The Poetry Foundation blogs about Belladonna*

The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog:

Belladonna* reading sparks discussion, manifesto about poets’ material needs.

Our Material Lives: A Working Poet's Manifesto by Ana Božičević

On September 13, 2011, the following statement was read as part of Belladonna*s first event of the season: Our Material Lives, Feminism and Poetry at Various Ages. It was prepared by one of the evening's readers, the amazing Ana Božičević.

Two nights ago, after our latest reading with Uljana Wolf and erica kaufman, we (the audience, the readers) sat in the cozy Dixon Place lounge and discussed our multiple economies--how we survive and make art, jobs for poets, academic jobs, teaching avant-garde poetics in our composition classes, resource sharing, how to better communicate our needs to the community. I think of this manifesto as a resource, a way of re-shaping the way we look at "poet jobs," our work and the work we create.



A Working Poet's Manifesto
Ana Božičević

What does a poem do? Let me rephrase that: what does a poet do? I wake up at 8, let the dogs out, read on the train to Manhattan, work 10-6. After work I take classes or teach, read on the train home, have very late dinner with Amy and fall asleep. Just before I drift, lines start going through my head and so I stir and I write them down. This is usually after midnight. I write them down in the dark.

When I tell people that I work full time and attend grad school and teach, they look at me funny. I don’t remember living another way, though, ever since I emigrated to the US. For a while I tried the broke in Brooklyn thing – eating two bagels a day, feeling heroic in a roachy flat – but I got writer’s block from the hunger and the filth. I did not thrive on punishment. I was not Vallejo. Coming from a country where jobs are at a premium, and having no economic or social support system in the US – as much as capitalism made me retch, electing unemployment felt disingenuous. So I worked.

It’s hard to figure out what kind of work is appropriate for a poet. A few months ago a poet I admire wrote on a blog that a poet should not be a bureaucrat and administrator -- a poet should be a poet, live for the art. Blue collar work was not even mentioned. So, let’s see, regular jobs are unpoetic, but then I read elsewhere that teaching is even worse – academic jobs are somehow deemed “not real,” as though academia were a virtual realm like the internet but counted even less. Staying at home in a different arrangement also doesn’t seem to do a poet good – mom poets are not paid for their work of mothering and often can’t go to readings and travel, poets fortunate enough to have a private income can’t mention it lest they be dubbed trust-fund babies, itinerant poets who move from colony to colony can’t keep a boyfriend or girlfriend to save their lives, poets with government grants are sellouts. Most of you in the room have been pegged as one or the other. Prestige & stigma are doled out in a random system of poet-castes that shift & refract differingly depending on the site you’re reading, the people you’re chatting with.

I listen and I am confused. I eat. What should I eat? I sleep – where? Does it have to be uncomfortable? Can I earn my rent or must I only accept donations, like a fortuneteller? I really don’t like being told what to do, especially by people who are not paying me. Why should a poet be a stranger to any human experience? Maybe it’s only my communist upbringing speaking. All I know is that everything is real and every work counts. Writing counts. Bricklaying counts. Pushing paper typing pouring coffee counts. Mothering counts. Everything counts and everything belongs to a poet, belongs in a poem.

What should a poem do? Auden wrote in lovely flowing lines that Poetry makes nothing happen. Maybe it’s just atomic physics, but nothing looks a whole lot like everything to me from here. How does it make you feel if you switch those two and say that Poetry makes everything happen? Now substitute Poetry for Poet: a poet makes everything happen. Now turn around and look at your friends here – isn’t it funny? It’s completely true: Aphra Behn: a spy, Marianne Moore a library assistant, Diane di Prima and Anne Waldman and Amy King teachers, Vanessa Place an attorney, Hanna Andrews an editor, E. Tracy Grinnell and Rachel Levitsky publishers – poets are making everything happen all over the place. And that means that we also change everything.

POETS FOR RENEWABLE ENERGY AND PEACE

Poets for Renewable Energy and Peace:
This October 23rd afternoon program (1-4pm) will feature poets from the war
region, including emerging Afghan-American writers Cihan Kaan, Sahar
Muradi, Zohra Saed, and Yusuf Misdaq. It will also include additional poets,
musicians, and speakers to be announced, and a special group performance of Allen
Ginsberg’s famous anti-nuclear power poem, “Plutonian Ode.” This event is
being produced by a recently created NYC-based group, Poets for Renewable
Energy and Peace (PREP), which hopes to inspire new and growing activism
against war and nuclear energy.

@Theater 80 St. Marks Place & First Avenue in the East Village/Lower East
Side. The admission is $10 that goes to HOWL's medical fund for artists and
writers. PREP will be selling advance tickets for amounts above the $10, the
difference going to support the group in its beginning stages, All of these
monies are tax deductible. For PREP checks should be made out to the
Committee on Poetry and note PREP: Poets for Renewable Energy.

Make Magazine reviews The Wide Road

MAKE MAGAZINE'S LEN GUTKIN reviews The Wide Road. (September 2011): The second quarter of The Wide Road, Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s strange, charming, picaresque “novel,” consists of epistolary correspondence between the book’s authors. These letters comment on the work we are reading, even as they evoke an enviably intelligent creative partnership. “We seem,” writes Hejinian to Harryman, “to be particularly given to unlikely linkages, to exciting mismatches, to the creative (playful, powerful, funny, mournful) co-existence of live incommensurabilities.” Read more...

SPD Bestseller!

Looking Up Harryette Mullen is named a Small Press Distribution Non-Fiction Bestseller.

(April - June 2011)

Bellephemera* Found Intros

by Emily Skillings

please welcome her...

Introducing an artist is no easy task. Do you go for the minimalist intro lite, only reading a few terse impressions of their latest work with some carefully placed biographical tidbits, or do you do the personal intro and talk about your amazing time with so-and-so in Cairo or give a portrait of yourself (much younger) reading their work for the first time and having a profound experience (these intros always seem to be more about the introducer than the introduced)?

Perhaps you try the intro-poem, in which you cannibalize one of their own poems to make a kind of nonsensical hybrid intro. I assume that we do all these things because, at the core of the moment when we are asked to present someone to a body of people, there is a definite awkwardness to the introduction. It has to be interesting, but not distracting, respectful but not boring. It has to present the artist's particular genius without being adulatory. It has to make the artist feel good, while, like a mini-review, illuminating some point or connection that the artist herself might not have noticed. I agonize over these little paragraphs, sometimes for weeks, only to realize that I haven't really written anything that makes sense.

Maybe the introduction is a performance of gratitude.

So you bring this little slip of paper and you give your introduction and then you put it down and listen to the brilliant reading. The little half-sheet of paper gets drinks spilled on it (It wasn't even saved in your computer). Your handwritten notes run. The introduction is very often a lost text, a discarded moment of nerves.

I will say this now: introductions are a community document of great importance. They are a textual representation of a complex moment where a person (introducing) interacts simultaneously with the physical presence of the artist about to read, the work of that artist and the momentary micro-community present at the reading. Imagine if, in social situations, we introduced each other with this amount of care and detail :

"This is Krystal Languell. She writes powerful, ass-kicking poems of great intelligence and clarity. She has an orange cat named Buddy. She is really smart and a great friend."

So introductions are important. In fact--send us your introductions! Send them to belladonnaseries@gmail.com with some information about the event (introducer, introduced, venue, date etc.). If selected, they will be posted on this very blog.

...and now some found intros from the Belladonna* archive!

August 2010--BookThug Nation Bookstore: The Summer Reading--Dusie Collectiv and Belladonna*.

By Krystal Languell

Kate Zambreno's novel O Fallen Angel is a triptych built around three characters: Mommy, Maggie and Malachi. It takes cues from Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and, according to Adam Novy at Dossier Journal:

"It doesn't give us tools to build a better world so much as show us how the tools we do have suck."

Interestingly, Kate Zambreno has this to say about O Fallen Angel in her review at We Who Are About To Die. She has just shared an anecdote about people-watching at Radio Shack.

"My novel O Fallen Angel is that woman holding the little hot dog in her hands who you want to vomit all over and punch. Or, my novel O Fallen Angel is the vomiting all over and the punching the woman holding the little hot dog in her hands, the woman who is society and Midwestern suburbia. My novel O Fallen Angel is both of these things. It is the vomiting and the punching."

This book is available for purchase tonight.

Kate Zambreno is an editor at Night Boat Books and writes the blog Frances Farmer is my Sister, which has spawned an essay collection to be published in 2011 by Semiotext(e)'s Active Agents series. She lives in Akron, Ohio.

Please welcome her.

By Emily Skillings:

I am very honored to introduce our next reader, Eileen Myles. I first met Eileen when she came to talk in my poetry class in college. In college you get all these guest speakers (usually men) who come in and talk to you about their poetry (or whatever they’re doing) and the projects they are working on, followed usually by a lot of advice. Eileen was different. She came into my class and talked about being a poet, and what that meant. This idea of being a poet was new to me, this identity outside of writing the poem itself. It was like a coat you could put on. Then she read some poems and I felt like all the grossness around poetry, all that sticky sludge I had all over me from going to bad readings was washed off with ice water. Even her voice was subversive, the way her poems tumbled out casually like natural speech but were so much more than that.

Aren’t we all excited about Inferno? This poet’s novel about life and art? After we were told about the cheapness of “I” and of self and didn’t really ever buy it it, this book comes to inflate our sense of I, to give it some fresh air. Myles Writes:

Before I could write before I even knew how to spell I went out with my best friend Billy LeBlanc and we created a bunch of letters out of symbols we knew: sun, wave, stick— we made letters. We had so much to say to everyone and we pronounced our ideas carefully with crayons on paper and we folded them up and placed them in one mailbox on a house on our street. We were so excited because the silence of our childhood was over…that sun, the first tiny symbol still sits there in my head.

This gorgeous impetus, sending the self into the world with words is what drives this work. The audacious verbalization of self, as Poet, as Lesbian, as Queer, as Female is portrayed as both simple and complex, ordinary and deeply important.

The only additional thing I want to say about Inferno is that it made me thirsty. I had to keep tearing myself away to down huge jars of water. I think that says a lot.

Please welcome Eileen Myles.

By Krystal Languell:

Cara Benson warns against gatherings of groups like this one tonight in her new book, (made). She writes:

Everybody walked in the room I mean everybody in the same room then walking around that room to sniff the walls as a type of appraisal of that room. The room. All the people in the room looked at the other people in the room to be looking at the people in the room and then the walls. Bowties. Nobody had on a bowtie.

We behave strangely in groups, and Benson points this out:

"It was as if every person in that room knew there was this apple and yet none of them would mention it."

She calls us out of our common, unspoken thoughts, our herd mentality and our reluctance to be uncomfortable, and she does so through uniquely designed prose poems. The titles, if they are titles, often appear at the bottom of the page or are otherwise set apart from the text.

(made) is Benson's first full-length poetry collection, and is available for purchase tonight. It's a collection that knows all about your:

"False testimony hand over one eye but peeking at the horrorshow."

Cara Benson is a Dusier, Black Radish, Belladonna* and BookThug. She edits the online magazine Sous Rature and teaches poetry in a NY State Correctional Facility. Please welcome her.

July 26, 2011: HOT TEXTS @ The Way Station

By Emily Skillings

Paul Foster Johnson's first collection of poetry, Refrains/Unworkings, was published by Apostrophe Books, and his second, Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, was recently published by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. With E. Tracy Grinnell, he is the author of the g-o-n-g press chapbook Quadriga. His poems have appeared in The Awl, Cannot Exist, GAM, EOAGH, Fence and Octopus. From 2003 to 2006 he curated the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place. He is an editor at Litmus Press and lives in New York.

In Johnson's Study in Pavilions and Safe Rooms, memories and words become boxes, structures, carrels, rooms in which we are kept and released--almost poured. In this superhuman, Arendtian "study," we are hurled through a tour of places (institutional, private, political, places of desire). We throw ourselves against the walls only to realize a secret door was there all along. Johnson writes in "Study in Pavilions": I would rather make my own ether/than have to explain again/that I don't work with images." This comically taut artist's statement is validated by Johnson's attention to trajectory, space, phenomenology and movement--there is nothing static in this book.

Please help me to welcome him.

Bellephemera--Selected author introductions from recent Belladonna* events

The following introduction was given by Martine Bellen at the Poets House discussion between Harryette Mullen and Barbara Henning on April 29, 2011.

This year has been an exciting one for Belladonna*. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Belladonna*, Belladonna* has provided a forum for feminist and avant-garde poetry since 1999 when it was founded by Rachel Levitsky. It began as a reading and salon series that published small chaplets to commemorate each event. Belladonna* has featured over 1750 writers of wildly diverse age, gender orientation, and origin. In 2011, Belladonna* began re-forming as a collective, now comprised of 11 women, including Akilah Oliver. And this year called—A Year in the Commons—Belladonna* published the collaborative book-length poem THE WIDE ROAD by Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian and now Belladonna* is here to celebrate the publication of LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN: INTERVIEWS ON SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY AND OTHER WORKS by Barbara Henning, with an introduction by Juliana Spahr.

In Spahr’s introduction, she says that “LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN is one of those books that can only happen in the arena of community-supported critical writing by poets about poetry.” LOOKING UP HARRY MULLEN is unquestionably a community-supported, a community-conceived, book. It’s made up of two sets of interviews, the first conducted in 1996. It began with Barbara Henning writing postcards and Harryette Mullen writing postcards back, and before long postcards overlapped because of USPS time delay, and postcards grew into letters, and the initial interview conceit took on a lively form of its own. The second set of interviews, which focuses specifically on the individual poems that comprise SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY, began in 2009 when Henning came up with the idea that directing a light on Mullen’s practice would offer her grad students at LIU a pivotal perspective into the poetry-writing process; in Henning’s words from the book: “The interview would be in the spirit of the Oulipo artists who reveal their experiments and constraints and catalogue them in the library of Paris. No mysteriously inspired writer’s ‘self,’ but instead a writer who is seriously inventive and willing to share her methods and approaches.”

So back to my point (or rather, Juliana’s) about LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN being a community-supported project—Who makes up the community to which I’m referring? The USPS (who helped create aleatory delays), Henning’s students; Henning herself and Mullen, of course; Rachel Levitsky had the idea of making a book with images so in the book there are photos taken by Henning, Mullen’s sister Kirsten’s friend Lauren B. Parker, Cecil Beaton, among others. An Etheridge Knight poem and a William Shakespeare poem are included in the book, so they are part of the composition of the community. HR Hegnauer worked on the complicated interior design of the book and its cover. For me, working on this book with Barbara has been an extraordinarily collaborative experience. And Stephen Motika and Poets House who very generously are hosting this talk and celebration. The community also extends to the Belladonna* Collective and now, you, dear audience, are part of the community. Of course I’m just naming a small part of the community; once a book becomes a book its breadth is incalculable.

Before I turn the discussion over to Henning and Mullen, I’ll provide you with short introductions of their work: Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven books of poetry, and a series of photo-poem pamphlets, including most recently, CITIES & MEMORY (Chax Press), THIRTY MILES FROM ROSEBUD (BlazeVOX), and MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY (United Artists). In the nineties Barbara was the editor of LONG NEWS IN THE SHORT CENTURY.

Henning’s work is grounded in the world around her, the day, and the moment she’s in. Like a magnet that attracts not only metal, but also light, sound, and gesture, the patterns of her written moment slowly reveal a larger world that we inhabit together, one which includes politics, family, and desire. Henning’s poetry and prose, her vision, are so fluid that to identify her as a poet or novelist or storywriter would be off course with her creative endeavors. And in LOOKING UP HARRYETTE MULLEN, some of us are fortunate to be introduced for the first time to Henning the teacher, interviewer, and photographer.

Harryette Mullen currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches courses in American poetry, African-American literature, and creative writing at UCLA, so we in NYC are especially lucky to get her for this weekend. Her poetry collections include SLEEPING WITH THE DICTIONARY, a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and RECYCLOPEDIA, winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award. In the introduction to RECYLOPEDIA, Mullen says, “If the encyclopedia collects general knowledge, the recyclopedia salvages and finds imaginative uses for knowledge. That’s what poetry does when it remakes and renews words, images, and ideas, transforming surplus cultural information into something unexpected.” Mullen’s poetry, often prose poetry, culls from vast storehouses of knowledge, personal and communal, and objects, and other writers’ writings—Sappho and Stein among them—and synthesizes collaged sound and texture into poem which obliterates any sense of interiority and exteriority, a tornado of salvaged knowledge, some allusions missed and some deeply perceived, which finds respiring meaning that recharges the quotidian.

As in:

A humble monumental

Music made of syllables

Or a heartbroken crystal

Cathedral with gleaming walls

Of Orangina bottles

--“Outside Art”

And now, over to Mullen and Henning…