However, the Frankentein altered world is still going.  They are out there, somewhere….like the ominous sewed up man that Frankenstein himself is.  It is shrouded in mystery of location, its own reality and the its potential to attack at any given moment.  Altering books, it would seem, has been a daunting and seemingly overwhelming task.  And yet, the words and images that have come forth are nothing short of spectacular.  Once the artist finally gives into the project, some really amazing and unique exchanges come to light.

On the East Coast…Christopher Stackhouse attacked this book with the same amazing energy that he gives to all of his work.  The first twelve or so images are from Christopher.  One can truly see his artist sensibility come through even in the images taken.

“I haven’t read Frankenstein in years, and it remains that way, though I did peer into the books pages, prior to dismembering the cover firstly. One of my favorite clips from the text “THE EVENT WHICH THIS FICTION IS FOUNDED…”, seemed apropos to contemporary life on tv, on the web, in the text book, in the ingredients listed on some colorful box of cereal. I was flattered by the word even prior to those, naming the section “PREFACE” so I circled it. Something about circles centers everything. And just beneath is an orang(ish) rectangular box. It is there for no particular reason, but not exactly so. There is perhaps no reason for any of it- beer and wine labels, the clear scotch adhesive material. I even penned a letter, a missive to the future in the tome too (as in “also”) but to something, to someone not exactly.

In the pictures that accompany this bit, there are four women featured very differently than any of the others. There is the pale, benign looking, young woman, with anonymous face, bright and wide eyed, descending from a Flemish painting with more clothes on than before, wholesome, a farmer’s daughter from Pennsylvania holding a basket of eggs. There is then on the cover, as I last left it, a collage of two figures one male and one female. The female an amputee and dancer and artist named Lisa Bufano. She lost her fingers and lower legs from a staph infection after a surgery. I saw  her perform once at Judson Church a few years ago. At one point in her show at the time, she began running with great speed and wide stride in a circle- it was beautiful to watch, I mean she did other things, but the spring in the prosthetics, her torso, the look on her face…the cut out of her figure there on the floor is…well, a picture of her figure, a female form moving. And though those two were at least depictions, I suppose I shouldn’t say ‘at least’, because there is nothing more or less about any of the women, in this context, it is par, or, everything is ultimately what it is; but the next two feature in text only, in words from ribbons. There is Harryette Mullen her name on a finely produced pamphlet from a reading given with another gentleman poet of due honor but not here and now (look at the picture and you will see). I went to hear her read back then at the “DIA Center For The Arts – “Readings In Contemporary Poetry…Saturday, May 31, 2003 at 4pm…528 W. 22nd Street New York City” – I was there for that. She was great. And last lady to mention whose name appears, like Harryette’s, near the Altered Book but not in it, is Eva Hesse. Suffice it to say that her book was on my desk that morning because she was so lovely to look at (I can tell from the pictures) and she died so young, and better to think about how redeeming her art was, well, creepy, and full of mysteries, and smart and not smart and present…her art is that of a presence, a shift in the minimalist text, perhaps not very minimal at all, perhaps luminescent, and I mean that in a really full, gorgeous, important kind of way, beyond decorative or synthetic or catch word, her art is escaping category and yet is, is established fact.

I saw myself in the book when I first got it in the mail literally. There was a mirror in the front pages and I looked in it and saw myself and grabbed a camera and took a picture. In the resulting photo I look like I am wearing a viser for space travel, something nearly futuristic if it weren’t for it being now, or rather, that it was actually then with no flash. In hindsight, I was a little freaked out by all the writing by whoever had it before me. It felt like bathroom graffiti, a different kind of creepy, which was counter the feeling I wanted when I imagined altering this book. I hardly read any of that stuff, none that I can remember, but that kind of writing is always so intimate that it barely wants to be remembered….strange word, yes, in this place of use in particular…to re-member. Clever huh. Furthermore the book serves profile prone on a pile of something on my work desk. There is a picture of that too. You can see where in the book I placed colorful tabs, but not exactly where I taped together pages.”

Onto the Colorado leg of things.  You will see two somewhat electric images of Isaac’s book towards the middle of the slideshow. Here is what Isaac Linder had to say about the project:

“The book has been here for months now; slowly it is absorbed into the environment and forgotten about and allowed to remain static (health). What can be made out from its poorly damaged form is read from cover to cover. The book arrived badly abused, with pages torn out and covered in careless scribbles the way a mindless child would treat such an object. What happens for the future of the book in the moment directly after a traumatic event – when a body is damaged but not completely destroyed? I attempted to read the book through its afflictions. Whenever I was reading the book I attached it to a battery that would conduct a constant flow of electricity into the book. This act of charging the text with electrical current amounted to the extent of my incredibly imperceptible intervention with the text. Whether I was reading the text with the window open at midday or in the middle of the night, the voltage running through the book would remain at a steady level. Intermittently I would also play pure sine tones of various frequencies in the reading environment and observe how they interacted with the hum of the current and the process of reading. At times words would blur and suture gaps and punctures that had been made in the book. The book would, at times, seem to subtly cast the aura of the book around itself. At other times, the current would become overpowering and the book would begin to smell incredibly nauseating as it inconspicuously burned (cauterization). Agianst a form of alteration in the overt sense that too often belies the extraordinarily slow or compressed or recursive nature of the form of the book, rendering it grossly and in an egregious manner, the book, allowed to relax, strove for sublimity (cf. suggestions [failed implementations] for the future of the book: encase it in a block of ice or rubber, use steel wool to erase all of the text in the book, make a joke like, “Lisa Frankenstein” by covering every page of the book in sugary sweet Lisa Frank stickers, bolt the book shut and silently insert it in the collection at a local bookstore, print out the injured portions of the text from Google Books and restore the volume to its fullness, frame one of the illustrations from the text and hang it on your wall, abandoning the remains on the moss under a tree in the park.)”

And from the West Coast, Jenifer Forsyth brings her elegant touch with such beauty and grace to their book.  You’ll see her images towards the end of the slideshow – filled with color and texture.

It has been very important for me to remember as of late that Iam loved and that I can love despite my mental illness. It hastaken me awhile to get to this book because I have been verydepressed, anxious and feeling little worth. I made the pages inthis book a reflection of my need to remember to take my time tolove myself and my incredible man and sons. They put up withso much from my illness and I am lucky to have them. Daily Istruggle to glow, to grow and make a difference in my life and thelives of others. Thank you for the time it took me to get togetherthe energy to work on this extremely cool project. I am light andtime and love – more importantly – I AM loved.”

And as for the Midwest book….well, we shall just say that the second leg had a hiccup, and it shall be skipped and onto the third!

by Min Oh

Let me begin with a confession: I did not want to write this and in fact hardly wrote anything of what follows.  The raw material of this essay clattered out of failure. Clogged power cords, innumerable yawns from my classmates, and a correspondingly bad grade for a bad presentation. The last thing I wanted to do when I sat down to write this essay was to capitalize on an embarrassment culminating in furious tears. But the little monster, who you will hear more of later, had other ideas.Two weeks and five days ago, I and two of my classmates were struggling to set up a live-Skype interview with Kass Fleisher as part of our presentation on her experimental text, The Adventurous. I had not wanted to have the interview because I didn’t think it would be possible to 1) efficiently set up the technology required and 2) keep the class interested. I was angry when the interview began, angry when the technology did in fact not work properly, and even more angry when the presentation flopped. But wait, I have given this story too recent of a beginning. I must tell you when it really began. No lies here. This is creative non-fiction.

A little over eight months ago, my precisely constructed expectations of graduate school collapsed to a shambles dusted with that same anger which nearly smothered the carnage of our class presentation. During my undergraduate studies, my classmates had responded to my particular approach to writing with disgust and, to my bitter disappointment, most of my classmates in graduate school felt the same way. I want to write, to make real the way only language can, the unspeakables of experience as a woman, as an ethnic minority, as a survivor of trauma. I believe language is the antidote of isolation and I write so that the unspeakables are not alone. So that I am not alone. I assumed that the peer readership of my fantasies would instantly actualize in graduate school. With the inevitable disillusionment of unrealistic expectations, I was angry with that particular sort of anger which nibbles up the loneliness which precedes it.

I allowed that anger to fuel a chapbook length work¹ which I am sufficiently satisfied with to set aside and allow someone else, a publisher, to shred its membrane and organs according to the demands of paper size and reader accessibility (of course my publisher is a white male). Now I am writing what should have been written before that work because I am afraid of what will be written after, even though I am afraid of what must be written before. I am afraid and I am writing bullshit. Watered down, palatable bullshit. I have put the lemon juice into my fish oil to help you swallow, to keep you from gagging. Why am I afraid? Let’s face it – anger is lonely.

I live in a jaded, post-post-post modern decade of the 2000’s which is frankly bored of the crazed feminists and whiny ethnic minorities, a decade where the dominant mainstream is convinced that it must assert itself before the supposedly preferred minority. In this situation of my decade, how can I write the feminine body? The traumatized body? The bodies of silence? How can I write at all, I who am not endowed with a trust fund and a pale pink penis and thus know nothing of those enviable assets?

In the midst of the anger of these questions, I fell in love with Kass Fleisher. She is an example of what I want from myself, the hoped-for product of the gasping struggle within myself and my texts. She, too, is angry. She, too, is writing that anger, despite the boredom of our decade. In her texts, the categories of women’s writing, hybrid writing, and transgressive writing collapse into each other. This is the collapse demanded by the strangled speech of the unspeakable. During our class interview with her, despite my anger, I couldn’t help leaning forward in my seat, struggling to distinguish words from the static Skype stutter. She knows what I want to know, she has written what I want to write. We fortunately recorded the interview which I then transcribed to procure a somewhat articulate rendition and be able to concretely formulate my own thoughts in response. Due to the static which was also recorded, I am still not entirely sure that I typed exactly what she said, but during that transcription I fell in love with her for the third time.

Since this class² began a few months ago, I have been strangely rebellious against the term ‘hybrid.’ I say “strangely,” because I am never critical of class material. I am a stereotypically obedient Asian female student: I regurgitate without question and thus gather my guaranteed A’s. But since studying the ‘correct’ biological definition of ‘hybrid,’ the little monster who has been living in happy co-dependence with me since I first began writing has mutated from its usual cross-legged posture within my ribcage. Its chapped fingertips now reach between the bones to clutch the under-skin of my breasts with a ferocious, twisted pinch. It wants to speak, demands that I write its unintelligible noise of the unspeakable. It doesn’t give a shit whether anyone understands it or if it’s following the rules – it simply must speak.

I will call this monster: X. As the interview progressed, I gradually realized that it was not simply Kass speaking – it was X. Our first question concerned her stance on the genre of hybrid. We expected a patly appropriate answer, considering that her text was assigned to us in a hybrid class and our instructor clearly identified her as a hybrid writer. She instead told us that she is uncomfortable with the biological analogy inherent to the term ‘hybrid,’ and prefers the term ‘transgressive’ instead. Hybridity is derived from and establishes itself between two points, much like the third point of a two-dimensional triangle. It thus maintains the very polarities which she, and I, wish to destroy with our writing. Kass explained that to follow the rules of genre is to follow one’s gender, to behave according to expectations which are not identical to the reality of myself but rather the Form of gender in the Platonic sense which my particularized reality must accordingly conform itself. I used to think of myself as a hybrid writer because I couldn’t help but break the ‘rules’ of poetry, the ‘rules’ of prose. The language itself demanded a violation of rules. X “wants to escape the hegemonic” and break open a space for the particular, the Glissant³ dazzle of “my own marginalia.”  X pinches my under-skin because it can’t honor even the rules of the hybrid and meekly follow part of one parent’s set of rules and part of another parent’s. X can’t follow any rules, not even parts. The necessitated violations which I had associated with the hybrid are precisely “where the hybridity occurs” but because of the hybrid’s biological connotations, we find ourselves using the wrong word. Wrong words make X, X who demands that the right words be spoken, very pissed off.

So Kass, i.e. X, presents the term transgressive, which can be “anything that violates the conventions of dictate,” in lieu of the problematic hybrid. Transgressive writing, because it is not bound between two points and the reinforcement of those points’ legitimacy, is one that constantly moves beyond what is already here in language to a beyond of what is elsewhere (which is to say, possible) in language. This beyond of elsewhere is, like the moving to beyond from here, a constantly moving entity which can only be imaginary. Like Glissant’s³ metissage, the writing of transgression is not rooted to the relation between polarities, rather, it is rooted to the beyond of elsewhere, the totality of relation itself. Transgressive writing can only be endlessly open, endlessly moving.

X demands transgressive writing. X also, as I said earlier, doesn’t give a shit whether anybody understands it, whether anybody even reads it. This is a problem because I, separate from X, do give a shit. I care about what X is saying because it is only language which can make X’s illegible scribbles and garbled animal-grunts into a world where these scribbles and grunts are no longer suppressed under the individual’s surface but can become a means for that isolated individual to participate in relations with others. If the unspeakable speech of X is never heard, never read, never understood, it can never create the world I imagine.

At the end of the interview, Kass said that she is currently working on a text which is writing towards change in the reality of domestic violence. She said that the possibility of enacting social change is the price she’ll take to “sell-out,” to duct-tape shut X’s mouth. Undoubtedly, social change requires a wider readership than that of a transgressive text like The Adventurous. But is the duct-tape really justified? In The Adventurous, Fleisher draws on humor to coat the bitter pill of the unspeakable, the lemon juice in her fish oil. She uses humor to gain publication – but what is lost in that humor? What has she lost in parallel to the loss I sense in my own writing this semester? When I asked her this, she said: “Ouch” and was silent for a few minutes. She finally said, “If the only thing gained is publication, then perhaps everything is lost.” But the world-creation of language requires publication; it is grounded on the fact of readership. Must we make two steps forward only to fall back one, maybe both, in order to make them at all? Is the use of humor any different than submission to convention – aren’t both mere lemon juice for the unspeakable fish oil? Is this what we are reduced to in this decade which smugly believes itself to be firmly on the other side of the feminist and civil rights movements?

I want social change. I want to create a world. I need readers. I am angry and I am afraid. X is very angry and X is speaking. Even in this conventional essay, I have only written a few sentences here and there to connect X’s thoughts. X isn’t very good at transitions, ensuring number agreement between subject and verb, and otherwise making grammatical, readable sense. But X has written most of this essay. I cannot duct-tape X’s mouth shut and silence the strangled, grasping moans and grunts. I can’t because X’s clawing fingers at the end of that bony elbow would still be free. X would still be pinching the under-skin of my breasts with perhaps an even greater fury.

¹ Body in a Hydrophilic Frame, Monkey Puzzle Press, April 2010

² The Hybrid Utterance, taught at Naropa University by Michelle Naka Pierce, began with the biological premise that the consummation of two pure parents, genres, produces hybridity. In keeping with this scientific approach, hybrid writings may be assessed according to their placement along a closed continuum of upper and lower limits. The offspring of a Cherokee mother and an Arapahoe father is an example of a lower limit hybrid: unrecognized by others as hybrid, it is disarmed of the hybrid’s inherent capacities for subversion and transformation. The upper limit of hybridity is an unimaginable animal such as that produced by the cross-breeding of an elephant and a parrot: an impossibility which cannot be read. Hybridity thus depends not only on the alleged purity of two parents, but also on its dance between the predetermined failures of upper and lower limits.

³ Glissant, Edouard. The Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Michigan: University of Michigan, 1997.

Michelle Puckett and Susan Gevirtz discuss Aerodrome Orion and Starry Messenger, published by Kelsey Street Press.

MP: First question, Susan, what does this work have to say about economy of space – in particular, the concept of relativity, how we orient ourselves, the relationship between sky and page in this book?

SG: Well, where to start? The word “economy” is interesting because it implies a structured amount – a definite amount of money or resources, whatever the resources might be – being meted out, or being used. As far as the sky goes, there is a financial economy involved: who gets to fly where, who gets to land where, who gets to do that more safely than someone else, who has access to fuel, whose airspace one country isn’t allowed to fly into – which has huge implications for everything about its actual economy. Those are some of the ways in which the economy of the sky interests me. And then, of course, there are parallels with the page in the sense that it is a delimited space. And certainly there are similar issues of access, but also the way that the work allows in – or doesn’t allow in – certain kinds of language, or is able to think outside of the page, or what kind of limit the page is seen to be, what kind of boundary. Is this a very strict boundary where not very much that seems like it’s supposedly outside the poem can enter in – or is it porous so that the airspace of the page can be a different kind of space than the restricted economy of sky?

I don’t know how anyone orients themselves in this poem, I can’t really tell, but I hope that the question about how to orient oneself is raised by the sound and arrangement, or where things fell, where words fell on the pages. The sky continues to be, and has for centuries been a navigational device – not device, but a template for navigation – and it is still that, but differently, always differently in different times because, while it might seem to be similar constellations that are up, they’re in different places, they move, and they’re named different things after different stories. They have different functions and so it’s never the same sky and it’s never the same kind of navigation. For example, South Pacific Islanders from Puluwat Atoll navigate by the feeling of the current under their bare feet in the canoe-like boats that they use to get from island to island, and they understand the way that the currents and the cycles of the moon match up. So if the page is similar in any way to a sky, it would mean that sky-writing could happen there and it would mean that there might be ways to read, even as if you are reading from above – from an aerial view – as if you’re looking at the page from the sky, or if you’re lying down on the ground and looking up at the page. There could be a sense of these linguistic constellations being different and the same and still of an English alphabet, but it’s maybe like taking scrabble pieces and throwing them, and they land this way or that.

MP: I love that because there was a part in our email conversation where I was asking you about the relationship of Aerodrome Orion to Starry Messenger, and we talked a little bit about how AO was concerned with what had happened in the past (which is not really the past, of course, but still very current), and that Starry Messenger can be seen as a reading of where we are these days. So when you say it’s like throwing the scrabble pieces up, or laying under the page and looking up as though the page were the sky, that makes sense because AO has a much more spacious feel, it’s much more constellation-like – there was more space – and you do get this sense of navigating by stars in vast amounts of space, as opposed to the second half of the book which becomes much more block-like and prosey, reading more like air traffic control manuals and instructional manuals.

SG: I thought that I was done but then these histories of the sky started arriving and I realized that there was pressure to not leave it as if there was just a contemporary sky. Of course, there are so many other ways of feeling like you’re in a plane in the sky, which aren’t necessarily that, like being in a hospital bed for many nights has a similar feeling to me. But that was one of the impulses.

MP: Another thing that I was interested in was this pointing that you did with the phrase, “Lo/ lo/ lo” and throughout the book with references to the sighted and the blind. It seems to me that the work is fundamentally concerned with the concept of observation, and specifically with Starry Messenger being the treatise written after Galileo observed the moon through a telescopic lens for the first time, and your obvious love of film, I’d like you to talk about what sort of transformation occurs to the reader of this work – what sort of information is offered by looking through this lens?

SG: Well, I don’t know, I’m not so interested in educating readers, or in helping anyone to see more. If it happens, as a result of reading the work, that’s one great by-product, but it’s not part of my wish or hope. I mean, I guess I do hope that some kind of interest of imagination is caught and that that fire goes. But there are a lot of things going on with it, and I probably don’t know a lot of them, but some of them that I am aware of have to do with the question of, again, what’s possible to see, and what isn’t possible to see. The possibility of looking up and seeing what isn’t there, as well as what is, is a big hope, a big sense of expansiveness and spaciousness and maybe a hope for poetry that you’ll look into the poem, or up into the poem, and there will be skies that you hadn’t imagined. And I don’t mean for the reader. Sure, of course, that’s great if it’s that for the reader, but the reading-writer hopefully encounters some kind of soaring or excitement that makes the blind fumbling along, which the writing can often feel like, suddenly illuminating. Not necessarily illuminating of a thing or an idea, but illuminating of just the sensation and the experience of the language being transformative and alchemical in some way.

And the “Lo”, throughout both pieces: well, I lift the language of the fairy tale, or of storytelling, at times because that kind of language, like invocations, is like a language of the glee of starting something, or seeing something for the first time, and you can find it often in the beginning of a fairy tale, or in a revelatory moment in a story, “Lo, this is seen!” The revelation of being able to see and also not being able to see anything when seeing, the shock of that, too – the possibility of that, too – is something that propels the work. Then there is the idea of using language that is exciting and promising and usually, in many cases, it’s followed up by a full story of what’s been seen, but it isn’t necessarily followed up here. It’s a kind of suspense, or edge, that I am interested in. I’m interested in almost finding out what comes next for everybody – not filling in the story, exactly, but trying to find out, what would it be if it’s not filled in? On the cusp of something that seems like it will be fulfilled, but can’t be. I think it requires a lot of suspension.

MP: It’s particularly interesting too, because I’m one of those people who – to my memory – have never had a dream about flying, and I’ve always been jealous of people who have. But I did have one dream about a scarf that picked me up off the ground – it was actually in San Francisco before I lived here! – and I got to kind of fly for a second with the scarf, and then my fingernails ripped it, and it deposited me gently back onto the ground and all I had was this slight sensation of losing my stomach for a minute, and then that was it. So it’s interesting to me to hear you talk about this being on the edge, being on the cusp, and kind of almost having something happen because that is very much what I experience when I think about flight. I wonder, for a lot of people who do have these sort of flying dreams, and do it often, and can even do it on command, I wonder what their engagement with the story would be like.

SG: I don’t know. And especially because, while it can be literal, the flight could be of so many different things, or kinds of things.

MP: Do you often dream about flying?

SG: No, not lately, but when I was littler, I did. When I was a lot littler! When I was probably between zero and five or six, I had a repeating dream that wasn’t really about flying, it was like a kinesthetic falling through space dream – almost like if you could be inside of a kaleidoscope while it was being turned, and your body would turn with it, but without the nausea, which immediately comes to my mind when I think of that. I had that repeatedly. And it didn’t have a story line, it was just the sensation.

MP: Could you talk a little bit about the concept of the lens?

SG: Oh, yeah. Well, I guess it’s never just a lens. It’s also a window, and it’s also glasses, etc., and one of the reasons why the Galileo and his use of it was so compelling is that you can think of the first telescope as sort of the first movie projector. But even more interesting to me is his delight. The language of his thrill at seeing what he saw is more the lens in the Starry Messenger piece that he wrote than the fact of the telescope that he made. It’s so rare that you hear someone that is trying to describe something include their delight and their thrill in witnessing that thing. So again, it was on the flying carpet of that that he really saw, I think, because you don’t know whether someone else from some other background would have been able to see the same thing.

MP: …just by having that tool in their hands.

SG: Yes, exactly. So really, the tool, just like with writing, is never really just the tool, although the tool is interesting, and the tool might be necessary, and the invention of the tool is also very fascinating. I think that there are different stories about whether he actually invented the telescope or whether there was a lens-maker who first invented something like a telescope and supplied him, but regardless, there are so many different things that could count as a lens, besides that telescope or that tool. I mean, a mirror reflects and can make fire, and you can see the sky in that. There are so many things – a pool of water – so many. So, it’s interesting in relation to poetry because it speaks to the way that one has to engage with the materials at hand, the daily life materials, in a way that understands them as animate – or as a lens through which to see the nature of their animation. Not beyond them – maybe sometimes that – but I don’t really think it’s beyond. So in that way, it seemed to be as much about poetry as about anything and about how what can happen with language is about the sky.

MP: In reference to language, you wrote back to me during our correspondence and asked me what I heard going on in the poetry “if it were only music, and not words that have the downside of potentially meaning something.” So I found that really interesting, though it’s definitely something that is always getting explored over and over again: what does it mean that we use words and what do words mean beyond their dictionary definitions? And there’s a tension there. I mean – it’s not music. Not strictly music. You haven’t written this on a violin. So there’s a tension and I would love to hear you talk some about the way that meaning and sound bounce off of each other and play with each other in this work. You did choose a couple of very specific taxonomies – aviation and astronomy. I assume you chose them, partially, because of what those realms of thought were able to open up in terms of exploration, but you chose these taxonomies, and yet the intention is not of instruction. I’m interested in what work you hoped to accomplish by using them.

SG: Okay, I’ll try to speak to some of that. First of all, I think that my response of asking you what is the music if we can get rid of meaning – I don’t think I said get rid of it, because I don’t think we ever can get rid of it, or would want to, but I think if there’s a poem where I can say “this means that,” then I’m pretty disappointed and I probably am not going to want to read on very much. So the hope is for it to be redolent with possible meaning. It’s like putting a cat on a leash – it’s going to go in a lot of different directions – and it’s not even as pinned down as a cat on a leash; that’s too confined of an analogy. So, the taxonomies…well I’ve always been interested in specialized language. Language that has been developed and is used to talk about phenomena that are not evident to people who don’t know that taxonomy. Instruction books, all sorts of things like that, I’ve always been interested in because they’re necessary. I don’t think of them as some sort of elite or esoteric vocabulary. For example: I don’t understand what the car mechanic is saying when she or he describes something about my engine. I am fascinated by my inability to understand and by the fact that they live in a world where this language makes sense and in fact not only makes sense, but makes it possible to act in ways that are useful and of interest. It’s of interest to me to have my car work, and it can’t happen without this specialized language. So many things can’t happen without specialized language and I don’t want to know all the specialized languages, but I’m interested in pilfering from them and sometimes pretending like I know something with them, or trying them on, kind of like dressing up, seeing what it feels like to use them. Will they lead me to something that I haven’t ever thought about before or haven’t seen before, or can’t know? And since my work always involves a lot of research, sometimes the taxonomies guide me. For example, when I did a lot of research into what it is to really be an air traffic controller in different parts of the world, I realized this is a whole world of specialized language. And I’m not going to learn aviation English right now, but I am going to be a voyeur and see what aviation English sounds like in action and then imagine that I know it, so that maybe I can learn at least something about specialized vocabularies and taxonomies, within English.

MP: I love that you’re fascinated by your inability to understand.

SG: I’ve always felt that way. I think that’s one reason why I’ve always loved to be in Greece because I think it regresses me to a state of early language acquisition.

MP: Talk about the turbulence I sensed in the text.

SG: Well, the text is interrupted. The poem is unsettled. What sustains it is a kind of submission to the unsettled. In a more literal way, like the sense of being a patient or passenger: once you get inside the plane, or inside the poem, if it’s really going to carry you, a kind of submitting goes on – much more in the case of being a passenger or patient, but your life is out of your hands and it’s an incredible act of giving up to be in that kind of position. But it’s also a kind of relief because all the minutiae of decisions that we make everyday are also out of our hands. I started writing all of this work in the hospital and I had, for the first time in years, time to read. And so I wasn’t happy that I was in the hospital, but I was kind of ecstatic that I had time to read, so, that’s probably in there. Turbulence. I guess I like a rough ride; I don’t like to know where I’m going, or what’s going to happen next when I’m working and I think turbulence in the poem is about something erupting that isn’t predictable. At least that’s the hope and the feeling.

MP: What does your “brief,” though two-parted, history of the sky say about division?

SG: Well, I think actually, more than division, it might speak to interruption that I was talking about a minute ago. It’s a brief history of the sky, not because there’s little to say about the sky, but because there’s so much to say, that, and I think it even says it in the poem, for reasons of lack of space or time – which are always the conditions we are working with – there’s no way to give an account that would be complete. Also, the history is in two places because it gets interrupted – something else comes in – and then it turns out that it isn’t finished and then it has to take up more breathing space. I think the other reason it comes up again is to show that it’s coming up again, and again, and again, but for the sake of brevity, it comes up only twice, and those two times hopefully indicate that it’s going to be repeatedly necessary to find out more.

MP: We corresponded about how the Sor Juana page was like taking a little break from the other concerns and making a diagram of the poem on the page. I’d like to talk a little bit more about that by looking at your use of Sor Juana’s First Dream (and the pursuit of knowledge in general) with your simultaneous critique of the language of evidence. Because for a good portion of human memory, history has been talked about in terms that are fixed. So what kind of logic emerges through this text that works in the space between this “language of evidence” or fixed meaning, and yet at the same time, goes after knowledge, discovery, exploration, trying to actually learn something…

SG: There’s a question, throughout, about what has really happened. And so there are a lot of different kinds of languages that the answer could arrive in; one could be the language of evidence, and one could be poetry. But how do you engage in poetry in a way that tells something, or proposes evidence, or is a way of thinking? And I think there are ways. And I think that reading for that way is one interesting necessity. So maybe there’s some wish to look at the limitations of the language of evidence, but also to think of what counts as evidence as more than just that kind of Western, scientific, positivist tradition.

MP: Thank you, Susan.

SG: And what did you make of the question I asked? Did you find it of any use?

MP: Yes, I did. It’s a kind of skewed way of looking that I’m always trying to incorporate when I read. That’s kind of how I came to phrase that question about taxonomies to you, because for me, yes, there was absolutely music there – and I mean literally music, but also, this thing that is beyond words. But for me, the question is always: how do you talk about the thing that’s more than words? And so tension is probably the best way that I could put it into words because there is a particular sound and a particular music to the taxonomies you chose and I think they are both fabulous and they open up knowledges on their own, and at the same time, there is something happening by the very placement of the words, by the appropriation of the words, by their interactions with other taxonomies, that we really can’t say much about because they are actions that occur on the page and in the process of seeing them.

SG: That’s a great way of putting it. That’s exactly what I would hope, and so thank you for hearing that and saying it. The result of doing something like that – lifting from the taxonomy palate whatever you want, as long as it seems to be coming out of the work and necessary to the work – doesn’t always make things pretty, that’s for sure. There is tension, and there’s even clashing and a kind of collision that isn’t necessarily at all harmonious. I like the idea of sound as a kind of tension.

Bio: Michelle Puckett earned her BA in Writing from Naropa University and is a current MFA candidate in the poetry program at Mills College where she is at work on a manuscript that uses family archive to explore the intersections of public & private guilt, national history, and the politics of looking and ordering. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Hot Metal Bridge, Bang Out San Francisco, The Walrus, Flaneur Foundry, A Trunk of Delirium, and Monkey Puzzle Magazine. She works as the Events Coordinator for Tarpaulin Sky and was the recipient of the 2009 Mary Merritt Prize in Poetry.

On Sunday, the bus moves along Istanbul’s congested sea road at less than one mile an hour.  It’s Zeno’s paradox delivered courtesy of public transportation.  The Istanbullis waiting up and down the route cram into the buses as they pull up to the stops; so-called “maximum occupancy” is reached only once the driver begins to move the vehicle, at which point general shouting ensues.  I’m shoved up against the windshield and haven’t paid the price of entry because I can’t reach where one might hand over coins.   The bus snails onwards, the passengers visibly unfazed by the total lack of progress.  They’re just along for the ride– however long the ride may be.  I spot the one other foreigner on the bus because he’s checking his watch periodically.  I sigh loudly to be a good patriot, even if no one is looking.  One Impatience Under G…

By this point in NYC, a Vesuvian eruption would have taken place: an orchestra of peeved sighs, necks craning to ascertain what motherfucking moron was responsible for the delay, watches consulted compulsively, cell phones in heat, and a general ooze of exasperation spreading over the human topography.  Here, the reactivity is absent: the situation is just what is.  And these guys aren’t even Buddhists!  Evening opens its broad wing over the heinous traffic and idyllic water way as one hour becomes two for a ride that should have taken 30 minutes, tops.  Then the sun relaxes its grip on the sky entirely: it never runs off schedule.

I’m moved toward the middle of the bus by the boarding passengers: the will of the crowd is strong.  Beside me, a little girl smacks a fledging colleague, who is asleep on her mother’s lap.  She jiggles the napper’s face around until the child wakes awkwardly and begrudgingly, her eyes attempting to roll right back where they came from.  After ten minutes of general face-manipulation, the triumphant girl announces, “Uyandir!”:  You woke up! The bus lurches about two inches closer to home, and then releases all effort again; it too would rather be napping.

After all this time I see the Good.  Not as Plato would have it, suspended in an abstract and privileged world of Forms—but right in my face, like a baby toy.   And no different from the baby who’s just discovered she has a hand and that it can do stuff, we are still reaching all the time for something pleasing to hold onto.  And here it is–

The water looks more aquamarine to the north of the city, the kind of water that seduces you, makes you think the world is an O.K. place to float your boat.  If you don’t look at the shoreline, where garbage of all varieties congregates in polymorphic blobs, flanked by trillions of translucent jellyfish who show great affinity for it, you might think you were somewhere art would aspire to.  I begin to pity agoraphobic litter: nothing forms ad hoc communities faster than crap in a strait.  This flotsam and jetsam, we’ll call it—because “garbage” sounds so harshly accurate—is the human inflection on this sweat rivulet of Mother Earth.  We were here. This part of the Bosphorus is one big trash bin—and our trash doesn’t so much float away as re-seek its place of origin, perhaps even the person who dropped it in the first place.  And yet alongside the trash is a general vista so pleasing to the eye, so a-bounce with boats of all sizes and purposes, that one can forget what plagues this water as one can forget on the brightest days our common human hangnails.

Felici-tea & Complici-tea [A Tea-lude]:

When the rain returns, the only thing that seems to get me by is tea.  My habits always comes back to that cup, the way the ability to see always comes back to the optic nerve.

It’s fortuitous, then, that I find a transcript in Upaya Zen Center’s newsletter [check them out!  They are doing amazing things, especially with end of life care!] of a surprising duo conversing on my favorite topos: Thich Nhat Hanh and Oprah Winfrey chatting together about imbibing happiness, or tea.  My questions about what comprises a happy life keep surfacing like so much garbage in the open water.  Luckily, the internet offers myriad courses in contentment, such as follows:

[from transcript]

Nhat Hanh: Mindfulness helps you go home to the present. And every time you go there and recognize a condition of happiness that you have, happiness comes.

Oprah: With you, the tea is real.

Nhat Hanh: I am real, and the tea is real. I am in the present. I don’t think of the past. I don’t think of the future. There is a real encounter between me and the tea, and peace, happiness and joy are possible during the time I drink.

Oprah: I never had that much thought about a cup of tea.

Nhat Hanh: We have the practice of tea meditation. We sit down, enjoy a cup of tea and our brotherhood, sisterhood. It takes one hour to just enjoy a cup of tea.

Oprah: A cup of tea, like this? [ Holds up her cup. ]

Nhat Hanh: Yes.

Oprah: One hour.

[reprinted without permission—but with a lot of adoration]

Hmmm. It takes me about 10 minutes to enjoy a cup of tea, mostly because I enjoy it too much and I don’t like it to become cold, which subtracts some of the merriment.

But sitting here as the blue day tilts its way towards a deeper, drunken gray, I feel unimportant in the grand scheme of the world, and alternately glad or mad about that.  Suddenly, it strikes me that I, too, though just an ex-pat watching the ebb and flow of Cihangir traffic, can be on Oprah—albeit through the authorial prerogative of bullshit.  And so I revise reality to my contentment, and offer you the updated transcript of SN, OW & TNT– TNT whom I love so much that, were I truly in his company, all I could eek out (or in) would be a slurp.

[B-S transcript]

SN [needing attention, off script]: A cup of tea!  An up for me!  A sup of glee!

TNT [kindly noticing]:  And nonsense is also real.

SN [making face at objectionable hot beverage]:  My tea tastes like nothing.

TNT [beatifically]:  Touching nothing, I am happy.

SN:  No, seriously: this is like grade C tea.  They wouldn’t serve this at a labor camp.

TNT [even-tempo]:  The low-quality tea is present, the low-quality present is present.

SN [sitting forward on seat]:  What I’m saying is this tea sucks.

TNT:  Sucking is present, sucking is present.

SN:  I can’t even drink this swill—

TNT:  Swill is present, not drinking swill is present.

SN:  Do you ever not like something?

TNT:  When I am not liking, I know that I am alive.  Then I am happy.

SN:  Oprah, what’s up; do you ever get served bad coffee?

OW [startled]:  I’m Oprah.

SN [face reddening]:  Really, come on.  Sometimes an intern must mess up and make you weak coffee…

OW [beatifically]: I never thought that much about interns.

SN [eye-rolling]:  This is maddening.  Isn’t anyone around here judgmental?

OW:  No, we’re on T.V.

SN [turning abruptly]:  TNT, have you ever flipped out about something?

TNT:  Flipping out, I know that I am alive.

SN:  No, when you flip out, you don’t know anything.

TNT [agreeably]:  Knowing nothing, I am aware I am knowing nothing.

SN [adverblessly]:  This conversation is going nowhere.  Our viewers are probably pill-popping just to endure such pointlessness.  Oprah, this is like thought-spaghetti–

OW [insightfully, trying it out]:  When I have spaghetti I know I am having spaghetti.

SN:  Congratu-f-in-lations.

OW [finger-wagging]:  We don’t allow words on the show which contain more than five syllables.

SN:  Give me a cup of tea, please—anything–

TNT:  The tea is present.  You are present.

Dew

But finally, after entertaining myself with faux-fame for long enough, I “get” what I needed in the first place, and it comes not from Oprah but from Issa, my little hokku genie.  Likely he was also a tea fan, given the culture in which he lived, but I imagine he preferred to take it as I do, with the potency of an espresso shot–

“The world of dew

Is a world of dew, and yet

and yet…”—Issa

And if, after reading this dew-tifully, as a person living temporarily in an urban space among so many other unknown persons, there is still something of thought-trash to wash off so that my inquiry into all this might arise clean yet again, practice and poetry will do that for me:

Caesar Vallejo: “I have scraped what carries me so close/ and I have carefully put away the map that/ was nodding or crying, I don’t know which.” (“Ello es que el lugar donde me pongo…”—Margaret Sayers Peden, trans.)

Our “map of the world” does seems to be both weeping and agreeing, as we poke our way along it, traveling from minor happiness to minor happiness.  Some days, all possible happinesses seem like three legged tables, just waiting for you to lean on them before they give way.  Here, the slight uneasiness I feel because of Turkey’s  susceptibility to earthquakes leads me to PBS’ perspective; “Continents are the ‘scum of the earth’, consisting mostly of light minerals light quartz, which can’t sink into the earth’s dense mantle.”  Hmmm.  From that reasoned angle, our “solid” land-masses themselves are no more than the collective phlegm that rises atop cooking lentils.   The same rich soup always surrounds us.  One ladle under G…

“Oh always, do not ever engage with the never of so/much always!”  (Vallejo, “Oh botello sin vino!”)

And eventually, from so much floating like this, we need a place to rest body and mind, which is the excuse of tea:

“My eyes, which had seen all, came back,

Back to the white chrysanthemums.”–Issho

Some Things Are Worth Shoving J on a Bus

And so I shove J onto the bus a few days later for a test run, and a few days after that we make it up the coast to Rumeli Hisari, the defensive towers.  This place is actually breath taking—an epithet I normally reserve for cloudscapes.  Built by the intrepid Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II in 1452, its magnitude signaled to Constantinople that the end was near.  The pre-Enlightenment signum was appropriately blunt: my-fortress-is-bigger-than-your-fortress.   And it was.  And the end of one thing was near, so the next thing could begin.

“1452” thus became an important date—which now is writ large on Rumeli’s hillside in raised gold letters, tipped toward the sky— with some of the same triumphant snazz of America’s “1492”, the year Columbus tripped on our continent and blurted out “India!,” all modesty and shame chucked out to sea with the bilge.    From the outside, you can’t ascertain the intelligence of Rumeli’s shape and design. From within, depending on where you stand, your perception of its architecture, hugging up against the hillside, nonetheless continues to change.  It’s weird and weirdly reassuring: this is exactly what happens with history.

And the irony intensifies: the inside of the fort is the closest thing to the Botanic Gardens we’ve encountered so far.  Safe from the wind, the old stones hold the heat and, because they’re stones and not so greedy, give it right back to whomever is in their company.  Plants have the run of the place.  It turns out this genius creation of war, the Conquerer’s Ace, is the most peaceful spot of all.  Nothing, it seems, is so good for peace as war itself.  The walls rise steeply, mountable via a series of staircases that would give Escher a complex.   And though one risks a plummet to the fortress floor on one side of the defense and to the seaside (and a graveyard) on the other, there are no guardrails anywhere.  The stones are as slick as they are old.  Much impersonal death has happened here already and yours, nice lil’ tourist, will be no exception.  Safety first– by which I meant, last.   The guards in their uniforms are taking photos of one another from the highest turret.  You can’t help but feel like a Conquerer In Training, looking out at the Bosphorus from above, lording it over the tankers that pass below you, as if they mean to go quietly.  The cars travel back and forth at eye-level on the elegant suspension bridge as if trying not to wake the history of cruelty from its nap.  But cruelty, I imagine, sleeps with its eyes open.

This place makes my heart turn soft.  It’s good to witness it with someone else.  I think J and I have had our fill of one another—but when you look into your partner’s eyes while leaning against a tower that has withstood so much falling apart, the things that trouble you from within are anaesthetized.  Plus, there are so many healthy trees here, wisdom-carriers.  The almond blossoms are out, these nuts that have fed me so much; their abundant flowers are white and delicate, with purple eyes in their centers.  J even spots a lady-bug, doing her thing near the buttercup crop.   There is enough green here to assuage whatever the heart wants to clench against.

Eventually we board a bus back on the coast road.  The driver seems to have just graduated intensive “asshole training for amateurs” at the Asshole Academy, and shows his credentials by demanding five lira from us instead of three—while the sign over his head states clearly that the fare is 1.50 per person.  Only by aping that he should give us our money back, we’ll just get off his stinking otobus, does he surrender and wave us in.  He doesn’t really have the stuff of a Conquerer in him after all, even though his bus stops every day near to the Fortress.  But it was worth a try, really; and, true to his calling, his resentment is expressed all the way back to Taksim by sloppy staccato braking.  One idiocy under G….

The world of dew is the world of dew is the world of dew…

Plus, it’s spring.  Really.