Is tradition a verb?

Day 2:

Patience brings you closer to reality. You ask how to breathe like a worm under soil watery, what floats in memory. You take it out. You put it back. You can close your eyes, and still smell the way the photos ran on the walls. You can smell a city of death inside you always. What miracle you are now. What fire carried you on the surface from there to this new paradise of absurd infrastructure, designed to fail, you ask. Is a city designed to always break?

**************************************
Process Notes:

I was 28 years old when Katrina & the federal levee failure destroyed New Orleans. I had a 2 year old daughter and I was 4 months pregnant with my son. I had just bought my first house. We packed for 3 days when we evacuated. I wouldn’t go back to the house for 2 years. I think if that woman could survive then I must be able to survive now. But maybe I survived then because I survived now. Perhaps, I was writing the survival of myself now and it depends on what I am able to hold here more than there.

what we forget to attend to

is what isn’t there

what is invisible

it seems ] what seems]

         [ever since    [we met

inside the matrix]

         a lot has been shutting down

[first me

             ] first me

         now [now] the world

Final Symptoms that emerge in PTSD:

excessive shyness

muted or diminished emotional response

inability to make commitments

chronic fatigue or very low physical energy

immune system problems

psychosomatic illnesses

depression, feelings of impending doom

feelings of detachment, alienation, and isolation

diminished interest in life

fear of dying, going crazy or having a shortened life

frequent crying

abrupt mood swings

exaggerated or diminished sex drive

amnesia and forgetfulness

feelings and behaviors of helplessness

inability to love, nurture or bond with others

difficulty with sleep

reduced ability to deal with stress

-Walking the Tiger

Photograph: 

A brick wall with weeds growing out of it taken near the Bayouk Choupic/ Bayou St. John

29.9755° N, 90.0852° W

“The word bayou comes from bayuk, meaning minor streams in the language spoken by the Choktaw, believed to have been one of the Native American nation-groups that inhabited this area before the Europeans settled here. The Native Americans called the bayou area Bayouk Choupic, after the mudfish, and built thatched homes near its bank.  Groups from the Chapitoulas nation are thought to be the first to inhabit the area. Another nation-group, the Choctaw had noted the advantages of living near this waterway and transported food and other goods on the bayou. They also traveled to the Mississippi River, by way of the bayou and a path now called Bayou Road. Ultimately, a trading village was established at Bayouk Choupic and Bayou Road.”

Source: https://www.datacenterresearch.org/pre-katrina/orleans/4/43/snapshot.html

“It all started the year after the storm, residents say. If the bayou was unsightly before Katrina, it was even bleaker right after. Floodwaters were pumped out of the city, but sluice gates were still closed, which caused low water levels in the bayou and high salinity, according to the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation. That wrought damage on the bayou’s already compromised environment, and exposed the tires, drowned cars and shopping carts that had been trapped in the water.”

https://midcitymessenger.com/2014/01/12/bayou-st-john-residents-look-into-restricting-activity-near-the-waterway/

 

Helicopter crashed near Bayou St. John, 2005

Bricks & Environmental Contamination:

Currently, the use of brick has remained steady, at around seven to nine billion a year, down from the 15 billion used annually during the early 1900s. In an effort to increase demand, the brick industry continues to explore alternative markets and to improve quality and productivity. Fuel efficiency has also improved, and by the year 2025 brick manufacturers may even be firing their brick with solar energy. However, such changes in technology will occur only if there is still a demand for brick.

Even if this demand continues, the brick industry both here and abroad faces another challenge: it will soon be forced to comply with environmental regulations, especially in the area of fluorine emissions. Fluorine, a byproduct of the brickmaking process, is a highly reactive element that is dangerous to humans. Long-term exposure can cause kidney and liver damage, digestive problems, and changes in teeth and bones, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has consequently established maximum exposure limits. To lessen the dangers posed by fluorine emissions, brickworks can install scrubbers, but they are expensive. While some plants have already installed such systems, the U.S. brick industry is trying to play a more important role in developing less expensive emissions testing methods and establishing emission limits. If the brick industry cannot persuade federal regulators to lower their requirements, it is quite possible that the industry could shrink in size, as some companies cannot afford to comply and will go out of business.

Source: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Brick.html#ixzz6TPrOxQM9

“The dreamer in his corner wrote off the world in a detailed daydream that destroyed, one by one, all the objects in the world”  -Bachelard, Poetics of Space

“Tradition can be a verb. It isn’t over yet. It hasn’t become history yet.” -Johnny Vidacovich

Plague Journal:

5.7.20

dear unica: do you remember seven years in the bardo? how we jumped, fled like an angel. winged our way out here. do you recall the in between. dreaming of dolls & men. how we trapped ourselves in the image. strap now to a life of carry: father in the exotic & mommy gone away & what of being bound to a brother. how we rewrite all narratives. shaving it down. did we murder the airwaves with our talk of revenge. tell me, even now do you love the extra pages of blank days till we outnumber time itself & what did we war within….

Resources: 

http://archive.oah.org/special-issues/katrina/Raeburn.html

[redacted] is my l_v_ language

i mask so fine the brittle hinges

the hand that sweeps it letters and the voice says to me

a window opens, i forget time moves               i'm writing just to you

tell me i'm not insane. i think about a day & realize i am hardly

i was wearing this mask all the time          for you

i'd cease to live but there's the pain, i'd have to hand it all to you

i think maybe you feel the same

instead we write these routes to clues

tell me you understand the song: under every gesture i was wrong

                   [don't say this part out loud]

i must be in love with suicide because it's all i think about

           be in love with suicide               it's all i think about


                in love         suicide               it's all i think


                    love         suicide                          i think


                    [EXIT]


to pull her up to speak [we must]  be that sick, we must be that sick
tell me how you border the safety of a mind always at work to undo
so you talk to me about love,


                   she doesn't exist her[e]      i couldn't feel     i t    anyway


and now you couldn't hear me too

      there was nothing i could write that would ever reach into you




 

Without motion

Shadowplay 

language is as close as i want

to get to love

it turns

me round

i wanted to run

into someone

safe enough to wing over

me, the air cold enough

clinging to this temporary

as near as i can stand

it’s fleeting, we retreat

control is about living

& for us, that meant survive

all the world did not give us

& then gave back its madness

i could read the pattern

of how we break, the body

that can’t relax hits a tipping point

written in hate, it was armoring

we had no desire to be the fire

put out, come for me

early morning before we disappear

back into lives, swallowing

of time under our fingers, fingers

you would trace the way i am

fingers under here, we be

this type of animal sheltering

in anonymous

you were the only
beast i could let go
underneath 

Blood Jet Poetry Series in New Orleans

Blood Jet Poetry Series will begin Sept. 11, 8PM featuring music and poetry every Wednesday night at 8PM followed by a limited open mic at BJs in the Bywater. Co-curated by Megan Burns and JS Makkos, Blood Jet encourages collaboration between musicians and poets as well as space for new performers in New Orleans. Throughout the year, Blood Jet will be hosting national poets as well as book releases and special performances.

Contact Megan Burns at meganaburns@aol.com for information on readings.

BJs in the Bywater is located at 4301 Burgundy.

Visit the Blood Jet Blog or follow on FB or follow on Twitter @bloodjetpoetry

Day 1: Tunechi Poetry Month

 

Dear Lil Wayne:

Once upon a time there was a dormouse, the deepest and the dark reasons of which clouds description. Once upon a time, there was a trilling. Do you recall the way to walk backwards, ward strange, to basket the option, to swerve left in the woods where wandered you lonely brown leaved. I wonder. Do you wonder too? I was able to recite how doth the abler regions cast a plague for seven seasons and how many pussies went to St. Ives, but on better days, the honey drips. I’m gonna have to put you downtown beneath the marbled staircase where luxury engines roll out exact replicas of the face we all want to wear this side of the sunset. When it said it was love, it was never enough. I watered the other’s discourse. The city did see; it was second in command. I’m rarely blue, how bout you too? I’m gonna have to put you back through the wire.

Truly,

Women

Peformative Madness: Country Style

I don't know anything about country music. When I put country music into Google Images, here's what comes up: white men in cowboy hats, white women, guitars, American flags, cowboy boots, wagons, Willie Nelson and this obscene belt buckle:

I'm fascinated by poet Kristin Sanders' obsession with country music. It speaks to my own obsession with rap music. Two different worlds/ sounds wrapped in the construction of how it makes us retell our own stories against the flow of another's words. I want to talk about her video and her poems over at TENDERLOIN this month. 

Link to Sanders' video: I Learned to be a Woman from a Nineties Country Song

http://www.tender-loin.com/sanders_sound.html

What's happening in this video? It seems like a tongue in cheek nod to how "country music" frames a type and that type is then performed by Kristin in an almost hysterical sense for our viewing pleasure. And I use "hysterical" with a precise nod to Invention of Hysteria, which I know Sanders is familiar with, and I use "pleasure" to denote as well the titillating view we are presented with as she romps and shakes before the camera.

The shot opens with our "performer" in the garbage can, a male voice off camera says, "do it" and then our "performer" pops out of the can to shake her stuff. It enacts a pornographic frame establishing who is the viewer, the one who controls the gaze, and who is the viewed, the one who performs for the gaze. It's hysterical in the dual meaning of the phrase as the video is funny and aims to poke fun, but hysterical as well in the pathological sense in that Sanders (the artist) uses her own body to enact a display of the tragically comic. Stuffing pearls into her mouth while standing in an open washing machine: she is quite literally the poet silencing herself, suffocating in the absurdity of these iconic displays: domestic and sexually available. Pornography exists in gluts of images, it's self-engorging and etymologically, from Fr. engorger "to obstruct, block, congest," O.Fr. engorgier "to swallow, devour," from en- (see en- (1)) + gorge "throat." In other words, to strangle on that which we desire.

Hysterical Epilepsy Hallucinations from "Iconographie De La Salpetriere"

ALBERT LONDE

The "performer" in the video is ecstatic, whether she is jumping on a bed with her hands tied behind her back or caressing a giant spoon or ironing while holding Freud in one hand. The appearance of Freud in the video leads us again to Invention of Hysteria where we learn: "Because Freud listened, hysteria returned to rattle the epistemic bases of neuropathology. But Freud had to pass through the great theater of hysteria at the Salpêtrière before beginning to listen, and before inventing psychoanalysis. The spectacle and its pain were necessary; first he had to get an eyeful" (Didi-Huberman, 80). An eyeful, that's what Sanders gives us, of herself. The performative specter who then is tied to the poem.

In the end of the video: the "performer" is masked. A lion mask obliterates her face as she takes what appears to be a basket of laundry outside the house. The return to the normative involves obliterating the face, hiding the face and containing the earlier exuberance or naked display. Behind closed doors, the "woman" is available; she is useful as an object that cleans and irons and also pleasing to the eye as an object that is able to be filled (with pearls) or to be gazed at in an inanimate state (corpse-like on the bed). The only babies, procreative elements that would signal her power, are reduced to king cake plastic dolls that are arranged over her abdomen as if she were a decorated float. There is no threat of real conception, no creation, and nothing to break the gaze of her role as that which is pleasurable to admire.

"We are all exposed to the prevailing ideology of our culture, and some women learn early on that they can prosper by aping the misogyny of men; these are the women who win provisional favor by denigrating other women, by playing on male prejudices, and by acting the man's woman." -Joan Smith, Misogynies

"It's a subtle abyss that separates men's use of women for sexual titillation from women's use of women to expose that insult." -Lucy Lippard, "Scattering Selves"

I thought a lot about how the enactment of this video depends on the normative sexuality displayed by Sanders and the accessibility of her as an object. What if the "performer" had not been "attractive," had not adhered to conventional images and forms that we find pleasing. What if the "performer" had been a person of color? How would a discussion of race have changed the dynamics, if instead of country music, the title was: I learned how to be a woman from nineties rap videos. What preconceived ideas would we imagine then as the template for what rap videos teach us about performing womanhood rather than country videos?

If they all display a performance then it truly enacts bell hooks statement: "misogynistic attitudes tend to be portrayed by the dominant culture as always an expression of male deviance. In reality, they are part of a sexist continuum, necessary for the maintenance of patriarchal social order" ("Gangsta Culture--Sexism and Misogyny).

I would go so far as to add that in relation to performative madness and the allusions to the hysterical women exploited at the Salpêtrière that being a woman always involves a performance (or several performances) and the pathology presents itself when the performance is treated as "normal." In other words, the insanity that women seem to chase is the distraction from a closer and more insidious form of insanity, which is the belief in the performance rather than a close deconstruction of how the part is played. What is portrayed as "natural" in film, books and T.V. is violence against women, is sexualization and mistreatment of women, is the ongoing fieldwork of upholding the patriarchal society that hooks reminds us: "must be labored in and maintained both to sustain patriarchy, but also to nourish an antifeminist backlash" (Gangsta Culture--Sexism and Misogyny).

I like that country music isn't a put-on for Sanders; it isn't a place to explore for some gain even as she points a critical eye at what it offers. She says in her interview: There’s no worst thing about country music, I truly love country music: what it says and what it refuses to say.  It’s so polite.  It’s so impolite.  I am utterly devoted to it, to who it made me become.  I have loved it all my life.  And this—speaking of secrets, of shame—brings me back to your very first question.  Sometimes we fall in love with what scares us most.

The poems are where the work is done though; regardless of our love or our devotion. It is our desire where we write it out, it is where we are not, which then complicates the images in the video. And Sanders' poems in conjunction with the video create a place of critique and discussion. You have to read the poems to get under the veil of the image like in  "Fancy Sung by Reba McEntire" where Sanders begins: "Fancy has a gun and I don't mean a real gun/ A man has a gun and I do mean a penis" or in "A Little Too Late Sung by Tanya Tucker" where she writes: "I walked into a gangbang and I was like/ oh shit." Sanders is not rewriting or decoding the songs for us; she's reinscribing them through the lens of her own performance stripped down. Beyond the pearls and denim, the "other" is given voice.

I think it's incredibly important to also point out that Saturday night, I went to karaoke with Kristin. And she sang "Fancy" by Reba McEntire. And it was beautiful and sexy and a woman can be a lot of things but when we're talking culture, a woman better be armed.