Ugly Duckling Presse

Ugly Duckling Presse is a nonprofit publisher of poetry, translation, experimental nonfiction, performance texts, and books by artists. UDP was transformed from a 1990s zine into a Brooklyn-based small press by a volunteer editorial collective that has published more than 200 titles to date. UDP favors emerging, international, and “forgotten” writers, and its books, chapbooks, artist’s books, broadsides, and periodicals often contain handmade elements, calling attention to the labor and history of bookmaking. Our office and letterpress workshop is located in The Old American Can Factory (Gowanus, Brooklyn). [Open to the public by appointment. Apprenticeships, internships and volunteer opportunities are available.]

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The UDP blog has moved to Medium

Head over to our new Medium blog for updates from the presse! It’s a space for continued conversation about our books and for documenting what's happening in our community—including photos from author readings, updates on our programming, and more. Read commentaries by friends of the presse on their favorite UDP books in our From the Vaults series, reflections on backlist titles by UDP apprentices in our Backlist Bulletin series, and dozens of author interviews. You can also browse photos from this tumblr by year on our photo archive page. See you there!

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Backlist Bulletin #7: TV Sutras

Catching the zeal for Dodie Bellamy’s The TV Sutras was slow at first, and then total. I grazed tentatively through the first half of the book, which is made up of 78 sutras, or aphorisms of received spiritual knowledge. In the preceding note, “The Source of the Transmission,” Bellamy claims that her process was not an attempt at “irony, cleverness or perfection — or art. The TV Sutras are totally in-the-moment sincere, even if that sincerity makes me cringe afterwards” (14). The text challenged my modes of reading; the sutras aren’t poems, but I wasn’t sure that I should internalize them as honest advice. The received knowledge, after all, was transmitted via television broadcast and written into the form of an ancient Indian scripture. In an interview with David Buuck, Bellamy cites Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a book of aphorisms on the practice and theory of yoga, as the base for her form, and a bad therapist who recommended yoga and meditation at home as a catalyst.

For each day of her 78-day sutra practice, Bellamy includes both a divinely inspired soundbite and its human-filtered interpretation. Both parts reach into their own well of images: for the sutras, a broader cultural subconscious as refracted through the commercials and melodramas of daytime television; for the commentaries, the store of spiritual language within Bellamy herself:

#16

Who says you have to have 12 periods a year on the pill.

Montage of young women repeating, “Who says.”

COMMENTARY

Each of us progresses, unfolds at our own speed. There is no set route. Acknowledge and follow your own rhythm. Trust your own experience/authority over societal expectations/programmatic doctrine.

— p.32

The commentary reflects central concerns of the book: how subjective experience is located in time, how spiritual authority is conferred, what boundary we can possibly draw between self and culture. In the essay that follows, “Cultured,” Bellamy unwinds the spiritual autobiography that formed the conduit to these sutras — in particular, she discusses her ten years as a member of a New Age cult. Dodie as narrator recounts events in a chatty, semi-fictionalized, often otherworldly manner, laced with fantasy.

Bellamy grabs hold of pieces of memory, allowing them to glisten with the sense of bliss found in her spiritual devotion. On a trip to Jacksonville, Florida, for a cult convention — Dodie’s first trip out of the midwest — she describes a potted plant: “a series of waxy green banana peels stacked one inside the other, and from the center pokes a trumpet of magenta, too intensely magenta for this world, its ‘petals’ sharply pointed — like razors — the incandescent dentate of an alien vagina” (111). Images of “other realms” and archetypal spiritual authority are superimposed over her young adult life. Delusion and euphoria bounce off of each other: “With my Teacher/sixth initiate boyfriend, high in the air, surrounded by treetops and light, life from then on would be one long spiritual retreat; I’d be like one of those ancient naked yogis who lives on a platform on stilts, wooden fence all around to hide his enlightened cock and balls as he waves to his devotees” (136). If the first section of the book is an even-paced, methodical, and procedural sequence, the second part is an unfurling, spiraling, high-entropy revelation. It is delicious prose, like listening to someone you love gossip. I eat it up and I’ll believe anything she says.

Throughout “Cultured,” memories work like sutras, accessed as the smallest possible unit that holds itself together, “terse, easily memorized, but […] intended to be expanded and explained” (207). Bellamy writes, “I’m reminded of the way that anyone from my past is reduced to a discrete set of images — and one fragment will emerge” (207). Memory is encountered from a new vantage point, again and again.

*

I want to convince everyone I know to read this book. If I told everyone that it was about cults, charisma, abuse of power, desire, sex, and bliss, everyone would read it. I put my head down when cultists in the subway station offer me literature, but I want to know who they are and what their lives are like. Sometimes they look at you with gentle ease spread across their faces, sometimes alarming concern for your soul. I remember being a Christian mega-church attending pre-teen filled with desire to bring everyone into the envelope of love I’d found in my bible study group. Years later, I still answer the door and talk to the evangelists about the Lord for too long, before my roommate makes me politely move on with a fake obligation. Faith — even others’ faith — can be so bright. I know better.

In the beginning of “Cultured,” Dodie is in a nail salon where Oprah is playing in the background, airing an investigative montage on Tony Alamo, an apocalyptic cult leader and sexual abuser. Last month, I watched a new documentary on Bikram Yoga in which toned and optimistic women gleefully enmesh themselves into a pyramid scheme/fitness club, under a verbally and sexually abusive leader. Like in Dodie’s cult, where a plagiarism scandal rocks the foundations of their leader’s authority, the appropriation of Eastern spiritual traditions into an American profit machine is foundational. The drama of the cult is consumable because it allows us to see an intensification of commonplace power dynamics, made into something recognizably perverse.

*

In Barf Manifesto (UDP, 2010), Bellamy celebrates writing that moves through the body and makes a mess, through a discussion of Eileen Myles’ essay “Everyday Barf.” Of this aesthetic, Bellamy writes:

The Barf is an upheaval, born of our hangover from imbibing too much Western Civ. The Barf is reflective, each delivery calls forth a framing, the Barf is expansive as the Blob, swallowing and recontextualizing, spreading out and engorging. Its logic is associative, it proceeds by chords rather than single, discrete notes. Hierarchies jumble in the thrill, in the imperatives of purge.

— p. 32

“Cultured” unfolds in this logic. After Bellamy disentangles herself from the cult, the same patterns resurface in different forms — in her entry into an experimental writing scene in San Francisco of the 1980s, specifically the “cult of New Narrative” to which she belonged, in the endless options for spiritual healing she engages in, in the pyramid scheme of teaching creative writing professionally. In this jumble, the draw of a charismatic spiritual leader who makes it all cohere is strong. But those figures are counterbalanced by moments of meditative clarity, the internal authority of Bellamy’s “bullshit meter,” her perception. Each paragraph delves into one of these modes, building on one another until they reach a crescendo. As she remembers sitting in a park with her girlfriend in Bloomington, Indiana, Bellamy writes, “No one told me that moving closer into what I perceived on a daily basis, the swingness of the swing, was the key to spiritual writing.” (230)

Towards the end of the essay, the “I” becomes increasingly destabilized, moving fluidly between the perspective of Dodie and a charismatic, frenetic guru alter-ego. The TV Sutras creates fertile ground for a curious, shifting perspective, allowing both writer and reader to enact the roles of spiritual leader and acolyte. As Bellamy writes, “The sutra process is the opposite of accepting things as they are, highlighting instead the instability of knowing.” (207)

— Paige Parsons

TV Sutras is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and through Small Press Distribution (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on March 6th are 50% off, use discount code CHARISMA at checkout.

The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.

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Book Launch: Andrei Monastyrski's Elementary Poetry with Boris Groys, Brian Droitcour, and Yelena Kalinsky, at e-flux

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Lisa Robertson, Rachel Levitsky, and Anna Gurton-Wachter: an evening of poetry readings presented by Coach House Books and Ugly Duckling Presse, at The Dance

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The Drug of Art: Ivan Blatný at 100

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Czech Center New York hosted a celebration of the work of Ivan Blatný, one of the most prominent Czech poets of the 20th century. The evening, moderated by Alex Zucker, began with an introduction about The Drug of Art, published by Ugly Duckling Presse, by the book’s editor, Veronika Tuckerová, followed by readings of Blatný’s poems by poet and translator Anna Moschkovakis, publisher from Ugly Duckling Presse Matvei Yankelevich, and poet and translator Monica de la Torre, accompanied by a projection of selections from Blatný’s work, a talk by Slavicist Jose Vergara, author of an extensive study about Blatný, and a moderated discussion with all of the evening’s participants.

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Backlist Bulletin #6: NETS

NETS is not strictly an erasure, so much as an idea of an erasure. The title is taken from inside the letters “The Sonnets of William Shakespeare.” Each numbered piece in the book offers a Shakespeare sonnet in pale gray text, almost melting into the page, with some words Jen Bervin has selected in full black. So the erasure exists but the source text is still discernible. In the “working note” which closes the book, Bervin states her aim of making the language “open, porous, possible,” also saying “when we write poems, the history of poetry is with us.”

*

The first thing I think when I hear the word erasure is Mark Doty’s banger, “Homo Will Not Inherit.” Published during the mid-late years of the AIDS crisis, it opens with a description of New York City, arriving at a xeroxed picture of jesus taped up in public space, with “homo will not inherit; repent and be saved” written on it in marker. The speaker responds repetitively to this attempted warning. In one iteration, he says;

I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit:

stupidity, erasure, exile

In a poem that finds a lot of fierce delight in queerness, this stays with me like a hook. The inheritance, which is our pain on the cultural, heritable level. The inheritance which is the queer condition of being erased, being unremembered, or remembered wrongly. In a poem which, by and large, is celebratory, I am haunted by this moment.

Claiming literary techniques as queer can be sloppy and counterproductive, at times, but it is also very satisfying. So I’d like to claim erasure as queer.

*

Another thing I like to claim as queer is all Shakespeare (fight me.) I could talk for a long time about the sonnets as queer texts, and about contemporary gender nonconforming queer writers like Julian Talamanetz Brolaski or Jos Charles who implement ornate, archaic language in parts of their work. Literature is one of the ways I know we have always existed.

I realize that enjoying classical trappings, and specifically liking Shakespeare, is not an original position. What I’m getting at is that people talk a lot about the continued relevance of Shakespeare without acknowledging that there is at this point a vast cultural apparatus propping up his relevance. It’s like the ur-version of complaints about remakes and sequels on successful movie franchises. There is a lot of work that probably never gets made because we are all still gagging over Shakespeare’s relevance. (I admit I’m thinking more of theater than poetry.) I’m saying I’m ambivalent about the choice of the sonnets as a source text for erasure, and even having spent some time with the book, I am still not sure about it. Is it the clearest text, for Bervin, for this project of illuminating the presence of a history of literature within the present?

*

What is interesting (and very queer) about erasure is that it contains, inherently, a question of which text is the true text. Is the original the truth? Or did the original contain and obscure some deeper reality which the erasure made visible?

*

*

Why erasure? Does erasure have inherent qualities? Is it easier to erase than to generate? Certainly it feels game-like, math-like, as though it sits in another part of the brain. Is erasure an act of creation, distinct from writing?

I’ve read some erasures that feel successful that are mostly strange-making or whimsical. I’m thinking mostly of Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter’s collaboration Of Lamb.

But beyond the surreal or disruptive possibilities of the form, erasure is political. There’s this great Solmaz Sharif essay about that. Erasure occurs in the non-literary sense of the world, all around us. There’s active erasure, and erasures of selective attention. Some news is not news, some voices are not voices. There are structures for archiving and validating peoples’ stories which constantly erase entire perspectives, entire lives, from the record.

Erasure is political and as such can sometimes be corrective. A couple years ago New Republic put together a piece about the movement towards erasure poetry under Trump, some need emerging for a reclamation or recontextualizing of language, faced with the illogic and malice embedded in the administration’s rhetoric. I know of two writer-artists (Erin Mizrahi and Isobel O’Hare) who are making erasure poetry from #metoo celebrity apology letters. Or Chase Beggrun’s book RED. RED is taken from Bram Stoker’s Dracula as NETS is taken from the Sonnets of William Shakespeare. Chase’s project feels clear and specific, in how it relates to the source text — where the original was a story about monsters, male heroes, and woman-victims, in RED it is a woman who acts, pursuing and being pursued by husbands and monsters. It is a book about trans identity which never needs to argue about trans identity. It simply finds itself, existing within the flesh of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, like a figure inside a sculptor’s stone.

*

There are many beautiful moments in NETS. With the original Sonnets present as a ghost-bolster, it is easy to see beautiful things, easy to appreciate the sparseness Bervin can create from those compact, lush texts. But the most impactful single poem, for me, is not in that category. It is this:

NETS came out in 2004. The Sonnets were published in 1609. In art the specific brings the general to life, which also contains the possibility of alienation, of staying too opaquely inside of the present and making work which fails the test of time. In this poem, the potential for making work against the backdrop of history comes alive for me. In this poem I understand why this project is necessary, why Bervin needs access to a canonical, larger-than-life, ancestral vocabulary for her own experience.

— C. Bain

NETS is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and through Small Press Distribution (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on January 24 are 50% off, use discount code DISAPPEAR at checkout.

The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.

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Backlist Bulletin #5: The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure

Elizabeth Reddin’s The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure (UDP, 2008) and Steven Zultanski’s Bribery (UDP, 2014) are two UDP books, six years apart, with a number of similarities. Both are set in and around Brooklyn, both are longform projects rather than collections, and, most significantly, both books unfold through prose paragraphs that are broken in and between sentences:

When in a helmet you can’t resign. What happens if you resign while wearing a helmet, is that like jumping. When you run fast to the end

of the road to the gate and you can’t catch your breath, because you’ve pushed yourself like someone was after you. How is it you know how

to live. (Hot Garment)

What’s exciting about this form is what’s exciting (to me) about all poetic experiments: it allows thought to be represented in a new and potentially more accurate way. The question is, what kind of thought is best expressed through writing that was crafted with the musical instruments of poetry, but still retains some tendencies of prose? Another way of asking this question might be: what can’t be expressed within the confines of either prose or poetry?

Comedy and horror are ever-present in equal parts throughout both Bribery and Hot Garment, and the broken prose form allows these moods to coexist harmoniously. The scene in Bribery of the narrator ventriloquizing a severed head would be much more serious in the form of a lyric poem. (The same could be said of the dream-scene in Hot Garment in which the narrator is pursed through Los Angeles by a murderous monk.) Such spectacles would take on disproportionate symbolic weight in conventional forms — a scabbed and sunken head in a poem is hard to read lightly. In pure prose, these passages might become anchored to a plot or character. Instead, the line breaks allow fluidity between brutality and humor, as well as between realism and metaphor: “Eventually / I carry [the head] to the exact center of Prospect Park and start digging. There’s a good reason I’m so intent / on finding the center of things.” (Bribery, p. 9)

Another commonality between the two books is the apparent closeness between the writers and narrators. The broken prose form is well-suited to writing to which personal happenings like relationships and routines are relevant, but not necessarily centered. As in a personal essay, Reddin and Zultanski’s voices are coherent, allowing for diffuse exploration of scenes and themes connected by the threads of personality. As in a poem, the reader never develops expectations of narrative: “People have ideas about what it is to write, we listen to these ideas and then we keep writing: Dear Aunt Evelyn, I wish I felt close enough to write you a letter.” (Hot Garment) The reader doesn’t need to know anything else about Aunt Evelyn.

Broken prose also admirably mimics the flow of spoken English. The way Reddin flits between ideas and observations is reminiscent of a heady conversation with a friend, in which huge topics can be addressed without scaffolding:

I am living now, no excuses. Sometimes I know I am living, sometimes living is standing very still and watching movement, sunbeam hits a green leaf aglow or in fall the yellow gingko fans spin on the branch like love can in your heart, you try to make no sound, try not to disturb it then, hoping a perfect moment could go on and on …… that reminds me of that radio song, is it barry manilow? “on and on, you just keep on (something I can’t remember) oh, trying, even though you feel like crying, on and on, on and on, o-n and o-n”.

It should come as no surprise that Reddin’s readings around the release of Hot Garment were dramatic and confessional, distinctly opposed to the typical poetry event. On one occasion, she turned the mic on full blast and read (performed!) for 40 minutes. In the words of Filip Marinovich, “[Reddin] does not accept the knots and bows and NO-NO’S presented to us by our predecessors (and there are SO many NO-NO’S!) but goes back into herself and finds out and articulates what is at stake, what is happening deep in there.” On the page the broken prose form strains against poetry, and in performance Reddin enacted this aloud.

Broken prose is a formal tool with an informal effect. Though each break is made carefully and rhythmically, the poems retain a wild vivaciousness, their speakers as capable of sarcasm as lyric bliss. The result is writing that is at once honest and absurd, and I can’t imagine a more appropriate way of approaching what it is to be alive today than that.

— Serena Solin

The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure is currently out of print. Stay tuned for a digital proof here. Bribery is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on January 7 are 50% off, use discount code BROKEN at checkout.

The backlist bulletin is a column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.

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Backlist Bulletin #4: Staying Alive

“A boat with no one on it brought

A startling, sharp joy: behold

The searchlights’

Lustrous

Fugitive

Humanity” (p. 15)

The task of staying alive is an obvious one we regularly mediate and reconcile with. The haptics aren’t always obvious, but yes, we do it. Of course, the possibilities of how to do it are endlessly stratified, especially when the dislocation of life hinges on inequity with its causal powers of control/domination. The severity of catastrophic endings rely on such stratifications. Still, the scale of crisis varies, sometimes there is no scale — it’s all around us, it’s been happening — and an apocalypse, and it’s resulting dystopia, won’t be something that strikes everyone in a singular moment. Survival isn’t renouncing death, nor is it an eager anticipation for a terrestrial end, a deliverance to alternative realities; thankfully, finality is not what Laura Sims came for in her post-apocalypse collection. A book like Staying Alive does fit seamlessly among others in end-of the-world discourse (from visions of doomsday visitations to theorizing life/dying in the Anthropocene) but, in her three-part collection, Sims distances us from the litany of obsolete apocalyptic speculations and brings us to a different, surging twilight that we witness while we sustain and are suspended to drown in our humanity.

“The place rocked

With that beating thud and it

Rained down darkness as we made out

Miserable

Skedaddle” (p. 22)

Darkness is anticipated — indeed, expected — in ‘the apocalypse.’ In Sims’ landscape it’s not always dark, and when it is it’s “[colorless]” (29), stripped and wrung out. “There was only: a pale pink glow / Above pink was yellow / Above yellow was blue / Above blue was no / Color at all” (55). Sometimes there is a brighter light, one that “came from underneath — inside the earth — ” (12); it was always there, but was it waiting? What pressured the pin to release it? It’s not the kind that ignites hope, but one that has some satisfying retributive intentions in the name of our dearly departed and fallen: “We’ll flatten from hunger and light the whole earth / With our comrades’ debris” (45). The guidance the light provides is undulating, its presence is liminal, and there is no arrival, just like surviving: “The eye must follow / The polestar, bright / Out of twilight. It seems to rise, to move” (53). It’s like the hue of a light of a future that passed, one we waved at while it zoomed over our heads and sprayed us with a dysphoria that we synthesized ourselves: “When the culture passed over / We bathed in its light in its fear in its / Mountain stream. We left mountains / Of carts full of junk behind” (36).

We really don’t seem to be in the immediate wake of any singular catastrophe; in the afterword, Sims mentions “the wake of whatever may come” — no, we’re definitely in a maelstrom (albeit one with enough benevolence to allow us to reflect) that keeps throwing up “machines,” the obsolete machinations of previous survivals. The sense of longing for the past or future is muted at times, and what we keep running into is a “torn” apparatus, demanding an apology or sitting on the vacant lawn of reality, begging:

“What stood in our yard were like demons

outside of time. One had a rock in its mouth,

another a tree branch” (p. 42)

What infrastructure remains after “smoke pours through the universe,” after evacuations, after “the world is soaked” and “the last beast dies?” Sims give us a reminder that our joy in excess represented the maintenance of a bleak termination: “Down a wide staircase of marble is / Nothing but waste.” (49) “And the last / Chandeliers / Suspend” (52). The metropoles we flock to are ruinous salvation: “The city teems. Above / It isn’t heaven; it’s / The ruin / Where / You shine” (28). The abandonment that we (the reader, the narrator, or whoever is left in Sims’ landscape) sense isn’t met with a weird cognitive dissonance about power-driven crisis, instead it forces a surrender from tacit self-preservation: “As long as / Your body / As brief as your body, it / Sputters / And gasps until / Oil runs over the bones” (59). For the moments when the narrator can squint enough to imagine a bustling city or can conjure someone by calling their name, a confused mourning overlaps with that muted sense of longing — while whomever is “staying alive” (us, or the narrator). There is that “startling, sharp joy” again, but still the “lustrous, fugitive, humanity” makes “the air full of sound” (38), there are “wailings” and “ululations” that overwhelm the atmosphere.

Staying Alive is sometimes survivalist — Sims notes in interviews and the afterword that she draws upon apocalyptic locations/events (Chernobyl, Katrina, earthquakes, The Winter Garden Atrium) and writings (H.G. Wells, Rebecca Solnit, even Little House on the Prairie) that inspired the collection. Staying Alive also reads as nostalgic for a purer past, and hopeful for an optimistic future. Life isn’t shaped by just surviving devastation. The terrain of Staying Alive is a vestibule for reorienting to a new type of living and for resolving what’s to come.

—Neelufar Franklin

Staying Alive is available directly through Ugly Duckling Presse (here), through our Partner Bookstores (here), and through Small Press Distribution (here). Purchases made directly through Ugly Duckling Presse on October 31 are 50% off, use discount code DYSTOPIA at checkout.

The backlist bulletin is a weekly column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.

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Backlist Bulletin #3: On Poems On

Before you get to Sandra Liu’s poems, you encounter the propulsive force of her language in the dangling preposition of this chapbook’s title: On Poems On what?

One would be hard-pressed to complete that phrase with a localized topic addressed by the poems. Liu’s curious eye roams widely over various unfoldings: mountains move, pools fill with water, human structures break down, hearts pump blood, and sentences take shape.

It’s really the first ‘on’ that disorients our entry into this volume—as if we are not about to encounter the poetry itself, but an analysis of someone else’s poems, somewhere else…a missing subtext. This is not the case; On Poems On appears to be its own urtext. Instead of pointing towards something beneath, the twinned prepositions situate the ‘poems’ in an unbounded set of relations, reaching outward in all directions. The preposition has been put to other uses.

In “Turtle,” Liu draws attention to the invisible connections holding the world together, tracing invisible lines between narrative, ecology, and architecture:

Every building in the city is held together with grout.

A forest is unified by an extended root system underground.

So, invisible lines are like the moments 

between the pages when flipping drawings become animation.

Do events have to be part of a story.

How can two events be part of one story and also mean 

two distinct stories. She’s disappointed.

(p. 6)

Michael Earl Craig wrote of Liu’s work: “the adjective linguistic comes to mind—or lexical, but never (not ever) wordy...” Lexical: “of or relating to words or the vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammar and construction” (from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary). These word-events do not have to be part of a story. In “How the Column Became a Kinked Tower <and vice versa>,” the associative play of the poem turns on the preposition ‘of:’

The skyscraper resembles nothing

less than a bolt of fish.

                                            A bolt?

Of canvas

                            that’s what the sails were made of.

An unabashed display of design prowess. 

<Jab> <Jab>

                                   A tower of power.

(p. 7)

Each time ‘of’ recurs, it forms new attachments, building to a lexicon, rather than a story. As in the title, the preposition charts out relationships, but with an open-ended quality rather than the precision for which we usually use prepositions: on the surface, above water, through the poem, towards an end.

In “Xs,” the movement of the poem cascades forward, on the heels of half-articulated words:

…His is not an interest

In geological accuracy;

He the pedogenesis: all this sand

On her back, he has rendered every grain—

None exceeds 2 millimeters’ coarseness—

Moving—not in that stream of an hourglass—

Clockwise; a building block in his arti

Culation of desert. She is the ce

Lestial body beats at the rhythm

Of maracas gone to the flat steady

Buzz of cicadas; just discerns the move

Ment of the hands, the temporal objects.

Not yet recognizing her humming or 

Knowing sound can only be created 

With mass she thinks it is the changing spec

trum.

(p. 9)

In the tension and release of this poem, we feel that we’re being pulled through language, tripping over it as we go. The focus is on the “pedogenesis,” or the process of soil formation, rather than accurate knowledge. Instead of dwelling with the objects of the poem, her language follows their movements. Spatial and temporal shifts happen rapidly and unexpectedly, as Liu turns, reverses, and opens up new visual touchstones.

In two instances, the title of the poem rolls into the first line. In the last poem, the title “ha falls” continues "in the snow” (p. 26). About halfway through the book, the title poem appears, answering that second “on” with: “Horseshoes: rules.” (p. 16)

Are these poems on horseshoes and their rules? Is that one attempt at closure for the title phrase? The horseshoe is discussed as a symbol of luck (“Hang convexity up and all the good luck dumps out of a talisman”) and for its practical uses, with consideration for the methods used to attach shoes to hoofs. But this information is presented with an air of indifference: “I don’t know / What the difference is. / I assume there is a difference,” until finally, the interjection:

I mean, what are we talking about here.

Please don’t firstline any stanzas

With a grammatical faux pas (read:

Don’t ever end a sentence on a preposition)

; and what does it refer to, er, mean?

Further, rules will need fleshing out.

(p. 17)

It’s as if the speaker reaches through the poem, breaking the “fourth wall” of the page, relinquishing the pretense that these ideas have connections. What if the words hold their own, not as “part of a story”? She writes the rules she’s already broken, and we’re caught wondering what possible rules could “need fleshing out.”

Towards the end of On Poems On, a first-person narrator materializes. In the poem “I in river,” that figure is imbricated in the landscape, though distinct from it. The polluted river—hurt and hurting the human body—cannot quite merge with it. 

Rain without acid, rain

With acid, rain;

Not like river

And i—i without

River, i; i with river,

I in river; river in me

And i am dead and not

Me, still not river.

(p. 24).

— Paige Parsons

The Backlist Bulletin is a weekly column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.

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Backlist Bulletin #2: Letter to the Amazon

The island—earth which is not, from which you cannot depart, that you must love because you are condemned to it. A place from which you see everything, from which you can do nothing.

— Marina Tsvetaeva (tr. Adora Phillips and Gaelle Cogan), Letter to the Amazon

I love when things are sad and gay, because I am sad and gay, but of course that is not useful. It’s not useful as a social or literary position, because one wants to refute the conflation of those qualities: Sadgay. Gaysad. I don’t want one to predicate the other. I don’t want this maudlin fatalism about the impossibility of queer love, which fuses desire and mourning. But there it is, lumped inextricably in my selfhood (and poetics) and experience. This was also, it seems, true of  the experience of Marina Tsvetaeva, transgressive early 20th century Russian poet and author of Letter to the Amazon.

 The “letter” is an essay, a form which already queerly troubles the boundary between public and private text. Tsvetaeva addresses Natalie Clifford Barney, a wealthy American expatriate living in Paris, responding in 1932 to Barney’s 1920 Thoughts of an Amazon, wherein Barney celebrated and valorized her lesbianism. Barney (despite or perhaps because of her position as a sexual iconoclast) was a distinguished figure in the Parisian literary scene, and held salons in her home from 1919 to 1968. Tsvetaeva encountered Barney after she came to Paris as a refugee in 1925, with her husband and daughter. Tsvetaeva, needing support, must have been aware of Barney’s resources and habit of helping unfortunate writers. Though this surely colored their relationship, they also connected as frères fèminines (Barney’s phrase) – women with deep emotional and erotic ties to other women. Tsvetaeva had connections with several poetic luminaries, but the emotional core of Letter to the Amazon is her relationship with poet Sophia Parnok, an intense love affair which spanned from 1914-1916. Parnok was 5 years older than Tsvetaeva; the common narrative is that the elder woman seduced her. The affair was public knowledge, and was painful for Tsvetaeva’s husband. Both women activated each other as muses, and despite the interpersonal and political instability which ultimately divided them, they seem to have remained major figures in each others’ emotional lives.

 I don’t know, this book is weird. It’s weird, even for me, a person who is on Team Sadness, to watch someone being so at war with their own joy. Approaching Barney makes sense for Tsvetaeva. Playing into flirtation, into some underscoring of their shared idealized passion for lesbian relationships, makes sense. But Tsvetaeva is bent on an argument that lesbianism is unsustainable. Ultimately, she writes, lesbian relationships break down in the face of innate desires, in “normal women,” for family and reproduction. The essay addresses the child, the desire to reproduce the lover in the child, as an unassailable keystone in womens’ emotional lives.

 I agree with the reviewers who find this disappointing. Maksymchuk and Rosochinsky, writing in LARB, argue that Tsvetaeva overlooks the Socratic claim that same-sex unions result in non-biological progeny like theory, art, and heroic acts. Emma Brown Sanders, writing for Full Stop, attacks Tsvetaeva for her formulation which suggests lesbianism is a choice, arguing that Tsvetaeva’s privileged background did not allow her to appreciate the uniqueness of her own experience, instead assuming her particular flawed relationship had universal qualities. I will say that it is hard not to argue with this book. I’ve taken it a little personally.

What bothers me about Tsvetaeva’s conclusion is that she is a person of dazzling intelligence, capable of striking leaps and lateral, associative movement. This is clear in her poetry. From “Poems to Chekoslovakia” (tr. Kaminsky/Valentine):

 Black mountain

blocks the earth’s light.

Time—time—time

to give back to God his ticket.

 I refuse to—be. In

the madhouse of the inhumans

I refuse to—live. To swim

 on the current of human spines.

...

                                      •

 They took—suddenly—and took—openly—

took mountains—and took their entrails,

they took coal, and steel they took,

they took lead, and crystal.

 And sugar they took, and took the clover,

they took the West, and they took the North,

they took the beehive, and took the haystack

via Poetry Foundation

 How is this person, so evidently brave and wild, content to say that lesbianism is subservient to natural laws when her own experience should have shown her otherwise? How can she resign herself to say;

Love in itself is childhood. Lovers are children. Children do not have children… One cannot live off love. The one thing that survives love is the child.

In her introduction, Catherine Ciepiela notes that parts of this argument are prescient, as the movement for queer rights has focused largely on respectability politics in exchange for assimilation—gay marriage, adoption, valorizing heterosexual family systems by aping them. (Gross.)

What allows this text to become interesting to me, despite its irritating qualities, is the feeling that I am watching a brilliant, passionate person at war with themselves. There are some texts that are centrally important to me as a writer, from the Black Arts movement, where the primary emotional action is vaguely similar: an internalized racism becoming a violent attack on the self. It feels like I’m seeing something forbidden, something private. How much can I watch someone hate themselves, I wonder, reading Funnyhouse of a Negro, or Baraka’s The Slave. Although Tsvetaeva faces different societal pressures, and does not allow herself the same level of emotional directness, the rejection and erasure of the self feels the same. She uses a huge and elemental language which makes it feel fatalistic and impersonal. Near the end of Letter to the Amazon:

Toward evening the mountain flows back completely toward its peak. When night comes, it is peak. It seems that its torrents are flowing backwards. At night she pulls herself together.

…

Weeping willow!  Mournful willow! Willow, body and soul of women! Mournful nape of the neck of the willow. Grey hair in front of the face, so that nothing more is seen. Grey hair sweeping the face of the earth…

(p. 30)

There is a similar quality, here, with the Black Arts writers I mentioned, of a poisonous secret that the writer is both trying to uncover and trying to keep obscure even to themselves. Aside from the difference in tone, there is another important distinction between these types of self-attack: what Tsvetaeva gets from this negation of herself is a kind of safety. A woman who loves women and is able to stop, or at least to stop being in sexual relationships with women, can be readmitted into society. She can become invisible within heteropatriarchy, whereas Baraka and Adrienne Kennedy could never render themselves invisible enough to be subsumed comfortably into the racial landscape of America. Tsvetaeva gestures towards some regret, some way that heterosexual connections lack the compelling depth and completeness of lesbian relationships, but she never admits to the safety, ease, and invisibility that returning to a heterosexual marriage affords. She frames this return to a conventional family as foregone, an extension of the tragic unsustainability of lesbian relationships. And that engenders in me something like pity for this fierce doomed creature. She is comforting herself, in the precarity of her life in poverty, her refugee status, her regret-tinged marriage. At least in the domain of her own sexuality, she can protect herself, albeit through disfigurement and compartmentalization. Has she won, then, at sad gayness, by claiming an agency over her own erasure? “Why did she come?” she wonders, parenthetically. “To hurt herself. It is, sometimes, all that we have left.” (p 23)

— C. Bain

The Backlist Bulletin is a weekly column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.

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A few more images from Other Presses Other Places, the exhibit of UDP-collected material from other small presses on display at the New York Public Library, featuring Peter Gizzi and David Byrne on Phylum Press (New Haven CT), Let’s Say Yes by Mary Jo Bang (Hand Held Editions, South bend IN), How Many tTimes the Lightening Strikes by Matthew Zingg (unknown), a Use Your Hands: A Simple How To Guide from the Philadelphia Buyers Market of American Craft (Philadelphia, PA), Into the Forest Engine by Garth Graeper on Projective Industries (Chicago/Houston) and others! More info on the exhibit here, on view through January 12.

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Backlist Bulletin #1: Transfer Fat

“Ecological awareness is like knowing, but more like letting-be-known. It is something like coexisting. It is like becoming accustomed to something strange, yet it is also becoming accustomed to strangeness that doesn’t become less strange through acclimation.” —Tim Morton, “What is Dark Ecology?” 

Poetry in translation is a mode of expression well-suited to ecological thinking because space is always left for the unknown. In Transfer Fat, Johannes Göransson’s translation of Swedish poet Aase Berg, the molecular level is as good a place as any to begin a project of ecological awareness. The sticky problems of species, of human vs. nonhuman consciousness, do not present themselves. Fat molecules are combustible and therefore warm, edible and therefore transferable; fat is both solid and liquid. Fat is physical proof of the interconnectedness that can serve as the foundation for ecological thinking beyond nature. 

Transfer Fat’s central organisms are the whale, the hare, and the Voter, the (pregnant) human—puns in Swedish, not so in English. Throughout the poems, these three beings inhabit and pass through one another: “I am still dead, I am flowing. Will follow hare through the newborn’s wild calm, go the hare’s softly rumbling sphere shape” (p. 9). The abstract and the concrete become one: “Time is shell” (p. 11). In “Power Line,” as in many of Göransson’s translations, conventional English vocabulary is not enough:

The giggly quillering in the light-capillary the fluttering flicker against the outlet screen In the landing pool the deep is formless  the bubbling spring is stubbornly warm (p. 35)

What is “quillering” (“kvillret”)? It brings to mind quivering, the quill, quelling, kvetching. It is an animal noise. But the poem does not necessarily exist in an animal space; electricity, the screen, and the pool are all of the manmade world. The “light-capillary” could be tubes of a television, or a nervous system. Manufactured objects are granted the same mystery as the bubbling spring. Throughout the book, the original Swedish on the left-hand side and the English translation on the right seem equally alien (at least to this English-speaking reader) but the words and letters—the constituent molecules—transfer meaning through sound, bypassing human logic: “rabies är frihet / i Harens år” or “rabies is freedom / in the Year of the Hare” (pp. 68-9). Even an English-speaking reader can feel the uncanny weight of these lines in both languages. 

The history of science is a rejection of the unknown. But to reject the unknown is to control or colonize, and in an age of climate catastrophe, this way of thinking seems particularly ill-advised. In Transfer Fat, Berg does not put science aside in service of romantic naturalism, nor does she force science to serve as a way of understanding. The language of physics (the most mysterious realm of science) is no more or less tangible than the whale jaw that “bends aside space and time” (p. 33). Instead, Berg and Göransson propose “existence as an intervention in the surface tension” (p. 55).

— Serena Solin

The Backlist Bulletin is a weekly column on titles from UDP’s back catalogue, curated and written by Apprentices.

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The New York Public Library partners with us to collect chapbooks, small-print periodicals, avant-garde zines, and hand-bound books from readings, book fairs, and shops worldwide. These are often handmade or printed in extremely limited runs and document the small-press activity of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This display showcases items in The New York Public Library’s Ugly Duckling Presse Chapbook and Zine Collection that were collected outside of New York. The texts come in a variety of eye-catching formats, from matchbook scrolls to accordion-style pamphlets, and were authored by poets at different stages of their careers, from well-established writers to up-and-comers.

NYPL has partnered with Ugly Duckling Presse for over five years, and our Chapbook and Zine Collection in their care now spans more than 1000 items. 

The display includes items from the Press at Colorado College, Small Fires Press (NOLA), Tarpaulin Sky (Grafton, VT), Minutes Press (MA), Nor By Press (Northampton, MA), Poetry Salon (Pittsburgh, PA), Burning Deck (Providence, RI), Alien Corn Books (Australia), Effing Press (Austin TX) and more!

Open now. Ends January 12th, 2020.Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. More info here.

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“WE ARE ALL SOMEWHAT COLONIZED IN OUR EXISTENCE”: JAMIE CHIANG IN CONVERSATION WITH ZAHRA PATTERSON

UDP apprentice Jamie Chiang interviewed writer and educator Zahra Patterson in February 2019 after the release of her UDP title Chronology, recent winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography. They discussed Zahra's journaling in Cape Town; her friendship with Liepollo Ranekoa, who passed away in 2012; the impact of language choice in postcolonial literature; tattoos; and more.

Taking as its starting point an ultimately failed attempt to translate a Sesotho short story into English, Chronology explores the spaces language occupies in relationships, colonial history, and the postcolonial present. It is a collage of images and documents, folding on words-that-follow-no-chronology, unveiling layers of meaning of queering love, friendship, death, and power.

Can you talk about the background of your decision to go to Cape Town to find who you are or the meaning of life? Did you find it? (In Chronology, Zahra refers to her journey to Cape Town as a search for herself.) 

Yeah, I mean sometimes I get a little dramatic perhaps when I'm writing in my journal. 

How old were you? How many years ago was that? 

It was the end of 2009 into 2010, so I would have been in my late twenties. I feel a journal is a place to express one's ideas, but it's also a creative space. I wouldn't take myself totally seriously in everything that comes out in a journal. I think there's definitely some self-awareness of one's own—my self importance, but also the quest to find oneself is not just to be made fun of. I think it's an important concept.

How long did you stay in Cape Town? 

I was there for around five weeks. As far as the decision to go, it was more spur of the moment. I was in South Africa for a wedding. My cousin got married and instead of going off traveling that far for a week, I thought I would just spend a couple of months if I had to go to that part of the world; there's no point in going for a week, so I was going to stay. I hadn't actually decided where I was going after the wedding until I got there, and Cape Town seemed to make the most sense to me. 

It perhaps felt the least imperialistic to go and spend time in such a cosmopolitan, international city as opposed to going somewhere more remote. You're either a tourist or a local, whereas Cape Town is an easy city to integrate into. 

I see. On page 33, you mention that you have a tattoo, and in the caption there is this word ke nonyana. What does ke nonyana mean? 

It means I'm a bird. 

That's the first word you spoke in Sesotho? 

Yes. I found the words in Liepollo’s English-Sesotho dictionary one day, and when she came home I spoke them. It meant a lot to her that I’d engaged with her language.

If you don’t mind, could you elaborate the story behind Liepollo’s colleague’s Facebook profile picture. What happened? 

It was the day she died, and his Facebook profile changed to her picture. It was an image of her. That was jarring because why somebody would put an image of a friend up, and there are very few circumstances that someone would do something like that and usually it's because they're dead. So when I saw that his Facebook picture changed to her face, it occurred to me that something terrible had happened. And I was at work at the time, so it was just very disorienting.

Sorry to hear that. Did you get your tattoo because of this? 

Yeah, so I didn't have anybody to mourn with because I had met Liepollo in Cape Town and we didn't have friends in common. Actually, we had a friend in common—an American who interned at Chimurenga while I was staying with Liepollo who I met once at the house in Observatory and once for coffee in Brooklyn—but she had moved to D.C. by that time, so I didn't reach out to her. It was a very isolated mourning experience. That's kind of why I got the tattoo, just to have her with me and to have that symbol and to think of her every day. Because when you have a long distance friendship, you're not going to think of the person every day. We were in touch every few months. I don’t want to forget her due to not having a lot of people to remember who she was with, so I needed to make her memory permanent on me. I think everybody thinks about getting tattoos in this day and age. My rule for tattoos is if I want it for a full year, then I'll get it, and I've never wanted anything for a year. So it’s my only tattoo.

And ke nonyana sounds beautiful. 

Thank you. I think it's beautiful also. 

And on page 37 and 38, there’s an interesting conversation you had with a Muslim guy named Saed. I found some of his talk kind of sexist. What was your reaction when you were talking to him? It sounds like he's almost preaching to you, trying to change your idea about what a woman's purpose is in this world. 

Exactly! But he also wasn't that; he was as if playing the role that he thought he was supposed to play and open to other ways of thinking. We're socialized beings, all of us. He wasn't terribly dogmatic. I don't think he'd been challenged too much in his way of thinking, but at the same time maybe he had because he was open to being challenged. So yeah, it was very interesting.

On page 47 to 48, you write about the panel What is the value of age and wisdom? at the Bronx Museum of Art. The five panelists are: Vinie Burrows, Boubacar Boris Diop, Yusef Komunyakaa, Achille Mbembe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. There’s a quotation from Mbembe: “If the language we use is in itself a prison...We have to put a bomb under the language. Explode language!” Could you tell us more about the context? 

Achille Mbembe is a leading postcolonial theorist. I think his words are also quite poetic, so he's speaking metaphorically. The context of that part of the conversation is imperialism and language. That intellectuals from formerly colonized nations use the colonial language to express decolonial ideas is problematic, but it's still very accepted. And even these intellectuals who are on the panel, they write in English and they write in French, but they also find it problematic that they do that; however, it's also part of their survival. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote Decolonizing The Mind in the early eighties, where he swore off ever writing in English again, but then he is put into prison and he's exiled, so he can't actually exist in his mother tongue and his mother land; the government there has ostracized him because he speaks out against what they're doing to the people. Therefore, he has to make his life in English in America, he teaches in California.

Circumstances don't necessarily allow a person to decolonize their lives because in order to survive in this society, we are all somewhat colonized in our existence. I think that saying to put a bomb under language is saying that we need to just get our ideas out there. There’s also the visual aspect of it, I see words and letters, like, splattered. Like fucking. . .we need to fuck with language; we need to push the boundaries of language.

As Diop said “Teaching Wolof enhances self-esteem.” Does Wolof have a writing system? 

I’m not positive about the history of Wolof’s writing system but I know some, especially in more northern Sub-African countries had created writing systems using Arabic script and maybe some of them now use the Latin alphabet, so I would have to look that up for Wolof specifically. 

You use your mother tongue to express yourself because ideas in a specific language can't be translated. When you lose the language, you lose the culture and the history of people. Also if you're writing in any of the indigenous languages to Africa, you're not writing for the colonizer; you're writing for the people who speak that language, which is also important. 

A lot of this theory, especially academic theory that is taught in universities, is very limited in its reach. I think even though these are serious intellectuals who write academic works for academia, they're aware and they're problematizing the limits of writing scholarly work for institutions that isn't necessarily reaching the people.

What other languages do you speak? 

I speak French. I lived in France for awhile. I would say I used to be bilingual; I'm kind of monolingual at this point in my life. 

What about in Sesotho? 

I was working on the project (an attempt to translate Lits'oanelo Yvonne Nei's short story “Bophelo bo naka li maripa” from Sesotho to English) originally, but the access to the language was limited. I wasn't able to access decent grammar books, I wasn't able to access the orthography that I wanted to access so I gave up pretty quickly...but it wasn't as simple as giving up. I stepped back because I didn't really feel it was totally appropriate for me to do what I was doing. I think that’s a hugely important part of my text, the part where I put myself into conversation with Spivak and she tells me, via an essay she wrote about translation, that what I’m doing is wrong. I want to learn a language in which I'm going to be able to speak to people. I’m still not totally sure if I should have published what was supposed to be such a personal exercise, so that section with Spivak is essential to me.

On page 72, you wrote Liepollo an email about a friend who taught you how to say Your sister is a whore in Tagalog?

A friend of mine, her first love was Filipina so she knew how to insult people in Tagalog. When she said it, it sounded Spanish to me so I was wondering if that kind of insult comes with colonialism...also a misogynistic perspective can come. Not to say that misogyny doesn't exist in all cultures, although I think there are probably some cultures where it doesn't exist. Just problematizing the way language can infiltrate into a culture and then become part of the existing language but isn't part of that cultural history—the etymology isn’t actually Filipino; the etymology is Spanish.

Are there any books and authors that inspire you a lot?

For this work, Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, that was a huge inspiration. Mouth: Eats Color by Sawako Nakayasu in terms of thinking about different ways, different things that can be done with form and then different things that can be done with translation. It was very liberating to read those two authors. I don't identify as a translator nor as a poet, so most of the things I've read are novels. My background is primarily in postmodern and postcolonial pieces of literature. I also thought about the nature of collage while I was working on Chronology. I looked at Wangechi Mutu’s work specifically for inspiration, but I’ve loved Romare Bearden’s work for years.

Thanks for sharing. The last question, what are you working on now?

I've started writing and hopefully I'm able to continue it. It's a piece that will potentially be called Policy. I'm an educator and I'm pretty passionate about how distorted and messed up the reality of public school systems is in this country. Although one could say I've been researching since I've been an adult, I started specific research for Policy last summer and I didn't start writing it until a couple of weeks ago. It's experimental in form. I'd say it's fiction meets theory, whereas Chronology is memoir meets theory. I'm not sure exactly where it's going but I'm thinking critically about charter schools and desegregation efforts in New York City and also the history of that. So going back to Brown versus the Board of Ed. . .I'll probably address school shootings, the school-to-prison pipeline, school lunches, teachers’ strikes; it’s about as intersectional an issue as there is—how we educate ourselves as a nation, and on the stolen land of our nation. 

I think right now, especially with the current administration, though public schools have been in danger for a very long time, our current secretary of education is a billionaire who wants to privatize education, so her agenda is to destroy our public school infrastructure. It's worrisome. Processing this information in a way makes me very angry because it's systemic. It's how you keep people oppressed. If you don't give people access to education, you're not giving them access to themselves. Never mind the tools they need to achieve and succeed in a capitalist society. 

I don't feel the United States has a liberatory agenda for education and I want to explore that a little bit in the history of curriculums and pedagogy because there have been, at the turn of the century, there were some really interesting education theorists like John Dewey and Ella Flagg Young, and their ideas for public education were very progressive, such as student driven classrooms, and not having really punitive systems. You find that education in private schools but rarely in public schools, so why are we not educating our youth in ways that let them think critically about the world that they're living in? Educating children to just follow rules and memorize doesn't work for most children. How many do you know in public schools who are excited to go to school every day? I think humans naturally are curious and want to learn and know things. So why is education taking that away from children? 

I don't know exactly how the project is going to manifest. It will be weird.

Zahra Patterson’s first book, Chronology (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018), won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography and received a Face Out Fellowship from CLMP. Her short works have appeared in Kalyani Magazine The Felt, and unbag (forthcoming). A reading of her play, Sappho's Last Supper, was staged at WOW Café Theatre. She is the creator of Raw Fiction and currently teaches high school English at a Quaker boarding school. Her writing has been supported by Mount Tremper Arts and Wendy’s Subway, and her community work has been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, The Pratt Center, and many individuals. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute.

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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.

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UDP: THE FIRST 25 YEARS (PART 3)

On March 19, 2019, UDP’s year-long celebration of its first 25 years culminated in a benefit gala, honoring the work of Burning Deck Press and Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop.

The night concluded with live music and performances by Erica Hunt and Ray Anderson, Damon & Naomi, C. Spencer Yeh and Charmaine Lee, DYKE DRAMA, and DJ D-Skillz, plus lots of dancing!

(photos by Elmo King)

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UDP: The First 25 Years (Part 2)

On March 19, 2019, UDP’s year-long celebration of its first 25 years culminated in a benefit gala, honoring the work of Burning Deck Press and Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop. 

After a series of readings and tributes, the night continued with books, a raffle, and live music, including performances by Erica Hunt and Ray Anderson, DJ D-Skillz, and Damon & Naomi.

(photos by Elmo King)