of your past, and literally writing them in the style and form you had been writing at each particular time. It's an extraordinary feat! What can you share with us about trance states to create poems?

Alice Notley:
In general I think poets write from a trance state. But I did something elaborate while working on Mysteries of Small Houses, though I didn't know at first that I was using trance. I was trying to go back into my past to see what I was like, what events and settings -- houses -- were like, at particular past times. I noticed that I was experiencing mild physical changes when I did this: my legs would tingle for example, and I just felt different. Doug suggested I was inadvertantly practicing self-hypnotism, so I got a book or two on the subject and became a little more systematic about 'going into a trance.'

To enter the writing of a particular poem in Mysteries, I first had to enter one particular house while in trance. This was the alley house, the house I lived in in Needles when I was four. I would go into a trance, walk -- in my mind -- up the few front stairs of that house and enter it. When I was in that house, I could go from there to any other time or house in my past that I wanted. But the key to entering into other times was that time, that house, because it represented my essential self. The part about using past styles wasn't as exact as you suggest. I wanted to resurrect past styles, but the style of a poem isn't exactly the style I was using in the year or years the poem's about. Sometimes it is but not always. But it is always a past style or form. The usage is generalized, and spiffed up. I'm better at those styles than I used to be.

As I said, I think poets tend always to write in a trance. When writing the poems in Mysteries, I deliberately went into a trance first, the process was ritualized, and I was more conscious of being in or using that state. The state was more heightened. The air turns particular colors sometimes, and one feels deeply blissful, or there's a sense of some grace as a substance -- a material entity -- pervading the body. I've deliberately gone after trance states while writing other books as well, including books written at the computer. Yes you can go into a trance while hovering over the keyboard. The action of the fingers is quite inductive. I suppose this kind of trance would be called mild. Who knows? I was always in a trance while writing Reason and Other Women, which remains unpublished. It was written entirely at the computer and its rhythms and syntactical cuts and slides are, as they say, hypnotic. More recently I haven't sought out a trance state in order to write, but it's interiorized in me: I don't really have to do anything to get there.

Conrad:
"I don't really have to do anything to get there" echoes your first statement, "In general I think poets write from a trance state." Except part of what you go to, or what you've interiorized, is learned, sought, on top of the gravitational, shared experience of writing from trance in general. Do the tools of learning to induce trance seem like something creative writing teachers should think about taking into the class? This is something I've thought about recently, never having been to class, nor ever having taught one, but now wanting to teach one. One of my ideas is to sit on the floor of the subway with others, using the crack and shaking of the cars moving, then stopping, then moving, then stopping, to induce a collective state for collaborating a poem. How do you feel though about trance in the class? Is it something to be talked about in terms of acknowledging trance as a shared state, or further as something to be sought out for entering specific time frames and other dimensional landscapes? It feels so uncharted, these possibilities.

Notley:
I've taught trance in workshops. It is a bit of a mine field. I gave as an exercise a sort of self-hypnosis, going-back-to-age-four-type thing, somewhere and at least one person in that class didn't want to do it because he or she didn't want to cope with what had happened at age four. For me it's an ideal age, for others it isn't. Then, I learned from my stepdaughter Kate Oliver, who was studying hypnotherapy professionally, an exercise for going into the future, by flying above and along a river (in trance of course) and then stopping somewhere to see what's going to happen there. That is, the river is a time line. I added this as a possible way to participate in the going-back exercise -- one could go back or go ahead. An older woman in one workshop did the going ahead one, which shook her up a lot, though her poem was mysterious, as poems are, and I wasn't sure why she was shaken: she didn't want to say, it was personal. In the same class a woman went into a trance and saw that something was happening to her car -- she saw outside the room and when she went out during the break, her alarm had gone off and someone had broken into it. After this class a woman came up to me and cautioned me, as well, against doing this sort of thing without preparing people better for coming out of the trance . . . So. I'm not sure if one should teach it the way I did. But I think poetry is written in a transpersonified state, and this fact could be talked about more. When I teach, usually I discuss a topic and lead the group gradually to write, and at the point when I say now let's write, something clicks inside everyone and they go to this other place. I can see it on their faces. Then they just start writing.

Conrad:
This is exciting information! Trance in the class! And you somewhat cover something else I wanted to get to about trance. Earlier when talking about the use of trance for creating Mysteries of Small Houses you mentioned the house in Needles you lived in when you were four. You said in trance you walked up the few front stairs to the house, and entered it. And, "When I was in that house, I could go from there to any other time or house in my past that I wanted." What was special about that house? Why was this the portal house? Or is it because of the age you were when you lived there that makes this the portal?

Notley:
I think, I hope, I make this clear in the book itself. I felt -- when I was working on Mysteries, not when I was four -- that I was most whole and unspoiled when I was four years old and living in that house. When I think back to that time, the light is perfect outside and I'm fearless walking about the neighborhood, I don't have negative feelings. The house was temporary for our family -- it was rickety and had just a few rooms and opened on an alley behind the Desert Inn Motel. We didn't have air conditioning, it didn't quite exist yet -- so the house could get quite hot: Needles attains 120 degrees in the shade, and higher, in the summer. I don't remember cold. It was as if the house was open to the outside, because it was fragile, but also because you didn't need much against the climate. It was like light clothes.

So, being this age when I'm not "bent" yet by socialization (see first poem in book), I can enter the other houses and ages and observe them dispassionately. This is my basic self observing what has happened. I discussed the process a lot with Doug and he didn't totally like what I was saying, because it left out sexuality and the frisson of evil, and maybe, some evolution into the good or even the better. I thought my premise held though. I wasn't interested in the good, or sexuality, at this point, I was interested in the true.

Conrad:
Your book The Descent of Alette puts the reader into a trance. As anyone who has read it knows, those quotation marks break us out of any routine reading, and gets us chopping the language into breaths which are always unexpected and keeping ahold of the trance. Even when you get into the groove of the quotation marks breaking up the language, until the end it's still unexpected, a new world of perspective. Was it your intention to induce trance with this book? And also, as a reader I experienced a sense of loss at the end of the book, not wanting the state to end, meaning both the trance state as well as the LIFE of the poem. And in Mysteries of Small Houses when you get to the house where you wrote The Descent of Alette, you mention a sadness of that ending. Can you also tell us a little about that?

Notley:
When I wrote The Descent of Alette, I gave no thought to trance writing as such. The subject didn't really come up in that defined way until a few years later. I hadn't even thought of the word; I was concentrated on the word 'epic.' But I drew on dream content and controlled visualization -- though in the latter I also tried to be automatic to a certain extent. Dreams and dream-visions are usually refined in poems -- all the rough, really embarrassing content of dreams (not the sexual so much as the bizarre) is polished away in favor of elegance and known symbolism. I wanted to let some of the rougher stuff in, because I thought I would find out something from it. Writing The Descent of Alette was all discovery for me, and the actual composition of it lasted about two years. So this was a long process and hard to say goodbye to. I knew -- pardon me for saying this -- that I had written a great poem, and that I would miss working on it. But I still have the poem and I still have the writing of it going on inside me, because this is how time and consciousness are magical. When I get to read from the poem aloud to an audience, I get it all back, I get back everything the writing of the poem gave me. It's not exactly the same as when I wrote the poem, but that richness is there plus everything the poem accumulates over time. I get to keep going back to it, somewhat in the same way I get to go back to my four-year-old self when I enter the alley house.

Conrad:
I first read The Descent of Alette from a copy of The Scarlet Cabinet I bought at St. Mark's Bookshop. I couldn't figure out what on earth this was, this book, as it was a compilation of books by both you and Douglas Oliver. It was very new for me, the idea of The Scarlet Cabinet. But to keep pace with "how time and consciousness are magical," I've always wondered about Robert Desnos in this book, and how at one point he becomes a Virgil-like character, walking you (us) through the pages. Can you tell us about your use of Desnos? And can you also tell us about The Scarlet Cabinet?

Notley:
You are confusing two books. One is The Scarlet Cabinet, a compilation of books by myself and Douglas Oliver published by ourselves. The other is my poem Désamère, which was published by O Books in the same volume with Close to me & Closer . . . (The Language of Heaven).

The Scarlet Cabinet was the 6th issue of Doug's and my magazine Scarlet, but it is a very lengthy compendium of books and is based on the concept of the medieval book, which might contain, say, an herbal, a long poem, a history, and more all in the same volume. Before the printing press, books, being hard to come by, might be collections of lots of books -- different kinds of books -- all together. The Scarlet Cabinet contains everything we couldn't get published at the time, circa 1992. So that's Alette, Doug's long poem Penniless Politics, a novel by him, two other sequences of poems by me, a sutra by him. It was an experiment in publishing.

Désamère is the first poem I wrote after moving to France, 1992-93. I was trying to enter France in my imagination, and composed this long narrative poem which has three parts. It essentially takes place in a North American desert after a global warming catastrophe -- the most salient fact about it and something no one has ever commented on. There are three characters in the first part, a woman named Amère who changes her name to Désamère, her dead brother an ex-soldier, and Robert Desnos the French poet. Desnos, who famously would fall asleep and dream for the Surrealists, is the oracular voice of the poem, telling the history of the century between World War II and the poem's present, out of the knowledge he possesses being a dead person, a poet, and a victim of a concentration camp. The second part of the poem is in prose and is a temptation in the desert, by a devil, based on my old high school psychologist, of Désamère. The third part of the book is a group of Désamère's poems, written somewhat in the style of Desnos. I selected Desnos for my poem because I already knew something about him, because he was courageous, and because he had suffered.

It's quite interesting to have an oracular voice in a poem, someone who isn't you whom you ask things of. Such a voice will always answer, if you do it right, and will know more than "you" do. I did a lot of historical research for the first part of Désamère -- though it isn't all that long, but is quite condensed. I would read about Vietnam or Stalin, then sit down to the poem to see what Desnos had to say. The Desnos voice would well up from somewhere -- I suppose it was me -- but I never knew what it would say or think.

Conrad:
First, I'm sorry about confusing the books, I don't have The Scarlet Cabinet here with me, but was for some reason thinking Désamère -- with the Desnos voice -- was part of that collection of books. Is the owl also a voice you ask things of? You mentioned once at a reading that a dream of owls brought the owl as a character into The Descent of Alette. Did the owl stick from that point on, or have owls always been a totem kinship in your life? With the recent release of Alma, or the Dead Women, and the tattoo of an owl on your shoulder (Eileen Myles took you to the tattoo parlor, is that right?), I've been wondering if the owl is a source of magic for you, an axis from which to see clearer? I ask it like this because in ancient cultures animal totems were often taken on for clearer footing in the world, especially in times of crisis and other challenges.

Notley:
The owl symbol arose in connection with Alette as a pun. Actually it first appears in "White Phosphorus," in the last section. The word's a pun on my brother Al's name, and then on my name too. At the end of "White Phosphorus" I have a vision of my brother as an owl after his death -- but he himself had the pun inside him: he had a collection of kitschy owl wall plaques and things. Then after he died my mother took it up too and collected a lot of ceramic and glass owls. As my father's name was also Al (and others in the family) the pun, and totem, really spreads. So in The Descent of Alette I gave the animal identity finally to the father, who as the owl in the poem has become his ultimate self and is Alette's teacher, her guide into the possession of owl powers, her instructor in killing the tyrant from the psychological point of view of an owl -- a clean kill, a blow from nature. After The Descent of Alette, the owl image stuck and I just have it. Everyone gives me owls -- I have a small collection. I got the tatoo so I wouldn't have to think about it anymore, it's just carved into my back. A totem is a point of identification with another species -- it can also be a plant -- with its talents and powers. There's usually a myth involved. Owls tend to represent death and/or wisdom -- the owl is Athena's bird, and my tatoo is of Athena's owl from an ancient Greek drachma.

Conrad:
When I was in Albuquerque for a brief time studying healing herbs I met an old woman on the Acoma Pueblo named Night Eagle who invited me into her adobe. I asked her if Night Eagle meant owl, and she said yes, and that owl was essential for her both as a woman and Native American because of the need to fly in the dark of night for what she needed for her family and for herself. When I told her about the stain glass made by the black masons in colonial Philadelphia with an owl at the top of the symmetrically placed symbols she nodded, said she had heard of this, and said it was for the same reasons she chose owl. She said white men had the eagle and were using its symbol to strike out and take in the light of day while others needed to be more covert. Part of me often wondered if such an extension of owl was being used by you with Alette. In trying to keep clear of exegesis I thought I would ask about owl in a more general way. Athena's owl? There, I was also hoping it was Hecate's owl. Hecate gets a bad wrap, and her story has morphed into making her an old hag stirring trouble, when really she was a crone with superior strength, her owl companion her carrier of wisdom. Hecate's powers were nearly matched with Zeus' own. I'd like to ask you about another archetypal package of divination, that being tarot. When in Philadelphia recently you mentioned a story about being in someone's apartment (Ron Padgett's?) and Ted Berrigan coming in through a window with a tarot deck? We had wine when you were telling that story and wine makes me foggy. But I'm sure I didn't dream this, at least some version of this.

Notley:
Fuck Hecate. I'm not interested in crones! More to the point, there is a tangible, beautiful, known ancient image of Athena's owl that one can avail oneself of. But the owl for me is all us Als, including Alma. In a particularly beautiful instance of owl, as I was falling asleep one night while Doug was in his final days in the hospital here in Paris, I turned into an owl and flew to his window -- That part was a half-sleeping fantasy. But then I dreamed I took him to heaven in his pajamas and we walked there, I showed him what it was. Though it was just a beautiful void with no one else there but it felt good.

Well, Ted and the tarot. Ted was living in a single room in a boarding house in Ann Arbor in fall,1969. It was midnight and I was waiting for Ted to arrive from somewhere, I was sitting on the floor of the room (only furniture a mattress, maybe a chair) with John Godfrey, visiting from New York. He and I were poetry babies, Ted was older. So the downstairs door, it turns out, locks after midnight; Ted couldn't get in. The window opened and there he was at the window, he'd climbed up the fire escape -- third floor room. He had a brand new Rider tarot deck, god knows where he'd gotten it, I can't remember. And he proposed to tell our fortunes. I'd never seen a tarot deck before. I guess I knew that there were different fortune-telling methods though. What method will you use? I asked. I'm going to make up my own method, he said. Then he told me and John, in turn, to select the cards we liked best and he'd use those. I had enough sense to select about ten, but John fell in love with all of them and couldn't narrow it down. He finally got the number down to 22 cards. Then Ted told our fortunes, but I don't remember what they were.

Conrad:
OOOOO! FUCK HECATE!? I've never heard anyone say that before! Wow! A test for the soles of the feet! I like that! HEHEHE! Just for the record I have nothing against Athena, I was sharing what I had been thinking with my own interest in crones coming through with the thoughts. If I turn 60 I intend to live the rest of my life as a crone. The half-sleeping fantasy of turning into an owl, and the dream where you take Douglas Oliver to heaven was beautiful, in many ways. Thank you for telling that. And Ted Berrigan's method of do-it-yourself tarot interpretation is great, and what the art form needs. Tarot, especially as an investigative tool for self-reflection, deserves creative minds making as many new doors as possible. You taught a workshop in New York recently using the tarot, how did that go? It made me happy to hear you say you were doing this, as the magical arts seem at home with poetry.

Notley:
The tarot workshop went extremely well. We only had a few hours to do this in, and we spent much of it reviewing the traditional tarot deck as a set of symbols which are, in effect, heavy words. Then we proceeded to make our own. I had twelve pieces of cardboard and figured we would only have time to make a deck of twelve major-arcana-like cards -- just the words, not pictures. I set out a couple of terms: I wanted cards that could refer fairly exactly to present crisis situations: the environment, world-wide immigration, and so on. The people in the class began to make their own demands: one person required a card for solitary tranquility, another insisted on a card for communication. I suggested we also use some of the traditional cards. So. We wound up with the following twelve: Death, the Earth, Chaos, the Poet, the Eye, the Lovers, the Web, the Immigrant, Wisdom, the Moon, Mutation, the Sun. We talked about the possible field of meaning of each of the cards (I can't seem to remember very well, at this point, what the Eye is.) I then directed each person to turn the cards over, mix them up, and choose three at random, to use to write a poem with. The poems were quite good.

I can't remember if I told you but I had gone out and bought a Rider Deck in Paris -- I thought I had thrown my old one out (I was quite mad at it. I found it later.) Then when I opened the deck I realized that, of course, the "words" were in French, with the same symbols, but they didn't always seem to mean the same thing. For example, the Magician is "le Bateleur," who seems to be some sort of street acrobat or tumbler -- this is different. The Fool is le Mat -- the dull person, and the High Priestess is la Papesse -- the female Pope. The "wordness" -- my sense of the wordness of the cards -- was upset by this difference. I liked that.

I'm not an expert in the deck at all. My interest lies somewhere near a sense that words are like tarot cards, and that a poem manipulates unpredictable depths with its words.

Conrad:
That workshop sounds engaging, and what an inspiring way to use the tarot, and to generate langauge. I've only ever attended one poetry workshop, when I was just a teen, and it was the most tedious 2 hours, so much so that I can still smell my boredom whenever thinking about it. It was a situation where a "famous" poet was visiting, and I was too busy listening to others about what to do. And yes, you had mentioned buying a deck in Paris, but what happened that made you mad with the old deck? And what cards are you most drawn to, or does it depend on timing and circumstances?

Notley:
Gee, there's finally something I can't tell you. It's too personal and upsetting -- I mean why I thought I had thrown out the deck.

My favorite cards are the High Priestess, Death, and the aces of cups and wands. I've also become somewhat fond of the Wheel of Fortune. According to Max Jacob's (and Paul Valence's) Le Miroir d'Astrologie, my card in connection with my sign (and decan -- French astrology has decans) is the Knight of Swords, so I kind of like it. I think astrology is mostly shit, but I dig Max Jacob. I like the tarot because it works like poetry and because you don't really have to "believe in" anything. It's there to be used. The symbols are remarkably durable and beautiful; they float out to encompass all kinds of meanings.

Conrad:
Your rich appreciation for the tarot, and how poetry can be a natural part of its weave makes me think of the many folks on the other side of this equation who have dedicated their lives to various occult practices who also see this same marriage. Freya Aswynn uses poetry and chants of Yggdrasil to better associate Runes, runic sigils and Norse mythology. With the tarot it seems every teacher and practitioner wants to include poems to explain or enhance the tarot. Anthony Louis uses Dylan Thomas to better discuss the Ace of Wands, one of your favorite cards:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
drives my green age....

I wish I had known you liked the Ace of Wands when I showed you the deck I use made by Penny Slinger. Her version is amazing, using Mercury's caduceus, combing the Ace of Wands with the mercurial sense of the Knight of Swords, which you say is associated with your sign. Penny Slinger uses some of the major arcana, but has shifted the paradigm by recreating a new language for the tarot, and she does so in the most creative, genius way, running without hesitation with her love for the tarot's endless unfolding, endless possibilities. Your tarot/poetry workshop also kept some of the major arcana and created new cards. Have you ever considered making a tarot? One that could be printed and made available? Jack Spicer's tarot is fantastic, in the true sense of the word fantastic. But he kept to the original template, although his interpretation is really great. (Kevin Killian is the only person I know who owns a copy of the Spicer deck -- only 100 printed) Maybe you would be interested in creating a tarot one day? How do you feel about this?

Notley:
The card associated with my sign is the Knave, not the Knight, of Swords. I'm a knave -- it probably better suits Scorpio. Always a little bit bad. I read my weekly horoscope sometimes in the Observer on Sunday, the British newspaper, and last week it said, You're a Scorpio, get scary! Although I don't believe in this astrological stuff -- the stars are a little far away -- I like the advice. Edwin Denby once said he always read his horoscope, because it always gave such good advice. By that he meant, not that it was specific to him, but that in general this kind of advice is good. You could get good advice from any of the twelve, probably, you wouldn't have to read your own. I thought Get Scary was really good advice.

Anyway, with regard to your tarot question, no I wouldn't want to make that kind of deck. I don't know enough and I don't want to devote that much time to knowing it. A lifetime. It's a little late. I am interested in the idea that anyone might make up their own deck and use it. In fact I got the idea for my workshop from a talk by Michael McClure, from one of the early Naropa talks volumes. He had taught there for the week and had assigned the class to make up individual decks according to their own affinities, personal symbolisms, and so on. And of course he had his, with all his own stuff therein: turquoise, brown, grahhhr, and so on. Everybody has their own deck inside, really. THE deck, the traditional deck, kind of works for everyone, though it's pretty medieval -- but it's remarkably flexible. But everyone has a personal set of symbols that they can and do work with, as they proceed through time.

Conrad:
Oh, the Knave, I was going by the Knight from your last answer. I like how you want us to search our own symbols, like in your workshop. That Michael McClure talk sounds like something to seek out, thanks for mentioning that. Astrology is something I wasn't going to get into after you first expressed your feelings about it because I don't ever want to be in the position where I appear as if I'm proselytizing. But for the tarot readings I do I read through the zodiac. It's an amazing layout, one that reaches far beyond the traditional Celtic Cross form mostly associated with the Rider-Waite and it's many companion decks. The texture of a reading through the circle of the zodiac carries the weight of the different grades of the four cardinal elements, not to mention how much the cards lend themselves to the individual signs beyond the elements. It's not just a way to help a reading expand, but literally explode with possibility. In the end the zodiac extends the metaphor of the tarot, and one can believe in astrology or not and still get something out of it. I do about two, sometimes three tarot readings a week in Philadelphia, and I've only ever had one person insist on the Celtic Cross. Which was fine of course, it was his reading after all. Many people are prepared for the zodiac layout from my little webpage for tarot readings, but those who don't realize it are usually surprised and excited about the idea.

Something else I wanted to ask you. At the Poetry Project's recent Allen Ginsberg tribute reading you mentioned at the microphone that you had been his typist for a little while. One of the poems you typed (twice you typed it, I think you said) was "White Shroud." About a month before that tribute reading I had received permission from Christopher Wiss (with help from David Trinidad and Erica Kaufman) to reprint Tim Dlugos's "G-9" for a queer anthology I'm co-editing with six others. It's a long poem, some 16 or 17 pages, no stanzas, just one long breathtaking column, and there was no copy available online or to be e-mailed, so I had to type it myself. "G-9" is a beautiful but painful poem to read, and one I had read many times before typing it, but typing it got the poem under my skin like never before. I would burst into tears and have to leave my apartment, come back, type, burst into tears and leave again. It was so upsetting and unexpected, and frankly a little exhausting. Since then I've decided to occasionally take poems I have great love for and type them, to see what new life they can have in me. After you mentioned having typed "White Shroud," AND THEN getting to hear your powerful interpretative reading of it, I have since wondered how much the typing of the poem shaped how you read it and feel it? It could just be that you're a powerful reader, which I think anyone who has heard you read would agree that you are, but for some reason the power behind you reading "White Shroud" felt unique and itches in my ears when I've read it in the book since. Is this maybe going back to the conversation on trance? You had said for instance that your unpublished manuscript Reason and Other Women was written entirely at the computer, and that the process was hypnotic.

Notley:
I typed the poems in the White Shroud manuscript so long ago that I don't think the experience was directly relevant to how I read "White Shroud" aloud. While I was reading it I tried to emphasize its structure -- it has a very firmly in place, story-telling structure -- and the immense detail. The poem goes in and out of typically Allen cadences, which as everyone knows are hypnotic, and which he often uses when he's describing things. These cadences seem to help him "see" better. So, as Anselm said later, sometimes I sounded like Allen and sometimes I didn't. The cadences would pull at me, then I would resist them for awhile, then they would pull at me again. I found this quite interesting.

When I was in my twenties, one of things Ted suggested I do -- that he had done -- was type up other poets' poems. He had one-page poems in mind, because those were the ones he'd typed. I was drawn to longer poems and typed up all of Jimmy Schuyler's "Hymn to Life," O'Hara's "Ode on Michael Goldberg's Birthday and Other Births," a large part of Williams' "Of Asphodel That Greeny Flower." I believe I internalized the structures and sounds of these poems -- somewhat -- and that they influenced much of my later work. I didn't know it while I was doing it -- it seemed to me that I was just typing, it even bored me. But I then wrote "Songs for the Unborn Second Baby," which is totally grounded in the O'Hara poem, and poems like "The Prophet," with its long lines that are as much like Schuyler's as Koch's, and then there's The Descent of Alette, which obviously owes a lot to the variable foot of "Asphodel." You take in a lot without being conscious of, rationally on top of, what it is -- this is magic.

I remember "G-9." I haven't looked at it in a long time, Tim's last poems upset me.

Conrad:
Glad I asked about this. So you're saying that doing the exercise of typing these other poet's poems internalized structure and some other tools for writing?

Typing "G-9" was such a powerful experience, and I've thought so much about WHY after having read it so carefully without typing it that it hadn't pulled that agony out of me the way it did at the keyboard. It's not so much about a better, more careful read when typing I think -- at least in this case, for me -- as it was about having to focus with my body, my fingers moving moving moving those words onto another surface, almost, how do I say?, drilling these emotions through to the surface. A couple weeks ago I typed Jules Boykoff's extraordinary poem "Commandment #8" seven different times, and took notes after each typing. Random, off the cuff notes. Not sure what I want from all this, but it's feeling like something is actually being done, on an internal level, maybe internalizing keys to some rusted locks, I don't really know for certain. Engaging the body with the mind does something very unexpected to the reading of a poem. This seems to work too in other ways when writing our own poems. Thoreau has this wonderful essay on walking, and how walking makes writers write. He talks too about the origin of the word "sauntering" and how it's from the French, back when pilgrims were walking to visit the holy sites of the saints. Thoreau asked us to walk, or saunter, as though all ground is holy, and in that exercise beautiful occurrences will be had. Frank Sherlock and I did an experiment in poetry which involved walking all over Philadelphia in this way, and it was definitely a rich experience in the end.

May I back up a bit? I got so excited earlier while you were talking about trance that I never got back to asking you what you meant when you said, "I think poetry is written in a transpersonified state." Could you tell us about this?

Notely:
Um, I don't think "transpersonified" is a real word. "Transpersonal" is. Someone like Phil Whalen made up "transpersonified," it gives you a sense of being above the personal and being a body at the same time. I think Phil used it to refer to an LSD experience: "I was in a transpersonified state." My point was that when you write poetry you are very far above the personal -- while writing. You don't have feelings. Except for a specialized kind of feeling -- esthetic? graced? inside a peculiar reasoning process? If you feel something else, like anger or love, your poem is probably no good. When I say this to someone, that person often nods sagely and says "Feelings recollected in tranquillity" -- whatever the Wordsworth quote is -- but that's not right. It isn't about "recollected." You can have feelings when you read it later, or not.

posted by poet CAConrad @ 5:06 PM 0 comments

AN OPEN LETTER TO JOHN BARR, PRESIDENT OF THE POETRY FOUNDATION

Dear Mr. Barr, first the Democrats take back control, then Rumsfeld steps down, and then, AND THEN, you finally admit to being bored with the company you keep in the latest issue of POETRY Magazine.

OH you POOR, POOR MAN, all this time I thought you were enjoying the drone of your peers, and here you've been HOPING someone would show you the fucking doorway to the true joys you were CERTAIN poetry can offer! Well Mr. Barr my dear, LOOK NO FURTHER!

Here is my email address in case calling me at home seems TOO BIG A STEP for you to take right away: CAConrad13@aol.com

On the other hand, here's my phone number, JUST IN CASE you get a feverish itch in your drawers to get started SOONER! 215 563 3075. Hm, don't mind calling, ANY TIME AT ALL!

How many sleepless nights have you spent not understanding why poetry was so boring? You wanted so much more, I hear that, I FEEL THAT in your article in POETRY Magazine. But it's here Mr. Barr, it's here, it's here. TRUST ME telling you it's here. Let me hold your hand while you read Alice Notley for the first time, or Carol Mirakove, Eileen Myles, Will Esposito, Frank Sherlock, Caroline Bergvall, Brett Evans, Stacy Szymaszek, OH MY GOODNESS MR. BARR SO MANY OTHER ELECTRICAL SHOCKS AWAIT YOU AND I WANT TO BE THERE TO SHARE THOSE MOMENTS OF AWAKENING! Oh my GOODNESS! WOW! Will we ever be able to catch our breath again? And after this I promise you will sleep like a baby LION every night for the rest of your roaring life!

Mr. Barr my dear, JUST THINK, you won't have to drink too much scotch after readings anymore to drown your sorrows, NO-NO! Now you can drink too much scotch after readings to CELEBRATE the arrival of the missing doorway, OH! Don't be so hard on yourself Mr. Barr, it's okay you missed the door, opened the wrong one.

All can be redeemed. All can be as blissful as you once imagined and hoped. Come with me. Come with me dear Mr. Barr, let me show you, let me help you undress in the warmth of genius poetry has to offer.

And then, when you realize all this, please DO make places for my friends in the spacious halls of your Poetry Society, Poetry Foundation, all that STUFF! We won't bite, well, yes we might actually bite, but you'll Love it so! We'll have THE REAL PARTIES you've been waiting to have for poetry! Oh YES!

One VERY BIG Love bite waiting for you,
CAConrad
click here for DEVIANT you DEVIANT me

posted by poet CAConrad @ 3:56 PM 3 comments