FROM THE VAULTS: CLAUDIA LA ROCCO ON CEDAR SIGO’S SELECTED WRITINGS
Ugly Duckling Presse is inviting artists and writers to respond to their favorite titles for our new backlist blog series From the Vaults. Our sixth contributor is writer Claudia La Rocco, with an appreciation of Cedar Sigo’s Selected Writings (2003; second edition 2005), Sigo’s first book.
Obviously there is For & after Cedar Sigo’s Selected Writings
The little red book* curving so pleasingly inside my back pocket, against me
Your words therefore also curving
Recently you gave a lecture on Barbara Guest, in a wood-paneled room (was it?) in a school on a hill, in a city adjacent to my city, the city that used to be yours. I walked all the way there. I was not dressed for how cold it was. I could not quiet my mind. These are the notes I took, now hopelessly, magically** unmoored from context:
I seem to have fashioned my own essential set of weaponry …intrigue, but without a plot; it is the cut of language which holds us breathless… an immediate privacy … sometimes the muse needs only an imagined audience of one …I try and keep it hovering, and ready to invade…
**That magically is embarrassing, and yet it wants to stay. I am overwriting because I want to please you, CS. Forgive me. I have special considerations/for intense associates — as you might say. Have said, that is, have written, have published in this little red book.
But now since they are out of context they can address themselves, your words, which do indeed hold me (at first “us,” but no, forget it, no theoretical readers here) breathless. Silky lines, and then a snag in the fabric, something earthy erupts and upends. It is a type of magic, to hear the line that no one else hears, to hear it so well you know just when to fuck it up. Paper magic.
The gem is still controlled. It is very controlled.
Because some of us (sic) are not listening, the message repeats. Burning orange. Burning red.
More than fifteen years old already, these words. Teenagers. Absolute panic.
All of the bars are uneven
The people, you say, are so sometimey
The spinning wheel cannot be slowed
The pages grow dog-eared, the cover dented and nicked.
I’m not so sure you don’t mean to be bad
Youyouyou, baby, the song (history) repeats
The promise of blood
I have built myself a fountain
And your words
They run darkly shimmering down the long, still hallways
*ed’s note: Cedar Sigo’s Selected Writings was published in 2003 as a 6.5x8.5” shiny green book with a purple flyleaf, one of UDP’s earliest publications (in fact, our very first full-length perfect bound book); the second edition, published two years later, included ten additional poems, and came in the form of a little 4.5x7” book with an offset & letterpress red cover.
CLAUDIA LA ROCCO is a writer whose work frequently involves interdisciplinary collaborations. Her books include the selected writings The Best Most Useless Dress (Badlands Unlimited), the chapbook I am trying to do the assignment ([2nd Floor Projects]) and the sf novel petit cadeau (published by the Chocolate Factory Theater in print, performance, and digital editions). With musician/composer Phillip Greenlief she is animals & giraffes, an ongoing experiment in improvisation. She has written for Artforum, BOMB, and The New York Times, where she was a critic and reporter from 2005-2015. La Rocco is editor in chief of SFMOMA’s interdisciplinary commissioning platform Open Space.
