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bagleywrightlectures · 5 years

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Q&A with Dorothea Lasky, after her lecture “What Is Color in Poetry or Is It the Wild Wind in the Space of the Word?” at the Poetry Foundation, January 23, 2014

You mentioned sound in your lecture. Can you speak more to the relationship, in your mind, between sound and color?

For me the connection is that in terms of both sound and color (and maybe all things in the sensual world) is the idea that we are limited as humans to understand the scope of them. And also, I guess there's the obvious other connection that when we have a name for a color then there’s an agreed upon sound that we're giving to whatever this frequency is that color's trying to approximate. I know I mentioned this idea in the lecture of the problem of indigo. I think it's kind of a funny problem to have--this problem of indigo--and just the idea that there are so many colors that we are not privy to, that we cannot understand because of the limitations of our meat eyes. With sound as well, there's an infinite progression of sounds to uncover. But I think that for me, just because I am more of a visual learner or thinker, it's easier for me to understand how that happens in a poem through the image and through color, and how we really are very limited in what colors we can experience. And I look forward to people that know and think and love sound just as much as I love the visual to consider what that could be in terms of sound--which we won't figure out probably ever.

Thinking of the relation between color and gender, and how color interacts and what reproduces what, and if there are any liberatory aspects of reappropriation, which I don't think is the case all the time because pink can be reappropriated as a masculine thing, like 'oh yeah, I'm masculine enough to wear pink.' So what do you think of the relationship of color and liberatory aspects of...or destabilizing the social norms of performance of gender?

I think it's maybe related a little bit to the section I was talking about how I feel like in American culture we sort of don't want to use color too passionately. We want to sort of limit our spectrum. If we look at many of our buildings or places we enter, they're not bursting with color. And so we create this social norm where we're limiting ourselves--we don't want to influence too much with our passions. I feel like liberating that in all respects of life is what's important. I've never felt trapped in a gendered way by pink, and so I've always liked when people are not trapped in any way by what colors they use in their daily lives. (And of course, just as an aside, we know that pink itself was not gendered as female until the last 100 years or so.) So, I hope that maybe this relationship between colors and gender is changing somehow. When I personally think of pink I think of that Plath line (“By whatever these pink things mean”) and why Maggie Nelson's reading of it is so wonderful, and right, that the pink is just like the skinned animal object--the actual flesh of an animal--and so it's kind of free of whatever girliness someone could've read into that line. [laughing] So, did I successfully evade answering your question?

So I guess I was sort of thinking of social norms with our association with color and what we see in the color, impacted by social norms, and if there's a possibility of being able to break out of using established associations.

I think there is if we decide that we should, then we should. If you want to wear pink every day, then you should.

For a year I wore my mother's clothes, everywhere kind of, to work and felt like I was performing in a way.

It's fun to perform. That is something I will agree with.

Have you ever thought about doing something for children in regard to color? Because I have a ten-year-old niece and this holiday we were coloring in the coloring book, and I colored things completely different than what they were supposed to be and she said, "That's not supposed to be that color. It's supposed to be this color." We start out very young indoctrinating our youth into what's accepted.

Yes, I think so. That's the sad thing about a lot of educational experiences in our country. Even when we have designated art teachers in classrooms (which is getting rarer and rarer), a lot of times it's to enforce social norms about aesthetic choices. That certainly happened to me when I was in elementary school. My elementary school art teacher shamed me in a lot of different ways for my [laughing] “abstract expressionism” and interesting color choices. I had to sit in the corner a lot in class, and I did not get a sticker for my drawings. That really wasn’t cool, and it really makes me angry now to think about it. Because obviously I overcame these pressures (hopefully), but what about all of the kids that didn’t. Actually, I've written a children's book and it’s about the personalities of colors. So, like how red is thought of as an angry color but that maybe red is actually a calm color, etc.

So, when I touch people I see colors a lot. Cuddling, there's this very vivid one, like I see orange and whatnot. I was wondering what part of your experience do you feel is electric in terms of your color? Does that make sense? Like what colors do you see when you're existing in whatever state?

Well, the weird thing is it's always changing, but I love that idea that--it reminds me so much of Hannah Weiner and how she was able to put her consciousness in a place where she did see things as kind of their aura selves. And I do really believe that kind of perception is existing, but it's very hard for us to kind of go into that space of perception. So, for me I don't necessarily see auras as much as I'd like to. I probably could if there was the space to do so more in the everyday, but when I do so it's just always different, whatever color is connected to a particular object. It’s not a consistent thing. Anyway, I'm on a big orange kick right now because someone told me recently that orange reduces blockages and takes away boundaries, so that's probably related to your orange cuddling thing.

#dorothealasky poetry lecture color

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sfsolstice · 2 months

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Dorothea Lasky, from Animal

#lit #literature #typo #typography #fragments #light academia #dark academia #aesthetic #dorothea lasky #animal #dorothea lasky animal #essay writing #oops typo!#peeking back into animal and i saw i had this underlined #what a banger of a line sdgjk #i love this lil book so much #240311

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ivisitlondon · 3 years

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iVisit... New Suns: A Feminist Literary Festival - Experience the 2021 programme from home

The annual literary festival New Suns returns for a weekend of talks, workshops and a film centred around feminist storytelling. The weekend will feature acclaimed writers, activists, artists, and academics including adrienne maree brown, Season Butler and Dorothea Lasky. This third edition of the festival, running from Friday 5 – Sunday 7 March 2021, will take place entirely online for the first time. New Suns is a co-production between the Barbican and independent publisher and curator Sarah Shin.

This year’s New Suns will look to the legacy of eminent science-fiction author Octavia Butler, to explore the power we have to both sustain and change the world around us, and how to commune with others. In particular, New Suns will reflect on Butler’s prophetic, unfinished Earthseed series, which imagines Earth in the 2020s ravaged by ecological disaster and violent divisions. The young Black protagonist Lauren Olamina not only survives a journey through a treacherous version of the American West after being forced to leave her home, but also seeds hope with her writing, and builds a new community that she believes one day will travel to the stars.

The festival will navigate the books’ central themes, such as the inevitability of change, community-building, examinations of race and gender, and humanity’s relationship to the cosmos.

The New Suns 2021 programme includes a talk between writers and activists adrienne maree brown and Ama Josephine Budge, exploring the practice and legacy of Octavia Butler; poetry readings and a discussion with Izabella Scott of The White Review, poet Dorothea Lasky and artist and poet Precious Okoyomon, exploring the relationship between space and our existence on Earth. There will be a workshop led by Alice Spawls, the co-editor of the London Review of Books, inviting audiences to experience journaling as a foundation for creative writing; and a film about the feminist scholar Donna Haraway. Another highlight of New Suns 2021 includes a science fiction writing workshop with writer and performance artist Season Butler. The full programme details can be found below. Festival bookers can continue to watch back all New Suns content until Tuesday 9 March 11.59pm.

There are two ways for audiences to join this year’s festival: a standard offer with access to the weekend’s live online programme (£15), and a ‘New Suns Plus’ ticket which includes a limited-edition anthology and a merchandise package in the post, plus the workshop on science fiction writing with Season Butler (£25). There will also be a concession ticket of £5 / £15 for Young Barbican members. The festival is available to UK based audiences and all tickets are available to book via the Barbican’s website.

The New Suns anthology booklet includes an extract from Octavia Butler’s book The Parable of the Sower; poetry by Dorothea Lasky and Daisy Lafarge; guides for self-reflection and meditation; as well as herbal recipes for strength and healing to enjoy this spring and beyond. The anthology is accompanied by thyme seeds and instructions how to use the herb beyond the culinary.

Sarah Shin, New Suns Founder and Co-producer, said: ‘Taking inspiration from Octavia Butler’s Earthseed belief system and community, this year’s New Suns festival and accompanying anthology may be considered like seed: to sow ideas and practices to cultivate adaptation, resilience and hope to create inhabitable futures.’

Razia Jordan, Producer, Barbican, said: ‘We're super excited to celebrate the third year of New Suns. As always, the festival aims to be a space for the exchange of ideas on new types of community and societies, and a platform for the creators and feminists who help us to envision these new worlds. Given the current circumstances, we've transformed New Suns into an online festival, and, for the first time, have been able to commission a special anthology which people can enjoy at home. New Suns is a key part of the Barbican’s Level G programme, an experimental platform for projects that ask crucial social and cultural questions, spark conversations and bring people from different disciplines together.’

In lieu of a traditional book fair this year, New Suns is partnering with Bookshop.org – a new online retailer for books that directly supports independent bookshops all over the UK and US. There will be a special New Suns section on Bookshop.org from today, offering reading lists for audiences who would like to dive into New Suns-related literature, while supporting independent booksellers at the same time.

The festival’s name is directly inspired by Octavia Butler, who said in her third and unfinished Earthseed novel: 'There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns’. In 2018 and 2019, the festival took place as a day of events, film screenings and workshops around a major book fair, featuring over thirty independent and major publishers at the Barbican Centre.

The Barbican believes in creating space for people and ideas to connect through its international arts programme, community events and learning activity. To keep its programme accessible to everyone, and to keep investing in the artists it works with, the Barbican needs to raise more than 60% of its income through ticket sales, commercial activities and fundraising every year. Donations can be made here: barbican.org.uk/donate

NEW SUNS 2021 PROGRAMME:

Friday 5 March 2021

Keynote talk: The Parables of Octavia Butler

adrienne maree brown in conversation with Ama Josephine Budge

5 Mar 2021, 7-8.15pm, online

Writers and activists adrienne maree brown and Ama Josephine Budge will be in conversation to discuss the work and legacy of American science fiction author Octavia Butler. The power and inevitability of change is central to Butler’s visionary stories, as well as the reimaginations of social relations across race, gender and class. How can we collectively seed, cultivate and create the worlds we want, and build habitable futures?

Cinema on Demand: Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival

2016 Fabrizio Terranova, 90 min

Available to stream from 5 Mar 2021, online

Feminist thinker, writer and historian of science Donna Haraway shares her life, influences and ideas in this documentary film by director Fabrizio Terranova. An essential and insightful glimpse into the thoughts of a major contemporary figure.

Haraway is a passionate storyteller, presenting a playful exploration of ideas in this film. Discussing topics as diverse as capitalism, and science-fiction writing; the conversations - which are punctuated by quirky animation - have a casual and intimate feel, drawing the viewer into their confidence.

The film will be available to watch at any time over the festival weekend via the Barbican’s Cinema on Demand platform. Cinema on Demand is available to audiences across the UK with a rolling four-week programme of titles and events that reflect the Barbican’s international cinema programme.

Saturday 6 March 2021

Workshop: What-if?

A Speculative Science Fiction Writing Workshop with Season Butler

6 Mar 2021, 11am – 1pm, online

Writer, performance artist and teacher Season Butler will lead a workshop on fantastical, futuristic writing and share her insights into how to conjure voice, subjectivity, and compelling, engaging prose. Part of the workshop will include breakout sessions for participants to practice writing exercises. Writers at all levels are welcome. Only available to New Suns Plus ticket holders.

Panel talk: Among the Stars

A poetry live reading with Precious Okoyomon and Dorothea Lasky + discussion with The White Review

6 Mar 2021, 5-6pm, online

For millennia we have stargazed for inspiration and knowledge via astrology, astronomy and space exploration. This session will include poetry readings and a conversation with Izabella Scott, an editor at The White Review, poet Dorothea Lasky and artist and poet Precious Okoyomon, exploring the relationship between space and our existence on Earth: how can what lies beyond our world help us here on Earth?

Sunday 7 March 2021

Workshop: Journaling / Diary writing with the London Review of Books

7 Mar 2021, 12-1.15 pm, online

Led by Alice Spawls, co-editor of the London Review of Books, this workshop will explore journaling as a foundation for creative writing. Focusing on skills for independent editing, playing with time and structuring prose, the workshop will draw from a combination of Octavia Butler’s writings and the diary columns from the London Review of Books.

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vlasco · 3 years

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Certeza relativa

Estoy casi segura de que en mi vida pasada fui un animal Lo sé Por mi hocico Por el pelaje que me envuelve Por mi amor Mi Loba mi Loba Te quiero Todas mis hormonas El cuerpo desnudo Y el cadáver Los días, dulces y largos Y de repente, la nada El espacio absoluto Con el que hacer un trato Estoy casi segura De que lo importante era el pelaje Antes de estar atrapada en este cuerpo Sé que justo antes de que los planetas me tragasen Miré a la gente e intenté hablar Y fue mi vocabulario, mi tono El que acabó conmigo

Dorothea Lasky (St. Louis, Estados Unidos, 1978), Hola mediodía, El Gaviero, Almería, 2016 Traducción de María Ramos

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aragamah · 6 years

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“I Had a Man” by Dorothea Lasky

Today when I was walking I had a man tell me as he passed That I was a white bitch (he was white) And to not look at him Or he was going to “fuck me in my little butthole” I wandered away Who is to say I think I am a white bitch My butt is big But I believe my butthole is little This violence that we put on women I don’t think it’s crazy Someone I know said “Oh, that man was crazy” I don’t think he was crazy Maybe he could tell I had a look in my eye That wasn’t crazy anymore Maybe he could feel the wild cool blood in me And it frightened him Maybe he knew I was the same as him But had been born with this kind face and eyes Doughlike appurtenances What about the day I left What happened then Dark bird barreling down upon me In the gentle air, to take me in his beak Pink and patterned house Never-ending sister speech To go along the coaster and never return To never repeat Did that one bitter eye know I have a voice To say what my words have done to me That unkind wind that blew through my brain With no thought of me Just to still the jungle animals Just to feed the endless clearing The giant Green and simple Face of the sea

#poetry #to be a woman in this world #the paris review

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spamzineglasgow · 4 years

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(REVIEW) Pain Journal Issue 3

In this review, Maria Sledmere draws out the material poetics of intimacy, glimmer, memory and salt in issue 3 of Pain Journal, from Partus Press, asking what kinds of dream-writing and ecopoetics we might find among the tangle, the camaraderie, the trace.

> Pain is an immaculate journal of new poetry and short, creative essays, edited by Vala Thorodds and Luke Allan, published by Partus Press and designed by Studio Lamont. Folding out the cover of issue 3, you’ll find an epigraph from Robert Creeley’s ‘The Flower’: ‘Pain is a flower like that one, / like this one, / like that one, / like this one’. Pain is a making, a sap, a sort of seedling and fruiting of where we are in the years. It likens itself to more than we’d tend to acknowledge. A blood, a fur of skin, a flower. It’s such a luxury to hold issue 3 in its peachy, matte dust jacket, admiring the beautiful type and the list of contributors. There’s an air of the covetable to Pain: maybe it’s the print quality, maybe it’s the poetry, maybe it’s the curation. I think it’s also something to do with the cover, dominated by the sans serif title PAIN: when I read this walking in the street, I make some kind of statement. It feels charged with the ambiguity of some high fashion statement, and yet what lucky readers are we that something of the contents may tell the pain — we don’t just wear it.

> Where to start! These are lush poems of communication, intimacy, sensation. Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir’s ‘Gleam & delicacies’ is a surreal and elliptical lyric of superstitious glimmer. Poetry as ‘a trap for the superstitions’. I find myself googling what a ‘glowfruit’ is and find some reddit discussions around the appearance of ‘glowfruit trees’ in Sims games. There’s this line, ‘I still have wild glowfruit trees. Do you?’, which feels like a summons, a challenge. Enter into this logic with me, where the one-time event of the glowfruit’s arrival has seeded the game’s eternal time. Someone comments, ‘They seem kind of random to me’. I had forgotten the magic of games and their luxurious richness and dream logic of glitches and hacks and splintered paths of narrative. Perhaps my childhood adoration of Sega and Nintendo was my way into poetry. The opening veils of an overlain world. Sigurðardóttir’s poetics have that quality of drifting between rooms and scenes, or falling between bodies and scales by one gesture of a linebreak, the slide of a button control, ‘I give birth to suns / for the morning hoax / slippery planets’. It reminds me of David O’Reilly’s video game, Everything, where you can move between a roving shrub, a celestial body and an oil rig in the space of ten minutes. What is meant by a ‘nighthaired waiter’? There is a dream-hand that extends to our proprioceptive venturing, that offers casual refusal (‘I didn’t come here to toothbrush the wolf’) by way of assembling the real and its purpose. The real which feels more like a ‘silhouette’.

> Significant, perhaps, that this poem of mirror-tricks and shimmers stands opposite Ruby Silk’s ‘Re:’, a poem that takes the banal conceit of email and pulling on tights in the swimming pool changing room to figure something of desire and its thirst. ‘we communicate drily’, the poem begins, ending with a slide on the nature of being quenched, on the question. Both poems forego punctuation, and more or less carry themselves on the turns of language: objects form a multiple syntax of moving between. Their cleanness on the page is perhaps what makes them gleam, they seem to hold their own. The gleam is present elsewhere in the issue, with Eloise Hendy’s ‘scrubland’ beginning, in the manner of Marianne Moore moving into Plath territory, ‘i too have a gleaming future. / a future like a fish scale, the eye / of a small bird’. Trauma or remembered pain is a matter of scale(s) and perception, of the body and its existential whittling, whitening. The speaker asks about whiteness, light, memory and dream: ‘all that spilt milk. all that gleaming’. You could say the gleam is metonymy for shame, the beaming cheeks, the sense of glowing or almost burning there in the situation. No capitals, a whittling. The idea of ‘nonsense’ itself, whittling down to the first gleam, its tender origin: ‘as a girl i was very soft’. The way the lines and stanzas slip, enjambed between, the idea of a passing through. The speaker offers her hurts: her fish eye, her pale appetite, her starved future, her dreams of fish bones and choking. ‘be gentle with me’, she implores. I think of this line from the film Lady Bird (2018), after Lady Bird loses her virginity under a pretence of shared experience and the boy Kyle is like ‘Do you have any awareness about how many civilians we’ve killed since invasion in Iraq started?’ and she replies, ‘SHUT UP. SHUT UP. Different things can be sad. It’s not all war’. ‘as an adult i am softer still’, Hendy writes, as though softening herself into the palest ghost and somehow becoming defiant, ‘my hand / is an arrowhead. a future / like a fish eye’.

> It’s no surprise that Pain is tinged with other existential tremors, those of the body and the world, of ecology and domesticity, of sex and dust. Helen Charman’s ‘In the pocket of Big Pig’ wears high theory cool on its sleeve as it sweeps into the muck and dirt of where we are. The movement of ‘manmade’ materials into the ‘natural’ is an aesthetic act: ‘Plastic / can holders entwine themselves around the / sea kelp — to tame and smooth frizz’. In that em-dash I feel the lines reaching out, the kelp and the twine and the human arms, the bristles. Does poetry do more than brush back the mess of the world, or tease it back into static? What are the ethics of pain’s poetic entanglement?

ecopoets try again and again to convince us of the whiteness of the snow drift. I like muddy ducklings dirty reedbeds

(Charman, ‘In the pocket of Big Pig’)

If ‘muddy ducklings’ has that childlike assonance of storybook rhyme, ‘dirty reedbeds’ feels adult, insistent, dark. The place where you tangle and possibly drown. Turning away from the pristine ‘snow drift’ that pulls us into the picturesque, an ecopoetics that continues the aesthetic throwback of nature poetry before it, this is an anthropocene poetics of living in a fraught, affectively entangled now: ‘I think we’re nostalgic for more than VHS when we / fuck in front of the Blue Planet poster misty-eyed as if / we’ll ever get to show the oceans to our own kids’. Sex is ambivalently yoked to procreation in the ‘misty-eyed’ act of fucking to get back to something primal, deep and planetary. The world as it once supposedly was and exists now mostly as mediation: scenes on tv, posters for Blue Planet. And the word ‘fuck’ for sex that feels iterative rather than tender, two bodies trying to make something of what they have, an intensified point in time and space, a mediation or trace of each other.

> A similar kind of iterative sweetness and friction occurs in Jack Underwood’s ‘Behind the Face of Great White Shark’, where some new entry to the ecosystem upsets the home, ‘Since we brought you home from the hospital / I have begged these hours to a stub’. Enter the metaphoric playground of sharks and dogs, worms, rats, beans and bananas. Something of this new love, the baby perhaps, the shark or the tender thirsty thing at dawn, is a hurt: ‘I admit I have been sick / since we met, pursuing this love-wound / like a moon beyond the windscreen’. A love you’d drive to all through the night, to arrive back where you started, chaste in your own ‘dawn kitchen’ with a moony look in your eye. I think of Dorothea Lasky’s ‘wild lyric I’, the one she discusses in her new book Animal: this playful and manipulative ‘metaphysical I’ that ‘can harness all fragmented senses of self and use them whenever it needs to’. Underwood’s I thrashes like a shark on the sick shores of a new love, a birthing tide, dark and light. An I that threatens violence, desire from all angles and limbs ‘fucking ambidextrously’; an I that ‘can keep you safe inland’, that pulls you into its glow, for this is just ‘the lesser work of living’.

> It is tricky to identify highlights from a journal where, as with amberflora (whose sensibilities resonate here), the selections are impeccable: focused, resonant, but also lovely alone. Nina Mingya Powles’ ‘The Harbour’ has something of Clarice Lispector’s radiance, pressed into a teeming poetics of its own. Its section titles add an epistolary quality, italicised as they are, ‘Dear whales,’, ‘Dear dreamer,’. Post-Arika, with all talk of Moby Dick and the mathematics of the whale, it seems these cetaceans are having a real moment. Powles’ address to the whale is elegiac, ‘I can pinpoint all the places you have died, / where I’ve buried you’. She’s putting pressure on the work of metaphor, the whale as so much more than whale, the whale as what cannot be contained, the whale that cannot contain itself. Her whale is more of a comrade, a friend:

When I looked out of the train and saw your deep blue body and you saw mine you stayed close to me, swimming alongside. We were both travelling home.

What if ecopoetics, or anthropocene poetics, were something more like this surprising camaraderie? Does it matter whether the encounter was imagined or actually happened? Running through Pain is this suffering silk with its shadows and texture of echo and gleam, ‘the dream is wet skin against her hands / the fact is echolocation’ (Powles). I’ve been thinking about what the tensile ethics of this fugitive touch are: the touch of the image, the whale and the speaker on the train, the relative distance of speed and time between them, the hospitality she extends to the animal she is also. ‘I’ll show you my mother’s potted orchids’, in a world where to cross one human threshold is to know that later the sea will be deep enough for you once more. Pain asks how much of each other we need to hold. There’s this passage from Hélène Cixous’ novel Hyperdream (2006) that speaks to this:

I hear it, I hear a murmur your skin speaks, a blood thinks, I hear your thought running under the skin I hear your life thinking under the neat eternal spotless silk. I read with my life. I am torn. At the same time I am healed and glued back together again. During this time the world suffers and dies [...]

What is the murmur of our speaking skins, our thinking blood? The body that dreams? One pain can open the next, there’s a gesture of infinity, the way that Anne Boyer identifies in her ‘meditation on modern illness’, The Undying (2019): ‘My new calamity meant it was possible to feel every cell at once and, in these, every mitochondrion, and that it was possible, too, to have a millionfold shitshow of sensations in locations newly realised’. To have your body illumined, intensified, surged to the end of each nerve and cell with this searing consciousness. When I had shingles, I felt real dreams; they seemed to extend to a million tips, concentrated in clusters on the skin of my belly. Real dreams/real hurt. Is a body in pain the body that dreams the most, from her almost-paralysis in sensory excess? I think poems like Powles are asking these questions, declaring, spacing, opening up, leaving us on the brink of a blank that is its own quiet sublime, ‘everything is so !’. And if ‘the fact is letting go’, what of the fact have we been holding all along? Is this like Creeley, gesturing towards this or that flower, as a way of describing, to insist on it. Something we ask as children: does a flower or a plant feel pain? Pain, pain. There it is in the world, it just is, like a flower, or something more tiny and abrasive, salt after salt. A period.

> Rowland Bagnall’s essay ‘The Metal We Call Salt’ closes the journal with a meditation on the poetry of Philip Levine and Elizabeth Bishop, writers who ‘[address] the delicate failure of poetry to say the things which can’t be said’. This is Creeley, surely, with the flowers which stand for the shapeless pain. I’m reminded of a line from Rachael Allen’s ‘Kingdomland’: ‘the glass and salt my crooked pathway; impassable glass and salt’. The glittering remainders which excoriate the entry and exit of threshold, painful debris of the sea. This is the ‘tantalising’ poetics that Bagnall writes of, words that ‘say that they are lost for words’, words that gift and withhold by their material gesture: words that carry traces of what they may be. Salt-tanged and gleaming as glass. ‘What got revealed when the layers of leaves / Were blown backwards?’ Ralf Webb asks, in his ‘Three Sonnets’. What is it to walk over the crunching ‘pathway’ of such poems for pain, ana-cathartic as they move into, above, through, around and from the wound and its ferric sting? The essay also looks at the paintings of John Salt and photographs of Mark Ruwedel, considering how as a preservative and purifier, salt as both an archival and corrosive mineral: art as what consumes and reveals, what glints with the not yet spoken. Salt in the wound for pain will sting, but it will clear. These poems are such interfusions, sweetness and dreams, the ‘torn’: healed and suffering of a life and a world, coming over. And, for just a while, Pain will hold you together, soft in its peachy embrace.

Pain issue 3 is out now and available to purchase here.

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 5/1/20

#review #poetry review #PAIN #PAIN Journal #Maria Sledmere #Partus Press

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thempoetry · 5 years

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“Double Portrait” by Brittany Perham

Lately, I’ve been lounging with James Longenbach’s How Poems Get Made, and it’s colored the way I’ve been reading the poets available to me. In particular, Longenbach’s chapter on voice describes how “[w]hen we say that a poem presents us with a strong sense of voice, what we’re often in fact saying is that the poem sounds like Donne” (39). And he goes on to describe Donne’s almost supernatural ability to create the impression of a human speaker through skillful variances in diction and the sound of words.

{In a particularly gripping section, he uses the lines of later poets to demonstrate Donne’s influence; listen in the following lines for the voice that seems to animate them:

Robert Browning: But do not let us quarrel any more.

Marianne Moore: Why so desolate?

D. H. Lawrence: You tell me I am wrong.

Bidart: What should I have done?

Ashbery: Time, you old miscreant!

Ellen Bryant Voight: I made a large mistake I left my house

…if these examples sound alive to you, notice the shapes to which they lead the mouth; notice the natural variance therein… } (38-39)

All of which is to say, I was thinking about voice when I picked up Perham’s book.

First of all, it’s worth noting — as the cover rightfully boasts — that this volume was chosen by Claudia Rankine (!) as the winner of the 2016 Barnard Women Poets Prize (the last winner was Sandra Lim, chosen by Louise Glück for The Wilderness). And an honor well-deserved: Perham’s poems are disarmingly frank without losing their playful edge; as an example, the first poem in the collection involves the idea (and actuality) of vomiting blood.

How does a collection that begins with the idea of catching your father’s bloody vomit in a “bin,” how does such a collection still manage to project such a sense of dignity, of self-collectedness?

If I may, I think the answer is twofold:

1. AURA OF LIVED EXPERIENCE: Perham’s poems ooze an aura of lived experience — of someone who has been through what she reports and has thought about it for a fortnight or two. In particular, it was a gift to experience her insights about what is major and what was minor, so to speak, as in her fantastic song about daily life with a partner:

I read your new book it’s great now I’m sulky I get a new job insurance! it’s great now you’re sulky but also you’re happy I’m happy I’m happy you’re happy It’s payday (26)

Taking up the gauntlet of many illustrious women poets before her, Perham magnifies the domestic for the drama it always is: a stage where shellfish, champagne, and paper towels mark the boundary between two individuals laboring over the project of togetherness.

This kind of book resists the canon for the precise way in which it resists the canonic judgement of what is major, and what is minor. Perham’s insistence on foregrounding the everyday is also her insistence that our lives are worth writing about: “There’s no use putting on perfume / for a Skype conversation” (31). Her ability to point out the obvious, the familiar is actually extraordinary, and constitutes a genuine poetic gift.

2. FORMAL INVENTIVENESS: The other reason Perham’s work is enjoyable is that Double Portrait reads like a romp, a display of inventiveness that extends beyond content (the playpen of many a contemporary poet) towards form. (In this way, her work recalls to mind the form-wrangling work of Danez Smith.)

Take, for example, the litany in the “Third Series” that begins:

9,885,998 of us watched the clip of a hatchling duckling One of us went to podcasts One of us heard the voices of old men and knew poetry was there One of us was male, male (55)

Or this poem, which weaves quartets in Dante-esque shifts;

I’d be be waiting for you to come home. Amy says, A fondling session comes with the inevitable risk — Spring will come and I’ll be alone in this little box of a room.

Amy says, A fondling session comes with the inevitable risk of being laughed at—is it habit, is it altogether voluntary? Alone in this little box of a room, a “fondling session” seems like everything! (75)

Weaving the ends of lines with acumen that reads as naiveté, an endless process of discovery, Perham lives up to Rankine’s incisive observation: “This is the world before exhaustion and cynicism overtakes the lyric.” In a world of exhaustion and cynicism, turning to others — mirroring them, attempting to “address the Thou” (77) despite everything — may be one energetic salvation.

Finally, I had to ask myself while binge-reading this book, why is Double Portrait not at all like Dorothea Lasky’s poems about kitten videos and so on? I think it has to do with my first point — the insight about the the genuine major and minor, the forthrightness of what feeling is genuinely bound up in. Perhaps it is fair to say that Perham’s work displays a wider, deeper palette of emotion, including the (rare!) shades of filial piety (9), forgiveness (3), uncertainty in the midst of fidelity (18), kiddish obsession (20) and the feeling of willingly becoming a stranger to a past lover (74). These are real emotions — and we judge their reality by the way in which they resonate with our own lived experiences. Said in another way: these are poems that resist the textureless digital world, that bristle and break the surfaces that flatten experience into ironic reportage.

Overall: 8/10 for intelligent jolliness

Read If You: -Are wondering who’s doing what in the world of poetic form these days -Miss your mum -Have been in several relationships and aren’t married yet; where are you even? are you on the “train of living” that everyone else seems to be on or are you, like, an accidental drifter? should you change your name? is it ok to feel what you feel? (Perham: yes.)