Author: silentbroadcast

The sky is bigger than the ocean.
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“Conceptual” poetry

I had an incredibly exhausting trip out to Buffalo with some friends to participate in the small press book fair there. What an incredible space.

A lot of my friends out there fall into the “conceptual poet” category. This label fascinates me for who gets placed in it versus who does not. There seems to be a strong proceduralism and/or repetitiousness to the projects I have seen get read under this “conceptual” banner. And a provocation at the center of their work. Some might describe it as “offensive.” I am on the fence. I’m interested and alert to it because I haven’t quite made up my mind about what I think it’s doing. That in itself is very exciting to me.

But what about authors working in different shapes with different motivations behind their work? Nathaniel Mackey. Urayoan Noel. Myung Mi Kim. There is a sense of history at their center that they write around. Does this disqualify them from this label of “conceptual”? I’m inclined to think so.

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Postmemory / 한 (HAN)

Sometimes research is a lifeline, a beautiful kaleidoscope that unveils a myriad horizon. At other times, it is the haunted umbilical cord that pulls at your center. Such pain.

I’m researching into cultural trauma. It is “funny” to read into something that feels so intimate to me. The traumas of war, displacement, domestic abuse,”the nation,” racial logics — these have left black fingerprints all over my family’s portraits. It ate my marriage. And still I sing! I am known for my sunny disposition!

I think about this term, “postmemory.” The psychological multi-generational fallout of trauma. A cultural violence, distilled into our bodies. KOЯEANs know it so well. We call it 한. I know HAN by a sort of native birthright, I suppose. It courses through me. It is not all of me, but it is mine. HAN. A deep sorrow, anguish, bitterness. Where are its roots? A heartrending sound, it pierces. It has an elemental depth. It hurts, it is familiar. Is this how continents are born? This beautiful folk singer, 김영임, has it coursing through her voice.

I’ve described it a bit previously in my review of Kim Hye-Soon’s poetry. I’ve written to and from it in so many places.

HAN is not just a feeling or a sound. It is also a gesture, a feeling inside your body. I have been working to release it through movements. I hesitate to call it dance. I meditate. I become filled with a mood. This mood moves me. I give into it.

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Can I climb this thorny rope that reaches from my guts, out of my throat, and into the sky? Can I climb this thorny rope into a new element, a new figure, a new light? Without ambition. Without hope. How may I climb.

Tell me the story / Of all of these things. / Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.

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To take seriously, from isolation

Are you capable of riding that hysterical horse into the sea?

Can you drink an entire ocean when that ocean burns with hot blue fire?

I say and say it again. Such blue fires may burn. And towards heaven whose words will ascend.

(All I want is to see your face)

This failing detente between North and South Korea, the high pitched rhetoric of fire storms and hell…where most see a potential holocaust or madness, I see an isolated figure that desperately wants to be touched.

How long can a body live in the shade of one nude tree.

My body wants to lay down in sand, how it holds me but leaves no trace.

Who is to say withholding, or clinging so, isn’t its own form of love.

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Insight, the body. Sinuous it goes.

According to East Asian astrology, this is the year of the water serpent. I’m trying to understand what this means for my imagination of this year. Serpents. Sinuous, terrestrial. They know and observe according to different rationalities. I feel time might congeal for them where it runs past me.

I passed by these dragon statues near Chinatown on my walk home this evening. The dragons felt nude to me, exposed. I normally imagine them enclouded, outside of my total vision. They roam the skies, dwell in fog banks encasing hermetic mountaintops, slumber in taut, silent lakes. Aren’t these truly the totems of inspiration, insight, the knowledge that crashes down through us — what we can’t prepare for?

I feel that so much has already crashed down. This year will hopefully be a quiet year of recovery, of subtle, deep set and slow terrestrial movements. Of serpent tectonics that bring the sky down into the sea. Serpents as land dragons. Slowed down, distilled and more gentle for our encounter. Speak.

Sha told me he was prepared to give up being human.

What am I prepared to foreswear in order to enter this dark blue room, the other side of sight. To continue as I have is to be pinned to the sky — blind, mute, frozen, exposed. An iron curlicue. No new forms.

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Light is a container full of noise

I was looking at this picture of the Cygnus cluster earlier this week. Nasa Spitzer Space Telescope image of Cygnus Whenever I look at satellite images of deep space that have been re-rendered to highlight their anatomy, I’m struck by how much data is carried in light. This image has been processed in order to make infrared information visible to us. From light, we can determine the composition of these celestial bodies, their rotation and movement, their age…we can even predict their futures.

When I think of radiation as light, when I think of heat as light, when I think of vibration as light, I am moved by the notion that all things in the universe transmit. Communicate. Cast informational streams from themselves. What does the heat generated from my body say? What am I broadcasting at every quivering instant?

And the light that reaches me and interacts with my body, my perceptions, my ideas… what information is being so blindly delivered into me?

Our bodies require light.

I seek the opening of an understanding.

What is being said and said again with me. What am I now saying, too. If my skin were composed of eyes, what would it see. If my body were a gigantic listening drum, what would I perceive.

A still from Hardcash production's documentary, "Children of the Secret State."
A still from Hardcash production’s documentary, “Children of the Secret State.”

When I was working on what later turned into my second book, Underground National, I was watching several documentaries about North Korea. I watched these documentaries with a grain of salt, of course, but the images were arresting. I was particularly moved by the plight of orphaned children in North Korea, many of whom are starving and live by begging or picking out scraps. There was one orphan, a boy, who was in clear distress. His face was contorted with pain. No one stopped to even look at him. He walked about, holding his clasped hands up to his chest. I am not sure how old he was. Perhaps 8 or 9. He was very small. The documentary was made over ten years ago. My spirit tells me this young boy did not survive. And when I think of this, I realize that the only documents that attest to his life could very well be the footage that was used in the film. And I was observing the recreated light patterns of what had once echoed off his body and into the camera’s lens, captured.

Light moves and fills me. It is not quite life, but it echoes and drums and resounds and speaks it.

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The Story I Never Know

I have been taking sky portraits for over two years now. It developed out of an eerie experience I had once while on the train to work.

I suddenly AWOKE. I suddenly found myself on the train, surrounded by others on their morning routes. I had no memory of rising out of bed, my morning toilet, dressing, leaving my home, or waiting for the train. It terrified me. What had become of all my lost time? And where was I in those spans? Who was I now without that person of those times lost? I felt intermittent. Was this dangerous? Perhaps so. It troubled me.

I realized I needed a mindful practice. Something to sweep me out of the default zero-grade attention that our banal daily activities lull us into. I needed something I could do regularly no matter where I was. And so my eyes turned skyward.

As a child I used to love cloud watching. I have a distinct, visceral body memory of me laying in the grass out front of the house where I grew up. I recall the dry crackle the grass made in my ears, the slight cool dampness of it pressed into my back. The way the clouds tumbled their way across the sky, eating each other.

When I was living in Pittsburgh, I was agog at how close the sky felt. It hung just over me. Perilous.

Back here in Philadelphia, it feels tamed by the lurking wild abandonment of so many of the streets near where I live.

I’m struck by a certain mode of day. I’m struck by the preciousness of that constantly evasive terrain–sky so fleet and stern. I want to say it.

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Symposium on Territory

ImageI traveled to Naropa University early last week to participate in this discussion with Craig Santos Perez, Kass Fleisher, and Juliana Spahr on territory. I was thrilled by the invitation back in the winter, since territory is one of the primary things I think through in a broad vein of my work. How is a space overwritten and transformed for us by the various, contentious, and overlapping histories and interests that render it visible to us? How do we participate in and move through these terrains?

The first night was the panel discussion, at which the four of us gave statements. I presented first on my relationship to KOREA as a diasporic subject. Juliana detailed the spaces she has written from/about/to across her body of work and some of her thoughts about her authorial decisions. Craig offered a rich historical framework for thinking about incorporation and the organization of spaces from a federal standpoint. Kass presented a spatialized framework for how different regions of the brain house and communicate trauma.

The second day, we each held workshops. I was very interested to see our various teaching styles at work. Our workshops were only 45 minutes long. I had struggled in my preparations for this workshop…it seemed short for me to get into a solid writing exercise, and I didn’t want to lecture. Without any shared texts or contexts for discussion, I worried that a dialogue might be too shallowly construed. I ended up deciding to treat this like an opening foray, an introduction to a type of writing practice.

I had asked my genius friend Sha LaBare if I could develop something from the ecography writing practice he designed, and he was incredibly kind and sent me some helpful materials that I pared down for the workshop attendees. I designed a parallel writing mode for the class, a terragraphy, which I introduced. My second book, Underground National, is a terragraphy (in hindsight).

During the evening, we each read. I was originally slated to read second, but there was a last moment switch, and so I opened the evening again.

I was introduced by one of the most generous statements by Angel Dominguez, a former UC Santa Cruz student now at Naropa. I remembered him from when I was in Santa Cruz a year ago. I have my eyes on him.

I felt stifled by the podium. I wanted to look into everyone’s eyes, but a spotlight made me feel as though I were speaking to a warm ocean churning softly in the distance. Am I alone? I felt my attention strive to reach out across the full span of the space, how it constantly collapsed back into my own body, the warm bright honey light on my eyelashes.

Kass read next. She shared from some notes. It was a free-style monologue describing in some detail a traumatic event that happened to her. She was agitated, upset. I mirrored these sentiments. I felt anxious, nervous, alarmed by her presentation. She was in a state of peril. She kept speaking. Several people left. I didn’t understand what had happened to us all. It was messy. The room was filled with an electric charge afterwards.

Bhanu rose with lightning eyes. They mirrored the alarm of what had just happened, streamed it back into a course of events.

Juliana read after a short break. She described her participation in several occupy actions in the Bay Area–actions that she brought her child to. Her work constantly reflected back upon her actions, narrated them with a flat-lined factuality.

Craig closed the evening with three pieces, two of which will appear in his forthcoming book. He drank a full glass of water. He was charming, he ventriloquized history, he cracked jokes. He glowed with good health. He described spam, it’s colonial and military arcs.

I learned a lot from my visit. I learned that I do not fare well in dry environments. I had a troubling dream my first night there. A friend was dying after having elected to transform their body’s interior into honeycomb. Everyone kept telling me it was too difficult to save them. There was nothing to be done. I felt without hope and small, crying before my friend’s seeping body.

I haven’t been able to sleep the night through since I’ve been back. Something is being set loose in me, maybe calving. I am restless. The other night, Rae Armanteout described restlessness as the impatience for what you don’t know will happen.

I saw how a community conversation could be infiltrated, filled up by one person’s preoccupations. I saw systems and histories break open to me but continue in their same courses. I saw myself blinded and speaking out of a body that limits my view.

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Next Big Thing!: Jen Hofer

What is the working title of the book? 

The book is always books, practices on and off the page, physical manifestations of thought. A reaching toward.

My current books-in-process include:

Ah.Me.RICH.AH: Your Exchange Value, a translation of Amé.RICA. Tu valor de cambio by Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas (to be published by Litmus Press).

Dolores Dorantes, A Bilingual Version of Books One Through Four of Dolores Dorantes by Mexican poet Dolores Dorantes (to be published by Kenning Editions). The specific titles of these books are: Poemas para niños (Poems for Kids), sexoPUROsexoVELOZ (PUREsexSWIFTsex), Septiembre (September), and Querida fábrica (Dear Factory).

Front Page News (currently out in the world in hopes of finding a publisher), one year of daily cut-up poems made from the front page of the newspaper in the place I woke each day.

Less Than One, More Than One (which I am in the midst of writing), the sequel to my 2009 book one (published by Palm Press).

Laws (to be published by Dusie Books), a sequence of (now very elderly) letters home from Mexico interspersed with horrified quatrains addressing the war in Iraq interspersed with musings on a book titled An Experiment With Time.

My most recent book is titled Shroud: A Piece of Fabric Sewn To A Piece of Paper By Way of A Map, a collaboration with Jill Magi. Jill wrote her “The Next Big Thing” piece about it.

 

Where did the idea come from for the book?

My books come from processes and relationships; insofar as these are made of ideas (alongside other things like inventions, curiosities, walks, meals, conversations and self-imposed limits) I suppose my books come from ideas that are in the world or ideas the world is lacking, which might be addressed by the book, though the book can never complete the idea. My books come sometimes from necessity, sometimes from will, sometimes inadvertently, and always with difficulty.

 

What genre does your book fall under?

My bio always begins in this way: Jen Hofer is a poet, translator, social justice interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, urban cyclist, and co-founder of the language justice and literary activism collaborative Antena. My books are exist in the spaces demarcated by the activities I’ve just listed, and in the spaces between them.

 

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 

The movie rendition (of any of the above) would be made by an experimental filmmaker who would have free reign to use any sorts of people, plants, animals or objects they might wish to include. There would be no actors. It’s all re-enactment.

 

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? 

Catch me in an elevator and I’ll give you the elevator speech for each of my current projects.

 

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? 

My books always take years – 3-10 years, usually. Life gets in the way of life, I find.

 

Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

For any project, book form or otherwise, I am inspired (and also somewhat paralyzed) by how many forces there are in the world that are the opposite of inspiration. Writing and the various public manifestations of that practice, including books, are not a corrective, but they can be a crucial reminder, counterpoint, dissonant harmony and instigation to think differently, be differently, and build a different world.

 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

I love the word pique, but that’s about all I have to say in regard to this question.

 

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

About her book The Story Of My Accident Is Ours, Rachel Levitsky said: “I like to think that being published by Futurepoem is self-publishing, as well.” I’d extend this idea to publishing with small autonomous presses generally—it is a form of participatory multi-self-publishing that is community-based, externalized, non-vain (in the sense of “vanity presses”) non-monetized (or not efficiently monetized), and entirely effortful, where the effort reminds us that the how of what we do matters as much as the what.

 

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:

TBA!