...the writing in HERE is concerned with boundaries (as perhaps all writing is?)...HERE is framed and inhabited by poems searching out questions of identity... "who am I?" or " who are we?"...the horizon of this work existing as the possibility for difference and agency...the poems acting as kinds of technologies for metamorphosis...machines for constructing the temporary nourishment needed for transformation...or more to my thinking...lacanian psychoanalytic linguistic instruments for transformations...these poems are the search for identities in self- and co-construction...identities in relation...identities in transformation...the possibility of the being-in-language as an gestural agent of liberty...but also...part of the action of this writing is also necessarily about the pain of transformation...the poems themselves harbingers of dark transmissions of personal experience...in these ways i'm reminded of the power of writing to aid memory as well as writing being a psychoanalytic tool for self discovery...Not simply reportage or journal entries of activities HERE is a collaborative poetry manuscript built upon a polyformal and multiplicitous potentiality...the forms utilized range from anaphora, list, lyric, prose, free verse, acrostic, the poetic play, the google search, epistolary, renga, and hybrids and variations of these to perfom a geography of body and of mind...but one in which the boundaries and horizons of the future are being formed...
Here are some of my favorite excerpts..
...From DL's "My Heart's Language"...
...Love isn't easy
It is hard to gain and lose
Our beliefs change
I can't believe that was me
Afraid of time
When she was scared
She was her mother
She was her own being
We just have to dig within our bodies
...From AH's "La, Mariposa, the butterfly woman"...
...i dreamed of a girl whose soft body opened like a cabinet
inside the cavity were embryos shining, daggers on
shelves and bags packed with the first green color of
spring
this was the Skeleton Woman
she stretches from heaven to hell,
we're all here, here, here
...From HG's "Part 1"...
...She (the jumper) is already accepting, moving
on to the next moment in time, society places her back
and dwells like gulls in a stand still cold front unable to
fly out of it and enlisting her among their ever familiar V-
formation.
White Noise: Becoming a transfixion, an escape out of
hell. Rid the conscious mind of the tedious aspects of our
tedious minds.
...From DB's "[Written in an address book]"...
...Stillness except for rocking,
Back and forth
Green, green, green, brown.
Darkened windows
A brick asylum
Darkened trees
Branches intertwined
Leaves cover every bit of light
Missing the escape holes...
...From TW's "[who am i?]"...
...I am a night owl who lives for the stars and
the crazy things that happen at night. I am a friend who
can be trusted until the end. I am on a journey to
discovery of what i want out of life. I am a girl who has
choices. I want to be free....
...From SMH's "Google Search"...
...You can't
remember a time when your thoughts of purpose did not
include others. It is kind of a relief to feel sure of yourself
You realize that we are all here for each other
and searching for a purpose. Suddenly a wave of
exhaustion comes over you. You turn off the computer,
walk back to your room, and crawl into bed, soft and
warm.
...lastly here is the RENGA from HERE in its entirety...
Slick as a motherfucking architectural major
Building buildings off of my irises
I sometimes crave Newport's, but my
Mother and father completely disagree
I'm scared they might disown me
Let's pretend
This ended hopeful
My mom won't let me watch scary movies
She says their innapropriate
Just like church
I wish that black crows on their wires visited me oftener
And more than I would like, I find myself singing "wrong
way"
She winces at my smoker-alto voice
The overall theme and structure of the poems in this work remind and encourage a reading of the order of the lepidoptera (moths/butterflies) as examples of the ways in which horizons and boundaries shift after metamorphosis...the ritualistic passage from one stage to another carries within itself the solidification of new social bonds and boundaries...to the caterpillar the personal relation to the boundaries of the world is one of gravity and nourishment...while through the ritual metamorphosis the moth/butterfly becomes relative to new amazing and dangerous stimuli, the winds sway, the vastness of travel, the settling on a flower, the availability and dangers of greater accesses of flight...HERE as a book exists as a series of texts reinforcing a collective experience of relational ritual...the ritual of transformation...as i read through the texts i view the diffracted angles of a shattered chrysalis...the poems of HERE are the pieces of a passed through space...it is an architecture for passing through, for passing time...but one marked with a horizon that is about to be different...an architecture with internal folds and excesses left as marks of the vast machinery of socio/biological (mis)understandings and frustrations that contribute to the shifting boundaries of an identity in...about....and beyond...transformation...
...i want to thank Tim Armentrout for sending this book to me...HERE is a testament to the powers of the imagination...the power to create your own path...the power to understand the paths of others...the power to continue to become...
