#maya weeks

[litmuspress]

"If you look closely enough in your sleep deprivation you will eventually see the colors singing."

-Maya Weeks on Etel Adnan’s current show at The FLAG Art Foundation 

[robertogreco]

Stay Put

Gary Snyder from the Upriver/Downriver newsletter Number 10, circa 1991, as shared by Nam Henderson:

Without further rhetoric or utopian scheming, I have a simple suggestion that if followed would begin to bring wilderness, farmers, people, and the economies back. That is: don’t move. Stay still. Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with a vow not to move any more. Then, take a look at one place on earth, one circle of people, on realm of beings over time, conviviality and maintenance will improve. School boards and planning commissions will have better people on them, and larger and more widely concerned audiences will be attending. Small environmental issues will be attended to. More voters will turn out, because local issues at least make a difference, can be won—and national scale politics too might improve, with enough folks getting out there. People begin to really notice the plants, birds, stars, when they see themselves as members of a place. Not only do they begin to work the soil, they go out hiking, explore the back country or the beach, get on the Freddies’ ass for mismanaging Peoples’ land, and doing that as locals counts! Early settlers, old folks, are valued and respected, we make an effort to learn their stories and pass it on to our children, who will live here too. We look deeply back in time to the original inhabitants, and far ahead to our own descendants, in the mind of knowing a context, with its own kind of tools, boots, songs. Mainstream thinkers have overlooked it: real people stay put. And when things are coasting along ok, they can also take off and travel, there’s no delight like swapping stories downstream. Dont Move! I’d say this really works because here on our side of the Sierra, Yuba river country, we can begin to see some fruits of a mere fifteen years’ inhabitation, it looks good.

Nam resurfaced that in response to maya weeks, who writes:

I almost never feel that I am doing enough, unless I’m burying my body in sand at the beach or paddling over a set with my mouth full of salt or building electric fence for sheep (which I have only done twice) or performing. But I have spent my entire adult life and most of my childhood defining myself by what I do: I’m a writer, I’m an artist, I’m an activist, I’m an environmental justice worker, etc., etc., etc. And as it turns out I have done kind of a lot of things even though of the 3 books I have written I haven’t published a single one; and I still don’t manage a flock of sheep, let alone any land; and I haven’t done a performance since like the beginning of last year; and I’m on some kind of weird hiatus from surfing while I do a bunch of work (namely, environmental justice advocacy and writing and training as a shepherd and figuring out how I am going to have a long-term relationship to land I care about) and now that my job is not getting the Environmental Protection Agency grant we put in so much work to apply for last fall I am back on the job market again (if you have any leads on environmental communications jobs I might be a fit for, please send them my way; thank you!) and that too takes time. But in the course of getting a lot of things done, I’ve sacrificed a lot. I’ve sacrificed stability. I still don’t have a retirement account even though I’m in my mid-30s. I’ve lived in a few different countries and many different towns and cities. My close friends are all over the place. I just moved yet again, and I still don’t have a dining table. Most of all, I’ve sacrificed time with loved ones. I’m an energetic person by nature. I half-joke that it runs in my family (the other half of me is dead serious). I can’t stand to see a goal unfulfilled. And what I am recognizing, at this historical moment that we are all living through whether we like it or not, is that that means I need to reorient my goals a little. So that they are less about doing, and more about being. About being stable. About being outside. About being around those I love.

And both of those remind me of something from Frank Bures that I posted here a long time ago:

[I]t may be wiser to try to cre­ate the place you want to live, rather than to keep try­ing to find it.

Given all that and maya’s emphasis on being, I am also re-reading my notes and collection titled “Who are you now?” where I will also be adding a pointer to this collection.

[francesca-lisette]

Writing Process Blog Tour

I was kindly invited to participate in this writing process blog tour by the poet and text artist Sarah Kelly. Thank you Sarah! You can read her post here.

On Monday 28th April, the writers and text-makers Maya Weeks, Oki Sogumi and Johanna Linsley will respond to these questions, so follow the links to read their answers next week.

1) What am I working on?

At present, as I have been for more or less the last year, I am working on reconfiguring the means of survival/ presentation of self-sustenance in a way that serves rather than hinders my insatiable need for art, for freedom, for glamour, for an understanding of the world that thrives on life and joy and friendship yet ventures, bursting with feeling, into its depths. It’s only now that I recognise this as my actual project, rather than writing (which emerges at odds and ends to this life, superfluously). Because the outcome of attempting to survive differently whilst adrift in this careless city is that no writing gets done. The minor triumph of survival becomes the cipher for creativity itself.

Well, seriously, I am at the threshold of several personal crises right now. My motto for this year is ‘Phoenixing’. It seemed incorrect when I picked it. Too pious, too spiritual, too grammatically clunky. I couldn’t put my finger on what bugged me about it, and I also couldn’t choose something else that I could actually remember, so ‘phoenixing’, despite its inadequacy, stuck. But now I realise our aspirations are predictive and as a result my greatest creative act this year will be to lift myself from the ashes of my former self, my former life in order to build a form of existence that thrills me, and consistently sustains my writing.

Why this self-indulgent gesturing towards the extraneous life of the poet? Because, well, that’s where the writing comes from. Not the events themselves, but our disposition towards and digestion of the events and world that make up our daily life, both exceptional and mundane. And so I strongly suspect that the most important phoenixing I will perform will consist of allowing my self to be my old, new, odd self again, in order to claim the work that’s been waiting for me.

Among my dreamed-of projects is one that I hope will take shape over the next few weeks, in time to be performed at the London Poetry Festival. It is a poem I’ve been working on on-and-off for over a year now, entitled ‘Becoming’. So far it has been a string of sentences inspired by the lucid mirror that is Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva; a failed attempt at a story-poem; a series of prose poems written after meditation or rituals performed in natural environments. & then, a few weeks ago, I realized: “Of course. It’s a novella.” Some mild research is required. And then excitement will be too, which only comes with fresh territory (and I know from the style of prose I want to create I must avoid mere imitation, which will be tempting and difficult and somewhat inevitable). Research is often necessary to produce this excitement, the discovery of something mine.

The subject of this sequence is the earth as woman and cyborg, her blocked sexuality gunking out rivers, dumps, instable climates, violent hurricanes, and skidding data flows. I will try to understand and tell her story through metaphor, satire, impasse, and the recognition of humbleness required for humans to save the world before it’s too late.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

What a strange and necessary question. I don’t know what the genre of my writing is. I mean I seriously don’t know whether this question is referring to poetry, or to a subset of that genre, such as ‘Cambridge School’ or ‘Post-Internet Feminist Writing’ or ‘Young British(ish) Lefty Avant-Garde Poets’. My writing probably circles around these three, & more, in order to follow its own trajectories. No-one’s writing is a genre. I mean I find such a distinction a trap (for the writer) and an escape from real engagement (for the critic/ reader).

So I’m not sure whose work my writing is supposed to be different from. But I can write about what makes it distinctive for me. My work used to be highly compressed, containing imagistic, obscure and/ or associative phrasing. Over the last few years I have deliberately opened it up. Making it more vulnerable, a  contaminated poetic field, less abashed to find itself an elongated form of consciousness. More terrifying & less scared. It still contains obscure images. It still compresses information. My values have not changed, but my work has shifted to reflect the expansion of my poetic project beyond a conventional definition of poetry, to one that attempts specifically to engage with poetry as a fundamental orientation towards the world, rather than first and foremost as a formal concern or mere vehicle for mind-chatter, dogma or aestheticism. Mine has taken those forms those too. But right now I want more spirit, and less judgement.

I think one way my work might differ from some poets (not all) is that I am as influenced by art practices, especially performance and cinema, as I am by pre-existing poetries, as well as magic and ritual. I mean I actually think a performance can be a poem; so can a ‘painting’. Ideally I want art, my art, to be in dialogue with everything. Is that too much to ask?

3) Why do I write what I do?

My writing is a way of producing beauty or illumination, sometimes both in the same poem, and often from ugliness. For intensity and expression and communication, & to go somewhere else & see where I am differently. & also because I can’t not write this way.

I also want to say that I think style is a political question, and writers should be the first to innovate new ways of thinking and using language that respond to the realities of the political situation between us. My poetics is also always a politics, and one which I prefer to allow to mutate without fetishizing one particular aesthetic over another. So then, I believe that poetry can be a form of conversation, at its most exuberant and particular.

4) How does your writing process work?

As far as what starts a poem or how frequently I work, there are no hard and fast rules. I have written poems by forcing myself to write every day, writing after meditation, writing after poetry readings or political demonstrations, tapping words into a phone at 2am in the dark, and (most often) following a train of thoughts that leads me to a cluster of phrases that I’ll jot down and later discover is the opening stanza of a poem. Always, this comes after an event or other stimulus, whether inner or outer.

I’m a lazy & overcautious editor – I prefer to write on the hoof, ‘you just go on your nerve!’ (Yes, O’Hara.) Poems of mine that have been heavily revised feel dead to me. The most magical moments in my writing life are when I discover a poem pouring out of my consciousness after a walk or a phone conversation or too much coffee, & I barely alter poems that arrive so completely formed.  

I cultivate an open poetic field & I like to let words dance down the page, settle into their own mis-spellings or made-up definitions, and soften the bridges of sovereignty claimed by proper nouns (i.e. de-capitalization).

The most stimulating way for me to write is when I have an idea and I let myself pursue it, investigate every irrelevant strand, and the work ends up writing itself as a response to that material. The finished mass is the manifestation of (my) dream; yet in the act of coming to consciousness, it gains self-awareness. Rather than being impervious from reality, it opens up a space in which vision affirms the veracity of the impossible.

[kwhpresents-blog]

sovereign

by Maya Weeks (Fourth-Year: Kresge)

inside aluminum siding mice reek in a slow race to the end

six americanas roost in the neighboring coop they'll eat anything for breakfast

we trundle ardently through the dilly-dally circus towards pacific valley

highlights at the summit include a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama and wildflowers the body is an ecosystem i don't want to find out if i am allergic to bees sipping last night's merlot (red sliding to the rear of my palate uncovers the meaning of bitter) i feel its effects after half a glass is it just me or is this what fruit flies taste like? i remove my glasses to remember and draw better i lie on my stomach and my mutt chases a hen onto my back where she claws and flaps, upset one of the nameless ones caws her way back to her eggs thank goodness i am not allergic to chickens