#recently reread

[thesingingknives]

O dear I perceive by the numb of my feet that it is fall or winter or some other notspring season

how come is that?

*

Well spring I’m onto your tricks don’t think I’ll be easier on you because all winter you sat on a fence and grinned

*

spring when you come again I think I’ll never sleep for walking the 2 AM mist till dawn and then dancing the day

—Diane Di Prima, from “More or Less Love Poems” (“Song to Spring”)

[thesingingknives]

Love is the only shocking act left on the face of the earth. Eroticism, murder, betrayal, starvation, torture, war, all pale in the face of love. We stare for hours at CNN, watch the world unfold hour by hour, numbed, deafened, defeated. We wander into the wrong neighborhood and are showered by hatred. We study the universe through distant cameras, drive ourselves mad searching for the origins of life. We detach ourselves and engage in futile superficial conversations about sexual politics, impressing one another with intellectual repartee, dress ourselves in various guises to avoid the alienation of aging skin, exchange hostile glances in loud, desperate nightclubs. This is the dance, the prelude to need and desire.

We confess our sins in cold, damp churches, kneel to the Lord to open our souls, punish one another for the frailties we cannot bear in ourselves. Winding ourselves up into frenzies of fear and self-loathing we are tamed by a cocktail or hallucinogen, pretty colors, strange desert journeys, emptiness and abandonment.

We flee from this most terrifying moment: in a warm room in the quietest night with whispers of tenderness and trust penetrating the senses, control, power, anger are thrown aside and we bear witness to the only valid instant in the universe, love.

—Sandra Bernhard, from Love, Love, and Love 

[thesingingknives]

a hundred maggots taught my gut to squirm a hundred weeks ago

and now you come with berries in your hair and wait for my applause

—Diane di Prima, from “More or Less Love Poems”

[thesingingknives]

I lowered my fingers into the current and drew them back icy. I hate water. Always have. To us she was taken, but somehow, also, she acted to make a gift. I know this. I’m scared to die. I don’t want to die. Not here, not yet. FUCK MY PAST, I’M JUST NOT DONE. Sera wrote that in her zine. Sera, who just wasn’t done.

I saw Sera in Richmond a bunch, and I saw her monsters too.

Angels, Matt says.

Every angel is terrifying, Rainer Maria Rilke says.

Almost deadly birds of my soul. Is that what those things were? The page where I began Sera’s eulogy has inky black birds down the margin. Her sister’s poem compared her to a bird, as did other remembrances. Over and over, I’d hear people with totally different points of reference imagine Sera as a creature of flight. And I’d feel the rush of air, of wing, on the back of my neck before turning to face what can only be described as deliberate nothingness. Was it her? Was it something else? What did it want? What could I say?

In my intent to talk about monsters I have ended up talking around them. Not mentioning the animals that pulled me in and out of dreams, the talon that hurled me physically across the living room of the 325 house. The overwhelming presence, as Rilke puts it, of ghosts and demons. In multitude. Not one but many. Protecting Sera, bringing her to me and drawing her away. I know Sera travels by train up there. Hops weather systems, riding with her legs kicking cloud cover, a motley crew of ghouls and multi-dimensional beings tumbling and thumping around the boxcar. Matt says Sera can go between any of us instantaneously. Yes, but that’s not the point. She takes the train. Because she does, that’s why.

—Ammi Emergency, from Emergency #4: Monsters (2005)

[thesingingknives]

letters to a dead reader

Dead girls, dead girls. You want to know, where are the boys? Where are the dead boys? The easy answer is, can't you see them?

They're here, hanging out under the name of the father, the law of the father, the non/the nom/the know of the father. Every word means "no". It's not anything else.

Which means the text is full of deaths, absences. Look into the abbess and who looks back? The text is full of deaths, absences. Holes. Girls. They're that nothing. And if you peep through them? There are the dead boys, pressed right up against the other side of the page.

Being both dead and text, they slide towards every each other, the girls and boys, the dead and the text. Under phallologocentrism, this is what we call slippage. All dead boys begin as dead girls. All words are approximate. Your mileage may vary.

This text, this dead girl, this dead boy, and all the dead in between are promiscuous, producing and freeing signs at the cost of their own bodies. History writes over those who write it. Movies repicture the star. When we can no longer dance in the minefield, we can still tango in the graveyard, a full turn each 24 hours.

The author, of course, is quite dead. But the words, they're quivering right now, undulating like a dead girl, writhing like a dead boy. All of this. Right in your hands. Right now.

—Daphne Gottlieb, from Kissing Dead Girls (Soft Skull Press, 2008)

[thesingingknives]

I feel like we should have a Guerilla Girls for writers. I want to be Djuna Barnes. No, I want to be Elfriede Jelinek. No, I want to be Valerie Solanas.

—Kate Zambreno, from Apoplexia, Toxic Shock, and Toilet Bowl: Some Notes On Why I Write

[thesingingknives]

I want my next life to be slow-motiony, with moody skies and grandpas tossing footballs and heirlooms passed down and really good hair and poignant background music. I want it to be like the fifties or the seventies or maybe even the eighties or maybe even some new future decade where things are like they used to be but in a new way. In my next life I want to accept things as they are and when people ask Why I want to say What do you mean why and when everyone comes back for homecoming I want to already be home.

—Elizabeth Crane, from “Football” (All This Heavenly Glory)

[thesingingknives]

Americans are like infants. As soon as something passes from our field of vision we forget it exists. I remember when the anchor people were as surprised as the public, when they didn’t have their lists of acceptable and unacceptable words and ideas within arms reach. As with the day after the WTO protests in Seattle, I remember when the rhetoric of the US mass media machine had not yet crystallized. I remember that things were different at some point, but like everyone else, I’ve forgotten exactly how.

—Ammi Emergency, from Emergency #4: Monsters (2005)