SAMANTHA GILES

deputized by CAConrad





Samantha Giles got her first job at age 9. She is currently the director of Small Press Traffic.

CAConrad LOVES the poets of San Francisco more than his own mother, and you can see him at CAConrad.blogspot.com/

I want to start by thanking CA Conrad for being and for sending me here in his stead and to say that I wish he was up here saying something brilliant and insightful and infused with color and meaning after having given us all a lot of chocolate. And of course thank you to Alli, David, Sarah, Suzanne and Brandon for co-coordinating, for you all for being here and for some of you for helping out.

In the process of deciding what to say to day I thought about a series of conversations with people whose thoughts on all matters of things to say and think matter to me. And because I still haven’t figured out what I am supposed to say, I am going to relate those conversations in such a way that I hope they help me say something about my labor and the writing that does or doesn’t result from it.

A little side step first to lay down the work life. I am both the administrator a small non-profit literary arts presentation organization and a…ugh…struggle with the word…homemaker? Housewife? Caretaker? of my six-year-old son and forty-seven-year-old partner. Both of these occupations provide an economic value to my household. Both are supposed to be part time, which in fact means I am almost always working or that I am constantly in a situation where what I perceive to be recreational time suddenly becomes work. And neither gives me health benefits.

Both jobs make me feel extraordinarily lucky to have them, because I love them equally and deliriously and I know the scarcity of such good gigs as these and yet both are not without their really terrible parts. I should also say that I am doubly underpaid, albeit in a friendly, compassionate, wish-we-could-do-more way. Both jobs require that I be super organized-- a skill at which I almost always fail miserably, but also require that I bring snacks which fortunately I can handle pretty well with regularity. Each is held together by sheer will as both are crafted in a system of resources that are unsustainable.

Both have the same sense of working in isolation in public, which is to say most of the work gets done alone for a communally-received product. And I think I am supposed to make this look somewhat effortless and create the illusion that neither requires any money.

These jobs deeply immerse me in a community and a politic and a thinking, each of which is almost entirely invisible to the other. This is to say, I never talk about Hiromi Ito at the elementary school playground and I don’t bring my child to readings or often relate how frustrating it is to make dinner for my family at drinks at the bar. Which results in that fact that I always feel sort of liminal in both communities--with one foot in and one foot out.

And I don’t want to be nor do I think I am the kind of parent who would demand that poetic communities change in some fundamental way to accommodate the conversation about what to make for dinner, because I am, I think in league with the other parents in the room, delighted to have an intellectual and communal space that has nothing whatsoever to do with the vast amount of resources it takes to do our jobs as caretakers of our homes. But it is interesting to me how totally nothing whatsoever it feels and what continues to maintain, so ardently, the nothing whatsoever.

Which is partly why, when I decided to return to poetry and pursue my MFA when my son was two years old, I had a conversation with a group of contemporary avant-garde women writers about this intersection of being a parent and a poet and how those angles show up in their writing and community work.

Their answers crafted a surprisingly uncharted map of a place where there are some of us standing with a child on one hip and our poetics on the other and then our bodies somewhere in between. I desperately wanted to hear that being a parent made them more interesting as writers, (sleep deprivation and multi-tasking being the great experiment that it is) or that writing made them better parents, or that both writing and parenting made them better activists. What I most wanted to hear was how great it was but mostly what I heard was an echoing of this invisiblization about what can or can’t be said or presenced about this duality.

And so I think about a somewhat recent conversation I had with Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, both of whom work at the same university, about “class passing.”, which had a little something to do with the idea (and I am super-simplifying of course) that if one read the right books or maybe the New Yorker and/or accidentally went to the right college at peak of its interestingness, it was possible to front as having a greater cultural relevancy than you might have otherwise enjoyed. And about how this fronting shows up a lot in the academy but also a lot in the general poetry world. I found this conversation baffling, and kept returning to it over a
number of days. Class passing, I said to myself. Class passing!

And most of what was so impenetrable to me was finally realizing this is something I would never even consider attempting to do because of its sheer impossibility. That my woefully under-read ignorance and white trash upbringing is writ large all over me, inescapable and permanent. But also, really, that I wouldn’t even want to class pass if I could, because it sounds exhausting. It made me somewhat grateful for my job as an arts administrator for an organization that is housed by a university but is not part of a university and feel love for my friends who work in the academy, whose jobs are hard in many ways not least of which is that they involve such concessions. Hello academy friends! I feel love for you!

But larger than this, this conversation gave me a lot of anxiety. Because now there was a whole new set of considerations outside of those that I already imagined to somehow wrangle the limninal sense of being here and here and there and there. Because more than the duality of my two jobs, I wrestle with the kind of poetry community and poetic I want to live in.

What I am most left with after all this wrangling and thinking about what gets seen or not or registered or not, is that it is enormous privilege to be standing here talking to you today about this. Well-fed and hydrated and safe on a beautiful day in which I am not working.

That while I do feel strongly that art and culture are as necessary a survival tool as food and water to a collective society and an individual personhood, art is not, in fact, food or water.

And as hyperbolic and cliché it is to say that there are people who do not have this privilege to sit here today in this room buzzing with interesting ideas and weak coffee and no threats of bombing on our streets or other attacks on our physical or psychic safety, it is, nevertheless, true. Which is of course not to say that we should all stop writing and give up our jobs or that I am even attempting to coalesce a manifesto. But only to say that for me it is hard sometimes to sit with the privilege of sitting here.

So how does this all relate to my writing? I will say this:

I feel lucky. I feel grateful for this life I never imagined possible. This life full of reading and books and opinions and ideas full of interesting people that I meet through both of my jobs who seem to care what I think and who also have attractive brains that matter to me.

And so when I get the very very rare focused time to sit down to write, which is these days honestly is only when one of you has asked me to do so, I feel responsible to acknowledge this privilege by writing and thinking about people and communities that perhaps don’t enjoy these same luxuries. So the bulk of my writing projects have concerned the people who have been killed on the streets of my town and the people who have been implicated in my country’s decision to use torture as a means of expediency along with the realities and my complicity in this.

And I don’t know exactly what I am trying to reveal or incite by telling you this other than it feels that I have no choice but to do it. To forge some kind of balance and light, however complicated and fraught, on the unseen and seen outside of this paradigm of me and you and us and them.

CEDAR SIGO

Cedar Sigo’s most recent collection of poetry is Stranger In Town (City Lights, 2010). Slivers, a small book of out-takes, B sides, translations, collaborations and prose is forthcoming from PUSH. He lives in San Francisco.


Labor Day Remarks

I have worked in the cosmetics department of Rainbow Grocery Cooperative since 2000. The insurance is excellent covering even acupuncture and massage. My hour wage has climbed steadily since I signed on at around 12.00 an hour plus we split the profits every year around X-mas time. It is run by the workers whom I believe to total around 200. You are encouraged to run for the various committees that make our store run properly, ecology, board of directors, public relations, etc. I am fortunate to have stumbled into a job that provides a many hours as one wishes to work. In order to give my writing the attention and commitment it demands I find that I can't work more than 25 hours a week.

But then the remainder of my time is certainly not spent writing poetry. I began to wonder, just what is it I do with my time. Then I came across these lines from John Wieners essay, The Lanterns Along The Wall, “I cannot imagine a single day when I have not spent dreaming or conjuring certain habits of the poet. Fortunate the few that make things surrounding the poets come true.” You almost need to be “in retreat” in constant “vision quest” to achieve this level of transparency. Wieners seems to suggest that it's the way you live between the poems that ensures there success. When I am off of work the veil is lifted. ISIS unveiled? High Fantasy. I never press myself to report back in poetry. So many conceptual breakthroughs happen through loose conversation with close friends. It's the spectacular side entrance to writing you had for some inexplicable reason been ignoring. You stumble onto these concepts sort of jokingly and you find the poem is waiting there already written.

Bernadette Mayer wrote something along these lines in a lecture she delivered at The Naropa Institute. She is discussing the form of her book Moving, “I set myself the task of not writing as much as possible. Only writing when I absolutely felt compelled, never writing the way most of us do, well I have to write or I haven't written enough or I should write every day, not doing anything like that but only that which seems to come from something other than the self.”

Whenever there is an offer of money for my services as a writer my energy and my abilities seem to rise instantaneously. I don't mean money made from readings, but rather from the writing of new pieces. It's funny but somewhat real to think of it as building a brand, like Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, where a tailored poem like something slight ( a blouse ) goes for three thousand dollars, “and they clock me and watch me diamonds shining looking like I robbed Liberace.” That's been the fun thing about collecting all my unruly works into a book, when they are finally laid side to side I just see dollar signs, to the point that I think I could even write a novel if the money were right. There is a poem by Ted Berrigan & Alice Notley that I had so much fun searching for the other night. I found it in A Certain Slant Of Sunlight, the poem is dated Feb. 20th 1982 , “You'll do good if you play it like your not getting paid, But you'll do it better if the motherfuckers pay you.”

I don't think my line would be as heavily set into each page had I pursued a masters then a teaching position, grading papers, being patient. giving feedback. I think I could teach one course every few years or so. But I never want to get sick of writing by doing a lot of chores that come with making it ones occupation. I worry that it files great poets down into narrow ones.

It finally taken all of this testimony to finally get to the mother lode of my professional history, beauty products. Its like how a good make-up job is the one no one notices. What I am really after is balance. My skin is extremely sensitive and can turn feral, red, and angry at the least provocation . If I didn't work at Rainbow with such access to my favorite products, I would probably look about 5 years older than I do now. As with poetry its not just the products (or the content) it's the order and the timing of the ritual, To wash my body I use Natures Best Vitamin E bar soap its almost all glycerin, I use no cleanser on my face just hot water in the shower, so many cleansers blindly strip out the oils that keep my skin balanced. Every other day (the ones on which I shave) I use 100 percent pure carrot facial scrub. After stepping out of the shower and drying off I use Juice beauty hydrating mist. I spray it directly onto the face, I never drag the cotton ball, again its too dipleating. Onto my hair I spray organic bulgarian rose water for further long lasting conditioning. While the skin is still damp from the mist I mix Abra phytoserum cellular gold into Aubrey organics collagen TCM therapeutic cream moisturizer. The serum gives the moisturizer legs so I never have to think of reapplying. I apply it is slowly in a circular motion careful to leave plenty of the cream still visible on the surface of the skin. I sit around the house for ideally 15 minutes while the moisturizer vanishes into my pores on its own. I return to the mirror and rub in the final excess, mist once more and leave the house. My more occasional treatments include Desert Essence Blemish touch stick, 100 percent pure red wine resveratrol scrub and mask and a green apple stem cell serum.

Most of my co-workers have no idea that I even write poetry or if they do they they think of it as knitting. It's kind of embarrassing having this book come out. Telling someone you're a poet is like saying your religious. You never know what they are thinking privately at that moment. I defend a lot of my recommendations to customers at Rainbow saying, “Im just telling you what works for me.” This whole paper started or I should say I knew that I could write it when I read Robert Creeley's introduction to The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, “What is realized is what has always been, that our words are literally our world, that their permission, what they lead us to, is all we have.” My mind is constantly on language. The possibility of being permitted to do more in the language. I see my job as the means to continue this engagement. The job is really standing around, playing around at a giant vanity, improvising possible remedies for mostly strangers. all the products surrounding me are natural or being disguised as natural. It's really all or nothing. Lately my beauty ritual has been just hot water, my skin has been that balanced.

JASON MORRIS

Jason Morris’s poetry & essays have appeared in TRY!, Jacket, Mirage #4 Period(ical), & elsewhere; Spirits & Anchors was published by Auguste Press in 2010. He lives in San Francisco, where he edits Big Bell & works as a bartender.

Writing about work is like work itself, it leaves me with everything and nothing to say. I work at my job—I’m a bartender—because it’s one of the few that pays the rent and allows me 4 days off a week. I’m definitely not saving anything, but time trumps money and as Ed Abbey says “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” I like to maintain a low overhead.

On a certain level, there’s nothing to it. A trained monkey could make a martini. Then again at times you feel totally exposed. As in writing, anything could happen at any time. Here the description of flying is apt, it can be hours and hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of terror (revelation). Good humor is crucial, but never at the expense of confidence. Mirrors are kept behind bars so the bartender can keep his eyes on the clientele at all times.

In writing I find overstimulation is key. Like that scene in “You’re Gonna Miss Me” where Roky Erikson has 4 TVs going plus the radio all at once. You have to turn everything up to full blast then listen hard for relevant material between the blinds of advertising static & hiss, all while writing with your left hand, out the corner of your eye. Reading Proust with the internet open to a page of criticism on it, with the Giants on KNBR while a notebook is open in front of you.

As at any job, it’s easy to get it twisted & forget the main purpose. Pour whiskey and take money, is how one of my favorite regulars put it. I don’t lift hammers, plant trees, or teach kids. Sometimes I prefer to believe I’m getting everyone high on the music I put on the jukebox. I remind myself priests also work for tips. To tear the fabric of the illusion would always be the only taboo. Often I feel like a zombie, and always when I leave I want to run screaming in the direction of my other life, which I see everyone here in, the healthier life of creative production.

But another thing this same guy said to me: just because you meet someone in a bar doesn’t mean they’re full of shit. It doesn’t, and the artifice of the community at a bar certainly doesn’t change the fact it is a community. Any community has its share of artifice. I want to talk about that difference, the difference between the community at the bar where I work versus this community of poets.

The bar is a community centered entirely around consumption in a weirdly fixed, unchanging atmosphere. As such I see it as the apotheosis of any job in this culture at this point in time. Post-industrial late capitalism, we’re basically all selling one another cheeseburgers in a giant mall. Writing, never mind fighting to keep alive a small press or a little magazine, is to immediately encounter the weight of the resistance this monoculture sets against this other community, the life I run toward when I leave the bar. I inscribe mine, anamorphically, as the boss does.

The ideal community of writers and artists is centered, instead, around wildly varied, densely diverse creative production. A community in which (to quote John Landry) both retention and resistance are built-in. Never too much permanence, & consumption only in aid of production.

Should a day job be like that, inverse, a waking dream? A photographic negative of the creative process? If so is Wallace Stevens the ideal? Is a day job a second skin you shed, something with nothing to do with the writing? Stevens went home from his job as Vice President of the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Insurance Company, shut the door of his study, and wrote “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”

How separate does that paramour—the imagination—remain from the workday? I don’t believe for a second that there’s such a thing as a job in unison with the creative process. In fact I question what’s meant by the idea of “a steady job.”

Then there’s Williams, the pediatrician, who says that the language of his poems comes from the “mouths of Polish mothers.” Things that seem like the liabilities of our public lives prove necessary to our lives offstage. Even in the midst of it, there you are, able to slip back into the real situation.

It’s the same mind that works both jobs, in other words.

You try & stay where the contours of the creative process remain only dimly visible. Turning up the volume way too high, then filtering out the interference. You get up and do the same thing again, sit down to write & each time it’s your first day on the job.