THIS IS MESSY, WE'RE NOT SORRY: Elegant Mire with Carrie Lorig, v. 1

What is the idiom of friendship? How do you open yourself up to the possibility of another’s language in a way where you can let it enter your own as a generous breeding? Latching on, barnacle reciprocity to get to the heart of a discourse? Carrie Lorig and I have been writing to each other for the past three years and within this space we have built a floundering scrawl where we always urge to make bleed. We wanted deconstruction, mess, mire to set the tone for all the implications of the body, gender, trauma and the political discussed therein.

The following is a selected map of those emails and conversations talking within the creases of our work (mainly Lorig’s NODS & The Pulp Vs. The Throne and Troyan’s THRONE OF BLOOD & KILL MANUAL), which make a sort of gchat epistolary, camaraderie in the margins of the 21st century’s situational technostress of the everyday. Here we make a weird flower, a form that references its own making and revels in the decanting.

I’m not sure if I’m remembering this correctly, but Bernadette Mayer’s Utopia is made of poems / Utopias that aren’t so much imagined re: ideas of perfection as they are built with particular friends and her associations with them (her intimacies with them) in mind. This is incredible to me, that utopia could never have anything to do with perfection and everything to do with attention to the dynamic shades of closeness / that blistering blossom.

Writing to Cassandra Troyan is a utopia made of strawberry kelp fields swaying under warm, dark water. It is a utopia in which it is always a pleasure to begin by calling the body / giving the body a name, a further vibrating layer, a new / jewel / skirt / flushing fairy light you can rip into the landscape with. Correspondence is the book but it isn’t the book. Its proximity is so far beyond that idea of boundary as a word. There is far too much blood in its inhaling / exhaling soil to call it the book / it’s so many crushed bones / so much moss&nutrientWAILING. The idea of language as an exchange suddenly exceeds all your durational expectations. I’m thinking of Raúl Zurita when he says to Daniel Borzutzky,

In these poems, I imagine a world, and this is something that is repeated often, that these things have happened recently, or they have happened millions of years ago. It’s as if someone arrives and is seeing everything that is happening now, but that they are seeing it from very far away, from a great distance. So the scenarios I create in these poems take place on a destroyed earth, an earth that is shredded to pieces, and in which all of the damaged people, all of the wounded, everything coexists at the same time.

This is what C thinks of when C writes to C. The love / letter. The decimation site. The elongation of longing. The lace around poetry / The sculpture / dripping in the wet clay. The end. The beginning. The jagged depth.

 

Carrie Lorig: I forgot to bring your book with me to Iowa City. But now I have it!!!!

THIS IS MESSY. I'M SORRY I'M SO MESSY. I have to go to a meeting but I will be back later today / tonight I will continue, will say some things about the quotes I chose.

“1: What the fuck are you doing faggot that's where I gut the / catches. pg. 12, THRONE
"A rush of some get through the bars where all the catch hangs.” pg. 18, THRONE

“it's like dissecting the pain cattle and following them at the same time. this part is a body i've / never heard of. this part is a body i've never heard an animal noise from." pg. 1, NODS
"She's slung over his shoulder all numb in the / cheek but her lips still look lively in a full purple. Her heels soft and tender a / young calf's I touch to make sure she's real.” THRONE

"I wouldn't let myself be this numb anymore. / In such dire times." pg. 14, THRONE

You were god and I so cold with bright hair laughing / deep-lunged chatters and I said no fuck this texture. 20 // boy cow, i'm going to kill your ride and wear its cut ribbons. pg. 24, THRONE

I AM A WARRIOR FOR LIGHT // pg. 66, THRONE
I LOOK AT WORDS AND LAUGH // pg. 77, THRONE

I'm going to continue to be messy.

1) I'm interested in relating "the catch" and "catching" to dangling, and how dangling appears mightily in both of our books. The bodies dangle, so do the words, so do the mouths. This makes me think of so many things. Female trapeze artists (I swear to god there were female trapeze artists who hung onto a small circle by their MOUTHS...like graceful fucking fish.) The saying "She's got her hooks into you." The rush and gush that is not clean. It is both a word that suggests helplessness and power over (to dangle something in front of someone...to be a female tease). It suggests, to me, that we are not suggesting that in between spaces simply exist and are temporary spaces that we pause in during transformation, but possesses (I'm stealing something from your NEXT BIG THING thing) "a rawness to be appreciated and dwelled in." And that dwelling is not stationary! What do you make of the presence of "catch" and "dangle" as verb and movement which shudders the text?

2) Another thing I really want to talk about with you is how and if you encounter comments about the "maximalist"*** quality of your work. (I have many times. One time I went on a date with a guy who had read my poems (somehow) and seemed very visibly disappointed when he said, "You don't seem crazy at all." Ugh.) This, I think, relates specifically to this quote pairing I mentioned: “I wouldn't let myself be this numb anymore. / In such dire times pg. 14, THRONE

// BECAUSE I AM GIRL OF THE ELEGANT MIRE, / Because I am asking you with a yellow ragbeam glass / slipping a porch apart into your big, big hands / I HAVE ALL AROUND ME / Do I have a thing about fullness? pg. 13, NODS

There is a difference between the way I feel about holding nothing back when I sit down to write and when people react to or note how I "hold nothing back." I don't want this to make me sound bratty. But sometimes I don't agree that female writing like yours and mine is maximalist, at all, or rather, the suggestion that it reaches towards extremes makes me feel that has to be other from "normal" or that a large amount of emotion and desperation has to be other from "normal." Normal is not the goal (I accidentally typed GOAT), but this fire hose inside me that writes me doesn't aspire to be a maximalist so much as it just needs to spray water the way my veins are currently set up to do so. When it comes to feeling and writing, I'm not sure I believe in excess. Or maybe it's just that I don't think we should be "surprised" by it when it occurs.

***Another example that occurs to me of why this unsettles me / what I want to dig at: Every time someone talks about Miranda July, they immediately use this word, "cute," (where are you Sianne Ngai!) without interrogating how cuteness actually functions in July's work. July does not hold back what could be called / culled as cuteness for the sake of being taken 'more seriously.'

3) Both of our texts are infected with a restlessness concerning form and appearance on the page (the swing between capitalized and uncapitalized, sometimes prose, sometimes bullet points or numbers, sometimes spread, sometimes enjambing). I am always uncomfortable with the idea that a poem can hold a poem. How could anyone, who has gotten near to the intensity of such a thing, believe in placing it in containers? Poems are not meant for Tupperware. Aubades by Rubbermaid©. I also edit like a motherfucker's motherfucker. Everything space-wise, is pretty intentional or is a result of making some kind of fully aware choice. However, I don't view that as controlling the text so much as wading in a texture and putting my hands in places. Does that make sense? I don't ever feel like I gain control so much as I get the opportunity to make a certain glance visible. I don’t know I'm going to stop there and hope you can help me dig out something from this.

aha!

Cassandra Troyan: LADY! Sorry to be so long in replying. I've had any onslaught of last minute deadlines, one for a show in Sweden that will be happening after my trip to Berlin in August/Sept.

There are certain text blocks of yours that make my head go TING! so maybe wherever these parts flare up, we can see how they get stretch out in conversation form. I think for our writing, this conversation isn't about decrypting in any sense, (which I feel happens during some interviews, etc. and it just so blah blah boring and away from the real heart of the issue.)

I think we have an ANTI-PURPLE aesthetic so hard it turns full Cyan, back into another kind of purple. I think about Purple a lot, but purple of the drank rather than the stuffed up code. A sovereign fur that clothes, the ancient pleasures of animals, a majesty only known to nature. Or how slowness codes itself in poetic language and maps its own refusal. How you tried to write a rider or descriptor about what “SCATTERSTATE” in NODS does, but then it just turned into another poem. Which in the language of academia, gets interpreted as refusal rather than the poem nature trying to leak itself out.
This part says a lot to me in terms of the things you/we want, and how its wanting can tear you looped. It takes so much effort to be raw, to constantly refuse healing and that lack of healing becomes the new wellness.

OK. I am going to send this email, and write/respond in the other email, because I am trying to go back and forth and just losing my spot since I have cockroach attention tonight.

YES. HOLD YR BREATH AS WE GO UNDERWATER.

 

Carrie Lorig: Quick transmission from the quinoa grunting in my fridge!!! or i am awake and staring and real small i will say. 1) yes that title 2) yes thank god i was thinking i don't know how to interview i don't know how to un/decrypt my skin goes crept up with hot ashes and there was an explicit sign on the trash can outside this gallery i was at tonight that said i can't throw those in there.

A LETTER IS ADDRESSED TO THE CHEVY BLAZER THAT WENT THROUGH THE INTERSECTION WITH THE REAR PASSENGER DOOR SWUNG OPEN

ATTN: COCKROACH

 

Cassandra Troyan: LET'S KEEP IT ROLLING, AND THIS TIME NOT FOOL OURSELVES, THAT DUH WE ARE ACTUALLY KINDA MAKING A BOOK, CUZ THAT IS WHAT WE DO.

HEART MASS,
C.

 

Carrie Lorig: YR RIGHT. The only way to keep going is to keep pounding. Something Bhanu said today that I'm going to steal. This is less an account of Anne Carson's lecture than the story of a locked door, something that I have trained myself to believe in.

We r going to talk a lot about locked doors. about all the ways we know to get around them. swimming for one. I think we ceaselessly have to communicate. That is how you get to a place where you forget when and where you capitalized properly. And I would rather a book. It is in a book that you can say C, I masturbated and then burst into sobs which I could not explain and which dried up quickly.

[I am so much pain / starving today. Where can it even go?]

The weather outside was similar. Bark of Clouds then none and a little bit of brief sun blare. Colder than July should be. Something immediate is about to happen. Is it going to storm or what? Hi, What's your name? Dishtowel. I would rather be left in the badlands to fender for ourselves. To wake up coughing dust and covered in new tattoos of the wood / word we love. AROMACATTLE. PADDLEHOOVES.

[Maybe it is because I am trying to finish a writing project of my own that should've been done months ago, but which, of course, couldn't be. And really, they have been understand and have let me continue to swim with those poems and listen to them. They've managed to nick me between the ribs today, yesterday.]

I have been reading a few things. Namely, Georges Bataille I think has very much to do with lots of the things we were talking about previously.

Namely,
willingness.

Which, to me, is such a feminine thing.

I think this is my problem [as of late] with all the internet paste ups which are against things. It is one thing to wander into something willingly and to come out with thoughtful things stuck to you. It's another thing to grow tired of the presence of something you aren't willing to understand.

"I wish intelligence that was as sensitive to pain as teeth are." – Georges Bataille

These arguments, though, I feel, are so far outside of my interest.

These are for those who believe that what they are writing is always Poetry.

I believe less and less what I do is poetry. If I had to make genre I would just press play on a recording of an affable rubber boot being sucked on / trying to lift itself in a mixture of mud / blood...as Feng Sun Chen would spell it. Blud.

I want also to insist that the following quote is something we both are wounding at. (LONG)

"Problems of physics clarify the way two images of life are opposed: one erotic and religious, the other pro-fane and matter-of-fact. One is open, the other closed. Making love is such an entire negation of isolated existence that we find it nature, even wonderful in a sense, that an insect dies in the consummation it sought out. And this excess has its counterpart in the urge of one person to possess another. This need doesn't just color the expression of erotic emotions; it also governs the reciprocal and proprietary relations that obtain between the worshipper and a darkly divine presence. (God becomes the property of the believer just as the believer in turn becomes God's.) This happen necessarily. But knowing it isn't the same as submitting to it."

This reminds me so much of the beginning of your book and that shunt of a girl body draped over that shoulder. What are the folds between that and the kind of love that both you and I, ...despite our complicated relationships to...everything, blare agape to?

“I'm / The closest thing I have / To a voice of reason” – Bill Callahan

That line makes me laugh every time. I bet I get to say it once in workshop this fall.

What do you think it means that I will never write poetry? That when in the editing process, I'm really looking at anything but poetry.

Mostly, flesh.

I'm constantly trying to replicate spaces like this one within the bodies of my poems. This is what it feels like to talk to you / to write inside points of billowing.

"At this point my tension becomes such that I awoke."

This is everything, right? That "WAKE UP" is not inviting someone to reach a point of clarity, but is actually looking more towards the soft spot between tension and release.

I think this is my graveplot today. Let's keep doing this as well as talking. I like the idea of talking in a room that also has all these chalkboards on the wall covered in equations. I would like to feel like the conversation never stops or starts.

CHUG A LUG

 

Cassandra Troyan: CHUG A LUG is right. I'm doing some performances soon that involve bonging various liquids and semi-liquids.

I FEEL LIKE A SAD SAPPY FLOPPER CAREENING INTO YR LIGHT. YES. SLICK, THE KNEES.

Bataille, always. And at length I must indulge. We are creature culture, calmly.

"CREATURE LOVE IS ALWAYS THE SIGN OF, AND PATH TOWARD, AN INFINITELY TRUER, INFINITELY MORE LACERATING, INFINITELY PURER LOVE THAN THE DIVINE LOVE. (To the extent of being a developed figure, God is envisaged as simply the foundation of merit, the substitution of guarantees for chance.) For those who grasp what chance is, the idea of God seem insipid and suspicious, like being crippled. To endow God, who is everything, with the attributes of chance(!): this slippery aberration intellectually and psychologically supposes a crushing of our creaturehood (a creature is human chance)."

Filthiness in purity. Austere sensibility in the face of destruction. This to me is the scene in The Piano Teacher where Isabelle Huppert's lover reads her list of wishes while she sits and listen to her filth cycled back with such calm. No cringe towards deceit. How to stab one's self in the shoulder and feel release. That moment of self-violence is the most celebratory in the film, we can all finally breathe.

My back hurts, as always. I can look down to my right and see the scars on my leg that I made out of choice. The violence and pleasure is mine.

"I am the frozen mammoth baby outside his yurt." NODS

CLAIM A SLUG

Today I am all BLUD I am bleeding big rotted clumps of it and when I pull then out they smell like the earth. Iron is a pulse but never a return. Never the gift gone lightly gone never gone will I leave my house? Will I leave this spore tree wanting to fess up and designate new confessions?
I am always on the always with like 3,000 projects and this leaves me in a laughing zone where it is never about not doing, I can not understand people who cannot write. I like mind games but I prefer better fucks with yielding chunky scores.
Willingness though, to write or speak, or bleed occupy the cannon of “womanly feels,” yes. These arguments and dictations of historical swings seem to me still a place unfit for female voice. Bhanu Kapil said the only thing possible, which was a question of insanity rather than accord. (But yes, she does unpack that already tactful wordpunch.) http://bostonreview.net/poetry/against-conceptualism

Wed, 2013-07-24 13:08 — Bhanu Kapil
Dear Cal Bedient,
Have you gone completely mad?
Bhanu Kapil

===========================================

I AM HEAVILY BORED.

Somedays I wake up and ask how can this even be real. What do you (who?) expect me to do today? Go to the office and look at porn? I cannot bear/bare to leave the house, and if I did would I go to Whole Foods and a eat a psychic salad by myself and is there possibly anything sadder than that?

Any such late-Capitalist action which exemplifies wealth/health and proper function but you do it alone with earbuds while browsing Twitter. I've been vegan for almost 10 years and now we get blamed for the effects of non-local agriculture, un-fair farming, and trade. Thanks Whole Foods for your poison stomach. (you are too, yes?)
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/16/vegans-stomach-unpalatable-truth-quinoa
We are in the room with a big pool in the corner and neither of us is ashamed.
I'm in a house in Ypsilanti, MI reading Anti-Oedipus.

Miss you my big bone quake!

APOLOGIES FOR ANY BRIEFNESS I CAN NOW FEEL MY BRAIN CHUGS AND I THANK YOU FOR THE IMPERMANENCE.
XOXO,
BLOOD MASS
CT