Her poem “Celebrity Brush” appears in the forty-seventh issue of Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poem “Celebrity Brush.”
A: S: It’s interesting that you call “Celebrity Brush" a poem. I think of it as prose but maybe there’s a bleed between when poetry is the usual register…
“Celebrity Brush” arrived during lockdown —so in a long span of solitary time when many of us revisited the past with a vividness not usually available in the rush of regular life.
Before I went to sleep one night I saw that Brandon Brown had sent an email calling for work for the revival of his online magazine Celebrity Brush — whose purpose was for poets to write about their most exciting encounters with celebrities. I woke up thinking about growing up in L.A. around many famous people and the way my child and teen hood were more profoundly shaped by the many movies I saw in L.A. theaters-- the films were the celebrities. I started writing about the banality of my brushes with celebrities and the chasm between the awe I knew I was expected to feel and the flat line, or even suspicion, I felt when meeting another famous actor, actress, producer, director, musician…
“Celebrity Brush” set a surprise momentum in motion for writing about L.A. child and teen hood encounters with significant movies and foods of the sixties. I realized that the star encounters for me were with the movies themselves, the whole experience of watching movies in a theatre, and the conversations that happened after —and the echoes and insights the movies cast on family and social life. Food being also a big star in those. So now “Celebrity Brush” is the first piece in a manuscript called Movies & Food.
Q: Fair enough! Although sometimes the lines do get blurred, after all. How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: Yes, I hope for that blur.
I’ve recently finished Guide School, an investigation into the schools that train guides and the global guide-licensing tourist industry. And an investigation too of the training of readers since the way one is taught to perambulate through a city or through a book shapes perceptions of the foreign and familiar, of theirs/ours. The guides who led me through the “old countries” of my grand and great-grandparents in Vilnius, Lithuania; Kishinev, Moldova; and Odessa, Ukraine; were trained and licensed by government schools that chose to delete Jewish presence from their official tour narratives.
Guide School records events of feeling, thought and study, inheritances of the destroyed Pale, as not ever what could be called “homeland.” In place of nostos, so without the desire or ability to return, it adheres to the shtetl requirement to record and to practice the Jewish prescriptions that to read and write are sacred acts. It also wonders (wanders in) how to navigate the present territory of accelerated and weaponized fundamentalism in politics and religion, antisemitism among its touch points, at a time when “others” who are not tourists but migrants and refugees are forced into perilous travel and are often depicted as “dangerous.” For many in diaspora return is not possible. And it is perhaps differently impossible for those who were never recognized as citizens of the state in their “old countries.” Guide School documents visits to the places my ancestors are not from but where they stayed, temporarily, for centuries. In this way Guide School is an itinerary of the irreconcilable, an unwriting.
If there is any nostos in Guide School it is for a repeat return to reading, discussing, writing, a Jerusalem that can be remade daily, hourly, in place of the actual geographic place. Guide School is devoid of fantasies of return.
It’s long. Some sections are poetry, some prose and others are both —the bleed. Above I say that it’s finished but it also seems to refuse to finish — a last section, maybe a separate manuscript or Coda, keeps proposing itself.
Q: Given the fact that most writers delineate between genres, I’m curious at the way you blend poetry and prose. Was this an idea that came naturally, or did you have to find permission from another writer working similar forms?
A: Ha! It comes “naturally” —which is to say I am constitutionally unable to write any other way. I’ve tried. I have always been untrainable in the realm of writing in discreet genres. I was exposed to permission for this, or an awareness of it as a viable form of thinking/making early on. But also heavily chastised for any practice of it in grad school.
Examples of early exposure include My Emily Dickinson, by Susan Howe, For the Etruscans, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Les Guerrilleres, by Monique Witting, Beverly Dahlen, Norma Cole and Barbara Guest’s work, Samuel Delaney’s essay, “On the Unspeakable,” among others. In my twenties I knew I could think critically but not in the given recognizable forms for critical writing or often public speech. So encounters with these works was revelatory—their formal composition and highly rigorous -but not academic- thinking in poetic and scholarly registers confirmed that I had to follow my idiosyncrasies. I’ve always told students that idiosyncrasies are entrances to work —not to be avoided but the opposite. The question: What does thinking look like on the page? —has preoccupied me forever. I’ve written about this in my “essay” collection Coming Events.
Q: With numerous published books over the years, how do you feel your thinking, and your work, has progressed? What do you feel your writing working towards?
A: Progress is not on my mind. I think – what needs to happen now? Where is my attention? What is the nature of the noise where the over and under heard converge? --the bleed between. Sounds, taxonomies, dictions--from news, conversation, music, construction, wind etc etc — obsessions come forward from these and propose their forms. Usually one or a few preoccupations overtake and I follow them until they run out. That could be for an hour or years. I read around and abandon all of that reading and thinking and follow what is set in motion. By which I mean dreams from sleep and awake, mis and rehearings, the unhearable. I wonder--work towards an always more vivid occupation of and registering of this on the page.
Q: How do your poems find their shape? Have you a sense of where the line might lead when you begin, or are your pieces more exploratory, seeing ways through which to find themselves? To begin, do you require a destination, or simply a way to begin?
A: Sometimes shape appears simultaneously as sound, or sound and rhythm take kinesthetic shapes — that is, a form rises from the feeling and sound of words embodied, spoken out loud or sounded silently.
The most vivid example of this occurred when I was in labor. My even breathing interrupted by contractions revealed that I was in the realm of couplets. I was surprised. But I was being coupled, or had been in the process of coupling throughout pregnancy, so it is not surprising that this was the form labor presented, required. Later, while cradling that baby and nursing her late at night, lines came to join the form:
arm leg kindling gather where water blankets soundThese lines turned into a poem of uneven uncounted (but close syllabically) couplets called “Resuscitations,” the first poem in Hourglass Transcripts* a book focused on the nature of the unnamed time occupied by the primary caretaker and the infant.
take her down again again quiet crown
While the form often arises, introduces itself, with word(s) sound, embodied sensation, lines are also a compositional consideration on the page having to do with reading. For example, how does a line length or break direct the reader’s attention? --including myself as a reader. I aim to coerce or invoke as many possible kinds of sense a line might yield — so word order, sound, cadence, are some of the elements that suggest backwards, up the page and down readings…
A way to begin is an ambush —so I never know the destination— but I can feel the vehicle moving even if I’m blindfolded.
Q: I’m curious as to how your critical writing might influence your poems, and vice versa. Do you see your critical and creative work as separate, or simply individual threads of your larger, more ongoing work? Or is it all part of the same expansive ongoing project?
A: I hope that my poems are critical writing, among other things.
What does thinking look like on the page?—Again this persisting question. How does criticality appear in writing that is not formally or rhetorically framed as “critical” or “theoretical?” There is writing that’s devoid of critical thought in all genres. What do I mean by “criticality," “thought?” I mean acute attention to “What’s going on?” (as Marvin Gaye puts it). Kathleen Stewart calls this, “atmospheric attunements” —"a capacity to affect and be affected that pushes a present into a composition,….the sense of potentiality and event.” A composition, as an event of attention —a potential realized as a poem or in another form. I address this event of encounter between readers and writers, a capacity for encounter with each other and environments in “Outer Event.” (the last piece in my book Coming Events). Instead of the critical/creative divide I ask what is the event(s) of this work I encounter as maker or reader (co-maker)? An awareness of the “capacity to affect and be affected” is reflexive thought, or criticality.
I’ve done tai chi for forty years. Doing the form has always felt like playing the air, my body an instrument. The shapes the body takes in tai chi are the shapes of the hexagrams of the I Ching. So doing tai chi is a writing in air: a sequence of movements different each time repeated. Like spelling a word with an alphabet, sequential and simultaneous.
In your question you name “the critical, creative, individual threads, the ongoing.” My affinity is with “the ongoing” which I take to be the unresolved and returning, an ongoing learning in the sense that Stewart uses “learning” here: “The body has to learn to play itself as a musical instrument in this world’s compositions.” It’s never done, the learning and composing and it’s always changing--What does thinking look like on the page? becomes: How does this instrument —writer, piece of writing, body--play itself? What is the pitch of its “atmospheric attunements?” The ethical and aesthetic converge here I think and keep reappearing in different guises … —There’s a lot more to say, but I’ll stop here.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: A partial and inadequate list, but:
Any of Barbara Guest’s work, especially Forces of Imagination, If So, Tell Me and Seeking Air.
The Odyssey, Fitzgerald translation, among others
In the Blink of an Eye, A Perspective on Film Editing, Walter Murch
the Presocratics
Clarice Lispector (any/everything)
Helene Cixous, First Days of the Year (and many others)
Brathwaite, Islands, History of the Voice
The Popul Vuh, Tedlock translation
Jabes, R Duncan, Ed Roberson, Tyrone Williams, Mandelstam, Stacy Doris, Phoebe Gianissi, and the poetry of many close (especially bay area) friends I can’t begin to name
The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan – The Literary Tradition. Translated and edited by Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Martin Inn, Robert Amacker, Susan Foe. The Essence of T'ai Chi Ch'uan is a translation of the T'ai Chi Classics, the principles on which T'ai Chi Ch'uan is based.
Ibn ‘Arabi Alone with the Alone, H Corbin translation
Jon Berger, Another Way of Telling, A Fortunate Man (with photographer Jean Mohr)
Abd al-Rahman Munif, Cities of Salt (Trilogy)
Much art, many films
--Thank you rob for asking all of these questions! And for your labors in getting the work of so many poets into circulation.
* Samuel Delaney, Shorter Views, Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary, Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1999Thanks to friend and poet Julia Drescher for recently passing this piece to me: “Atmospheric attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011, volume 29, pages 445-453.
*The poem “Resuscitations.” is also anthologized in The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood
