My Own Private Radical Poetics (Birthday Manifesto)
Today I’m listening to Beyonce’s Lemonade (What is it about your face that I can’t erase) + somewhere, too, in mind, I have on repeat that oft-quoted DFW line:
”Everything I ever let go of has claw marks on it"
Also today, all week, I’m channeling Robin Coste Lewis, who I was lucky to meet last month at an Emerging Writer’s Festival, where we were both guests:
“I’m not going to think about it!”
It’s a strategy: Here’s some shit! AND THEN: I’m not going to think about it!
A strategy of the well-adjusted, a healthy strategy. Self-care.
Robin and I were speaking of stress, difficult things, lightly but still, and one of the banal difficult things that came up in this catalogue of mutual whinging was travel-stress. Robin just won the National Book Award for her stunning Voyage of the Sable Venus, and is traveling constantly; she said she’d have to take a small plane from Detroit to Chicago and how she hates small planes. There was a moment where that seemed to bother her, the idea lingered, but then she declared, “I’m not going to think about it!”
I keep hearing her words, that line: a clarion call, a reminder, a way to counter those claws: I’m not going to think about it. Today, for example, I’m not going to think about: my ex-husband, and all of the rude things he has been saying to me lately, which I didn’t think anyone was allowed to say anymore, but so it goes. I’m not going to think about it!
I’m not going to think about the latest academic-scholar-poet he has been involved with since oh maybe 5 minutes after we ended our marriage, and yet not 5 minutes before I’d found a place to live and also not 5 minutes before we’d figured out how to actually, in fact, disentangle and divorce &etc.
I’m not going to think about it! I’m not going to think about his latest academic-poet girlfriend! I’m also not going to think about the review she wrote, which all of our mutual friends (because of course she is within the same community he and I have shared for many years) shared on my FB and Twitter and etc in which she wrote, however formally, a review extolling his viscerally-impactful radical poetry. I’m not going to think about how she made sure to note that his poetry will, dear reader, rearrange your limbs. (My limbs are still in recovery, after all.) Not going to think about her limbs!
I will say: the poets who love my ex-husband are very good at embodying the grotesquerie of his radical poetics.
I’m also not going to think about how this latest review echoes his earlier affair, the one that helped to end our marriage, which was already ending or over but still — I’m not going to think about that affair with that poet, who began their affair with a not-review of his latest book, describing how she’d read his book in her bed, and, of his book, she noted:
It knew what I wanted and gave it to me
I’m not going to think about that either.
Because of course, dear reader, I am, if nothing else, an unreliable narrator, and all of these things I’m NOT THINKING ABOUT are merely one side of the story. Yes, of course, I’ve had my fun—though it didn’t involve writing reviews of grotesque poets—and we all pay a price in the end. I believe in the multiplicity of truth, the impossibility of truth, the construction of self and narrative.
So I’m not going to think about the price!
I’m also not going to think about paying my lawyer or my rent or the sorry state of academia—I’m not going to think about my contingent non-tenure track jobs or —
Here’s what I am going to think about: the books I read in bed these past weeks when I’m insomniac, high on Nardil and the June light, as Jane Kenyon put it: Robins’ Sable Venus and Ferrate’s Lost Daughter and Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and Kate Zambreno’s The Book of Mutter (just last night! I was in tears); also that line by Eileen Myles, something she tweeted, a reminder (as CHER herself might say) there is love after love! or was it: EVERY LOVE SAVES ME FROM THE LAST LOVE - so why should I find myself so afflicted? I don’t! This is the human condition. We live we love we lose ad infinitum. I believe in love after love. I wrote that. I mean that.
There is only loss in this life, after all. But there is always love—it never ends, even after death, even after divorce, which is death, but worse (I sometimes think).
Here’s what I will think about: ART. For example, last week, I happened to find out just in time that one of my all time favorites, SOPHIE CALLE, was in Chicago, speaking at the Art Institute. And so after class I trekked through the madness of downtown, through rainy Draft Town (something to do with NFL football) and found my place in a line spanning the block to be seated in the audience for Calle’s lecture. My friend, the brilliant Lin Hixson, offered a poetic introduction for Calle, spoke of Calle’s work as the artful composition of self, her concern for the multiplicity of truth. Calle took the stage—I adored her dress (of course)—and began to discuss her work with her charming accent and wry humor— she spoke of her art of following people randomly, how this began and how she wasn’t even an artist, she was just obsessed. She spoke of creating, of building an “artificial obsession”, taking the job as a chambermaid; she spoke of the way boredom and banality is part of her work. Someone asked if she had a “discourse” around surveillance and stalking— and she said “No. I have no discourse”. It was funny. She was funny. She said later that she does not find this work funny while she is creating it, however. She spoke of “the fabrication of non-reciprocity” and how the day she stopped following the man (she’d followed him to Venice, and called 100 hotels to find where he was staying). She said that part of her project is that she can control the emotion, while she is obsessed or stalking someone. That in life, of course, it is much harder to control emotion.
She only briefly showed her project with taxidermy, which I remember seeing at MOMA in the 90s with my boyfriend. I loved him so much. But I loved Sohie Calle more. And her work, even then, even in my inability to articulate why, rang cherries. And that occurred to me last week, too—Calle discussed how after the email from the man breaking up with her, the one that led to her famous TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF project, she quickly became much more excited about her project then about the loss itself, which had been intensely painful. And she said she was so happy to be involved in the project that before long she was afraid he would ask to get back together (he didn’t).
And that was such a relief to hear. I really feel that my work has simply flourished, felt more urgent and true and alive in the past years, as my marriage has disintegrated, and though I didn’t want my marriage to fall apart—no one wants that—I also know that there is truth and consolation in making art, in doing the work that you have to do—it is a gift, as Lin herself reminded me last summer, “That’s a gift,” she said, to be able to write your way through this or within this, or around this, or beyond it. To be able to make the work that you have to make. And to spend a day at work, to talk about art all day, to end the day with Sophie Calle’s inspiration lighting you on fire from within, to come home and to stay up too late working on your own projects, this book, this one you have to write now, the one you’ve been thinking about it for a year—and god thank god for that. Grace, some would call it.
(My ex and I walk back and forth on Grace these days, taking our son from his place to my place, the street is Grace, here in Chicago, and that doesn’t seem to be totally by chance.)
Someone asked Calle how the man who wrote the email felt about the project, and she said that he didn’t like it but he respected the project. And then she said, “But he is not with out arms, he is a writer, and he is able to respond.”
So that is how I feel about my ex, the Radical Poet. In fact, I remember when he was first involved with the polyamorous poet, reading various polyamorist literature like The Ethical Slut, quoting this rhetoric to me; I remember he and his polyamorous lover told me, “We decided that you should be able to write about this. It’s ok.” And I laughed, I think, or I thought about Chris Kraus, I think, or I thought about I Love Dick, but that’s not why I laughed, I laughed because I WAS ALREADY WRITING ABOUT IT
I mean, didn’t he know who he married? I have ARMS, as Sophie Calle would say. I’ll wear this story out, I’ll exhaust it by sheer repetition, I’ll use my sentimental life to make art, I’ll control my emotions while google-stalking, I’ll see the online trajectory of his latest grotesque-radical-poetic affair. I’ll see the radical poets playing soccer, sharing meals, sitting on the floor at another not-so radical poet’s house. I’ll collaborate with Paul Auster. I’ll take a job as a chambermaid. I have no discourse around surveillance! I’ll call every hotel. I’ll fly to Venice. I’ll contact 107 women and ask them to interpret his emails. You’ll see. I have arms.
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