Thanks to our amazing respondents this month, and as always to you for your solidarity!
JULY AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT
We're so pleased to announce that responses from Kit Robinson, Brian Kim Stefans, and M.C. Adams with Camille Roy are now posted on the blog. To download a pdf of all three, please click here. If you'd like to join our email list, please write to labday2010@gmail.com to receive a monthly notice when new content is posted to the blog. Finally, if you've got a more extended set of thoughts than fits in a comment box, please feel free to send those along any time.
Thanks to our amazing respondents this month, and as always to you for your solidarity!
Thanks to our amazing respondents this month, and as always to you for your solidarity!
M.C. ADAMS W/ CAMILLE ROY
M.C. Adams has worked in the software industry since 1985. Her employers have included Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and a number of start ups. She has extensive background in languages, compilers, grammars, translators and other software development tools. She is the founder of Beelucid Software.
Camille Roy is a writer and performer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her latest book is a collection of poems and prose called Sherwood Forest. It is published by Futurepoem.
Landslide Brought It Down
A ground level view of the American economy
by M.C. Adams with Camille Roy
I'll start by going back to the spring of 2003. I was walking down an apartment building hallway towards the door of a technology startup called Friendware. I had a feeling of assurance. Behind that door I believed lay my next job. Despite the fact that none of 35 mid-career professionals in my recently completed Advanced Java class had gotten a job, I believed I would get this one.
I was right. The glib follow up would be, It went downhill from there. But getting the job was a little bump on a downhill slide which was already in progress. Just days before, another member of my class had taken me aside and whispered that at the thriving small company where she had worked for 15 years, business had just evaporated. Gone. She was laid off and her prospects were dismal.
So I opened the door to Jack Porterfield's apartment for the interview knowing that some sort of economic turn had started. I was unsettled, but more curious than afraid. I had no clue that the way events would ultimately shake out would shock me to my shoes.
Jack had a recently issued patent and high hopes for a new product based on it. My assignment for him was a side project which was supposed to earn operating income as he crafted the first release of a technology that he had been working on (with breaks) for probably seven years.
At first there was just one other employee (a secretary, whom I'll call Stephanie) and we worked in his apartment which was high on the northern side of a building on Broadway. It was furnished in basic startup style: Office Depot tables, a dirty wall to wall carpet, workstations. But it had a view that swept from the Golden Gate to the East Bay hills. Given that it was a job, I had some perfect hours there. Sea breezes flowed through the room and I could look up from my desk and watch sail boats leaning with the wind. The air over the Golden Gate held an intense yellow sparkle of sunlight reflected from the water. One day a window in the adjoining elegant art deco building was open and for hours a large filmy curtain undulated in the wind.
As it was Jack's apartment and he was the boss, we settled into his rhythm – insights and plans, laced with jokes. “Excuse me if I'm yanking your chain...” he'd begin. One day I was working on an awkward technical corner case when a chat from a sex worker popped up on my screen. 'Hey Jack sweetie call me...' etc. Jack saw this and told me flatly that he loved prostitutes. I felt apprehensive. Was this the sort of boss confession that would lead to unwelcome asides or even advances on female staff? No - Jack was too cool for that. He just liked prostitutes. He had a little engine of liking that filled the office. He loved his ex-girlfriends (who called frequently) and his many friends and talked story about all of them.
Do you want to picture Jack? He was rotund. Fleshy and pale, with dark hair, thinning on top. About my height and age. His grin was easy and made his lower lip stick out. He was from New York. Strong accent. In his younger skinnier days, he went to the same dance club I did, back in the 80's (the I-Beam).
Some interesting things about Jack: he had written a couple of novels. He was one of the first 20 hires at a major tech corporation (Sun Microsystems) and he walked out of that job with stock options that at their maximum were worth 100 million dollars. (Sob story: he didn't cash in anywhere near that.) He was also part of another company that had gone public. As these things are scored in Silicon Valley, this was an excellent show. To start off his career he had gotten the highest score in the country on the computer science GRE. And he'd earned a Ph.D when he was only 21.
For most tech entrepreneurs, there are at least a few bright flashing indicators of techno genius. Jack was only unusual in that he told us about them. How gabby he was!
But a boss is not a friend. He paid me a third of what I'd made only a year before. A third! When I argued with him, it seemed there just wasn't any more money. It was that or no job.
And, along the way, there were more signs of economic disintegration.
Camille Roy is a writer and performer of fiction, poetry, and plays. Her latest book is a collection of poems and prose called Sherwood Forest. It is published by Futurepoem.
Landslide Brought It Down
A ground level view of the American economy
by M.C. Adams with Camille Roy
I'll start by going back to the spring of 2003. I was walking down an apartment building hallway towards the door of a technology startup called Friendware. I had a feeling of assurance. Behind that door I believed lay my next job. Despite the fact that none of 35 mid-career professionals in my recently completed Advanced Java class had gotten a job, I believed I would get this one.
I was right. The glib follow up would be, It went downhill from there. But getting the job was a little bump on a downhill slide which was already in progress. Just days before, another member of my class had taken me aside and whispered that at the thriving small company where she had worked for 15 years, business had just evaporated. Gone. She was laid off and her prospects were dismal.
So I opened the door to Jack Porterfield's apartment for the interview knowing that some sort of economic turn had started. I was unsettled, but more curious than afraid. I had no clue that the way events would ultimately shake out would shock me to my shoes.
Jack had a recently issued patent and high hopes for a new product based on it. My assignment for him was a side project which was supposed to earn operating income as he crafted the first release of a technology that he had been working on (with breaks) for probably seven years.
At first there was just one other employee (a secretary, whom I'll call Stephanie) and we worked in his apartment which was high on the northern side of a building on Broadway. It was furnished in basic startup style: Office Depot tables, a dirty wall to wall carpet, workstations. But it had a view that swept from the Golden Gate to the East Bay hills. Given that it was a job, I had some perfect hours there. Sea breezes flowed through the room and I could look up from my desk and watch sail boats leaning with the wind. The air over the Golden Gate held an intense yellow sparkle of sunlight reflected from the water. One day a window in the adjoining elegant art deco building was open and for hours a large filmy curtain undulated in the wind.
As it was Jack's apartment and he was the boss, we settled into his rhythm – insights and plans, laced with jokes. “Excuse me if I'm yanking your chain...” he'd begin. One day I was working on an awkward technical corner case when a chat from a sex worker popped up on my screen. 'Hey Jack sweetie call me...' etc. Jack saw this and told me flatly that he loved prostitutes. I felt apprehensive. Was this the sort of boss confession that would lead to unwelcome asides or even advances on female staff? No - Jack was too cool for that. He just liked prostitutes. He had a little engine of liking that filled the office. He loved his ex-girlfriends (who called frequently) and his many friends and talked story about all of them.
Do you want to picture Jack? He was rotund. Fleshy and pale, with dark hair, thinning on top. About my height and age. His grin was easy and made his lower lip stick out. He was from New York. Strong accent. In his younger skinnier days, he went to the same dance club I did, back in the 80's (the I-Beam).
Some interesting things about Jack: he had written a couple of novels. He was one of the first 20 hires at a major tech corporation (Sun Microsystems) and he walked out of that job with stock options that at their maximum were worth 100 million dollars. (Sob story: he didn't cash in anywhere near that.) He was also part of another company that had gone public. As these things are scored in Silicon Valley, this was an excellent show. To start off his career he had gotten the highest score in the country on the computer science GRE. And he'd earned a Ph.D when he was only 21.
For most tech entrepreneurs, there are at least a few bright flashing indicators of techno genius. Jack was only unusual in that he told us about them. How gabby he was!
But a boss is not a friend. He paid me a third of what I'd made only a year before. A third! When I argued with him, it seemed there just wasn't any more money. It was that or no job.
And, along the way, there were more signs of economic disintegration.
KIT ROBINSON
Kit Robinson worked as a cab driver, teacher’s aide, mail clerk, poet-in-the-schools, legal proofreader and jury trial reporter before beginning a three-decade career as a corporate communications professional. He is the author of Determination (Cuneiform, 2010), The Messianic Trees: Selected Poems, 1976-2003 (Adventures in Poetry, 2009) and 18 other books of poetry. He lives in Berkeley, where he works as a freelance writer and plays Cuban tres guitar in the Latin dance band Bahía Son.
Get a Job
The question of the employment of the poet has interested me almost from the beginning. My “Taxicab Diaries,” from the summer of 1971 in Boston, was the first thing I had published in Barrett Watten’s This magazine. My serial poem “The Dolch Stanzas” was written in 1974 while I was working as a paraprofessional teacher’s aide at a San Francisco elementary school. Like work of mine to come, “Dolch” made use of the material of the workplace, in this case the Dolch Basic Sight Word List.
A few years later I wrote “Casual Blues” while working as a seasonal clerk at the Oakland Bulk Mail Center. This longish poem was built from stanzas depicting the production floor, written during breaks or while hiding near a window with views of the container port landscape outside. In my spontaneous recording of sense data in real time I was somewhat influenced by Larry Eigner. But I added a programmatic layering effect. Based on each written stanza, new material was generated using a “diagonal” reading technique – first word first line, second word second line, etc. – to form new second- and third-generation stanzas. From these materials the final poem was constructed.
In the 1980s, when I entered the computer industry, the material of the workplace, its language as well as its (other) social formulations, became regular components of my writing practice.
In some ways all of these uses of jobs in the service of writing were perhaps a way of answering a larger questions: how does a poet deal with having to get a job?
Charles Olson: Poet, get a job!
Ted Berrigan: Good Friday you die on the cross, and Easter Sunday you rise from the dead and everything is glorious and wonderful, and then Easter Monday you have to go out and get this job.
I recently became a practicing musician for the first time since my student and post-grad slacker days when music was a form of daily life. My music community today reminds me of the various groups of guys I knew in the 80s and 90s through basketball. Both groups cut across age, race and class lines, with people from all walks of life, as the saying goes, with the added benefit that many of my new music friends are women. In my band Bahía Son we have a jeweler, a teacher, a scientist, a business person, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a postal manager, a retired administrator and a freelance writer.
Of course, despite the occasional gig we are not professional musicians. The pros live by gigging, touring and teaching, in various proportion. But even many professional musicians also have day jobs. Hence the expression, “Don’t quit your….”
For my musician friends, a symposium on music and jobs would be inconceivable. The time would be better spent on practice. But for poets it seems an unavoidable question. Why?
I think it is because, deep down, we poets resent having to do anything but write. Isn’t that enough?
I read recently that Bob Dylan’s life was transformed at age 14 when he heard Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train.” “When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss,” Dylan is quoted as saying.
Ted Greenwald: I be my own boss
But there is another reason for our fascination with jobs, and it has to do with the teaching profession. The evolution of university creative writing and literature departments has created a poetry industry in which the poet can have a viable career and, assuming obligations to teaching, administrative duties, conference participation and publication, even be financially rewarded for her work. The job also comes with some down sides, not least of which is the current conservative assault on liberal education at every level. But to those of us who toil outside the academy, a profession that valorizes poetry, even with lip service, looks pretty attractive compared to those in which it can only represent a conflict, or at best a colorful sidelight.
At the same time, we are aware of distinct advantages for us as writers to remain outside the academy. Otherwise, how could we accept having to work so hard to avoid it, right?
But what then? Some stick to their guns. These are the pure poets. The more heroic pay the price of poverty to uphold the honor of the poet’s art. More power to them! Others depend on spouses or family money. Nothing wrong with that.
For the rest of us, well, we’re no worse off than the amateur musician. We have our opportunities for la perruque, and then there are the pleasures of labor itself, which are not inconsiderable if you are able to do something well. Most work involves helping others in some way, if only others like oneself who are similarly engaged in the dynamics of the workplace.
Poetry helps no one. Least of all ourselves. We pursue it anyway, and this anyway is our bread and butter. It propels us on our way, forward into the mouth of time and finally down the gorge of history. It’s nice work if you can get it.
Get a Job
The question of the employment of the poet has interested me almost from the beginning. My “Taxicab Diaries,” from the summer of 1971 in Boston, was the first thing I had published in Barrett Watten’s This magazine. My serial poem “The Dolch Stanzas” was written in 1974 while I was working as a paraprofessional teacher’s aide at a San Francisco elementary school. Like work of mine to come, “Dolch” made use of the material of the workplace, in this case the Dolch Basic Sight Word List.
A few years later I wrote “Casual Blues” while working as a seasonal clerk at the Oakland Bulk Mail Center. This longish poem was built from stanzas depicting the production floor, written during breaks or while hiding near a window with views of the container port landscape outside. In my spontaneous recording of sense data in real time I was somewhat influenced by Larry Eigner. But I added a programmatic layering effect. Based on each written stanza, new material was generated using a “diagonal” reading technique – first word first line, second word second line, etc. – to form new second- and third-generation stanzas. From these materials the final poem was constructed.
In the 1980s, when I entered the computer industry, the material of the workplace, its language as well as its (other) social formulations, became regular components of my writing practice.
In some ways all of these uses of jobs in the service of writing were perhaps a way of answering a larger questions: how does a poet deal with having to get a job?
Charles Olson: Poet, get a job!
Ted Berrigan: Good Friday you die on the cross, and Easter Sunday you rise from the dead and everything is glorious and wonderful, and then Easter Monday you have to go out and get this job.
I recently became a practicing musician for the first time since my student and post-grad slacker days when music was a form of daily life. My music community today reminds me of the various groups of guys I knew in the 80s and 90s through basketball. Both groups cut across age, race and class lines, with people from all walks of life, as the saying goes, with the added benefit that many of my new music friends are women. In my band Bahía Son we have a jeweler, a teacher, a scientist, a business person, a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a postal manager, a retired administrator and a freelance writer.
Of course, despite the occasional gig we are not professional musicians. The pros live by gigging, touring and teaching, in various proportion. But even many professional musicians also have day jobs. Hence the expression, “Don’t quit your….”
For my musician friends, a symposium on music and jobs would be inconceivable. The time would be better spent on practice. But for poets it seems an unavoidable question. Why?
I think it is because, deep down, we poets resent having to do anything but write. Isn’t that enough?
I read recently that Bob Dylan’s life was transformed at age 14 when he heard Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train.” “When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss,” Dylan is quoted as saying.
Ted Greenwald: I be my own boss
But there is another reason for our fascination with jobs, and it has to do with the teaching profession. The evolution of university creative writing and literature departments has created a poetry industry in which the poet can have a viable career and, assuming obligations to teaching, administrative duties, conference participation and publication, even be financially rewarded for her work. The job also comes with some down sides, not least of which is the current conservative assault on liberal education at every level. But to those of us who toil outside the academy, a profession that valorizes poetry, even with lip service, looks pretty attractive compared to those in which it can only represent a conflict, or at best a colorful sidelight.
At the same time, we are aware of distinct advantages for us as writers to remain outside the academy. Otherwise, how could we accept having to work so hard to avoid it, right?
But what then? Some stick to their guns. These are the pure poets. The more heroic pay the price of poverty to uphold the honor of the poet’s art. More power to them! Others depend on spouses or family money. Nothing wrong with that.
For the rest of us, well, we’re no worse off than the amateur musician. We have our opportunities for la perruque, and then there are the pleasures of labor itself, which are not inconsiderable if you are able to do something well. Most work involves helping others in some way, if only others like oneself who are similarly engaged in the dynamics of the workplace.
Poetry helps no one. Least of all ourselves. We pursue it anyway, and this anyway is our bread and butter. It propels us on our way, forward into the mouth of time and finally down the gorge of history. It’s nice work if you can get it.
BRIAN KIM STEFANS
Brian Kim Stefans worked as a pizza maker and line chef in college, in the warehouse at the Strand Bookstore, as an administrative assistant at the Hair Club for Men, in telecommunications at MoMA, and from then on (after a stint as a graduate student), at a hodgepodge of administrative and temp jobs until landing at Fodor's Travel, where he worked as a database administrator on what would have become (if we knew what we were doing) the predecessor to Google Maps (ha!). He then became the web editor/programmer at the CUNY Graduate School, a part-time job with benefits, where he worked for seven years. After receiving his MFA in digital literature at Brown, he worked as an assistant professor of English/New Media at Stockton College, a state liberal arts college in south Jersey. Presently he is an assistant professor of English at UCLA. Information about his books, videos, programs, graphic design and whatnot can be found at www.arras.net.
My attitudes toward work are probably most shaped by my diabetes, which has not enabled me to live without healthcare. I’ve never been an adjunct teacher, a freelance web designer (at least full-time), etc., and have generally relied, prior to my job as a professor, on a regular daily schedule to help me keep my health in order. On a more philosophical level, I’ve never wanted to be dependent, or beholden to, anything like a grants or awards system, largely because it seemed to me, after the controversies of the 80s around such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley, that it made much sense to rely on the opinions of judges, especially those associated with the government, to finance your work. Of course, there isn’t much of a grant system for poets anyway, but I tend not to apply for grants for any of the other artistic activities I engaged in.
My first job out of college was at the Strand bookstore. I then became part of the illustrious generation of Bard graduates to get a salaried job at the Hair Club for Men. It was there that I learned word processing, how to create spreadsheets (in something called Lotus 1-2-3) and work with a database. These skills gave me some mobility; I eventually got a job at the MoMA working in the telecommunications department in the basement, which was a great thrill for this O’Hara nut. I then attended a Ph.D. program in English at the CUNY Grad Center and moved back to New Jersey, but left it when I realized that it was largely training for professorships (and not a revolutionary intellectual hotbed which I guess I was seeking). In the late 90s, the internet was just rising – I was meeting folks with liberal arts degrees like my own who were earning what seemed like lots of money programming HTML. Since I had programmed computers since I was 10, I tried to learn C++ and Java and whatever else was out there with the hope of making some money, and also exploiting these new technologies for art.
My general advice for poets in New York is to get some desk job that you can learn very quickly so that, after a few months, you are able to do your own thing on the boss’s time. The other bit of advice is to keep learning new things, especially technological, as the skills are very general but applicable in many places. Maybe it’s my diabetes, or a conservative strand in my sense of the “daily,” but I don’t think a 9-5 job, with its melancholy pedestrian rituals, is that bad, especially in a great place like New York. It seems to me a little dangerous to have a truly fulfilling job, or even “career,” while you are trying to develop as a poet. I was never very creative or ambitious in my job choices when I was younger, and I think that kept me quite free to exercise my creativity elsewhere. As you get older, of course, things change: your youthful excitement at finally being out of school, finally being a practicing artist, meeting tons of new people and generally dreaming about your great literary future gives way to the reality of friends moving away, other friends moving up the economic scale, family dying, the economics of your city pricing you out, your own work getting lost amidst the constant influx of younger, more ambitious and more hip, artists, the possibility of getting too old to learn new skills, etc. What you do for work then acquires some greater spiritual importance.
I’m in the position right now of having a job that is really great. I’m teaching digital literature, new media theory and poetry at UCLA. I don’t think of my teaching as a “vocation” in the way one who had trained to be a professor might, so I didn’t go into it with any more desire than not to screw up, and to make it as interesting for myself and students as possible. Now that I’ve been at UCLA for two and half years, I’m quite eager to make the intellectual and artistic community there, and in Los Angeles at large, a place that continues to attract outside writers and artists. I’m still trying to teach myself new tricks, often in the service of my teaching and art, but also simply to have a back-up plan. I always had a lingering fear that the bottom could drop out at any second. Many in my family are presently unemployed, including siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and I’m in the rare position of being the guy with the steady job after so many years of waywardness. I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve not, this far along, ever really been able to help out except to offer a spare bedroom on occasion.
I don’t have any terribly philosophical insights into what it means to be a poet in the academy, or what it means to be a poet who works or doesn’t work. I’m from a pretty working class background, not to mention an immigrant background, so whether or not to put in your hours was not something you had the luxury to think about (and culturally, it was considered noxious). I spent a lot of time at a very crappy job in New York because I was too depressed and uninspired to send out resumes – depression is a greater enemy to me than work! – so I don’t recommend that, but having the basic stabilities, along with good friendships, should be quite amendable to writing poetry. I felt quite claustrophobic in suburban New Jersey when I was a lad, so have made it a habit to disappear into imaginative enterprises which, if anything, were intended to take me elsewhere; I supposed preparing for this sudden leap into a transformed future has also kept me on the look-out for something new to learn in case the present just collapses. That’s about it.
My attitudes toward work are probably most shaped by my diabetes, which has not enabled me to live without healthcare. I’ve never been an adjunct teacher, a freelance web designer (at least full-time), etc., and have generally relied, prior to my job as a professor, on a regular daily schedule to help me keep my health in order. On a more philosophical level, I’ve never wanted to be dependent, or beholden to, anything like a grants or awards system, largely because it seemed to me, after the controversies of the 80s around such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Karen Finley, that it made much sense to rely on the opinions of judges, especially those associated with the government, to finance your work. Of course, there isn’t much of a grant system for poets anyway, but I tend not to apply for grants for any of the other artistic activities I engaged in.
My first job out of college was at the Strand bookstore. I then became part of the illustrious generation of Bard graduates to get a salaried job at the Hair Club for Men. It was there that I learned word processing, how to create spreadsheets (in something called Lotus 1-2-3) and work with a database. These skills gave me some mobility; I eventually got a job at the MoMA working in the telecommunications department in the basement, which was a great thrill for this O’Hara nut. I then attended a Ph.D. program in English at the CUNY Grad Center and moved back to New Jersey, but left it when I realized that it was largely training for professorships (and not a revolutionary intellectual hotbed which I guess I was seeking). In the late 90s, the internet was just rising – I was meeting folks with liberal arts degrees like my own who were earning what seemed like lots of money programming HTML. Since I had programmed computers since I was 10, I tried to learn C++ and Java and whatever else was out there with the hope of making some money, and also exploiting these new technologies for art.
My general advice for poets in New York is to get some desk job that you can learn very quickly so that, after a few months, you are able to do your own thing on the boss’s time. The other bit of advice is to keep learning new things, especially technological, as the skills are very general but applicable in many places. Maybe it’s my diabetes, or a conservative strand in my sense of the “daily,” but I don’t think a 9-5 job, with its melancholy pedestrian rituals, is that bad, especially in a great place like New York. It seems to me a little dangerous to have a truly fulfilling job, or even “career,” while you are trying to develop as a poet. I was never very creative or ambitious in my job choices when I was younger, and I think that kept me quite free to exercise my creativity elsewhere. As you get older, of course, things change: your youthful excitement at finally being out of school, finally being a practicing artist, meeting tons of new people and generally dreaming about your great literary future gives way to the reality of friends moving away, other friends moving up the economic scale, family dying, the economics of your city pricing you out, your own work getting lost amidst the constant influx of younger, more ambitious and more hip, artists, the possibility of getting too old to learn new skills, etc. What you do for work then acquires some greater spiritual importance.
I’m in the position right now of having a job that is really great. I’m teaching digital literature, new media theory and poetry at UCLA. I don’t think of my teaching as a “vocation” in the way one who had trained to be a professor might, so I didn’t go into it with any more desire than not to screw up, and to make it as interesting for myself and students as possible. Now that I’ve been at UCLA for two and half years, I’m quite eager to make the intellectual and artistic community there, and in Los Angeles at large, a place that continues to attract outside writers and artists. I’m still trying to teach myself new tricks, often in the service of my teaching and art, but also simply to have a back-up plan. I always had a lingering fear that the bottom could drop out at any second. Many in my family are presently unemployed, including siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles, and I’m in the rare position of being the guy with the steady job after so many years of waywardness. I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve not, this far along, ever really been able to help out except to offer a spare bedroom on occasion.
I don’t have any terribly philosophical insights into what it means to be a poet in the academy, or what it means to be a poet who works or doesn’t work. I’m from a pretty working class background, not to mention an immigrant background, so whether or not to put in your hours was not something you had the luxury to think about (and culturally, it was considered noxious). I spent a lot of time at a very crappy job in New York because I was too depressed and uninspired to send out resumes – depression is a greater enemy to me than work! – so I don’t recommend that, but having the basic stabilities, along with good friendships, should be quite amendable to writing poetry. I felt quite claustrophobic in suburban New Jersey when I was a lad, so have made it a habit to disappear into imaginative enterprises which, if anything, were intended to take me elsewhere; I supposed preparing for this sudden leap into a transformed future has also kept me on the look-out for something new to learn in case the present just collapses. That’s about it.
JUNE AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT
We're so pleased to announce that responses from Dolsy Smith, Mary Austin Speaker, and Tom Marshall are now posted on the blog. To download a pdf of all three, please click here. If you'd like to join our email list, please write to labday2010@gmail.com to receive a monthly notice when new content is posted to the blog. Also, if you've got a more extended set of thoughts than fits in a comment box, please feel free to send us those as well.
A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for PDF design and hosting. Thanks for your interest and solidarity - see you in July!
T.C. MARSHALL
T. C. Marshall was educated at Rolando Park Elementary, Oak Park Elementary, Monac School, Sunkist Elementary, Foster Elementary, Lewis Jr. High, Hoover High, UC Berkeley, UCSD, Simon Fraser University, Naropa Institute, San Diego State University, and UC Santa Cruz. Now he educates others at Cabrillo College and writes. He invites responses to his e-mail address: ToMarsha@Cabrillo.edu, or through Facebook where he may be found under the name Thomas Christopher Marshall.
HONOR LABOR
For the sake of spurring further discussions, I will take off here from two slippery moments of impulse: one, my first hearing about PLP from Steven Farmer over nouveau VietNamese food; and, two, from the “Jobs are jails” sentence quoted by one of the original contributors in a larger borrowing from a friend. These impulses were, I think, both toward the same end even though one was a positive misunderstanding and the other was a dialectical angle of indirect opposition. I’d like to think both may have been what I’d call “creative mis-takes” à la Philip Whalen’s funny pointed mis-hearings like “adipose muchachos, compañeros de mi vida.” I hope you will indulge me a bit as I adopt a voice that imagines itself speaking. In the long run, I will answer PLP’s six questions, maybe raising a few more along the way. I look forward to any form of Q&A. Dialogue is the natural dialectic.
Talking with Steve, I took the original question to basically be: “What does your job teach you about your work?” Once I saw some of the original talks and the response pieces, I thought I might have gotten that question wrong; still I asked myself: “What would this look like if I did it according to that question?” That was my positive possible misunderstanding.
My dialectical indirect bouncing off of another impulse came from reading one of those talks. In that talk, a poet offered an idea from a friend that "jobs are jails." I made a leap glancing away from this interesting idea because it seems to me that maybe jobs are more like schools, not in the most positive sense but in the way we can learn from them. My own experience as a student and as a teacher tells me that schools teach mostly in ways obliquely angled off of what is “required” or called for in standard ways. It’s not in what our bosses require of us or the standards they apply, but the very fact of requirements and standards can teach us a lot for our writing. Our jobs can show us a lot about the structure of the world in which we do our work. A job of any kind puts you in relation to things and people and a system of values: this in itself is an education—that it exists, that is, this system in each job a little different but there. Jails are just a power racket cog in such a system, depersonalizing. Any job webs out wider than that, and you can make it show you stuff.
I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak from a position that gets lost too often between the university academics who get the podium fairly often through conferences and publications and the wide assortment of otherwise working poets who have presented so far at last year’s conference and on this blog/site. I work as a contract instructor for a community college district. I have a contract that emphasizes a load of teaching units, a load of office hours, a set of “shared governance” obligations, and participation in a structural hierarchy administering a hierarchized structure of educational achievement. That is not just a casual list; it is my attempt at a concise full description of the factors that rule my job. That list is the beginning of my “what it would look like” answer.
What a job is about, mostly, is expectations, and a job is a good situation for learning about expectations. At my job, it is what is taken for granted as expectations that has enlightened me a little. We are expected to fulfill our contractual obligations regarding hours in the classroom and office, paperwork on paper and not, taking a position in the hierarchy, and taking part in the systems in place. But there are unstated expectations too. We are expected to help students learn. We are expected to have expectations of them. We are expected to act as though the whole thing can and does work. We are expected to act as though we believe that we have academic freedom and that it is being fulfilled in the systems in place. As with any job, a moment of stopping and looking can provide an outside perspective. As with any job, once you have taken this break, the whole game of expectations becomes a farce. A farce is not not worth playing out. That’s where what I call the “gas” factor comes in.
“Gas” stands for “giving a shit.” I see that we are prevented from fulfilling all those expectations by the structure of expectation itself. My own expectations have revealed to me what I have to call the “unteachability” of my students; this is their sense of certainty, of knowing already just like the bosses do. Instead of tossing up my hands or my lunch, I meet this with a dialectical complement of teaching “uncertainties.” I have the good luck and the tough luck to get to work on writing itself with them. Their certainties about who they are and what they know provide a resistance that is both good and tough. I then get to act as if I care to help them overturn their over-determined individualisms. Held within the system, still I try to create assignments with requirements to see meaning as being built, in flux, momentarily determined, not hard wired, never forever. I play this inside the farce of the larger play I’m paid to be part of, and it gets me gassed.
DOLSY SMITH
Dolsy Smith is a librarian in Washington, D.C. He writes regularly but doesn't publish much. At present, he is enjoying three months of research leave, working on a book about academic writing as lure and discipline.
As an academic librarian, I am blessed with one of those “day jobs” that all the time seem less and less plausible: a job with adequate salary and benefits, job security, professional standing, and a forty-hour week that neither swells with overtime demands (like much white-collar work) nor drains one’s waking hours of their vitality (like manual labor or many service jobs). As a librarian, I enjoy the privilege of doing “knowledge work” not immediately recouped for capital - teaching, research, and writing - although the saturation of the university by the managerial unconscious continues apace.1 But unlike my friends and colleagues on the faculty, who pour themselves through the sieve of those intellectual activities to find only the desperately small residue of institutional recognition and rewards (positive evaluations, publications, conference appearances, occasionally a raise or promotion), my “day job” is such that I manage to keep a good part of myself in reserve. Perhaps more important for my lucubrations than having time for them is being able to dedicate a mental space: a private space apart from the circuits of performance and reward. For the past several years, keeping my poetic work private has been the precondition of my doing it at all. I worry, of course, that past a certain point this approach proves self-defeating, but at the same time, I can’t seem to make plans for the work itself - apart from planning to make time for it amid other obligations and solicitations.
I am happy with my choice of career, and I do enjoy my job, even though there is something about it residually unsatisfying. This dissatisfaction doesn’t stem simply from its status as wage-labor, nor from its disciplinary character; after all, writing poetry is a discipline I can escape into at the end of the day. To put it a bit abstractly, the soul of work courts power and possibility - the very modalities of poeisis - but managed work pits those modalities against necessity and control. I have been thinking lately a lot about the concept of information, which we in the library profession use to talk about the work we do. It seems as though, from the librarian’s point of view, all the products of intellectual and creative activity - all works, in other words - should be reducible to this one common and universal substance, amenable to algorithmic principles of organization and storage - amenable, in short, to the logic of control. In a fascinating essay, John Guillory points out how much of the writing of modernity falls under the heading of informational genres: genres whose intent is not to persuade, imagine, or reveal, but merely to document or report: to render transparent to those in authority the activities of labor, or conversely, to convey to labor the decisions of management and the designs of capital.2 In other words, as JoAnne Yates argues, these genres of writing make possible the extension and ramification of managerial control on which the modern organization depends.3 I think the distinct lack of pleasure (or lack of possibility for pleasure) that attends writing in modes like the annual report - apart from their blatantly ritualistic character - has to do with the fact that the intention of these modes is, as Guillory notes, profoundly anti-rhetorical. Although they do not, of course, succeed without rhetorical resources, one knows, composing in them, that their institutional function, their raison d’etre, prescinds from that dimension of language that gives language its rhetorical power: from its being as material, personal, intimate, affective work. And so these genres of writing mirror the situation of organizational labor writ large, which is performed under the compulsion to ignore the feelings that attend its performance. Managerial structures demand that we cloak affect in efficiency - a disembodied rhetoric that proclaims the perfect justice of the code.
Again, I feel fortunate in that I can muster a certain amount of passionate investment in my job. Professionalism permits a sense of autonomous responsibility (over against the expectations of management), and I do often find myself passionately engaged, when working with students, arguing with colleagues about pedagogy, etc. Nonetheless, the passionate and moral commitments that work serves and inspires are not the same feelings that abide in work and that, from moment to moment, condition its performance. For the most part, the passion that I can muster on behalf of my job feels different from the pleasure I take in writing poetry. At issue, perhaps, is the work of time itself. As passionate investment, work looks toward the future as means to ends. As enjoyment, work appears as an end in itself - if the word end lends itself to what vanishes upon its presupposition. It tends to fill time, “as a glass may be filled not just to the level of the rim but slightly above.”4
Of my own poetic work, I would say that it amounts to a long, slow struggle to let language overflow the presence of my self-control. It is useful, perhaps, to distinguish control from constraint: the latter is arbitrary, extrinsic because chosen, and generative; the former is necessary (because internalized), intimate as my own reasons for doing anything, and repressive. Control manifests itself in my writing as an appetite for meaning and as a drive for self-expression, where these terms suggest the representation of moral or aesthetic truth, but also as the tilt toward any larger set of purposes to which I might subscribe the work. It is manifest, in short, as an urge to justify the work, inhabiting effort and devouring it from within like the larvae of a wasp, that gnawing self-doubt that can chew on an incomplete sentence for hours inside its fragile paper dwelling.
To emancipate the affective character of work seems like an admirable undertaking in any domain, not only in art. If it starts there, well, maybe it’s because art, as tradition and social practice, sustains traces of that character - of those characters, rather, flocking to efface themselves, in which is written down our inadequacy and our despair.
1 I borrow the phrase from Donna Strickland, "The Managerial Unconscious of Composition Studies," in Tenured Bosses, Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University, ed. Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, & Leo Parascondola (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004).
2 John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004).
3 JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1989).
4 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980).
As an academic librarian, I am blessed with one of those “day jobs” that all the time seem less and less plausible: a job with adequate salary and benefits, job security, professional standing, and a forty-hour week that neither swells with overtime demands (like much white-collar work) nor drains one’s waking hours of their vitality (like manual labor or many service jobs). As a librarian, I enjoy the privilege of doing “knowledge work” not immediately recouped for capital - teaching, research, and writing - although the saturation of the university by the managerial unconscious continues apace.1 But unlike my friends and colleagues on the faculty, who pour themselves through the sieve of those intellectual activities to find only the desperately small residue of institutional recognition and rewards (positive evaluations, publications, conference appearances, occasionally a raise or promotion), my “day job” is such that I manage to keep a good part of myself in reserve. Perhaps more important for my lucubrations than having time for them is being able to dedicate a mental space: a private space apart from the circuits of performance and reward. For the past several years, keeping my poetic work private has been the precondition of my doing it at all. I worry, of course, that past a certain point this approach proves self-defeating, but at the same time, I can’t seem to make plans for the work itself - apart from planning to make time for it amid other obligations and solicitations.
I am happy with my choice of career, and I do enjoy my job, even though there is something about it residually unsatisfying. This dissatisfaction doesn’t stem simply from its status as wage-labor, nor from its disciplinary character; after all, writing poetry is a discipline I can escape into at the end of the day. To put it a bit abstractly, the soul of work courts power and possibility - the very modalities of poeisis - but managed work pits those modalities against necessity and control. I have been thinking lately a lot about the concept of information, which we in the library profession use to talk about the work we do. It seems as though, from the librarian’s point of view, all the products of intellectual and creative activity - all works, in other words - should be reducible to this one common and universal substance, amenable to algorithmic principles of organization and storage - amenable, in short, to the logic of control. In a fascinating essay, John Guillory points out how much of the writing of modernity falls under the heading of informational genres: genres whose intent is not to persuade, imagine, or reveal, but merely to document or report: to render transparent to those in authority the activities of labor, or conversely, to convey to labor the decisions of management and the designs of capital.2 In other words, as JoAnne Yates argues, these genres of writing make possible the extension and ramification of managerial control on which the modern organization depends.3 I think the distinct lack of pleasure (or lack of possibility for pleasure) that attends writing in modes like the annual report - apart from their blatantly ritualistic character - has to do with the fact that the intention of these modes is, as Guillory notes, profoundly anti-rhetorical. Although they do not, of course, succeed without rhetorical resources, one knows, composing in them, that their institutional function, their raison d’etre, prescinds from that dimension of language that gives language its rhetorical power: from its being as material, personal, intimate, affective work. And so these genres of writing mirror the situation of organizational labor writ large, which is performed under the compulsion to ignore the feelings that attend its performance. Managerial structures demand that we cloak affect in efficiency - a disembodied rhetoric that proclaims the perfect justice of the code.
Again, I feel fortunate in that I can muster a certain amount of passionate investment in my job. Professionalism permits a sense of autonomous responsibility (over against the expectations of management), and I do often find myself passionately engaged, when working with students, arguing with colleagues about pedagogy, etc. Nonetheless, the passionate and moral commitments that work serves and inspires are not the same feelings that abide in work and that, from moment to moment, condition its performance. For the most part, the passion that I can muster on behalf of my job feels different from the pleasure I take in writing poetry. At issue, perhaps, is the work of time itself. As passionate investment, work looks toward the future as means to ends. As enjoyment, work appears as an end in itself - if the word end lends itself to what vanishes upon its presupposition. It tends to fill time, “as a glass may be filled not just to the level of the rim but slightly above.”4
Of my own poetic work, I would say that it amounts to a long, slow struggle to let language overflow the presence of my self-control. It is useful, perhaps, to distinguish control from constraint: the latter is arbitrary, extrinsic because chosen, and generative; the former is necessary (because internalized), intimate as my own reasons for doing anything, and repressive. Control manifests itself in my writing as an appetite for meaning and as a drive for self-expression, where these terms suggest the representation of moral or aesthetic truth, but also as the tilt toward any larger set of purposes to which I might subscribe the work. It is manifest, in short, as an urge to justify the work, inhabiting effort and devouring it from within like the larvae of a wasp, that gnawing self-doubt that can chew on an incomplete sentence for hours inside its fragile paper dwelling.
To emancipate the affective character of work seems like an admirable undertaking in any domain, not only in art. If it starts there, well, maybe it’s because art, as tradition and social practice, sustains traces of that character - of those characters, rather, flocking to efface themselves, in which is written down our inadequacy and our despair.
1 I borrow the phrase from Donna Strickland, "The Managerial Unconscious of Composition Studies," in Tenured Bosses, Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University, ed. Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, & Leo Parascondola (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004).
2 John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (2004).
3 JoAnne Yates, Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1989).
4 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: U of California P, 1980).
MARY AUSTIN SPEAKER
Mary Austin Speaker is a poet, curator, blogger, book designer, and teacher. She founded Triptych Readings poetry series in New York, blogs for the Bryant Park Word for Word series, and is currently an art director for HarperCollins Publishers. In August she will begin teaching composition and work as a freelance book designer.
A few weeks ago, I gave notice at a job where I have been paid more than I have ever been paid in my life. For the past twelve years, apart from three years off to complete my MFA in poetry, I have worked as a book designer at a major publishing house. On Monday of this week, my upcoming departure was finally made public, and two of my colleagues were laid off in addition to my own position being eliminated after my departure. When I informed the publisher for whom I work that I was leaving, he was disappointed to see me go, but encouraging and happy to see me pursuing my writing in earnest.
Everyone I work with has agreed that this is a good time to leave the business. Ebooks are beginning to eat away at print budgets. Corporate publishing might be imploding in their rush to make cheaper and cheaper books. "All books should be free!" said a friend recently. I flinched, and saw the book industry vanishing in the same digital act of disappearance as the music industry. Yet I'm inclined to agree, and take some solace in the fact that the book-as-object is gaining in value as quickly as the book-as-information is losing it. Letterpress shops are becoming increasingly common. Small presses abound. Quality seems like it's beginning to matter again. Artistry. I have made my living working on objects—inexpensively made printed books— that are becoming increasingly less valuable, but as this happens, my conception of value is beginning to change anyway.
When I was 23, I became active in my company's union, a local of the United Auto Workers Technical and Professional sector. The collective bargaining agreement covering about 350 employees was about to expire, so I joined the negotiating committee to renegotiate our contract. This was the same year that the MoMA workers (members of our local) struck and picketed. The economy was flush with tech-boom dollars, and our paltry wages had come to seem antiquated. When I argued that our labor was worth more than we were being paid for it, I was told that people work in publishing "for love." Love as a currency deliberately used by one of the largest media companies in the world was a disturbing notion. But to some extent he was right. We work in publishing because we like the air— there is a shared value system at work that recognizes the worth of writing. But we are ultimately making a product declining in value, we are made to be more and more productive with little compensatory rewards, and this gets more and more heartbreaking the more you're doing it "for love." I resisted the proclamation that love should be an adequate compensation for wages we felt we were owed. We received, in the end, significant raises. We felt triumphant, though we were still paid relatively little.
Years later I would find myself setting a line of type by John Ashbery, or designing Werner Herzog's film diary, or working late into the night with Patti Smith as she fretted over word choice, and I would think, "I can't believe I get paid to do this. I would do this for free." They were rare moments, but they cast long shadows. And I was paid well to do that work. In love and in money. Each are valid currencies. But I think it's appropriate to designate certain spheres for those currencies to be acceptable as payment. Poetry operates in an economy that is barely monetary. Its currency is much more abstract— an alloy of music, seduction, relevance, performance, artistry, hype, bravado. Some of it might be love. That is what has started many a press.
I am looking for an economy that understands value to have many iterations, money being only one among these. In a few months, I am moving from New York to Iowa, where things are much cheaper, and I have more room to be naïve, or at least experimental. I have never gone off the beaten path before— always I have been employed by a major corporation or living on fellowship at a university. In the fall, while my husband attends graduate school, I will enter a new economy, and I expect to be paid in love as much as in money. I am already grinning stupidly when I read about the course text for Argumentative Writing, the comp class I’m teaching in the fall at the local community college in Iowa City. To teach argument! To discuss corporate responsibility and the abstraction of family in class with full-grown adults!
When I was hired to do this, I received an apology regarding the pay. I know that full-time adjuncting is not a sustainable kind of employment for me, but a class here and there is enough to keep my enthusiasm up and my energy focused on a service that I think is necessary, helpful, important. This is part of the economy of labor that I would like to recognize more: What is necessary? What is helpful to create a world I would like to live in? What kind of labor can draw me closer to the kind of community that I want to be a part of? What kind of work can provide the most fertile ground for writing poems and making art? Working full time in the service of others has not, thus far, been terribly fertile ground for this— the poems arrive, but the sustained attention required to put together and publish a book is always cut short.
I expect my values will change over time. Already I feel a bit conflicted about teaching. Am I diluting the negotiating power of full-time staffers by offering my occasional services? Should I value that concern above my own need to do good, worthy work; or the education of full-grown, dedicated adults, who might become more responsible citizens as a result of my labor? Where, ultimately, is my labor most valuable? Who is responsible for the value of labor? These are questions I would love to see explored by others.
I will need to eat, of course. And have health insurance. For that I will lean on my husband as he has leaned on me. For other expenses: thrift, invention, freelance. I am young enough to afford to do this. I have no children and no debilitating medical conditions. I realize this luxury, and the luxury of mutually supportive partnership. And I feel beholden to exploit these things, these two years of no expectations, for the brief time it's available to me.
A few weeks ago, I gave notice at a job where I have been paid more than I have ever been paid in my life. For the past twelve years, apart from three years off to complete my MFA in poetry, I have worked as a book designer at a major publishing house. On Monday of this week, my upcoming departure was finally made public, and two of my colleagues were laid off in addition to my own position being eliminated after my departure. When I informed the publisher for whom I work that I was leaving, he was disappointed to see me go, but encouraging and happy to see me pursuing my writing in earnest.
Everyone I work with has agreed that this is a good time to leave the business. Ebooks are beginning to eat away at print budgets. Corporate publishing might be imploding in their rush to make cheaper and cheaper books. "All books should be free!" said a friend recently. I flinched, and saw the book industry vanishing in the same digital act of disappearance as the music industry. Yet I'm inclined to agree, and take some solace in the fact that the book-as-object is gaining in value as quickly as the book-as-information is losing it. Letterpress shops are becoming increasingly common. Small presses abound. Quality seems like it's beginning to matter again. Artistry. I have made my living working on objects—inexpensively made printed books— that are becoming increasingly less valuable, but as this happens, my conception of value is beginning to change anyway.
When I was 23, I became active in my company's union, a local of the United Auto Workers Technical and Professional sector. The collective bargaining agreement covering about 350 employees was about to expire, so I joined the negotiating committee to renegotiate our contract. This was the same year that the MoMA workers (members of our local) struck and picketed. The economy was flush with tech-boom dollars, and our paltry wages had come to seem antiquated. When I argued that our labor was worth more than we were being paid for it, I was told that people work in publishing "for love." Love as a currency deliberately used by one of the largest media companies in the world was a disturbing notion. But to some extent he was right. We work in publishing because we like the air— there is a shared value system at work that recognizes the worth of writing. But we are ultimately making a product declining in value, we are made to be more and more productive with little compensatory rewards, and this gets more and more heartbreaking the more you're doing it "for love." I resisted the proclamation that love should be an adequate compensation for wages we felt we were owed. We received, in the end, significant raises. We felt triumphant, though we were still paid relatively little.
Years later I would find myself setting a line of type by John Ashbery, or designing Werner Herzog's film diary, or working late into the night with Patti Smith as she fretted over word choice, and I would think, "I can't believe I get paid to do this. I would do this for free." They were rare moments, but they cast long shadows. And I was paid well to do that work. In love and in money. Each are valid currencies. But I think it's appropriate to designate certain spheres for those currencies to be acceptable as payment. Poetry operates in an economy that is barely monetary. Its currency is much more abstract— an alloy of music, seduction, relevance, performance, artistry, hype, bravado. Some of it might be love. That is what has started many a press.
I am looking for an economy that understands value to have many iterations, money being only one among these. In a few months, I am moving from New York to Iowa, where things are much cheaper, and I have more room to be naïve, or at least experimental. I have never gone off the beaten path before— always I have been employed by a major corporation or living on fellowship at a university. In the fall, while my husband attends graduate school, I will enter a new economy, and I expect to be paid in love as much as in money. I am already grinning stupidly when I read about the course text for Argumentative Writing, the comp class I’m teaching in the fall at the local community college in Iowa City. To teach argument! To discuss corporate responsibility and the abstraction of family in class with full-grown adults!
When I was hired to do this, I received an apology regarding the pay. I know that full-time adjuncting is not a sustainable kind of employment for me, but a class here and there is enough to keep my enthusiasm up and my energy focused on a service that I think is necessary, helpful, important. This is part of the economy of labor that I would like to recognize more: What is necessary? What is helpful to create a world I would like to live in? What kind of labor can draw me closer to the kind of community that I want to be a part of? What kind of work can provide the most fertile ground for writing poems and making art? Working full time in the service of others has not, thus far, been terribly fertile ground for this— the poems arrive, but the sustained attention required to put together and publish a book is always cut short.
I expect my values will change over time. Already I feel a bit conflicted about teaching. Am I diluting the negotiating power of full-time staffers by offering my occasional services? Should I value that concern above my own need to do good, worthy work; or the education of full-grown, dedicated adults, who might become more responsible citizens as a result of my labor? Where, ultimately, is my labor most valuable? Who is responsible for the value of labor? These are questions I would love to see explored by others.
I will need to eat, of course. And have health insurance. For that I will lean on my husband as he has leaned on me. For other expenses: thrift, invention, freelance. I am young enough to afford to do this. I have no children and no debilitating medical conditions. I realize this luxury, and the luxury of mutually supportive partnership. And I feel beholden to exploit these things, these two years of no expectations, for the brief time it's available to me.
We're happy to present our 3rd round of responses: May's contributors are ter Braak, Bhanu Kapil, and Dana Ward - to download a pdf of all three, click here.
If you'd like to join our email list, please write to labday2010@gmail.com to receive a monthly notice when new content is posted to the blog. Also, if you've got a more extended set of thoughts than fits in a comment box, please feel free to send us those as well.
We are pleased and grateful to be part of a larger conversation around poetics and labor. Lately, we've stumbled across some pretty amazing projects: Amber DiPietra and Michelle Puckett's new working class reading series, the SFMoma conversation around Shadowshop, Mark Nowak's recent Harriet posts.
These and others inspired us to start building a sidebar of links on the PLP blog as a "Poetic Labor Library." If you'd like to send us resources to include in this library, we'd be much obliged.
A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for PDF design and hosting. Thanks for your interest and solidarity - see you in June!
-Brandon Brown, Steve Farmer, Lauren Levin, & Alli Warren
If you'd like to join our email list, please write to labday2010@gmail.com to receive a monthly notice when new content is posted to the blog. Also, if you've got a more extended set of thoughts than fits in a comment box, please feel free to send us those as well.
We are pleased and grateful to be part of a larger conversation around poetics and labor. Lately, we've stumbled across some pretty amazing projects: Amber DiPietra and Michelle Puckett's new working class reading series, the SFMoma conversation around Shadowshop, Mark Nowak's recent Harriet posts.
These and others inspired us to start building a sidebar of links on the PLP blog as a "Poetic Labor Library." If you'd like to send us resources to include in this library, we'd be much obliged.
A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for PDF design and hosting. Thanks for your interest and solidarity - see you in June!
-Brandon Brown, Steve Farmer, Lauren Levin, & Alli Warren
BHANU KAPIL
Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado, where she teaches at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and maintains an integrative bodywork practice. Her most recent book is humanimal [a project for future children] from Kelsey Street Press.
A Poetics of Labour
1. How do you navigate your employment life and your poetic life energetically?
As soon as I step over the boundary of Naropa's campus, I put it out of my mind. If something particularly intense happened -- an insitutional crisis or interaction -- I give myself until Route 66 to let it circulate in my mind. When I cross the intersection of Highway 287 and Route 66, that's it. I don't think about it anymore. Much the same thing unfolds after a bodywork session. When I cross the threshold of the room in which a session has taken place, I forget what I learned or knew. This is complicated in cases where, for insurance purposes, I have to write up my SOAP notes. In those cases, when I have finished the notes, I wash my arms to the elbow with salt and hot, then cold, water. And when I close the door to the space for the night, I turn around and bow to it. At the end of classes, too, we bow out. It is simple bow. We meditate, then I indicate the bow by saying: "We end with a bow to the space between us, which is the space of writing and the writing to come." The energetics are about sealing these spaces, perhaps because what unfolds inside my work environments is invariably volatile, interesting, and intense.
2. How does your employment life relate to poetic form in your own work, or in poetic work generally?
From bodywork, I derive a language of the nervous system -- of the carapace of fat, light and electricity that surrounds or packs a nerve -- and I apply this to the sentence. The sentence, in this formulation, becomes a site for memory processes and pathologies, but also speed. The speed at which something might pass from one site to another, below the level of conscious reflection. From the work with the fascia, I derive the "diagonal line" as the axis of release, a phrase I also encounter in the post-colonial essays of Gayatri Spivak. In classrooms, I encourage my students to work upon this diagonal, and to translate between the flows of a body, and a text.
3. How do class relations play out in the poetic sphere or how do they appear in or affect your poetic work?
They played out for me in England as almost zero access to arts administration culture. The arty world. In the U.S., I don't read as working class - race stuff, too, is different - and so bypass what might otherwise circulate around my body as a member of a class. Or race. Is this true? In my writing, I return, inexorably, to the world I am from. Currently, I am writing a novel of the race riot, set in Southall and Hayes, the working class area of north-west London I lived in; a part of London that perhaps someone from another part of London would not call London. For example, I once went with my friend Mickey Cooke to his guitar class, and we went back to his friend L.'s flat. Turns out L. was an EARL. L. was a bit flirty. I went to the bathroom. It had white shag carpeting and lightbulbs around a mirror above the bathtub. When I came out, L. and Mickey were drinking Pimms and Lemonade, but it was time to go. I said: "Nice to meet you. I have to go." L. said: "What part of London do you live in?" I replied. He said: "That's not really London though, is it?" I left and waited for a bus. It was a double decker bus, the old-fashioned kind with an open deck. As the bus pulled away, L. came running along beside it in the traffic. He shouted: "When can I see you again?" But I still felt ashamed from his remark and did not respond.
4. Contemporary working and living conditions and their effect on writers. (Vs. other times, other locations).
House with garden and chicken coop. $800 mortgage, though I live an hour out of town. Gas money. I cannot afford to live in Boulder: $1900 for a two-bedroom apartment. I support myself, my mother (recently emmigrated from India), and a ten year old son on my salary from Naropa University, which was, until recently, in the 30s, but is now in the low 40s. My home is also the family home for my sister, who is completing a degree at CalArts. I supplement my income by working in a low-residency program at Goddard College, but Naropa is about to require that we do not "moonlight," presumably so that we can be more present on campus, which would support retention. I also work part-time as a body-worker. For this reason, I try to enjoy my work and take as much pleasure in it as possible, and to make it into something that nourishes my writing. I try to live a creative life every day because I do not take holidays or have a private space of any kind. How does this affect my writing? If I was not a single parent/care-giver with one to three jobs, perhaps I would be a South-east Asian novelist!!! But I am not. I am not a novelist. I think part of becoming an experimental writer was that it was a mode that allowed me to think about, collate and theorize fragments. What makes life liveable for me is the daily happiness afforded to me by the stability of my home, and the kindness of my neighbors. I also feel very nourished by my encounters with other writers, in places that are not, typically, the place where I live. I try to live a life of daily adventure, and to appreciate the freedom to write or perform towards the race riot scene, something I can't imagine doing, or having done, in the UK or India. (Though perhaps I'm wrong.)
5. The stance of the institutionally unaffiliated artist or intellectual in relation to the academy.
I was unaffiliated. Now I am affiliated. Sometimes I fantasize about being unaffiliated. This will have to wait until an Argentinian businessman on a skiing trip to Colorado falls in love with me and says: "Bhanu, I want to build you an adobe house in the hills. But I'm allergic to cats. Brenda will have to go." Also, the places where I teach -- two outrider or alternative writing schools -- don't have much money or funding, so -- I don't know about how much of an academy I am a part of. Perhaps I am deluded on this point; perhaps that is a ridiculous statement. Yes, I think it is. I have the privelege to choose my stance. What else? I rarely talk about writing with my core faculty colleagues (we don't have tenure at Naropa); but rather, with writers who are, in the institution, "staff." This is a diffcult one. Am I corrupt? Yes, I am corrupt if I am a part of an institution that has practices I don't agree with, especially as they affect staff. That are dodgy or inequitable in some way. I am corrupt if I don't protest them. Anne Waldman has been a mentor to me in this regard, though on some level, if I lost my job through an anarchic resolution, I then worry about my mum. I am her immigration sponsor, so I have to have a stable job. This is a strange country. Health care, immigration status and economic forces converge upon the question of affiliation. As for my status within the academy itself, nobody seems to care what I do. I feel a great creative/experimental freedom at Naropa, for example, which balances the crap pay and the need for financial stability. I say it is crap pay, but it is really not. It is pay. It is about ten times more than what my uncle, an electrical engineer, earns in India. Also, let's face it, if I lived in England, it is almost unfathomable to imagine being a professor of any kind. I am so grateful to this country for the gift of intellectual and practical work: teaching experimental writing. And the writing of it too.
6. Additionally, we are interested in specifics of everyone's job or trade that might be invisible to many.
At Naropa, I drink tea in the biodynamic green-house on campus, then lie down next to the strawberry bed. In my massage space, when a client leaves, I do a back bend over the table. At Goddard, I film Douglas Martin climbing a tree. I fall over in the snow. I walk into the surrounding woodland with a drum, at dusk, for Shiva Pooja, which no-one sees. To prepare for a facial, I gather rose hips from the foothills and mascerate them to a fine paste; I mix this paste with cream. During a reading, I see the violet outline of an accompanying presence, and sometimes, I feel the awareness of an ancestor turned upon me in the room.
A Poetics of Labour
1. How do you navigate your employment life and your poetic life energetically?
As soon as I step over the boundary of Naropa's campus, I put it out of my mind. If something particularly intense happened -- an insitutional crisis or interaction -- I give myself until Route 66 to let it circulate in my mind. When I cross the intersection of Highway 287 and Route 66, that's it. I don't think about it anymore. Much the same thing unfolds after a bodywork session. When I cross the threshold of the room in which a session has taken place, I forget what I learned or knew. This is complicated in cases where, for insurance purposes, I have to write up my SOAP notes. In those cases, when I have finished the notes, I wash my arms to the elbow with salt and hot, then cold, water. And when I close the door to the space for the night, I turn around and bow to it. At the end of classes, too, we bow out. It is simple bow. We meditate, then I indicate the bow by saying: "We end with a bow to the space between us, which is the space of writing and the writing to come." The energetics are about sealing these spaces, perhaps because what unfolds inside my work environments is invariably volatile, interesting, and intense.
2. How does your employment life relate to poetic form in your own work, or in poetic work generally?
From bodywork, I derive a language of the nervous system -- of the carapace of fat, light and electricity that surrounds or packs a nerve -- and I apply this to the sentence. The sentence, in this formulation, becomes a site for memory processes and pathologies, but also speed. The speed at which something might pass from one site to another, below the level of conscious reflection. From the work with the fascia, I derive the "diagonal line" as the axis of release, a phrase I also encounter in the post-colonial essays of Gayatri Spivak. In classrooms, I encourage my students to work upon this diagonal, and to translate between the flows of a body, and a text.
3. How do class relations play out in the poetic sphere or how do they appear in or affect your poetic work?
They played out for me in England as almost zero access to arts administration culture. The arty world. In the U.S., I don't read as working class - race stuff, too, is different - and so bypass what might otherwise circulate around my body as a member of a class. Or race. Is this true? In my writing, I return, inexorably, to the world I am from. Currently, I am writing a novel of the race riot, set in Southall and Hayes, the working class area of north-west London I lived in; a part of London that perhaps someone from another part of London would not call London. For example, I once went with my friend Mickey Cooke to his guitar class, and we went back to his friend L.'s flat. Turns out L. was an EARL. L. was a bit flirty. I went to the bathroom. It had white shag carpeting and lightbulbs around a mirror above the bathtub. When I came out, L. and Mickey were drinking Pimms and Lemonade, but it was time to go. I said: "Nice to meet you. I have to go." L. said: "What part of London do you live in?" I replied. He said: "That's not really London though, is it?" I left and waited for a bus. It was a double decker bus, the old-fashioned kind with an open deck. As the bus pulled away, L. came running along beside it in the traffic. He shouted: "When can I see you again?" But I still felt ashamed from his remark and did not respond.
4. Contemporary working and living conditions and their effect on writers. (Vs. other times, other locations).
House with garden and chicken coop. $800 mortgage, though I live an hour out of town. Gas money. I cannot afford to live in Boulder: $1900 for a two-bedroom apartment. I support myself, my mother (recently emmigrated from India), and a ten year old son on my salary from Naropa University, which was, until recently, in the 30s, but is now in the low 40s. My home is also the family home for my sister, who is completing a degree at CalArts. I supplement my income by working in a low-residency program at Goddard College, but Naropa is about to require that we do not "moonlight," presumably so that we can be more present on campus, which would support retention. I also work part-time as a body-worker. For this reason, I try to enjoy my work and take as much pleasure in it as possible, and to make it into something that nourishes my writing. I try to live a creative life every day because I do not take holidays or have a private space of any kind. How does this affect my writing? If I was not a single parent/care-giver with one to three jobs, perhaps I would be a South-east Asian novelist!!! But I am not. I am not a novelist. I think part of becoming an experimental writer was that it was a mode that allowed me to think about, collate and theorize fragments. What makes life liveable for me is the daily happiness afforded to me by the stability of my home, and the kindness of my neighbors. I also feel very nourished by my encounters with other writers, in places that are not, typically, the place where I live. I try to live a life of daily adventure, and to appreciate the freedom to write or perform towards the race riot scene, something I can't imagine doing, or having done, in the UK or India. (Though perhaps I'm wrong.)
5. The stance of the institutionally unaffiliated artist or intellectual in relation to the academy.
I was unaffiliated. Now I am affiliated. Sometimes I fantasize about being unaffiliated. This will have to wait until an Argentinian businessman on a skiing trip to Colorado falls in love with me and says: "Bhanu, I want to build you an adobe house in the hills. But I'm allergic to cats. Brenda will have to go." Also, the places where I teach -- two outrider or alternative writing schools -- don't have much money or funding, so -- I don't know about how much of an academy I am a part of. Perhaps I am deluded on this point; perhaps that is a ridiculous statement. Yes, I think it is. I have the privelege to choose my stance. What else? I rarely talk about writing with my core faculty colleagues (we don't have tenure at Naropa); but rather, with writers who are, in the institution, "staff." This is a diffcult one. Am I corrupt? Yes, I am corrupt if I am a part of an institution that has practices I don't agree with, especially as they affect staff. That are dodgy or inequitable in some way. I am corrupt if I don't protest them. Anne Waldman has been a mentor to me in this regard, though on some level, if I lost my job through an anarchic resolution, I then worry about my mum. I am her immigration sponsor, so I have to have a stable job. This is a strange country. Health care, immigration status and economic forces converge upon the question of affiliation. As for my status within the academy itself, nobody seems to care what I do. I feel a great creative/experimental freedom at Naropa, for example, which balances the crap pay and the need for financial stability. I say it is crap pay, but it is really not. It is pay. It is about ten times more than what my uncle, an electrical engineer, earns in India. Also, let's face it, if I lived in England, it is almost unfathomable to imagine being a professor of any kind. I am so grateful to this country for the gift of intellectual and practical work: teaching experimental writing. And the writing of it too.
6. Additionally, we are interested in specifics of everyone's job or trade that might be invisible to many.
At Naropa, I drink tea in the biodynamic green-house on campus, then lie down next to the strawberry bed. In my massage space, when a client leaves, I do a back bend over the table. At Goddard, I film Douglas Martin climbing a tree. I fall over in the snow. I walk into the surrounding woodland with a drum, at dusk, for Shiva Pooja, which no-one sees. To prepare for a facial, I gather rose hips from the foothills and mascerate them to a fine paste; I mix this paste with cream. During a reading, I see the violet outline of an accompanying presence, and sometimes, I feel the awareness of an ancestor turned upon me in the room.
DANA WARD
Dana Ward is a poet & works (gratis) as a full time childcare provider for his daughter Vivian. They go to malls & parks together in Cincinnati, OH. You wouldn't believe some of the weird & interesting things they've seen in the mall lately, wow!
From Things The Baby Likes (A-Z)
Delirium Tremens: I worked at a liquor store in coastal Maryland when I was nineteen. My boss had worked there since he was nineteen, &, because he fondly remembered the privileges bestowed on him by his boss he allowed me to not only buy bottles from the stock but more extravagantly to run up a tab, which meant every night, since I was young I longed for sugar, I’d settle on a pint of E&J or Southern Comfort, & an airplane bottle or two of Yukon Jack, the latter I'd pour into a fountain Mellow Yellow & nurse on the long commute inland, getting home by nine or so half drunk to find Brandon painting or reading or looking out the window, at which point we’d share the other bottles, talking some, or working in our rooms. Mornings at the liquor store some of the regulars would come in with a look of pleading shame in their eyes, dt’s flaring badly, & we'd try to make jokes to deflect the abjection but it was like being an apothecary, all of the colorful bottles in the sunlight.
Quitting Your Job: On my last day at my previous job I was given a watch stopped at 4pm (“Quittin’ Time”), as a farewell gift. It’s beautiful to be in possession of a broken clock that’s right not only twice a day but always, or more precisely, never, with an intimation of always. I have it on the windowsill beyond my computer & I move my eyes from the face of that watch to whatever I’m doing on the screen, just as I once flashed my eyes from the screen to the working clock above the office door.
Winning the lottery: There must be some kind of Marxist numerology one could employ to uncover a secret yet meaningful ratio between the current price of gasoline & that day's lottery jackpot. Their physical proximity on gas station signs suggests a deeper, occulted significance, some mathematics of extraction, risk, fantasy & labor, which, if discovered, might turn out to be the phantom denominator long thought to have been scribbled beneath Debord's famous graffiti "Never Work". Examined by experts in 20th Century insurrectionary forensics, the ink in which this ancient graffiti was written has been revealed to be the same ink used to print lottery tickets today.
 |
| Under the urn cork, confetti |
From Things The Baby Likes (A-Z)
Delirium Tremens: I worked at a liquor store in coastal Maryland when I was nineteen. My boss had worked there since he was nineteen, &, because he fondly remembered the privileges bestowed on him by his boss he allowed me to not only buy bottles from the stock but more extravagantly to run up a tab, which meant every night, since I was young I longed for sugar, I’d settle on a pint of E&J or Southern Comfort, & an airplane bottle or two of Yukon Jack, the latter I'd pour into a fountain Mellow Yellow & nurse on the long commute inland, getting home by nine or so half drunk to find Brandon painting or reading or looking out the window, at which point we’d share the other bottles, talking some, or working in our rooms. Mornings at the liquor store some of the regulars would come in with a look of pleading shame in their eyes, dt’s flaring badly, & we'd try to make jokes to deflect the abjection but it was like being an apothecary, all of the colorful bottles in the sunlight.
Quitting Your Job: On my last day at my previous job I was given a watch stopped at 4pm (“Quittin’ Time”), as a farewell gift. It’s beautiful to be in possession of a broken clock that’s right not only twice a day but always, or more precisely, never, with an intimation of always. I have it on the windowsill beyond my computer & I move my eyes from the face of that watch to whatever I’m doing on the screen, just as I once flashed my eyes from the screen to the working clock above the office door.
Winning the lottery: There must be some kind of Marxist numerology one could employ to uncover a secret yet meaningful ratio between the current price of gasoline & that day's lottery jackpot. Their physical proximity on gas station signs suggests a deeper, occulted significance, some mathematics of extraction, risk, fantasy & labor, which, if discovered, might turn out to be the phantom denominator long thought to have been scribbled beneath Debord's famous graffiti "Never Work". Examined by experts in 20th Century insurrectionary forensics, the ink in which this ancient graffiti was written has been revealed to be the same ink used to print lottery tickets today.
ter BRAAK
This iteration of "ter Braak" speaks out of a political need to stay private, a "contra-literary" need to establish a defiant anonymity, and a private, personal need to function from discreet "subjectivities." Not to be altogether confused with the genuinely original Dutch critic M. ter Braak, who chose a brave, self-determined form of physical termination in 1940, just days before the Nazis were coming to fetch him for resistance against their regime. This iteration believes, or hopes, that if both the reader and the author are thoroughly subtracted from the proverbial equation, possibly a different (or at least differently satisfying) writing can be actualized.
I know a fellow who got in a big U-Haul Truck packed with 17 years of "California" and actually drove almost his entire existence and his whole cat Frankie O'Hara back to western New York in 1999, not necessarily to study under Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo and get his Ph.D union card, but maybe to work as a golf pro for a couple of years. He ended up relocating quite precisely in the exact spot from which he had escaped 20-plus years earlier when he had previously removed his body from the suffocating parochialism of small towns and gone off to college in Florida, then to graduate school in hippy wine country Sonoma County, CA. Indeed, he ended up right back where he had begun becoming aware of where he was (in cultural time and space) and how much his perspective could change what he saw outside and how much others' perspectives from outside may altogether obscure what one sees inside or out as well as inside-out. He ended up right back in a fucking factory, surely exactly what he had most assuredly and, he had been convinced for several years, permanently left behind, thoroughly abandoned, thoroughly and distinctly turned away from, for his entire adult life. Wowie!
He's been there for ten years. Works in a cubicle, possibly Cubicle 22. He's still not sure what's his number. Hasn't figured OUT how precisely he would locate the exact latitudes and longitudes of such endlessly tropical brown, grey, light grey, dark gray, medium grey, dark gray twists of local color and universal nexuses he's been designated yet. Much to be said for functioning as a fully expatriated non-Nationalisticalist who GOT IT early in late teens, that is, how many nine lives a Rosy Crucifixionist, a “Ghandi with a penis," or any other cosmodemonic and really quite angelic beat_read free spirit in a completely invisible set of mindsets can bring to a workplace and subculture. First of all, well, the "mirrors" that one dull manager after another surrounds us with, Sir, they will indeed force us to become invisible, as they cannot reflect very much, if anything, that is truly real about one's own true light. They can reflect back merely what they are capable of seeing and understanding, and it's far removed from any borders of their own sanity defenses. At the same time, those very limits prescribed by such mirrors force the reflection object to manifest even greater or more concrete inner subjectivities, for the reflection object, himself (in this case), does nonetheless repeatedly feel the holes in his own several mirrors formed by relentless attacks on a dignity that refuses such monstrous alienation and degradation.
Fortunately, any body and his or her sisters can keep a small writing tablet in a private pocket and scribble potentially public notes to reconstruct every concrete block, stain, sheen, spot, and crevice of material, physical objects nobody sees and feels when locked in the far toilet stall at the south end of some Romanticist’s Stalag 17 but here more aptly, simply named Building 17 for twenty minute intervals. There, the whole world is literally within arms' reach and no supervisors can look over somebody's shoulder to espy whether anybody is revising the eight poorly written and ill-edited "Software Installation Procedures" said supervisor gives done subordinate to revise because said supervisor, lacking even rudimentary writing skills, cannot write them himself/herself; it just takes too much time or too much patience, and best of all said supervisor’s done subordinate works with those operating systems and applications on a daily basis, and bestest of all, done subordinate actually taught 50-100 sections of Freshman Composition in a previous career that was much more flexible in terms of self-determination, even determining when it's time to take a powder and make an inventory of the toilet paper dispensors all said and done back in Building 17 or Stalag 17, either/or.
Factotum-22 also gains great freedom in an 8-5 (or every other week 7-5) Information Technology "day job" in the factory by embedding somebody’s writing even more securely right under the company's nosiness. Quite in matter of fact directly assigned to create and edit documents, including web pages, for the company's Auditing Systems, it's really a quite, quiet, and small matter, via the immaculate invisibility of transparent fonts, to blend into the more obscure documents all kinds of poming too dense and impenetrable for even the Language writers to appreciate, much less recognize as "Poming." Of course, yes, surely it's written in all manners and forms of computer and networking jargon and behind the surface appearance of ostensibly technical data of the HTML pages that render yet something else altogether, underneath there, in little pockets of "Comment tags" neatly or haphazardly encoded in java scripts and the eighth or ninth page of the crew's cascading style sheets, there it is, an entire playground nearly permanently inscribed right beside the company's bottom line legers and legal documents, yet essentially eternally invisible. There one can register remarkably crude, direct, and quite challenging chess-game-long logics and logistically superior attacks on the government that the company owns and on the actually relatively few underwhelmingly conscious executives in the company who control that ownership or find such ownership, unwittingly or criminally, gratifying. And nobody will ever know that it's even there unless they really, really must, and then Factotum-22 may well reveal it to them eagerly and gladly, but for now, it's just relaxing and sleeping there, pretending to be comatose, as it probably needs to stay there awhile.
But this is all terribly smarmy and phony. Let's be real! The workplace can be tirelessly, genuinely alienating for writers, but so what? Who are they, anyhow, some spoiled bunch of buffoons who've inherited not only wealth but some kind of delusion that "the World" (for "the World," choose from your own abilities to make and create such a concept," Reader-X) owes them "a Living." No law against what goes on inside one's mind, though, and if one has to steal away to the waterclosets like any other average Joe/Lulu, Sir -- to jot things down or otherwise reflect on what one really thinks meaningful -- so be it. If one has one's work done, and if one can in fact "multi-task" quite well, and most writers/"dreamers" have taught themselves to daydream since Kindergarten, what's wrong with writing a book or two or three on the so-called “company's time” that is left over from THE COMPANY'S TIME SAVED because one has gotten one's "work" done with greater efficiency and speed and conscientiousness than the professional and accomplished delegators alluded to above can muster and for which they get "the big bucks" though they DO little more than assign unloved win-win labor to their subordinates. Yeah, maybe it's a factory, sure, it is, but even Persig observed that one can begin with a brick in the wall and travel light-years and eons and galaxies without straying from that initial, nominal 10 mm mortar joint which circumscribes such lush English bond between Capital and Wobbly-head. And pomers just "talk to walls," anyways, usually walls that reflect blank slates, but that the pomer wants to turn into a big house of mirrors in order to feel secure and happy in life.
LARRY KEARNEY
Larry Kearney was born in Brooklyn in 1943. Publications include Dead Poem (White Rabbit), Five (Tombouctou), Kidnapped (Foot), Oz and Damaged Architecture (Smithereens), Streaming (Trike/O Books), Passion, Transmission, and The Only Available Substance/Please Keep My Word (with Sarah Menefee) from Worm in the Rain Publications, a personal press through which he has published a large number of titles.
Jobs
Lathe hand, Kearney Engineering
Draftsman, Kearney Engineering
Brooklyn Public Library
Postal worker
Poet
Architectural model-maker
Machinist, Franklin Machine Works
Power Room installer, Western Electric
Postal worker
Editor, Sierra Club
Landscaper
House painter
Knife-case maker
Bookbinder
Truck driver
Manager, David Wold International
Ghostwriter
Desktop Publisher, Nadja
Correspondent, Latin American Trade Finance
Teacher, New College
Teacher, Dunham Academy for Gifted Students
My father was working class independent. In the thirties he’d organized a strike and while everyone had supported the action, no one turned up on the line. He was a tool and die-maker and designed and produced numerous machines for Naval Research and the chemical thermometer industry, among others. He ran a one man shop, except for me, and in bidding on jobs filled out forms that asked whether he had five hundred employees or less.
He was disappointed that I didn’t want to go into the business, and felt I had a certain talent for it. I could have pointed out that the books he read to me, and the stories he told me, and the fact that he once sat on the side of my bed in the dark and told me that he’d always wanted to be a writer and live in San Francisco, had something to do with the way my mind was. But the topic never came into the open, and he acquiesced gracefully to what I chose to do.
When I say he was working class I mean that as a complete definition. He had no desire to move up in social status. All he wanted to do was be the best at what he did and be paid for it appropriately. He found that being the best at what he did, and solitary, didn’t automatically translate into appropriate pay. As a matter of fact, it was something of a drawback. He struggled all his life with the middle-men, and the glad-handers.
He was literate, and particularly well-read in history, and he once told me that the reason he didn’t argue politics with the people in our building was ‘you can’t argue with people who don’t read.’
Jobs
Lathe hand, Kearney Engineering
Draftsman, Kearney Engineering
Brooklyn Public Library
Postal worker
Poet
Architectural model-maker
Machinist, Franklin Machine Works
Power Room installer, Western Electric
Postal worker
Editor, Sierra Club
Landscaper
House painter
Knife-case maker
Bookbinder
Truck driver
Manager, David Wold International
Ghostwriter
Desktop Publisher, Nadja
Correspondent, Latin American Trade Finance
Teacher, New College
Teacher, Dunham Academy for Gifted Students
My father was working class independent. In the thirties he’d organized a strike and while everyone had supported the action, no one turned up on the line. He was a tool and die-maker and designed and produced numerous machines for Naval Research and the chemical thermometer industry, among others. He ran a one man shop, except for me, and in bidding on jobs filled out forms that asked whether he had five hundred employees or less.
He was disappointed that I didn’t want to go into the business, and felt I had a certain talent for it. I could have pointed out that the books he read to me, and the stories he told me, and the fact that he once sat on the side of my bed in the dark and told me that he’d always wanted to be a writer and live in San Francisco, had something to do with the way my mind was. But the topic never came into the open, and he acquiesced gracefully to what I chose to do.
When I say he was working class I mean that as a complete definition. He had no desire to move up in social status. All he wanted to do was be the best at what he did and be paid for it appropriately. He found that being the best at what he did, and solitary, didn’t automatically translate into appropriate pay. As a matter of fact, it was something of a drawback. He struggled all his life with the middle-men, and the glad-handers.
He was literate, and particularly well-read in history, and he once told me that the reason he didn’t argue politics with the people in our building was ‘you can’t argue with people who don’t read.’
APRIL AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT
We're so pleased to announce that responses from Amber DiPietra, Steve Benson, and an anomyous contributor are now up on the Poetic Labor Project's blog. To download a pdf of all three, please click here. We're grateful for these responses, which continue the conversation around poetics and labor that was the subject of the gatherings in the East Bay last Labor Day. As part of our commitment to continuing that conversation, please stay tuned for monthly updates with new content.
We want to open the space to as many people as would like to join - your comments and provocations are welcome. If you've got a more extended set of thoughts about any of the new writings, or the original presentations archived from the event, please feel free to submit those to: labday2010@gmail.com. A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for designing the PDF and to Dan Thomas-Glass for original artwork. Thanks for your interest and solidarity!
We want to open the space to as many people as would like to join - your comments and provocations are welcome. If you've got a more extended set of thoughts about any of the new writings, or the original presentations archived from the event, please feel free to submit those to: labday2010@gmail.com. A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for designing the PDF and to Dan Thomas-Glass for original artwork. Thanks for your interest and solidarity!
ANONYMOUS
from five o'clock: SLOPE's daily weather report for March 2011
Labor, Poetry & Professionaliztion: pastiche of journal entries
I am thinking about professionalization, labor and poetry. How the counterpoint echos off each of these. Yet, these caverns find themselves pressured together, by little quakes, by life’s demander/s and other bandits: These are the attempts to crumble them into fluidity. If this essay had a title it would be: stealing time.
I work four jobs: part-time permeates every move I perform. Today it is sunny and almost too hot, a reprieve from the rain dumping on this coast and my hair and the news is reporting on radiation floating. I worry about getting sun stained; I wish I had my lover’s skin; I realize the privilege in this thought, which also feels.
Part-time afterschool program coordinator, part-time administrator, part-time poetry editor, part-time bartender and part-time lover. I live 300 miles away from my lover. The inability to dedicate myself to anything drips off the walls of these caves onto my skin, which can’t help but absorb. Yet, dedication (investment) is what I seek in each job. The economy of investment, its exchange, makes it beautiful between lovers, but despondent on a large scale and rarely beautiful at a job. Though, these jobs do want to be a part of this beauty, even if they are subject to the same imaginary-dollar-house. It is this nuance and intention that causes my feet to trip over themselves, that causes me to over-invest and therefore, under-invest in each cave. Like when you write/ read something so determinedly good that it renders its opposite as clearly as the intended essence. I realize that failure also feels. I picked these positions because they were the best to me and the best for me. “The Best” is a vague qualifier, as lazy in practice as it is in writing or use.
Are my caves the best because they allow me to funnel my unrelenting need for labor into a category of professionalization, a need resulting in my class and upbringing? A need which connects me to disparate family? Did my class and upbringing fool me? I am not special in thinking this and my generation is not unique in feeling it. I have had fourteen jobs since I was 14, which is also when I started working. It’s like that Tee-Shirt made in Hawaii or somewhere: “QUIT YOUR JOB/BUY A TICKET/FALL IN LOVE/ NEVER RETURN”
I started reading a piece that told me ellipses were an ethical gesture because they indicated a missing text. This creates a culture that is embarrassed to use the text, I thought. Culpability must also extend past my writing into a utility driven self-reflexivity. Yet, I create permissions. Permissions we create. What I am trying to say is that culpability can, and perhaps should, be the fluid that forges the flood: the flood that cleans or damages anyone’s caves. Perhaps, the damage will be to those houses of professionalization, labor and poetry.
Labor, Poetry & Professionaliztion: pastiche of journal entries
I am thinking about professionalization, labor and poetry. How the counterpoint echos off each of these. Yet, these caverns find themselves pressured together, by little quakes, by life’s demander/s and other bandits: These are the attempts to crumble them into fluidity. If this essay had a title it would be: stealing time.
I work four jobs: part-time permeates every move I perform. Today it is sunny and almost too hot, a reprieve from the rain dumping on this coast and my hair and the news is reporting on radiation floating. I worry about getting sun stained; I wish I had my lover’s skin; I realize the privilege in this thought, which also feels.
Part-time afterschool program coordinator, part-time administrator, part-time poetry editor, part-time bartender and part-time lover. I live 300 miles away from my lover. The inability to dedicate myself to anything drips off the walls of these caves onto my skin, which can’t help but absorb. Yet, dedication (investment) is what I seek in each job. The economy of investment, its exchange, makes it beautiful between lovers, but despondent on a large scale and rarely beautiful at a job. Though, these jobs do want to be a part of this beauty, even if they are subject to the same imaginary-dollar-house. It is this nuance and intention that causes my feet to trip over themselves, that causes me to over-invest and therefore, under-invest in each cave. Like when you write/ read something so determinedly good that it renders its opposite as clearly as the intended essence. I realize that failure also feels. I picked these positions because they were the best to me and the best for me. “The Best” is a vague qualifier, as lazy in practice as it is in writing or use.
Are my caves the best because they allow me to funnel my unrelenting need for labor into a category of professionalization, a need resulting in my class and upbringing? A need which connects me to disparate family? Did my class and upbringing fool me? I am not special in thinking this and my generation is not unique in feeling it. I have had fourteen jobs since I was 14, which is also when I started working. It’s like that Tee-Shirt made in Hawaii or somewhere: “QUIT YOUR JOB/BUY A TICKET/FALL IN LOVE/ NEVER RETURN”
I started reading a piece that told me ellipses were an ethical gesture because they indicated a missing text. This creates a culture that is embarrassed to use the text, I thought. Culpability must also extend past my writing into a utility driven self-reflexivity. Yet, I create permissions. Permissions we create. What I am trying to say is that culpability can, and perhaps should, be the fluid that forges the flood: the flood that cleans or damages anyone’s caves. Perhaps, the damage will be to those houses of professionalization, labor and poetry.
AMBER DIPIETRA
Amber DiPietra works as a poet, a disability advocate, and a somatic writing teacher for folks in the disability community--not necessarily all in that order.
Please imagine the proceeding sections as non-linear, rounded confluences—my relationship to work/poetics as Venn diagram. For me, there is no longer any real separation between the various kinds of work I must do and my poetics. This is both a beneficial alignment and a chiasmus of energies. Fractal symmetries that sort of shove into each other while trying to surface.
Please click here to listen to an audio version of this contribution.
work-work
The short answer to “What do you do?” is, “disability advocate”. Though, often, it is easier to respond with, “disability service provider” because people can interpret that as case manager or social worker and that makes sense to them. The longer, more accurate answer, is that I work for the Independent Living Resource Center in San Francisco, where I am absolutely not a social worker (via the old model of managing someone else’s choices and determining abilities based on bureaucratic qualifiers). Independent living centers exist nationally in most major cities. They are government-mandated, largely government-funded nonprofits that serve as places where people with disabilities can go to get information about resources, such as assistive technology, support groups, accessible arts programs, alerts about proposed legislation impacting disability issues. ILCs are where people can get help with navigating social services like personal or in home care, low income housing options, employment accommodations, etc. My work also requires me to keep up with the politics around healthcare, genetic testing, civil rights and technological innovations.
It requires me to be a constant communicator—either via phone, in-person, or increasingly, via social networking—since one of the biggest issues facing people with disabilities is the divide that still exists in terms of social integration. But most of all, this work requires me to sit with people and envision outcomes. People come to me with a mass of reality and their language around it—a new diagnosis or years of living with nagging, stupid issues that crop up. Things like: “landlord won’t let me have a ramp and now three steps keep me prisoner in my apartment”, or “I need to take Goldie to class on my shoulder because she can talk to the voices while I take notes for my exam”, or “I go to job interviews and as soon as I walk in the door with my white cane, the interviewer sounds plastic”. Primarily, mine is a job of collaborative making. A kind of peer counseling poiesis. I listen, co-brainstorm, share stories about folks in similar situations. I take the language that is given to me and give it back to the person who has come to see me—either by offering a way to prioritize around the issue, reframing options, or simply emoting in a way that is authentic and carries new momentum.
freelance-work
As a “peer mentor” at my independent living center, it is hard to know how much or how little to do, how best to facilitate a space for the client’s envisioning process. Especially when we are stand together against such gaping holes in community support systems. There are appeals to file, requests to fill out, bureaucratic languages that must be worked within. Then I go home and I swirl these interactions around in my head for days at a time, trying to hit upon some creative suggestion I can offer in each individual situation. This “taking it home with me” is not really required as part of my paid work, but it is the part that makes me a poet within the context of the work. I have wanted to push that impulse further and I have wanted to combine my paid work as an independent living center worker with my work as one who writes poems. I have also wanted to bring in body-work, the hardest most basic work. I wanted to create a single space to function as a poet, a body-worker and a disability advocate, so I have been experimenting with Write To Connect. A creative writing class for folks in the disability community.
body-work
I ran out of cartilage over 25 years ago and all of my bones, including the vertebra in my neck, have been grinding to a halt since then. I am 32 years old. I have bone spurs, tendon impingements, and frozen joints. If I want to maintain any freedom of movement for the next, hopefully, several decades, I must work every day, slowly, tediously, to keep some modicum of space between my internal moving parts. This means undoing the time spent working by swimming, sitting in warm waters, lying down, making dull circles with ankles, shoulders, wrists, etc. It also means massage, acupuncture, and energy work. And Art workouts! (This embarrasses me, to go into all this, because I feel like I have said this stuff on the internets before. I am kind of phobic about being repetitive, because being repetitive in writing seems to mimic somatic constriction I experience all the time. However, it also tends to loosen gently, methodically, which is absolutely the point.)
All of this body-work requires a huge amount of money, time, and attention. I give far less of any of these resources to the body-work, than I give to other types of work. That’s because I get bored, because it is invisible, because it feels indulgent, because it leads me into claustrophobic self-narratives about the nature of how I do or do not move, because it seems simple and I haven’t figured out how to plug my somatic machinations into my writing in a way that is totally interesting and accurate. I think a sure bet is to find a way to offer the body-work to others. To have an energy work practice I offer out of my apartment, for instance. Currently, I’m confused about the apprenticeship process for that—and how I really feel about it as a fair exchange. If you know of an energy worker/poet who could help me legitimize this for myself, please send me an email. Most days, I want to be a practitioner of some unquantifiable transformations for and with others, more than I want to be a poet.
Please imagine the proceeding sections as non-linear, rounded confluences—my relationship to work/poetics as Venn diagram. For me, there is no longer any real separation between the various kinds of work I must do and my poetics. This is both a beneficial alignment and a chiasmus of energies. Fractal symmetries that sort of shove into each other while trying to surface.
Please click here to listen to an audio version of this contribution.
work-work
The short answer to “What do you do?” is, “disability advocate”. Though, often, it is easier to respond with, “disability service provider” because people can interpret that as case manager or social worker and that makes sense to them. The longer, more accurate answer, is that I work for the Independent Living Resource Center in San Francisco, where I am absolutely not a social worker (via the old model of managing someone else’s choices and determining abilities based on bureaucratic qualifiers). Independent living centers exist nationally in most major cities. They are government-mandated, largely government-funded nonprofits that serve as places where people with disabilities can go to get information about resources, such as assistive technology, support groups, accessible arts programs, alerts about proposed legislation impacting disability issues. ILCs are where people can get help with navigating social services like personal or in home care, low income housing options, employment accommodations, etc. My work also requires me to keep up with the politics around healthcare, genetic testing, civil rights and technological innovations.
It requires me to be a constant communicator—either via phone, in-person, or increasingly, via social networking—since one of the biggest issues facing people with disabilities is the divide that still exists in terms of social integration. But most of all, this work requires me to sit with people and envision outcomes. People come to me with a mass of reality and their language around it—a new diagnosis or years of living with nagging, stupid issues that crop up. Things like: “landlord won’t let me have a ramp and now three steps keep me prisoner in my apartment”, or “I need to take Goldie to class on my shoulder because she can talk to the voices while I take notes for my exam”, or “I go to job interviews and as soon as I walk in the door with my white cane, the interviewer sounds plastic”. Primarily, mine is a job of collaborative making. A kind of peer counseling poiesis. I listen, co-brainstorm, share stories about folks in similar situations. I take the language that is given to me and give it back to the person who has come to see me—either by offering a way to prioritize around the issue, reframing options, or simply emoting in a way that is authentic and carries new momentum.
freelance-work
As a “peer mentor” at my independent living center, it is hard to know how much or how little to do, how best to facilitate a space for the client’s envisioning process. Especially when we are stand together against such gaping holes in community support systems. There are appeals to file, requests to fill out, bureaucratic languages that must be worked within. Then I go home and I swirl these interactions around in my head for days at a time, trying to hit upon some creative suggestion I can offer in each individual situation. This “taking it home with me” is not really required as part of my paid work, but it is the part that makes me a poet within the context of the work. I have wanted to push that impulse further and I have wanted to combine my paid work as an independent living center worker with my work as one who writes poems. I have also wanted to bring in body-work, the hardest most basic work. I wanted to create a single space to function as a poet, a body-worker and a disability advocate, so I have been experimenting with Write To Connect. A creative writing class for folks in the disability community.
body-work
I ran out of cartilage over 25 years ago and all of my bones, including the vertebra in my neck, have been grinding to a halt since then. I am 32 years old. I have bone spurs, tendon impingements, and frozen joints. If I want to maintain any freedom of movement for the next, hopefully, several decades, I must work every day, slowly, tediously, to keep some modicum of space between my internal moving parts. This means undoing the time spent working by swimming, sitting in warm waters, lying down, making dull circles with ankles, shoulders, wrists, etc. It also means massage, acupuncture, and energy work. And Art workouts! (This embarrasses me, to go into all this, because I feel like I have said this stuff on the internets before. I am kind of phobic about being repetitive, because being repetitive in writing seems to mimic somatic constriction I experience all the time. However, it also tends to loosen gently, methodically, which is absolutely the point.)
All of this body-work requires a huge amount of money, time, and attention. I give far less of any of these resources to the body-work, than I give to other types of work. That’s because I get bored, because it is invisible, because it feels indulgent, because it leads me into claustrophobic self-narratives about the nature of how I do or do not move, because it seems simple and I haven’t figured out how to plug my somatic machinations into my writing in a way that is totally interesting and accurate. I think a sure bet is to find a way to offer the body-work to others. To have an energy work practice I offer out of my apartment, for instance. Currently, I’m confused about the apprenticeship process for that—and how I really feel about it as a fair exchange. If you know of an energy worker/poet who could help me legitimize this for myself, please send me an email. Most days, I want to be a practitioner of some unquantifiable transformations for and with others, more than I want to be a poet.
STEVE BENSON
Steve Benson teaches himself and willing subjects whatever he notices he's learning, day by day. He's written orally, on paper, and otherwise, under a number of discrete and indiscreet conditions.
Working for myself, in collaboration
I’m a licensed psychologist. I work in an office I rent in a small town. As a psychotherapist, I’ve been variously and spontaneously hiding less, getting more real in it, including not knowing, in the moment, what anything means or what it’s good for. My client and I have hopes, but these are subject to change. So it’s close in some ways to how I work as a writer. Both situations let me be sincere and ethical. I get to decide how candid to be and when and how and why to say what I might later regret.
I get to try out roles and sides of myself, interact with diverse real and imaginary interlocutors, and explore my attention to language in its dynamic and uncertain action. I sometimes think of theories and precedent ideas associated with experience or reading, but I don’t have a stable plan or a rationale for making one. There are ways I limit or block myself, which generally have to do with trying not to be tiresome, disrespectful, or hurtful. I get to care, and there are experiences of learning and intimacy I wouldn’t find any other way. The more serious and earnest I find it, the more fun it is.
I couldn’t feel as resilient, I wouldn’t have as much fun, I wouldn’t experience my own integrity or invention anywhere near as much, if I weren’t self-employed. I could make lots more money in a hospital or a city job, with my degree, but the scale and role I have here allows me to recognize passion and happiness sporadically every day. I limit professional working hours to about 40 a week. I don’t let the business grow. In my sixties, I don’t expect to retire; I’ll have two children in college later this decade. My independence allows me to treat people as equals and to improvise my orientation to whatever I decide to say or do.
In my experience, this job is “artisanal,” in the meaning Andrew Joron applied to work, in his Labor Day 2010 talk – unquantifiable – qualitatively evaluated – and it’s ephemeral, like performance work, leaving only “the record” as document of what’s transpired. Like the “proletarian” Andrew describes, I have “nothing to sell but [my] labor,” one of activating relations through speaking and occasional writing. I have control over what happens to the profit I am making and lots of say over my working conditions: this is precious.
My father’s work was all in the advertising industry in Manhattan. He was gone 12-14 hours five weekdays and often holed up in the study working Sundays. He seemed pressured. Excessive smoking and drinking led to death by retirement age, debility and lost income before that. He missed out on relationships with his children. His career set a negative precedent we have variously reacted against.
Working for myself, in collaboration
I’m a licensed psychologist. I work in an office I rent in a small town. As a psychotherapist, I’ve been variously and spontaneously hiding less, getting more real in it, including not knowing, in the moment, what anything means or what it’s good for. My client and I have hopes, but these are subject to change. So it’s close in some ways to how I work as a writer. Both situations let me be sincere and ethical. I get to decide how candid to be and when and how and why to say what I might later regret.
I get to try out roles and sides of myself, interact with diverse real and imaginary interlocutors, and explore my attention to language in its dynamic and uncertain action. I sometimes think of theories and precedent ideas associated with experience or reading, but I don’t have a stable plan or a rationale for making one. There are ways I limit or block myself, which generally have to do with trying not to be tiresome, disrespectful, or hurtful. I get to care, and there are experiences of learning and intimacy I wouldn’t find any other way. The more serious and earnest I find it, the more fun it is.
I couldn’t feel as resilient, I wouldn’t have as much fun, I wouldn’t experience my own integrity or invention anywhere near as much, if I weren’t self-employed. I could make lots more money in a hospital or a city job, with my degree, but the scale and role I have here allows me to recognize passion and happiness sporadically every day. I limit professional working hours to about 40 a week. I don’t let the business grow. In my sixties, I don’t expect to retire; I’ll have two children in college later this decade. My independence allows me to treat people as equals and to improvise my orientation to whatever I decide to say or do.
In my experience, this job is “artisanal,” in the meaning Andrew Joron applied to work, in his Labor Day 2010 talk – unquantifiable – qualitatively evaluated – and it’s ephemeral, like performance work, leaving only “the record” as document of what’s transpired. Like the “proletarian” Andrew describes, I have “nothing to sell but [my] labor,” one of activating relations through speaking and occasional writing. I have control over what happens to the profit I am making and lots of say over my working conditions: this is precious.
My father’s work was all in the advertising industry in Manhattan. He was gone 12-14 hours five weekdays and often holed up in the study working Sundays. He seemed pressured. Excessive smoking and drinking led to death by retirement age, debility and lost income before that. He missed out on relationships with his children. His career set a negative precedent we have variously reacted against.
MARCH AT THE POETIC LABOR PROJECT
We're so pleased to announce that responses from Anne Boyer, Tyrone Williams, and Lara Durback are now up on the Poetic Labor Project's blog. To download a pdf of all three, please click here. We're grateful for these initial responses, which broaden the conversation around poetics and labor that was the subject of the gathering in the East Bay last Labor Day. As part of our commitment to continuing that conversation, please stay tuned for monthly updates with new content.
We want to open the space to as many people as would like to join - your comments and provocations are welcome. If you've got a more extended set of thoughts about any of the new writings, or the original presentations archived from the event, please feel free to submit those to: labday2010@gmail.com.
Thanks for your interest and solidarity!
~ Lauren Levin, Steve Farmer, Alli Warren, Brandon Brown
Thanks for your interest and solidarity!
~ Lauren Levin, Steve Farmer, Alli Warren, Brandon Brown
ANNE BOYER
Anne Boyer is a single mother who works three jobs in the ivory basement, or for at least two of these jobs, the sub-sub ivory basement. She lives in Kansas.
FOR LABOR
Because I decided to get as many jobs as I could and work these jobs in between sleeping and eating and caring for my child, I wanted, also, to build muscle and then more muscle, eat lean protein, and lose all intrusions of language or imagination or whatever it was that distinguished a poet from anyone else. This is not the first time I had to quit like this, but with all of these jobs I could eventually begin to see my hamstrings. I learned to do the reverse prone jacknife, and though later I understood it was a question of "How much poetry can I remove from me?" at the time it was a question of numbers, each hour accounted for in a notebook devoted to the accounting of hours.
In that my life consisted of working many jobs and taking care of a child and eating protein without any reading or writing, my life was not that different from the lives of many other people except that sometimes traces of an earlier life would appear in the form of people wanting things from me. I resolved to give them nothing. I barely gave them no. I learned to do my deadlifts with one leg behind me straight high in the air. I was always wanting balance challenges, like the twenty pound bicep curls with one foot tucked against my knee.
There were a few nights I would feel sorry for myself and cry about capitalism and what it had done to us, but not too many nights. Some nights we would go to the strip-mall bars of these old suburbs of the gentrifying city, and in these bars the people who worked too many jobs and also took care of their children and did not read too many books sang songs by Shania Twain and Destiny's Child.
I could not even stand in the bruised world yelling "It's a bruised world!" Was this some kind of macro-nutrient imbalance? Who knew?
*
I had a dream about the labor conference. I hadn’t been invited to speak and don’t know why, then, I was speaking there, but stood up in front of you and said, "Now imagine that once every seven years one Tang drinker gets to sip on the orange juice. Imagine being the one who is always being promised the orange juice. Imagine, sometimes, they even let you pour them their juice." This was a “provocative model” and “highly efficient de-professionalization” -- and I realized even then I couldn’t keep talking about Tang-life but couldn’t stop, could also not start to say what I meant or finish it. It was a graceless dream, or a dream in which I had been graceless, and afterwards I woke up and wondered if I had been reading from someone else’s notes.
*
I had never even thought of trauma as a trauma, perhaps because that word seems to be used by a kind of despised class to indicate the disappointment they feel that they are not able to have exactly everything that they want. I don’t even want what I want. What delicious possibility is inherent in the world of those who do not have the everything of the few, who do not have to make one false choice, then the next, traumatized always by the stakes of mere taste, by the terror of an incorrect move among the serious, spectacular minutiae?
After the second night of hemorrhaging I promised in an email “I will not let myself die” but still almost did. Even my boss said out loud what was killing me. It would have been perfectly literary if I had let myself die there on the bathroom floor asking for no help and afraid of the cost of the hospital. I had two choices and bleeding to death or losing all my money was too much symmetry. The bills later shook in my hands, shook on my lap, as if they were a kind of wind-up terror toy. The project of devaluing had made me, as a concept to myself, almost entirely expired. Once I got out of the hospital, my daughter said “humans die easily,” and I told her that “yes they do,” and also, “no they don’t.”
*
One has slivers of the self-directed life. I can give you the exact days and months and years: two days here, in a city I might never see again, or one month, there, thanks to that. At first, a pie chart, then something else: there is a brute in these rooms and apartments and duplexes and trailers and shared houses and single-family houses. The brute is not human, but like a bear, if a bear were a shadow, and ten times bigger than any figure I let myself imagine. This brute like a shadow and the bear not like a human is named survival-life. The brute is always saying something, is always paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, is all-like give me the labor of your body, not the work of your hands. There are children who fall asleep every night in that bear's arms. My favorite arts are the ones that can move your body or propose a new world. What at first kept me enthralled wasn't justice, it was justice-like waves, and a set of personal issues, like aestheticizing and the limitations of reading lists before the digital age.
I read my Epicitus until I realized I had enough, already, of the corrective imagination of a slave. People told me, of themselves, my whole life has been that brute. I’ve never figured out how to write about anything, like narrative is allergic and analysis is violence and discursion is betrayal. I’m sure I don’t know how I fit in here, but if you look for “all life into survival and all survival into life” I am something like the third hit down.
FOR LABOR
Because I decided to get as many jobs as I could and work these jobs in between sleeping and eating and caring for my child, I wanted, also, to build muscle and then more muscle, eat lean protein, and lose all intrusions of language or imagination or whatever it was that distinguished a poet from anyone else. This is not the first time I had to quit like this, but with all of these jobs I could eventually begin to see my hamstrings. I learned to do the reverse prone jacknife, and though later I understood it was a question of "How much poetry can I remove from me?" at the time it was a question of numbers, each hour accounted for in a notebook devoted to the accounting of hours.
In that my life consisted of working many jobs and taking care of a child and eating protein without any reading or writing, my life was not that different from the lives of many other people except that sometimes traces of an earlier life would appear in the form of people wanting things from me. I resolved to give them nothing. I barely gave them no. I learned to do my deadlifts with one leg behind me straight high in the air. I was always wanting balance challenges, like the twenty pound bicep curls with one foot tucked against my knee.
There were a few nights I would feel sorry for myself and cry about capitalism and what it had done to us, but not too many nights. Some nights we would go to the strip-mall bars of these old suburbs of the gentrifying city, and in these bars the people who worked too many jobs and also took care of their children and did not read too many books sang songs by Shania Twain and Destiny's Child.
I could not even stand in the bruised world yelling "It's a bruised world!" Was this some kind of macro-nutrient imbalance? Who knew?
*
I had a dream about the labor conference. I hadn’t been invited to speak and don’t know why, then, I was speaking there, but stood up in front of you and said, "Now imagine that once every seven years one Tang drinker gets to sip on the orange juice. Imagine being the one who is always being promised the orange juice. Imagine, sometimes, they even let you pour them their juice." This was a “provocative model” and “highly efficient de-professionalization” -- and I realized even then I couldn’t keep talking about Tang-life but couldn’t stop, could also not start to say what I meant or finish it. It was a graceless dream, or a dream in which I had been graceless, and afterwards I woke up and wondered if I had been reading from someone else’s notes.
*
I had never even thought of trauma as a trauma, perhaps because that word seems to be used by a kind of despised class to indicate the disappointment they feel that they are not able to have exactly everything that they want. I don’t even want what I want. What delicious possibility is inherent in the world of those who do not have the everything of the few, who do not have to make one false choice, then the next, traumatized always by the stakes of mere taste, by the terror of an incorrect move among the serious, spectacular minutiae?
After the second night of hemorrhaging I promised in an email “I will not let myself die” but still almost did. Even my boss said out loud what was killing me. It would have been perfectly literary if I had let myself die there on the bathroom floor asking for no help and afraid of the cost of the hospital. I had two choices and bleeding to death or losing all my money was too much symmetry. The bills later shook in my hands, shook on my lap, as if they were a kind of wind-up terror toy. The project of devaluing had made me, as a concept to myself, almost entirely expired. Once I got out of the hospital, my daughter said “humans die easily,” and I told her that “yes they do,” and also, “no they don’t.”
*
One has slivers of the self-directed life. I can give you the exact days and months and years: two days here, in a city I might never see again, or one month, there, thanks to that. At first, a pie chart, then something else: there is a brute in these rooms and apartments and duplexes and trailers and shared houses and single-family houses. The brute is not human, but like a bear, if a bear were a shadow, and ten times bigger than any figure I let myself imagine. This brute like a shadow and the bear not like a human is named survival-life. The brute is always saying something, is always paraphrasing Hannah Arendt, is all-like give me the labor of your body, not the work of your hands. There are children who fall asleep every night in that bear's arms. My favorite arts are the ones that can move your body or propose a new world. What at first kept me enthralled wasn't justice, it was justice-like waves, and a set of personal issues, like aestheticizing and the limitations of reading lists before the digital age.
I read my Epicitus until I realized I had enough, already, of the corrective imagination of a slave. People told me, of themselves, my whole life has been that brute. I’ve never figured out how to write about anything, like narrative is allergic and analysis is violence and discursion is betrayal. I’m sure I don’t know how I fit in here, but if you look for “all life into survival and all survival into life” I am something like the third hit down.
TYRONE WILLIAMS
Tyrone Williams teaches literature and literary theory at Xavier University. He is the author of several books of poetry and the forthcoming elegy, Pink Tie.
My Belated CPT—ellipsis, translation, the body
On January 14, 2009, Cathy Park Hong posted a comment on Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater. Here is a small portion of what she wrote:
The text is not a script for voice, but a script for performance, underscoring its artifice… the emphasis is on the artifice of voice, the voice in drag, masque, ridiculous impersonation. The voice is both synthetic and serves as a synthesis of hybrid languages…Toscano’s poetry is infected with the language of Globalization and consumerist culture…tech-speak, ad-speak, and business-conference room-speak….question the totalizing effects of Global Capitalism on individual choices… informs us that faced with the market monolith, there are no choices, even though we’re led to believe that we’re inundated with them. The voices are mordant, thorny…Many of his works share a troubling relationship with the collective: in one sense, the mass subsumes into corporate groupthink, but in another sense, the collective is necessary for political action. Throughout the book, the individual is never specified. Voices are anonymous, neutered groups…there is no differentiation between person and product, person and property, person and the labor force…simply anxious actors programmed to put on a “happy pappy face” in the great determining system of Capitalism.
On January 19, 2009, I posted my response:
I concur completely with your comments even if they are, as you note, an essay toward a more thorough analysis of Toscano's work. You have identified what I too find compelling and troubling, the reduction and ad absurdum logic of the "voice" to a collective--that is, the way the collective turns out, in its more vulnerable moments, to "be" an assemblage of disembodied voices. Yet, and this is the radical nature of his work, that dynamic (which is not a dialectic) is also the promise of another future, a trans-nationalism at the edges, if not outside, of the consumerist/globalizing markers of identity--and "identity politics" is far too reductionist (and parochial)--with which, in which, we find ourselves, so to speak...
***
I am writing this, today, on January 18, 2010. I did not intend to mark this work with the X of an anniversary, much less the MLK of a national holiday. Yet here I am, one year after my initial post on CPT. In what sense did my body know, if it knew, that it had been a year, a full revolution around the sun, even if the difference between dates, one number, is the index of history as a constructivist science, a lag, belated date only in relation to a day—one revolution around its own center—called Monday? And what does this body, which is not the same body about which I wrote a few words above, have to do with the X of an anniversary, the MLK of a national holiday? Would it be brash to call these days and dates, the delay that throws them out of line with one another, one or the other always late in relation to one another, CPT? Can this delay be drawn as an ellipsis, as an absence, as the relationship between a stamp pad and stamped impression, between a stage and a stomp?
(Rodrigo Toscano from Conditions of Poetic Production and Reception, part 1)
Now, along a Realist Theatre code-&-expectation grid that sequence “makes no sense” as to how the body-action narratively “syncs” with the speech-say action. But from the perspective of Poetics Theater, it’s altogether different. The body-action is a coordination (between two players) as through a series of stress points (the limits of two anatomies). And the speech can also be thought of as a coordination (of materiality of the signs) as through a series of ideological stress-points (Globalization giving birth and truncating incipient urbanist art forms). The “((fuck))” is where the two theatric designations would meet, but don’t. So action and speech are preserved (not pimped one onto the other), and what’s expended is the spectators striving to piece them together,"((fuck)).” So, they’re disynchronous as regards unified gesticulatory purpose, but bisynchronous as regards an elemental theatric moment, that is, a demonstration of players coupled by a spectatorship making critical discriminations of such a demonstration.
This writing proceeds without ellipsis, having reduced Cathy Park Hong’s writing to a text sewn together with ellipses, the point being that Hong’s writing is mere pretext for my writing. Still, the ellipses are an ethical gesture, alerting the reader of a missing text. Translation not only presumes the elliptical, it demands it, cannot precede without expelling an ur-pre-text. Every translation, of course, like every mode of translation, differs from other translations, other modes of translation. What does it mean, then, to translate one revolution of the sun into a date? And the reverse: what does it mean to translate a discourse into a body even if we grant that both may share a term—a “poetics”—even if we also understand that this one word means at least two different things when applied to discourse and to a body?
My Belated CPT—ellipsis, translation, the body
On January 14, 2009, Cathy Park Hong posted a comment on Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater. Here is a small portion of what she wrote:
The text is not a script for voice, but a script for performance, underscoring its artifice… the emphasis is on the artifice of voice, the voice in drag, masque, ridiculous impersonation. The voice is both synthetic and serves as a synthesis of hybrid languages…Toscano’s poetry is infected with the language of Globalization and consumerist culture…tech-speak, ad-speak, and business-conference room-speak….question the totalizing effects of Global Capitalism on individual choices… informs us that faced with the market monolith, there are no choices, even though we’re led to believe that we’re inundated with them. The voices are mordant, thorny…Many of his works share a troubling relationship with the collective: in one sense, the mass subsumes into corporate groupthink, but in another sense, the collective is necessary for political action. Throughout the book, the individual is never specified. Voices are anonymous, neutered groups…there is no differentiation between person and product, person and property, person and the labor force…simply anxious actors programmed to put on a “happy pappy face” in the great determining system of Capitalism.
On January 19, 2009, I posted my response:
I concur completely with your comments even if they are, as you note, an essay toward a more thorough analysis of Toscano's work. You have identified what I too find compelling and troubling, the reduction and ad absurdum logic of the "voice" to a collective--that is, the way the collective turns out, in its more vulnerable moments, to "be" an assemblage of disembodied voices. Yet, and this is the radical nature of his work, that dynamic (which is not a dialectic) is also the promise of another future, a trans-nationalism at the edges, if not outside, of the consumerist/globalizing markers of identity--and "identity politics" is far too reductionist (and parochial)--with which, in which, we find ourselves, so to speak...
***
I am writing this, today, on January 18, 2010. I did not intend to mark this work with the X of an anniversary, much less the MLK of a national holiday. Yet here I am, one year after my initial post on CPT. In what sense did my body know, if it knew, that it had been a year, a full revolution around the sun, even if the difference between dates, one number, is the index of history as a constructivist science, a lag, belated date only in relation to a day—one revolution around its own center—called Monday? And what does this body, which is not the same body about which I wrote a few words above, have to do with the X of an anniversary, the MLK of a national holiday? Would it be brash to call these days and dates, the delay that throws them out of line with one another, one or the other always late in relation to one another, CPT? Can this delay be drawn as an ellipsis, as an absence, as the relationship between a stamp pad and stamped impression, between a stage and a stomp?
(Rodrigo Toscano from Conditions of Poetic Production and Reception, part 1)
Now, along a Realist Theatre code-&-expectation grid that sequence “makes no sense” as to how the body-action narratively “syncs” with the speech-say action. But from the perspective of Poetics Theater, it’s altogether different. The body-action is a coordination (between two players) as through a series of stress points (the limits of two anatomies). And the speech can also be thought of as a coordination (of materiality of the signs) as through a series of ideological stress-points (Globalization giving birth and truncating incipient urbanist art forms). The “((fuck))” is where the two theatric designations would meet, but don’t. So action and speech are preserved (not pimped one onto the other), and what’s expended is the spectators striving to piece them together,"((fuck)).” So, they’re disynchronous as regards unified gesticulatory purpose, but bisynchronous as regards an elemental theatric moment, that is, a demonstration of players coupled by a spectatorship making critical discriminations of such a demonstration.
This writing proceeds without ellipsis, having reduced Cathy Park Hong’s writing to a text sewn together with ellipses, the point being that Hong’s writing is mere pretext for my writing. Still, the ellipses are an ethical gesture, alerting the reader of a missing text. Translation not only presumes the elliptical, it demands it, cannot precede without expelling an ur-pre-text. Every translation, of course, like every mode of translation, differs from other translations, other modes of translation. What does it mean, then, to translate one revolution of the sun into a date? And the reverse: what does it mean to translate a discourse into a body even if we grant that both may share a term—a “poetics”—even if we also understand that this one word means at least two different things when applied to discourse and to a body?
LARA DURBACK
Lara Durback is not a book artist and is sick of being called that. She works with the book form and lots of old equipment in order to understand and constantly be mindful of the process of the making of anything. She will teach at Naropa University's Summer Writing Program this year.
I hate money. I really do. I like labor. I like working. I work hard. I always have. I've been working with this organization MISSSEY. I'm a poet, but I usually don't say that to people. In the MISSSEY Community Collective, I am called Fundraising Team Leader. "But you hate money!" you say.
I say, "I fell in." I met these people and I couldn't leave because they face human darkness every day with a radical love for others. It seems to be the only way one can work on these things. (Well it requires a lot of self-care on the people doing the working too.) I was pissed off at someone else on my Fundraising team, and I complained to Nola, the founder of MISSSEY, who responded by email saying, "I hear you. ...[addressing my concern, but] love conquers all." I wanted her to be my Ganesh, to move away my obstacle, to be "the boss." But she was like, "just love." I grit my teeth to myself for a few days, want to quit everything, and then things clear and I can work on things again.
I hate asking people for money. I don't want money for anything except trains and beer and photocopies and books. I needed things for a while, now I know that everything I need I can find in the trash. I grew up thinking I would be on the street everyday. I was told that. I ate cold hot dogs from the fridge while he talked on the phone. But I'm big now.
I hate asking for money but today I went into a schmoozy Temescal restaurant and asked for money. I usually think of my work with MISSSEY as curating...I only ask for things from businesses that have been a dear part of my life for a while, people who have some sort of relationship with communities and employees that I respect, like Oakland Community Acupunture, Pizza Pazza, Full House Cafe, Rooz Cafe, Laura Camp Yoga. Friday is my day off, and I dedicate about 4 hours to MISSSEY usually, and this particular morning I was working on me & Greg Turner's chapbook for Dusie, Garbage Research #1: Hoarders. We'll see if it makes it as a chapbook, it's pretty ziney.)
So anyway, that morning I had been at a mindful pilates class in which I just lay on a roller and think about my spine for an hour, and I felt radiant and focused and clear for the first time in two weeks. Despite the scary tsumnami and earthquake news, it was inner peace. I biked up the street and got a number for a sandwich at Genova, #78, and they were only on #50. So I thought, I'll go across the street and try to get a gift certificate for MISSSEY's raffle fundraiser. I sort out one of the copies of the letters asking for money and try to write a personal note. A gust of wind comes and knocks all my papers around. Someone helps me. I thank them and say something self-deprecating and walk into the empty restaurant. At the back, 4 men are prepping food. I am intimidated, start getting dizzy. "Hi, I'm here to s-see if you have a would uh give a uh g-gift certificate for a fundraiser." They all grin at me kind of condescending.
They are cutting meat. I don't eat meat. I don't mind it, but it's really gross alone, and with people all touching it. The main guy is very good looking, and is grinning sort of smugly. "What's it for?" "It's MISSSEY. Motivating Inspiring Supporting and Serving Sexually Exploited Youth." I stumble over that too. I kick something on the floor accidentally. I have 2 braids, yoga pants, an overstuffed bag weighting me down, I feel about 1 foot tall. I feel like they are looking at my body. "Sexually exploited? That's kind of a clumsy term." "It's another way of saying teen prostitutes, but they are not prostitutes because they are not making any money. And people don't have much sympathy legally for the term prostitute."
"I love prostitutes." He says. My hips feel like they are going to fall off. "Don't talk like that..." I say, but I am crumbling, "Did you get our letter we sent?" "Probably not," he says, and I feel like I just want to run, run, run.
"There are a lot of girls on the street near where I live. I have smokes with them and stuff when they're outside," he continues. "Where?" I asked. "63rd and San Pablo." "Are they young?" "Some of them." And he sees me still giving him wary psycho eyes, and says, "No seriously, the first girl I dated used to be a prostitute. I had a kid with her. [He walks around from the other side of the counter.] She's an amazing human being. She wasn't like on the street though....of course I'll give you a gift certificate."
"So she was making money, huh? Well these girls aren't making money. The new trend is that long time drug dealers have switched to dealing girls. It's less risky." He starts writing a gift certificate with meat hands.
He shakes his head and gives me the gift certificate. I shook my head. " I really thought you were just going to be an asshole." I said. "Thanks." And I got back over to Genova when they were only on #76.
Sometimes I wonder how I have time to work on this stuff. This is work. I am on my way to the office to make phone calls and use Google docs and edit letters and plan meetings. I can ask for money for this because it's not for me. If it was for me, I would hate asking even more. I fell into working here, and I have a 2/3-time job at Mills College Book Art Program the rest of the time. And then the rest of the time, I write (and the writing of course overlaps with everything whenever it can).
I think work was a lot worse before I decided to completely shape and curate my life. I never had energy to do anything. I was constantly anxious and thinking that every thing I wrote or did wasn't good enough. (I mean, there were meds to surrender to, also.) Many of the people I admired in high school and early college were poets, knowing them in a book, or knowing them in life and also in their writing. I chose to go to college because I needed to get away from my family. I did not have academic goals. I did not have money to move anywhere on my own without choosing a dorm. The poets that I found as I studied had one foot in academia and one on the ground. I met Jena Osman. Her advanced poetry workshop was the most challenging course I took in college. Plus there were others I had found on my own, in libraries. I was exposed to poets that were working very hard on things that other people would puzzle over to understand why they were working so hard. Poets that I encountered generally studied things other than their own line of work. (I cannot say this about people I knew who "officially" studied finance, or linguistics, or sound design. It seems like the line for others was often between study vs. fun. Or study vs. responsibilities such as children and jobs that make rent [a restaurant job/office/store job]. So a poet is not separating that. Yeah?) Was I lucky? Were other poets elsewhere not like this? From people's perceptions of poetry that i've heard outside of poetry scenes, poetry is perceived to relate to depression, love, laziness, or tragedy (as in all the 9-11 poetry attention), perhaps it's not true that poets are the way they say they are. But I always thought, real poets studied the world. Real poets lived like something like Ed Sanders' Investigative Poetry narrates, though I'm not exactly sure I'd want to be Ed Sanders. Real poets had knowledge of all the art around them, current events, consciousness, word origins, urban planning, labor organizing, indigenous peoples, alternate histories, psychology, biology, sociology, and they all have theories about everything. Real poets were multiple. Real poets were secret philosophers but not as annoying, just flakier and more late.
When people in Full House Cafe where I waitress on Sundays ask me what kind of art or writing I do, I say, "investigative poetry." If I don't say that, they will think I write about love and hide in my room. I write about love sometimes, don't I?
Once I can start allowing myself to have the space to learn other things besides poetry, forcing myself to be with people other than poets (it's not that hard), then I am more of a poet.
The labor of printing chapbooks by letterpress washes over me now. I'm supposed to talk about that here, I think. I enjoy the mechanics, the rogue printers I met who will tell you how to fix any problem cheaply once they trust you. I also enjoy spending time researching how to buy the least amount of things possible to run a whole print shop and bindery. How much can we reuse with things like Freecycle? How can we find things made locally? How do we balance between making art more sustainable and not buying into greenwashing marketing?
I print only sometimes. It can be extremely frustrating to work with individual metal letters and spacing, and the long sessions are hard on the body. Vandercook presses (flatbed cylinder proofing presses) were not intended for production work. People would run one print and take a photo of it. (But Vandercooks are easier to learn and there is less risk of smashing your hand than on a platen press, such as a C&P, a press that is intended for production.) I have experienced a rip in the cartilage of my sternum that I'm almost positive was related to printing on a Vandercook (cranking the heavy carriage back and forth hundreds of times with the same arm, with an odd torque to my torso).
People know what I have access to in terms of presses at Mills, and unlimited art crap lying around, but they don't generally know the complicated system of space and power I need to navigate in order to make my day-to-day operation of Mills peaceful. And that means I can't just print all the time. I also have such problems with overextending myself I have ended up in the hospital in the past. (But that's how you get a part-time job in Book Art that 24 people all over the country applied for because people just love access to that stuff so much. You gotta be an overachiever, a go-getter. Little did the applicants know it would be 2 years of planning six equipment moves involving cranes and trucks and also moving carts of things alone, and bringing your boyfriend in to help you because it couldn't get done otherwise and sweeping out cabinets of mysterious powders left over by the chemistry building the program moved into BEFORE it became a dream job.)
I cannot count the times I have been asked by people to print something for them or with them, even though I barely know them, and for a long time, it made me feel like it was all they wanted from me, sort of like something else I always thought people wanted from me. I mean, I'm not against doing free work at all, but...
Nola said at a MISSSEY Community Collective training, "It's a classic abuse thing, people always go back to, 'that's all they want from me.' "
Like sex. Like sexy letterpress.
But you can heal, and have pleasure again, and print again, and write again.
I give honor to a lot of the poets who do a lot of things. I'm so happy to hear of poets as urban planners, performance artists, doing graphic design, social work, protesting, working with youth, enmeshing the world they have in their poetics with the rest of the world, making it one fluid curation or stream of energy that matches an intention. Because what is a poetics if it doesn't do anything that gets it out of the house.
I hate money. I really do. I like labor. I like working. I work hard. I always have. I've been working with this organization MISSSEY. I'm a poet, but I usually don't say that to people. In the MISSSEY Community Collective, I am called Fundraising Team Leader. "But you hate money!" you say.
I say, "I fell in." I met these people and I couldn't leave because they face human darkness every day with a radical love for others. It seems to be the only way one can work on these things. (Well it requires a lot of self-care on the people doing the working too.) I was pissed off at someone else on my Fundraising team, and I complained to Nola, the founder of MISSSEY, who responded by email saying, "I hear you. ...[addressing my concern, but] love conquers all." I wanted her to be my Ganesh, to move away my obstacle, to be "the boss." But she was like, "just love." I grit my teeth to myself for a few days, want to quit everything, and then things clear and I can work on things again.
I hate asking people for money. I don't want money for anything except trains and beer and photocopies and books. I needed things for a while, now I know that everything I need I can find in the trash. I grew up thinking I would be on the street everyday. I was told that. I ate cold hot dogs from the fridge while he talked on the phone. But I'm big now.
I hate asking for money but today I went into a schmoozy Temescal restaurant and asked for money. I usually think of my work with MISSSEY as curating...I only ask for things from businesses that have been a dear part of my life for a while, people who have some sort of relationship with communities and employees that I respect, like Oakland Community Acupunture, Pizza Pazza, Full House Cafe, Rooz Cafe, Laura Camp Yoga. Friday is my day off, and I dedicate about 4 hours to MISSSEY usually, and this particular morning I was working on me & Greg Turner's chapbook for Dusie, Garbage Research #1: Hoarders. We'll see if it makes it as a chapbook, it's pretty ziney.)
So anyway, that morning I had been at a mindful pilates class in which I just lay on a roller and think about my spine for an hour, and I felt radiant and focused and clear for the first time in two weeks. Despite the scary tsumnami and earthquake news, it was inner peace. I biked up the street and got a number for a sandwich at Genova, #78, and they were only on #50. So I thought, I'll go across the street and try to get a gift certificate for MISSSEY's raffle fundraiser. I sort out one of the copies of the letters asking for money and try to write a personal note. A gust of wind comes and knocks all my papers around. Someone helps me. I thank them and say something self-deprecating and walk into the empty restaurant. At the back, 4 men are prepping food. I am intimidated, start getting dizzy. "Hi, I'm here to s-see if you have a would uh give a uh g-gift certificate for a fundraiser." They all grin at me kind of condescending.
They are cutting meat. I don't eat meat. I don't mind it, but it's really gross alone, and with people all touching it. The main guy is very good looking, and is grinning sort of smugly. "What's it for?" "It's MISSSEY. Motivating Inspiring Supporting and Serving Sexually Exploited Youth." I stumble over that too. I kick something on the floor accidentally. I have 2 braids, yoga pants, an overstuffed bag weighting me down, I feel about 1 foot tall. I feel like they are looking at my body. "Sexually exploited? That's kind of a clumsy term." "It's another way of saying teen prostitutes, but they are not prostitutes because they are not making any money. And people don't have much sympathy legally for the term prostitute."
"I love prostitutes." He says. My hips feel like they are going to fall off. "Don't talk like that..." I say, but I am crumbling, "Did you get our letter we sent?" "Probably not," he says, and I feel like I just want to run, run, run.
"There are a lot of girls on the street near where I live. I have smokes with them and stuff when they're outside," he continues. "Where?" I asked. "63rd and San Pablo." "Are they young?" "Some of them." And he sees me still giving him wary psycho eyes, and says, "No seriously, the first girl I dated used to be a prostitute. I had a kid with her. [He walks around from the other side of the counter.] She's an amazing human being. She wasn't like on the street though....of course I'll give you a gift certificate."
"So she was making money, huh? Well these girls aren't making money. The new trend is that long time drug dealers have switched to dealing girls. It's less risky." He starts writing a gift certificate with meat hands.
He shakes his head and gives me the gift certificate. I shook my head. " I really thought you were just going to be an asshole." I said. "Thanks." And I got back over to Genova when they were only on #76.
Sometimes I wonder how I have time to work on this stuff. This is work. I am on my way to the office to make phone calls and use Google docs and edit letters and plan meetings. I can ask for money for this because it's not for me. If it was for me, I would hate asking even more. I fell into working here, and I have a 2/3-time job at Mills College Book Art Program the rest of the time. And then the rest of the time, I write (and the writing of course overlaps with everything whenever it can).
I think work was a lot worse before I decided to completely shape and curate my life. I never had energy to do anything. I was constantly anxious and thinking that every thing I wrote or did wasn't good enough. (I mean, there were meds to surrender to, also.) Many of the people I admired in high school and early college were poets, knowing them in a book, or knowing them in life and also in their writing. I chose to go to college because I needed to get away from my family. I did not have academic goals. I did not have money to move anywhere on my own without choosing a dorm. The poets that I found as I studied had one foot in academia and one on the ground. I met Jena Osman. Her advanced poetry workshop was the most challenging course I took in college. Plus there were others I had found on my own, in libraries. I was exposed to poets that were working very hard on things that other people would puzzle over to understand why they were working so hard. Poets that I encountered generally studied things other than their own line of work. (I cannot say this about people I knew who "officially" studied finance, or linguistics, or sound design. It seems like the line for others was often between study vs. fun. Or study vs. responsibilities such as children and jobs that make rent [a restaurant job/office/store job]. So a poet is not separating that. Yeah?) Was I lucky? Were other poets elsewhere not like this? From people's perceptions of poetry that i've heard outside of poetry scenes, poetry is perceived to relate to depression, love, laziness, or tragedy (as in all the 9-11 poetry attention), perhaps it's not true that poets are the way they say they are. But I always thought, real poets studied the world. Real poets lived like something like Ed Sanders' Investigative Poetry narrates, though I'm not exactly sure I'd want to be Ed Sanders. Real poets had knowledge of all the art around them, current events, consciousness, word origins, urban planning, labor organizing, indigenous peoples, alternate histories, psychology, biology, sociology, and they all have theories about everything. Real poets were multiple. Real poets were secret philosophers but not as annoying, just flakier and more late.
When people in Full House Cafe where I waitress on Sundays ask me what kind of art or writing I do, I say, "investigative poetry." If I don't say that, they will think I write about love and hide in my room. I write about love sometimes, don't I?
Once I can start allowing myself to have the space to learn other things besides poetry, forcing myself to be with people other than poets (it's not that hard), then I am more of a poet.
The labor of printing chapbooks by letterpress washes over me now. I'm supposed to talk about that here, I think. I enjoy the mechanics, the rogue printers I met who will tell you how to fix any problem cheaply once they trust you. I also enjoy spending time researching how to buy the least amount of things possible to run a whole print shop and bindery. How much can we reuse with things like Freecycle? How can we find things made locally? How do we balance between making art more sustainable and not buying into greenwashing marketing?
I print only sometimes. It can be extremely frustrating to work with individual metal letters and spacing, and the long sessions are hard on the body. Vandercook presses (flatbed cylinder proofing presses) were not intended for production work. People would run one print and take a photo of it. (But Vandercooks are easier to learn and there is less risk of smashing your hand than on a platen press, such as a C&P, a press that is intended for production.) I have experienced a rip in the cartilage of my sternum that I'm almost positive was related to printing on a Vandercook (cranking the heavy carriage back and forth hundreds of times with the same arm, with an odd torque to my torso).
People know what I have access to in terms of presses at Mills, and unlimited art crap lying around, but they don't generally know the complicated system of space and power I need to navigate in order to make my day-to-day operation of Mills peaceful. And that means I can't just print all the time. I also have such problems with overextending myself I have ended up in the hospital in the past. (But that's how you get a part-time job in Book Art that 24 people all over the country applied for because people just love access to that stuff so much. You gotta be an overachiever, a go-getter. Little did the applicants know it would be 2 years of planning six equipment moves involving cranes and trucks and also moving carts of things alone, and bringing your boyfriend in to help you because it couldn't get done otherwise and sweeping out cabinets of mysterious powders left over by the chemistry building the program moved into BEFORE it became a dream job.)
I cannot count the times I have been asked by people to print something for them or with them, even though I barely know them, and for a long time, it made me feel like it was all they wanted from me, sort of like something else I always thought people wanted from me. I mean, I'm not against doing free work at all, but...
Nola said at a MISSSEY Community Collective training, "It's a classic abuse thing, people always go back to, 'that's all they want from me.' "
Like sex. Like sexy letterpress.
But you can heal, and have pleasure again, and print again, and write again.
I give honor to a lot of the poets who do a lot of things. I'm so happy to hear of poets as urban planners, performance artists, doing graphic design, social work, protesting, working with youth, enmeshing the world they have in their poetics with the rest of the world, making it one fluid curation or stream of energy that matches an intention. Because what is a poetics if it doesn't do anything that gets it out of the house.
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