THIS IS MESSY, WE’RE NOT SORRY: Elegant Mire with Carrie Lorig, v. 4

Carrie: i'm reading your piece on tract – trace

"The ground is like a bad omen. You can drag a stone back to the place of departure and still be stuck in the temporary undercurrent (misread as undercut) of delusion."

Carrie: i don't know how you want to start our discussion or how it might move over to our two books but something i wanted to ask you about or to think through maybe is anger. or like what is anger's pulse in our writing or your writing or what does that have to do with both exhaustion / violence / rhythm. there are so many things to be angry about and equally exhausted about?

Cassandra: yes

the section in yr book about Raúl Zurita and his attention to history's formation in the articulation of trauma is so meaningful for me.

Carrie: i think there is an energy / a propulsion that can get mistaken for anger? or that that anger is more dynamic than it is often allowed to be?

Cassandra: It reminded me, if there is a potency to poetry's force in the world, it is its ability to address both macro and micro traumas without privileging one over the other.

Carrie: yes. i think you're so amazing at joining those things in your book!

Cassandra: i think anger is important though, it is a tool to be harnessed

Carrie: via the collapse of history and the present / 50 shades and the one who utters 'i'

i feel embarrassed talking about it like i've never been utterly filled with it when writing poetry. that's just not true but i feel like I’m witnessing its music / horror more

and not assuming that means love can't still be there or whatever else needs to be there! that throb and its variousness needs to be part of the alignment / the shading / the chakras

Elisabeth Workman / while talking to me about the presence of red + turquoise in TPVTT / sent me this description of the throat chakra:

Cassandra: yes, they are there together!

Carrie: how do we make sure violence doesn't swallow us or anger or maybe that's my question?

Cassandra: http://novaramedia.com/2014/12/women-in-dark-times/

nina power and jacqueline rose talk about this here.

Carrie: “When kisses turn to losses / and I suddenly feel consciousness about the blood rolling / to all the uneven corners of my land" –KILL MANUAL

that's fine! i am too

i think i feel genuinely stupid trying to talk through this in that...like THRONE OF BLOOD taught me that violence doesn't beget violence

inherently in poetry

which is something i worried about learning to write / that i felt so angry but didn't want to put male violence back in the world

Cassandra: but i think you do talk about this well

"...ultra violent in a good way. The violence of stepping out of one life and into another, with the freedom to mourn, love, and create works of art that nobody can ‘resist’ "—Bhanu Kapil

Carrie: *nods*, but i do it so differently than you. i think you are so willing to involve / prioritize the wound and its intense / unpredictable juices

Cassandra: the visceral is a political gesture in that it makes the violence real, as in a lived investment rather than an abstraction.

Carrie:  mmhmm and the AWARENESS your violence has of its own array, how present it is. This chapbook by Djuna Barnes, The Book of Repulsive Women, which I'm currently really obsessed with is similar, though so much smaller in its scope than KILL MANUAL.

Cassandra: Ooooh would love to read that!

"“Dear Alive of / Mine, The danger of trauma, / I said in a letter to S, even in its slightest forms, / even in tiny, relentless harm, / is how quickly space / for reflection, / for word after word translation, / for remarkable trips through..." –THE PULP VS. THRONE

Carrie: "With your legs half strangled / In your lace, / You'd lip the world to madness / On your face.” –Djuna Barnes

The poems are complex folds / repetitions in which the death or fading of city women is chronicled.

Oh that is a line about trying to understand adjunct trauma! I remember sitting in my office, thinking about what it felt like to try to move beyond the paralysis of being overwhelmed / what it felt like to try to move beyond feeling sucked away. I'm amazed by how violence and trauma make me feel like a corpse, a word I sometimes genuinely struggle with. Because it is so different than dying, so different from being dead / from dying. When male abuse occurs or institutional abuse occurs, than I feel I understand the word corpse or am one.

Cassandra: That is exactly the experience of trauma, being disconnected with one's body. I often feel corpse-like. I am in my body but I can't feel it, or there are events and sensations acting on it, but they are outside of my desire or control.

Carrie: And something like "feed yr clit a pie" or the doorknob fucking in "Operation Interlude" (KILL MANUAL) is such a rejection of that disconnect, though some might find that image "violent"

Cassandra: Or, those scenarios are about re-integrating situations of trauma into one's fantasy as a way of re-encountering the body, re-claiming leadership over it. To release the corpse grip.

Carrie:  yes yes yes i was just thinking that somehow it reminded me of how anorexia is so misinterpreted as a disease of vanity when it's this really fucked refusa/lresponse or it was, in part, that for me...or even addiction and our refusal to acknowledge that that's person's body has been altered far more potentially than their "morals" or "will."

Another gift from Elisabeth, from Mothernism (I am especially interested in the idea of “a process of deeply identifying with perceptual forms”):

Cassandra:  The body has its own wills.

Carrie: it took me so long to believe violence could be beyond white male violence / which is maybe part of a complicity or a way to keep us away from seeing anger as a tool

they just got to "violence" in the podcast you sent me

Cassandra: Yes, the conversation is interesting in how it is not a conversation. They are talking past each other since they cannot recognize each other. Which seems telling to me about your relationship to violence and especially women's. How we are separated from our bodies in a corpse-like way once the conversation of violence comes up, it appropriates and is symptomatic of the body's response, somatically. The way violence is held cipher-like in feminized bodies, so that at any mention of it the body rebels against the discourse of harm.

Carrie: yes, yes, but i also don't think it has to separate us or result immediately in that talking past (or what is talking past / what is that energy / does it always mean an absence of touching?). i don't / haven’t felt pushed away by its presence in poems

Carrie: i agree it’s totally natural to make us want to pull away but the intensity of poetry / the way it alters the environment of reading / suggests we can do or could do otherwise

Cassandra:  but often there needs to be some break that helps to solidify that distinction. when Zurita's book is thrown overboard, which was the only thing saving him from the terror of the oppressive regime, “the only thing that told me that I wasn’t crazy, that I wasn’t living in a nightmare...and when they threw the poems into the sea, then I understood exactly what was happening.” –THE PULP VS. THE THRONE

Carrie: *nods nods*

Cassandra: The entirety of that whole page feels so crucial to me through its historical clarity and direct correlation to political violence experienced in the body. The deaths of those disappeared and murdered by the State and the bodies of those still living but forced into silence, or must bear the weight of testimony by the fact of being survivors. Or, when the poems were thrown overboard, Zurita could finally identify the senseless brutality all around him. It was much worse than a nightmare, it was real.

Carrie: mmhmm and in that moment he sees how endless that realness is to become

as in the book never ends

the book can only start again and again.

Cassandra: and that is only revealed in the rupture.

Carrie: mhmm

yes

yes

Cassandra: in violence.

the violence to him, to his country

“The book is a stone finally given the radical power to speak as a world.”–THE PULP VS. THE THRONE

Carrie: and how often such things begin the book

or the poem

"NOT REALLY SURE WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THIS SITE" –KILL MANUAL

Cassandra:  you always return to the book, while mine is about departure, in many ways. Especially in your book, I find there are many parallels with descent / dissent, the book growing out of violence, soaked in it, touching violence, perpetually returning as the only method for recovery by traversing the wound. The small bodies, the small tremors creeping across the page signal and highlight the necessity of every felt articulation.

Carrie:  "THERE IS NO WORLD LEFT TO LIVE IN" –KILL MANUAL

Expelling through intimacy is something I'm thinking about in regards to your poems. Propulsion / Revulsion united. The Suicide Note and its versions suggest finality / a non-escape that also echoes elsewhere in black sponges sucking / dripping but then there is a poisoning / an air of toxic-nests / The sulfites! The spreading bruise that...glows /

"finality" is façade.

Carrie: i'm thinking about how the world dies at the beginning of William Carlos Williams's Spring And All / the world ends but then everything comes back as it was / but also flagrant / fragrant

Cassandra: “to drift down through a crack to the bottom of an (infinite) wound, to grow soaked in that descent which is actually not a descent so much as it is an ever-changing movement, an unpredictable circling around in order to face.” –THE PULP VS. THE THRONE

Carrie: William Carlos Williams's first pages are meant to be this poisoned version of Eliot's Waste Land / A Critique of Eliot’s Ashen Memorial Service

We both believe in fear and being saturated by it

incredibly

that's what i feel so much when I think about you

Cassandra: you too, when i was re-reading the last 30 pages of yr Throne i was also listening to Kendrick Lamar's new album and feeling so perfectly overwhelmed.

Carrie:  "Is a nipple a tit
or just the signifier
the place marker of attention
HEY I’VE SEEN YOU
move that a little to the left
leave me not abandoned
almost defiled and left raw
but precisely disclosed
at the moment of talent just before the break-down
hysterics
end yr life
beseech all claims
what does it mean to trust men
or anyone at that
suddenly now I see my hands
like I have never before." –KILL MANUAL

Cassandra: I guessing I am trying to figure out the movement yr book/writing takes, as it is not actually held in "descent / dissent"

Carrie: "I have no native tongue" –KILL MANUAL it seems also how both books begin. Which brings us back to the corpse and how it exists in the world or continues to move through the world

Cassandra: The living corpse that traversing all worlds. This is exactly Hiromi Itō's Wild Grass on the Riverbank

Carrie: i don't know how i think of movement in poems. i only think of what is necessary? hm

i feel really less wedded to visible rhythm than i ever have

Cassandra: i don't mean in poems, i mean the whole formation.

Carrie: which might not be what you mean at all

Cassandra: “This book is meant to capture the entire process of losing, of wandering through writing as closely as possible. The book begins, for Jabes, by revealing what makes it, by revealing the difficult exchanges with language that make it.” –THE PULP VS. THE THRONE

or what is the corpse's relationship to the book; the book is the body? a form it needs to throw itself into/against?

Carrie: yes and maybe that's the title and it's propulsion

what is it to live in the versus / the verses

i want the corpse to be able to throw itself into and against at the same time

or to alter its course

as it is...encounters

Cassandra: yes, and the dialectic formation is false. it's lying down/standing up at the same time.

Carrie: despite being a body beyond encountering

yes and Bhanu teaching us all to think of lying down as an incredible vibration / vertigo of the body

like you seeing your HANDS rather than a FACE

is everything to me

what can be made rather than what can be perfectly reflected in chemically cleansed pool

is always my question when it  comes to movement!

and formation!

i forget i have a face more often than i forget i have a body

Carrie: or what can be forged / ecstatic forgery

since i am a jewel thief

Cassandra: or the face corpse is often forged

it is erased, forgotten

Carrie: the unfathomable is given its narrative / its fathom / its phantom. no wonder there is so much haunting. i mean, not to be simple, but i don't remember my grandmother's face, but i remember what it felt like to touch her body in the coffin

and beyond that i remember her energy

and how she surrounded my smaller, might as well have been lying down body, and when my mother told me for the first time that she was a "woman born before her time" (aka she struggled with sev. depression)

Cassandra: a woman against her body or against the body designated by her time.

Carrie: which is always what the book is for us

but generative?

but violent?

"how about whore-hearted and full of life." -KILL MANUAL

Cassandra: the book is a momentary closure, a corpse.

it returns the ecstatic whore to herself.

Carrie: i love that. that's such an important proclamation for me / that i need.

Cassandra: she can be free, but not divorced from the world and that what feels most at stake for both of us.

Carrie: i'm writing a poem right now trying to understand what the word corpse means to me.

i don't think i ever put it to the book but of course it is the book

Cassandra: and yes, how Brandon Shimoda recently asked if there are corpses in our books

Carrie: impossible touching via "boiling water" –KILL MANUAL

YES

Cassandra:  and i thought i had none

but then i looked and they are in all of my books.

Carrie:  i only had one because he's asked me the question before

but i told him that question had been haunting me for months

and that Djuna's book had had me thinking about it again

as well as a catcalling on St. Pat's day I experienced

Carrie:  there's a big gap between dying / corpse as we already talked bout

What does it really mean to let go ?

is what I see there

Cassandra: Or, the corpse's letting go is always available to be easily colonized by those who wish to; i.e. Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, etc.

Which reminds me of when you are referring to Bhanu Kapil, "When the narrative skips around / and becomes purple with distance. Vertigo. Racism. Misogyny. They get tangled up in the garden / where the book is tangled up. Vertigo. Racism. Misogyny.” pg. 114

Carrie: A dizzy fucking corpse

How long something can linger and elongate and shatter is lost within the confines of Place, Goldsmith

length and longing aren't equally experienced?

Cassandra: or here, http://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/03/19/the-disembodied-voice-a-response-to-kenneth-goldsmith/

Carrie:  which seems to completely miss the point of the mourning / loss / potential transformation / defamation that goes into the long poem / the swelling dead body

Cassandra: "What are you eating for lunch? You should, like Bhanu Kapil once told me, not eat the Chiquita Banana or drink the Coke or ignore your complicity, but maybe you’re hungry, and I’m hungry too, but I’m also haunted. Listen to the voice. You’re dying. I’m here, I’m dying too."

Carrie: yes!

Cassandra: i do not know the Koo poem

Carrie: someone sent it to me yesterday

Cassandra: send it to me?

Carrie: https://preludemag.com/contributors/jason-koo/

Cassandra: what upset you about this?

Carrie: as it goes on

its' treatment of women

it becomes a poem about fucking women

and admitting to being a bad person

without...actually giving into that!

Cassandra:  ah, i see now.

Carrie:  there's no fragility in this length

Cassandra: "If there is such a thing as transcendent porn this was it: something
that makes you weak watching it, not in a moral way
But breathtakingly weak, you actually start uttering the pornstar’s name
as she writhes there ungodly beautiful, you can’t
Believe she’s fucking for you on screen, what did you do to deserve that?
All free."

i wanna vomit

Carrie: it's really / it's all we've been talking about

ppl calling it fearless

and how insulting that is

Cassandra: the corpse rejects this commodified pleasure. the corpse saves her body for herself.

Carrie: *nods* / and this poem presupposes to know everything the woman desires

any woman

a corpse's thoughts are her body

the corpse can never be the fantasy or be real in the way you want her to either

Carrie: untouchable to dicks! lol

Cassandra: Have you read Hiromi Itō's Wild Grass on the Riverbank?

There are so many corpses / there is the corpse of the father, but he is not quite dead, though he smells and his penis falls off.

Carrie: i have it! Paul Cunningham / Action Books sent it to me but i have only culled through it thus far and reacted and liked what i did read in the culling.

i remember reacting so strongly to words that appear on the first pages (24) "Mother said, / 'A growing, laughing, living body" / Mother repeated, 'A growing, laughing, living body'"

Cassandra: YES!

Carrie: because i thought it was so incredibly defiant and flowering

and like it's exactly anything that the book only ever is

and the poem

Cassandra: it lives and grows in spite of itself

Carrie: and as a fragment!

in some way

Cassandra: and the fragmentary is triumphant, is saying, oh just fuck it.

Carrie: no explanation in that sentence as to what makes it grow or laugh or live or why it grows or laughs or lives

Cassandra: "i can't go on, i'll go on"

Carrie: and its fragmentary in a triumphant way grammatically, too, in that it’s not like "breaking the rules" of sentence structure really

Cassandra:  much blossoming here!

Carrie: volatile river glass!

 

 

 

 

CODA: 

Writing a letter, risking it / It’s dangerous / A continuous unknown to which narrative applies but also / It’s unfathomable.

 

What propels the letter (reading / writing your communiqués, reading communiqués between others) isn’t the content of the letter or what it might attempt to make clear / is it? The grease on the edges, the handwriting, the murk or mist that unsettles / resettles it.

 

“Jimmie sentence structure WRITE* IN JOY APRIL has decided

to become Hannah finishes her sentences WE WEAKEN

EASILY”

-Mostly About the Sentence, Hannah Weiner

*I first typed WRING

 

“In vain we hope to be known by open and visible conservatories when to be unknown was the means of their continuation, and obscurity their protection. If they died by violent hands and were thrust into their urns, these bones become considerable”

-Hydriotaphia (Urn Burial), Sir Thomas Browne

 

“The commune of two

 

Or

if what will last”

-The Girl Without Arms, Brandon Shimoda

 

There are all just pages I opened to / that I would include in my letter to C / a love so raw. If I could, it’s how I would teach my students to read. To write letters throughout. Sometimes to the book and sometimes to something more important.

The letter is obscurity / continuation / considerable. The scraps of. The vivid tatters of. It is unproven. Their encounter. And yet, the mouth of the sea urchin can bore into granite (Victor Hugo). And yet, a love so raw gores me.

This is the figuration of discontinuity / the streets also a book. The grease on my hands / the bodies of those dead, those killed by the police. The city of flames / my heart in the thick of it when I see Rekia Boyd’s brother not asking for, but demanding justice. The language of propriety enrages me.

Every time I speak of the love for my friends / when we build a love in the face of / but not in rejection to violence / when we walk down the middle of the street, we are saying FUCK THE POLICE. I refuse to walk down the fucking sidewalk and this is a love letter eating the scraps of “FUCK THE POLICE” where in the morning when I almost died / when I thought I couldn't go on / I soaked up all the pain of disbelief but then I could almost breathe / I was returned / I was returned to the site of my unbecoming / we were alive again / and we let it age us / folded back into communiqué.