Slaughterhouse Workshop, Part 2

Text and photographs by Thomas Sayers Ellis.

Commentary and poems by Jennifer Fitzgerald.

Part 1 can be found here.

 

That first day of shooting I was impressed by everything I saw, especially the hanging hooks and other machinery, such as trucks and forklifts and tools—the numerous silver things from another century that I couldn’t name. If I let my imagination crawl, the whole environment was one big controlled, atmosphere of torture.

 

Holster filled with sharpened blades.

Meat hangs, menacing on hooks—

 

stacked like pine trees,

branches splayed.

 

I made sure that I had three cameras—one loaded with color film; the other, b/w, and a digital camera just in case. I bought along a flash but challenged myself to only use it when absolutely necessary.  I had to wear a long white coat and something to keep my hair covered while on the floor. The smell did not rush out to meet me. I stepped into it and it digested me—one exposure and a time—and lasted, my body in it, for the next three days. Even now when I see the images, my senses are transported back to the moment the photographs were taken, sharply. I am where I have been.

 

That smell is blood,

connective tissue slapped on the floor,

primal fluid, your pulse raised

like a teaspoon of adrenaline, fades

 

but instinct lingers

like the fat clogging

your sole’s gaps.

 

As I walked slowly through the cold, wet warehouse, my body remembered being photographed by Bruce Weber for Interview Magazine with the caption “Literary Activist.” I sensed that I was now in the same building or in a building very close to the one I was  in 1994. This would not be the last time that I would feel a sense of time travel while working with Local 342. Everything I knew about photography, poetry and cinema were colliding. Years ago Weber sat me on a bed and photographed me as a team of boy-photographers passed him, as if in a bucket line to put out a fire, different cameras and different camera backs. Weber wore a bandana and barked out audibles, changing the visual playbook at the line of scrimmage like Peyton Manning, often, without even looking back at his team of helpers. He didn’t take his eyes off of me, not once, during the shoot. My body could feel it. I was near it, 1994, but where were my boy-photags. When Jennifer tried to help, she accidently exposed a whole roll of Porta 120mm film. Damn poet.

 

 

[Jennifer]

The subject sees the camera, the photographer redefines the subject and I stood, a spectator of observation and discovery; all thumbs with a roll and a manual wind. I tried to line it up, tried not to let on that it was my first time.

I felt like a baker, dressed the way I was dressed. I could sense things rising, falling, movement I could not see. The floor was slippery and someone was using a water hose. The workers were often ghosts of themselves, the rivals of silhouette in steam and heat. I thought to myself “Damn, all of the photographs will look like they were taken in a dream.” Between precise rows of cows, I walked, more so to let the workers see me being casual and to get them used to seeing me.

 

A Picasso carved

from a side of beef.

 

Take hands to aerial knife,

swipe, shoulder-slice

 

tissue, disconnect; reestablish

bond with flesh.

 

I crouched my camera bag to my gut like a pigskin and dashed between the dark and bright slaps like I was breaking lines and splitting shank portions into metaphors. My audience was meat, “Hog Butcher for the World,/Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,…” mixed with Cornbread, Earl and Me with a respectful nod to Upton “Incognito” Sinclair. Self-trained as a creative writer, I couldn’t stop thinking creatively, so all of that (and then some) flooded my mind.

 

 

Tolerated. I stood next to the butchers, balancing listening and shooting. The knives were sharp, medium format sharp, sharp and silent, so silent they made a revision of air, a skill the meat obeyed.

 

Cut, scrape, move to the left.

Cut, scrape, move to the left.

Bone fragments fleck

off protective glasses.

Repeat swerves,

sleights of hand.

Cut, scrape, move to the left.

 

They joked with each other about appearing in photographs and a few of them refused to be photographed saying they didn’t want to be found. There was the occasional disagreement and stabbing, humans. I learned quickly to distinguish from their eyes who would allow me to photograph them and who would not. I did not give any one particular worker more attention than another, and despite all of the blood, plastic barrels of animal fat, and the side-by-side breathing of men and women, I could not stop feeling like I was inside the brick stomach of a huge machine—pulleys, conveyor belt-like intestines, large vats and bins of stripped bone. Stanzas, lines, words.

 

Captive bolt pistol hacks, hisses,

heaves cow to the floor.

Hook the hooves and invert bodies;

suits on a motorized line.

The killing floor is slick.

 

So often the poem on the workshop table is treated like a dead body undergoing an autopsy. By cutting into the poem the instructor identifies the various causes of death—a lack of structural integrity, kidney failure. Overwhelming narrative behavior, pancreatic cancer. Soon, in the bedpan next to the bed of the poem-patient, persona. Open tradition surgery, the bypassers. The stitches left on the poem-body by the removal and insertion of the tumors of reference, malignant lumps of info-knowledge held together by the nuts and bolts of slightly rhythmic linearity and pre-packaged bald patches of observation, creative junk food. At the residency of Medical Fine Arts, the bypassers are also spreading their series-viruses to the Race Erasers who, in turn, take delight in turning the various forms of their own Blues, cleverly so, into soul-less mechanisms where nothing but moderate formal structures and the wrong-headed performance of paper freedom grows. Like Health(can’t)Care, so much of today’s verse-shop-worse will do anything to its own limbs to be seen not heard.

At the beginning of every semester I say “Please don’t bore me and I won’t bore you.” At the end of the Spring semester I used to jump up on the workshop table and do a few seconds of the James Brown and end it by dropping down onto the table into a half split in front of the whole class.  My gift to them, my work against tradition-thinning, my way of relieving my own tension and of removing the word “tension” from our workshop discourse, why, because its usage reminds me of appendicitis. When I teach low-residency, I line edit as a way of creating a conversation with the poem, not the poet, even though I will address the poem by the poet’s name. Much of the problem, I pretend, is the poem’s fault. The poem cannot hold poetry. The working poem is either underworked or overworked but they all work somewhere in the world. There is no such thing as an unemployed poem but there are poems that refuse to hire certain poetics and, often, any form of poetics at all. What follows is one of Jennifer’s MFA poems and TSE’s line comments, followed by Jennifer’s sass to TSE’s razors.

<