Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
KEVIN KILLIAN
Kevin Killian has worked in the same downtown office since the summer of 1983. He is the author of two volumes of Selected Amazon Reviews and fourteen other books.
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.
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.
GEORGE ALBON
deputized by Stacy Szymaszek, read by Alli Warren
George Albon is a poet and bookseller.
Alli Warren is a poet, administrative assistant, and co-curator for The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand.
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Hyperglossia (Litmus Press, 2009) and the Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC.
In 1961, Robert Duncan was asked to contribute an essay to Journal for the Protection of All Beings, a journal whose name was originally going to be The Protective Association for All Beings. Aiming his essay at the original title, Duncan challenged its assumptions. Privation and adversity, he suggested, weren’t to be avoided at all costs; they may even be engines of creation. Using a Manichean language to comment on the socially well-meaning presumption he heard in the language of the request, he wrote, “I strive to realize the Good, not against the Evil, but in order that there be Good in the Gift as well as Evil.” The journal’s editors were doubtless thinking of protection as leftist concern over the wars of the moment, ideological wars as well as actually deployed ones, and their new atomic face. Going to the root, Duncan saw “protective” as paternalistic at best and state-managerial at worst. What would a “protective association” be if not coercive? Duncan’s devotion to “the orders of a household” may have given him a measure of psychic stability that other poets lacked, but his poverty was as real as anyone else’s. “This writer has no steady resource,” the essay began. “He is as likely to run thin as to leap his channel; he must run his course where he may.” For Duncan, economic insecurity was a hardship that contained aspects of freedom; it pointed toward the opening of the field as much as anything else. Security, on the other hand, was chloroform—it disabled the active imagination from encountering those glimmers in a precious and uncertain life that are its most acute testament. “Wasn’t vulnerability,” he asked, “the very quick of the light?”
Along with checks from home, and with no dependents, Duncan got by as a typist. There were other people, and other ways, to consider the problem. Talking with David Meltzer in 1969, Kenneth Rexroth (an early avatar, like Jack Spicer in his own way, of Pacific Nation) told his young interviewer: “People on the West Coast work.” “People” meant male poets. Poets in the West can make physical labor play their way. Rexroth offered a counter-example in Hart Crane, who “spent all his time fretting about his economic problems, but if he had been a Westerner, he would have gone out and gotten a job in the woods or at sea or something like that, and he would have made a lot of bread. A hell of a lot more bread than he ever did writing advertising copy for candy.” When Rexroth talked about work out West, he was emphasizing outdoor jobs as opposed to white-collar office jobs, but there’s a factor here which is not spoken. The work in the West was seasonal work. Harvesting, summer lookout posts, Merchant Marine tours, non-union dock gigs during high periods—these were ideal for poets who were physically able to do it, because they could make “a lot of bread” and then have stretches of time off for poetry.
As it happened, Rexroth was talking about a seat-of-the-pants personal economy that had worked for canny individuals in the recent past and which gave the promise of crossing over to a present moment of the collective and the tribe. No doubt the Rexroth model worked for some, and was impossible for others. “Seasonal” work is also one season in a life—how long it is sustained will be up to individuals and circumstances. In 1964, five years before Rexroth told his interviewer that “people on the West Coast work,” a symposium was held at the Old Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco, on the subject of “bread and poetry.” Advertised (and maybe organized?) by Lew Welch, the symposium featured Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and himself. The question that night was how to live as a poet. The three poets, who shared much common ground in their poetics, revealed three different temperaments that evening. Snyder, with some trade-in skills under his cap, had the most equanimity. Besides working in forestry and park services, he was also among the first wave of Americans to earn money by teaching “business English” overseas. The Rexroth model par excellence, his self-sufficiency in this context was enviable. Forward-looking, “progressive” in its view of limits, it had one foot in the archaic small society and the other in the federally funded conservation job corps developed in the 20s and 30s. Writing poetry that was often about the process of staying self-sufficient, his approach had some calm in it: “Whatever work I’ve done, whatever job I’ve had, has fed right into my poetry, and it’s all in there.” Whalen, with a physique less suited for physical labor and a poetry requiring endless dredgings of the unseen, has a harder go of things, but “I don’t mind a part-time job ordinarily.” At the time, however, he no longer had his half-day gig washing laboratory glassware at UC, “and it’s a great burden on my nerves. Right now I’m sort of getting by on my pretty face.” A classic Whalen attitude: humor as resilience, giving the Neapolitan razz to hardship.
The most poignant is Welch. The one with the greatest variety of job work under his belt, he’s also the most unstable. Cab-driver, salmon and crab fisherman, post office worker, even a stint in advertising (where, as legend has it, he came up with “Raid Kills Bugs Dead”), his back is to the wall. He’s getting by on “any kind of left-handed job that’s left over, that nobody seems to want.” He was just back in town after a breakdown and an extended stay in a CCC shack near California’s northern border. (CCC shack…Old Longshoreman’s Hall…were the mid-60s the last period when totems of labor history like these still had a living ambience?)
Welch’s quandary—his sense of choices—may be conditioned by alcoholism. But he has a strong pull toward the Poet as Being, rather than just part of being. “While I was growing up my job always seemed to me to be to get myself into the kind of person that would have something interesting and accurate to say about things. And in order to develop into that kind of person, I always found it exciting and interesting to change jobs a lot, to do a lot of different things, and I always like working with my hands—just labor jobs.” Now, at 37, the scene is different. (None of these poets are young. Snyder, the youngest, is 34, and Whalen is 40. And at the time of his essay, Robert Duncan was 42.) Welch’s horizons are shifting, though he would also embrace the tribal consciousness blooming in the Bay Area, and its realignments, in which the Poet was a benefice to the community and thus accorded a living. This was the era when some poets wanted to put “poet” under “occupation” on forms. (I wanted to, too, if I’d been old enough to fill any out.) It’s hard to imagine poets doing this in the present—either it was a silly idea all along, or poets now have a more horizontal view of what they do and don’t choose to privilege the “poet” part. (Or they’ve internalized the skepticism of the clerks.)
These three poets are optimistic, each in his way. Snyder, cohesive and integrated, simply says, “I’ve had no problem at all.” Whalen acknowledges a split between crummy jobs of the past and his vocation “that I had a hard time sewing up but I’ve gradually, I think, fixed it up. It’s all evening out slowly.” Welch wants to forget the bad jobs and embrace the new tribes. “First I have to solve my problem. Without in any way causing a strain on my community, without begging or conning anyone in any way, I will pay my bills entirely by doing my real job, which is Poet.”
These optimisms were healthy personal convictions, part of the bodily optimism of any moment, but in the ambience I can feel the vibration of a particular few decades, a grace period floating inside the mythic boundlessness of the American Sublime.
George Albon is a poet and bookseller.
Alli Warren is a poet, administrative assistant, and co-curator for The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand.
Stacy Szymaszek is the author of Hyperglossia (Litmus Press, 2009) and the Director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in NYC.
In 1961, Robert Duncan was asked to contribute an essay to Journal for the Protection of All Beings, a journal whose name was originally going to be The Protective Association for All Beings. Aiming his essay at the original title, Duncan challenged its assumptions. Privation and adversity, he suggested, weren’t to be avoided at all costs; they may even be engines of creation. Using a Manichean language to comment on the socially well-meaning presumption he heard in the language of the request, he wrote, “I strive to realize the Good, not against the Evil, but in order that there be Good in the Gift as well as Evil.” The journal’s editors were doubtless thinking of protection as leftist concern over the wars of the moment, ideological wars as well as actually deployed ones, and their new atomic face. Going to the root, Duncan saw “protective” as paternalistic at best and state-managerial at worst. What would a “protective association” be if not coercive? Duncan’s devotion to “the orders of a household” may have given him a measure of psychic stability that other poets lacked, but his poverty was as real as anyone else’s. “This writer has no steady resource,” the essay began. “He is as likely to run thin as to leap his channel; he must run his course where he may.” For Duncan, economic insecurity was a hardship that contained aspects of freedom; it pointed toward the opening of the field as much as anything else. Security, on the other hand, was chloroform—it disabled the active imagination from encountering those glimmers in a precious and uncertain life that are its most acute testament. “Wasn’t vulnerability,” he asked, “the very quick of the light?”
Along with checks from home, and with no dependents, Duncan got by as a typist. There were other people, and other ways, to consider the problem. Talking with David Meltzer in 1969, Kenneth Rexroth (an early avatar, like Jack Spicer in his own way, of Pacific Nation) told his young interviewer: “People on the West Coast work.” “People” meant male poets. Poets in the West can make physical labor play their way. Rexroth offered a counter-example in Hart Crane, who “spent all his time fretting about his economic problems, but if he had been a Westerner, he would have gone out and gotten a job in the woods or at sea or something like that, and he would have made a lot of bread. A hell of a lot more bread than he ever did writing advertising copy for candy.” When Rexroth talked about work out West, he was emphasizing outdoor jobs as opposed to white-collar office jobs, but there’s a factor here which is not spoken. The work in the West was seasonal work. Harvesting, summer lookout posts, Merchant Marine tours, non-union dock gigs during high periods—these were ideal for poets who were physically able to do it, because they could make “a lot of bread” and then have stretches of time off for poetry.
As it happened, Rexroth was talking about a seat-of-the-pants personal economy that had worked for canny individuals in the recent past and which gave the promise of crossing over to a present moment of the collective and the tribe. No doubt the Rexroth model worked for some, and was impossible for others. “Seasonal” work is also one season in a life—how long it is sustained will be up to individuals and circumstances. In 1964, five years before Rexroth told his interviewer that “people on the West Coast work,” a symposium was held at the Old Longshoreman’s Hall in San Francisco, on the subject of “bread and poetry.” Advertised (and maybe organized?) by Lew Welch, the symposium featured Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and himself. The question that night was how to live as a poet. The three poets, who shared much common ground in their poetics, revealed three different temperaments that evening. Snyder, with some trade-in skills under his cap, had the most equanimity. Besides working in forestry and park services, he was also among the first wave of Americans to earn money by teaching “business English” overseas. The Rexroth model par excellence, his self-sufficiency in this context was enviable. Forward-looking, “progressive” in its view of limits, it had one foot in the archaic small society and the other in the federally funded conservation job corps developed in the 20s and 30s. Writing poetry that was often about the process of staying self-sufficient, his approach had some calm in it: “Whatever work I’ve done, whatever job I’ve had, has fed right into my poetry, and it’s all in there.” Whalen, with a physique less suited for physical labor and a poetry requiring endless dredgings of the unseen, has a harder go of things, but “I don’t mind a part-time job ordinarily.” At the time, however, he no longer had his half-day gig washing laboratory glassware at UC, “and it’s a great burden on my nerves. Right now I’m sort of getting by on my pretty face.” A classic Whalen attitude: humor as resilience, giving the Neapolitan razz to hardship.
The most poignant is Welch. The one with the greatest variety of job work under his belt, he’s also the most unstable. Cab-driver, salmon and crab fisherman, post office worker, even a stint in advertising (where, as legend has it, he came up with “Raid Kills Bugs Dead”), his back is to the wall. He’s getting by on “any kind of left-handed job that’s left over, that nobody seems to want.” He was just back in town after a breakdown and an extended stay in a CCC shack near California’s northern border. (CCC shack…Old Longshoreman’s Hall…were the mid-60s the last period when totems of labor history like these still had a living ambience?)
Welch’s quandary—his sense of choices—may be conditioned by alcoholism. But he has a strong pull toward the Poet as Being, rather than just part of being. “While I was growing up my job always seemed to me to be to get myself into the kind of person that would have something interesting and accurate to say about things. And in order to develop into that kind of person, I always found it exciting and interesting to change jobs a lot, to do a lot of different things, and I always like working with my hands—just labor jobs.” Now, at 37, the scene is different. (None of these poets are young. Snyder, the youngest, is 34, and Whalen is 40. And at the time of his essay, Robert Duncan was 42.) Welch’s horizons are shifting, though he would also embrace the tribal consciousness blooming in the Bay Area, and its realignments, in which the Poet was a benefice to the community and thus accorded a living. This was the era when some poets wanted to put “poet” under “occupation” on forms. (I wanted to, too, if I’d been old enough to fill any out.) It’s hard to imagine poets doing this in the present—either it was a silly idea all along, or poets now have a more horizontal view of what they do and don’t choose to privilege the “poet” part. (Or they’ve internalized the skepticism of the clerks.)
These three poets are optimistic, each in his way. Snyder, cohesive and integrated, simply says, “I’ve had no problem at all.” Whalen acknowledges a split between crummy jobs of the past and his vocation “that I had a hard time sewing up but I’ve gradually, I think, fixed it up. It’s all evening out slowly.” Welch wants to forget the bad jobs and embrace the new tribes. “First I have to solve my problem. Without in any way causing a strain on my community, without begging or conning anyone in any way, I will pay my bills entirely by doing my real job, which is Poet.”
These optimisms were healthy personal convictions, part of the bodily optimism of any moment, but in the ambience I can feel the vibration of a particular few decades, a grace period floating inside the mythic boundlessness of the American Sublime.
SARA LARSEN
Sara Larsen is a poet who has worked as a bar waitress, grocery check-out girl, record store clerk, clothing retailer "personal stylist", office receptionist and, most currently, as an executive assistant.
1.
every day i travel between the poles of commodity.
the BART train i ride to my executive assistant job in the city travels underground between the two money centers of oakland and san francisco - that is, the port of oakland and the san francisco financial district. at these locations twice a day, every weekday, i disappear underground and underwater and reappear in two distinctly different spaces of capitalism: from the fourth largest container port in the US, where all of our goods ship in and ship out for distribution in the global maze, to the financial power center of our major cosmopolis. under the bay, under the approximately 15 feet of salt water and fish and crustaceans, as well as pollutants and oil and trash, shooting through a semi-lit tube, i flicker in and out of monetized culture (yet still permeably abreast of ipads, ipods, iphones, kindles, blackberries, etc), on my way to work.
2.
over dinner one night recently, i asked david if he knew of any good books on the subject of vocation. although david said that he wondered the same thing before, really, he said, to his knowledge, there aren't any.
vocation is a religious word at it's core, vocat in latin "to be called". in greek, the term kletos means "calling", and is related to "ekklesia", meaning to be called out from the crowd and into the body of the church.
3.
i tend to experience poetry as a vocation. it is a calling that i must answer. it is not related to goods or services, and it's certainly not related to paying my bills. it is not related to possession. it simply MUST HAPPEN.
in our conversation about vocation, david pointed out something obvious about it, and yet something that i hadn't really given much thought to: that the calling - in this case, poetry, if we accept it as a calling - begs the question: who or what calls?
4.
this is not the case in employed life. i'm am not called to show up in front of a bunch of emails and meetings everyday. not at all. but, as a friend related that ezra pound once said, and this is somewhat out of context, "a poets gotta eat".
i decided a long time ago that i never wanted to function as a poet with a capital "P" in an institution, that this would be problematic for both my work and my disposition. i've always preferred my poetic work to take place in what i fancifully imagined could be a radical space, outside and against the hypocrisy, demands and expectations of dominant culture. for the sake of time, i will take for granted that most people in this room can imagine, and doubtless have experienced, the many things i'm referring to here when i talk about the hypocrisy, demands and expectations of dominant culture.
hence, up to this point in my life, i've always taken to a personal philosophy that dictates that the work that i do for a living, which i considered for a while as "unrelated" to my writing, would be secondary to the work that i do as a poet and culture worker.
employed labor, after all, is most often dominated by a strict hierarchy in which, admittedly, one can find moments of permeability (the WIG is one of them). most of us in employed labor have a "boss" that we answer to, most of us must dress, act and manipulate perceptions in order to stay employed. employed labor is often not creative or innovative, it's about following basic social and institutional rules.
the majority of us aren't employed in a "community", whatever multiple definitions or problems that word may connote, and the majority of us, unfortunately, are not working as part of a cooperative. the majority of us work in institutions and/or corporations.
despite my employ in an institution, that labor i must enact in order to feed, shelter, and clothe myself, to go out to dinner, to have drinks after this event, to dye my hair, to enjoy a cup of coffee with my book on weekend mornings - despite my employ in an institution, i can still say FIRMLY, i despise institutions and especially corporations, in general, and absolutely prefer the communal radicality of whatever it is that a subculture community makes.
to be a poet in our culture is to do work, which many of us often refer to as our "second job", and that work is done "underground". i think of this when i am literally underground and underwater, transtubing between the port of oakland and the san francisco financial district.
5.
ekklesia: i know that what i am part of here is an ekklessia, a calling out from the crowd and into the poetic body. the poetic body includes the poem itself, but it also includes this room, what we all, with multiple addendums, call "The Community". although i agree that it's important to do so, i'm not going to spend time right now interrogating what the permeable borders of community means…we will do this together later, i'm sure, as we have in the past…i just want to say, there is a body here, a communal body, and in addition to the lone, private work of much writing, and in contrast to the necessity of employed labor, i feel called to it.
5.
i find my work life and my writing life in a subtle yet overwhelming dialectic. this dialectic reigns over my waking life, and sometimes in my dreams as well.
i mentioned that there was a time when i considered the work that i do for a living as secondary and separate to the work that i do as a poet and culture worker. now i can see that is not the case, that it is never the case. 40 hours a week at a business desk is 40 hours a week of consciousness. 10 hours a week commuting is 10 hours a week of jostling my solo interrogation into the body of this poetic ekkessia with the bodies of commerce, the bodies of poverty, the bodies of necessity, and the very real, tender bodies of everyone around me.
7.
on a daily basis, i ride through that dark tunnel between the port of oakland and the san francisco financial district. i disappear there for approximately 4 minutes. this is poetry. the motion through the interstice, the underground, the dislocated place.
ANDREW JORON
Andrew Joron’s most recent book is Trance Archive: New and Selected Poems (City Lights, 2010). He makes his living as a proofreader and indexer.
In response to a request for Joron's text version of his Labor Day presentation:
Thanks for asking about the text of my Labor Day talk. Alas, I spoke using only some hastily scribbled notes which I then discarded. So the recording is all that remains of my contribution!
Best wishes & best of luck with this worthwhile project --
Andrew
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.
BRANDON BROWN
Brandon Brown has a day job, publishes small press chapbooks, blogs for the SFMOMA, and writes poetry.
STEVEN FARMER
Steven Farmer has published six poetry books to date, most recently Medieval and Glowball. He's been in the workforce since childhood; with extensive years in the restaurant business and a decade or so in the IT world.
Inside the Outside (on Lablor Day 2010)
Thanks to the Fab Five who curated this event: Suzanne Stein, Alli Warren, Brandon Brown, David Brazil, and Sarah Larsen. It’s inspiring that the younger generation of the current Bay Area poetry scene has come up with such an important and salient topic. I chose to simply answer some of the general outline questions sent to us, so you’ll hear four responses.
1. How does your employment life relate to poetic form in your own work, or in poetic work generally?
It seems to me we're invisible as workers in poetry circles, and invisible as poets in workplace circles. I've done many years of both blue collar (a line cook, a chef) and white collar (IT) work. They engender different inputs/outputs to the writing. It's pretty amazing what I've learned in both silos. I have to remind myself to be grateful, but I'm often too tired to do so.
Of the two, blue collar work offers a cleaner body/mind break, but you're physically exhausted after work. White collar is more blurry, because the mental work stays with you longer, and complex business problem solving doesn't always work on a watch. The break is not as clean, and it's hard to sit in front of a computer and write after spending 8-12 hours doing so during the workday.
I tend to think of tactical and social relations in blue collar work, and of hierarchical relations in white collar work. By tactical I mean the rewarding feeling of executing a skill repeatedly under pressure, getting better at it over time; or the way workers interact in a team setting, the culture they come from, etc. By hierarchical I mean structural relations of power, modalities of communication, alienation, etc. These things cross-pollinate the content of my writing.
To clarify, I should mention the two professions I've worked in require at minimum 50 hr work weeks, and often more. 70+ hours when the need arises. This is not uncommon in salaried positions of what was once described as the middle class but what is now I'm hearing called simply, 'the multitudes'.* There is nothing middle about it.
2. How do you navigate your employment life and poetic life energetically?
Because of the excessive weekly hours dedicated to the job, and then kids, animals, etc., the writing time has to be economical-- a minimal time investment with a maximal return. My method is (has become) to carry around a small notebook for random content to put into predefined buckets (poems-to-be), and then spend one night a week in intense writing mode, which sometimes spills over into the weekend a little. I do this on Friday nights. Over the years it was hard to get used to setting a specific weekly timeframe, but it can work. The ritual involves working at the computer, mostly in the living room with a pile of books I've been reading, my notebooks, maybe a baseball game on the TV, my wife and daughter doing whatever they're doing, the dogs running around, the internet open, and earplugs keeping the noise at a minimum. It seems I've come to want life buzzing around me, to be connected when I write. Other times I do the same but in solitude. But whether alone or in company, Friday evenings bring a transfer of energy that is brought into the writing from leaving work-- sort of a liberation of identity and mind. At the same time it brings content/baggage/frustrations/insights from work with it into the writing, still fresh in the mind and ripe for re-framing.
This method fits the specification I've come to adopt in my practical structuring of my books. Generally I don't write poems, I write books. I write titles first, and then fill in the poems like buckets as I go. I write and rewrite a table of contents (really a table of titles). The notebooks, the internet, the environment around me then lends itself to one bucket or another, which will be the bucket I work on that evening. The buckets then take on a life of their own.
It seems my years of over-employment has something to do with this method, as if this "catch-all" bucketing method was subconsciously adopted to optimize the scarce timeframes available to write. At any rate, it works for me; it's my compromise with capital's demand on my time.
3. Can you comment on the particularity of our struggle to “do two jobs,” that is, make artworks and earn a wage to support ourselves?
I'll answer this in two parts. First, I'll say this: I have not resolved this struggle. As a result, my relationship with work is often unhealthy. I've made it unbalanced. I approach it too often like I'm a victim, and I can sometimes bring an overwhelming negativity to it.
• Writers don't know this side of me.
• Workers don't know this side of me.
• My family does know this side of me, unfortunately (and I often work from home).
I am however working on my mental habits and approach. I want to temper my victimhood; I'm responsible for my decisions. Regardless of the struggle, I think the unaffiliated should work to become more than just a contingent of whiners.
Secondly, there's a big difference if you have children-- you just doubled or tripled the stakes. The amount of money you'll need to make, and demands on writing time will increase. So the question shifts a bit-- we are earning a wage not "to do two jobs," but three.
I started to say most poets aren't breeders, but then I checked myself. Poets do breed. They breed in the academy. "Steve Farmer the poet" was born in the academy. Without it, he's just a worker with a hobby.
4. The stance of the institutionally unaffiliated artist or intellectual in relation to the academy**
This could end up being a bitch-fest, a cesspool of duality, exclusion, victimization, and blaming. Let's get started!
I think the unaffiliated feel left out of the conversation a lot. I think they think the affiliated have an unfair advantage over them in terms of readership. I think they wish they could also teach on the side occasionally (-- become affiliated?), regardless of compensation, without it being a job. And of course, they're jealous of those 3 months off every year.
I have a lot of friends and acquaintances who teach, but I don't. What's the connection? In a review of one of my books years ago, Edmund Berrigan talked about how I bring the insider/outsider perspective into my work. He never really specified inside and outside of what, but inherently as readers we knew he was referring to 'the life of an artist' vs. well, everything else. The culture at large. But we don't want to say so. We don't want to be identified as spies. Or do we? I'm a spy, and I work for both sides. In the US, it seems the "life of the poet" has increasingly become "the life of the teacher" It's what poets do, so, the inside = the academy, the outside = not.
The unaffiliated. The working unaffiliated. What does this mean in terms of readership? In terms of community? Can an unaffiliated poet even imagine being asked to a residency as a visiting artist-- if even for a week? How about just dropping into a class and talking for a day? What if they did it for free? Are writers-in-residence only of value to students if they are already on the inside track, already teaching? Already "qualified"? Why do author bios read like resumes-- or is that too obvious a question?
Inside the outside, and vice versa; the borderline, rich with conflict/ contradictions/ content.
*
The academy produces poets; restaurants, offices, and factories do not. To be clear, I could have ended up in the academy, and would have if it made sense. It was the choices I made as a young parent and breadwinner that kept me out, for starters. Traveling assistant adjunct English professor in a recession didn't sound very practical to me at the time. I started writing poetry in college; college changed my life. I went in a cook, musician, and sketcher/artist of sorts; I came out a poet, no turning back. Many of us here have a similar story. If your family of orientation didn't value or know much of anything about art, the stronger your passion grew. You moved to a city where the poets were. You weren't kidding around. As Louis Cabri might say, you started writing to save your life.
Thinking about it a minute, when the door closed on my formal education, it closed pretty hard. In my case (of over thirty years of a writing life), I've been invited to participate in one conference. Meanwhile, I've heard of and watched many of them go by-- some of them addressing points important to me. To the younger writers present here-- is that what you want for yourselves?
So there are possible grievances; not against our peers, but systems. Grievances unaddressed can lead to a festering and negative imagination. But to many on the outside; the advantages the academy has for an increased readership and platform can seem (to the unaffiliated) almost staggering.
But there are signs of hope***. I would like to imagine a space where unaffiliated and affiliated could co-mingle, come and go at will, something more organic. But it shouldn't be just outside the academy; I would ask our peers in the academy to reach out in a real way to these communities, and pull them in to speak to the people who matter quite a bit in this regard: the students. It is they who will make certain decisions in their labor life that will impact their writing life (more than they think) going forward.
Thanks.
__________________________________
[*] The multitudes: To paraphrase very roughly, a globalist notion (often attributed to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire) that stresses (among other things) how we are all taken advantage of regardless of class or position (the doctor and lawyer, the line cook and bus driver equally in this sense); our time is stolen regardless of the material or immaterial nature of our labor, and the very fabric of our thoughts and inner values come to mirror what is best for capital, and most often, against our own interests.
[**] I'd like to comment here on some feedback I received from a friend after this talk, regarding my use of the term “the academy”. While we should make a distinction between tenure-track teachers and adjuncts (who work for less pay and job security, and for the most part no health insurance), the points I'm making regarding influence on students and (to some extent) syllabus control still hold true for both. I don't think 18-20 yr old students make a distinction between the two job positions and rank; I know I didn't when I was a student. Still, an apology to any adjuncts who may have been offended by my remarks; they weren't intended to be insensitive to any financial struggles that may result from a pursuit of the vocation.
[***] The internet has exposed large DIY communities all across the states, and social networking sites have helped this immensely. Locally in Oakland, the reading series at 21 Grand, Artifact, and Studio One are far more than series. The many crowded house readings at the Doll House and the Brazil/Larsen compound, as well as community organs like Try magazine, and the Non-Site collective in San Francisco.
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