Tag: poetry

579: “Acquiring New Meanings” (Vandana Kalra & Shilpa Gupta)

                Vandana Kalra: “Do artworks keep evolving, acquiring new meanings, even after leaving the artist’s studio?”
                Shilpa Gupta: “They do […] [One example] would be an outdoor light installation which is currently being shown on Lake Zurich. In the 2004 work, lines from a ruled book rise and get transformed into three interwoven languages—English, Urdu and Hindi—all saying, ‘I live under your sky, too.’ Fifteen years ago…”
                -From Vandana Kalra’s interview with artist Shilpa Gupta on September 6, 2020

                Sometimes writing the trick of writing pretends that these words exist somehow “out there,” steady and stable, meaning the same thing year after year and place beyond place. I love staring at that illusion until I blink and see through it. Every piece of writing I really connect—like every piece of art that inspires or humbles me—is always acquiring new meaning.
                I first read this interview with Shilpa Gupta 2021, a few months after it happened. Since then I’ve returned to it: the webpage and the words are the same, but the meaning is different, just like Gupta’s light installation meant different things while changing times and places in 2004 to 2020. Perhaps that’s on my mind because a series like Uproar is a kind of transformation through time. I can go back and read the posts from 2015 or 2017 or 2020, and the pixels on my screen pretend they’re the same, but for me they never are. Sometimes what I wrote back then is a realization that has grown into the soil of my life, so now it’s a practice, and it’s surprising to see the seed being planted. Sometimes a quote I wrote about sounds completely different to my ear then it did then: not a seed but a shovel, or not a shovel but a mirror, or not a mirror but a crack in a mirror, or not a crack but a wildflower I admire as I pass by. 
                It’s not just our gardens that change. Our tools shift in our hands, too. When I started teaching a mentor told me, “I’ve been assigning The Catcher in the Rye long enough to go from seeing myself in the teenager to seeing myself in the older teacher.” When I pay attention to the readings I assign students, they all change, year after year: not just in how I see myself in them, but in how they connect to the world around them and in what they make possible.

by Azlan

577: “[A Tool] Made By Someone Else” (Min-zhan Lu)

                “[Because of how I was taught, it seemed that the tool of language] was made by someone else and was then acquired and used by me. How the others made it before I acquired it determined and guaranteed what it produced when I used it.”
                -Min-zhan Lu, From Words To Silence, p. 445 

                Today I started teaching a seminar for university instructors to come from across campus and discuss what we’re doing when we teach writing, and how we can do it better. It’s a wonderful, experimental, interdisciplinary conversation, with people joining from around the world and from many different fields. Sometimes—at first—it can be hard to get on the same page. We all come from different disciplines, and so we have different ways of talking about writing and writing instruction. Today we suddenly landed on that shared page by remembering Min-zhan Lu and asking: well, what are you doing when you write? In your learning, what is the tool of writing for?
                For assessment, said several instructors. Reflecting on their own educational journey, another added: writing is how I put together my thoughts. Another: writing is where I build the puzzle that I hope to share with you, inviting you to rebuild it and  work with it in your mind. Another: writing is where I release some of a day’s stress. Another: writing is one place I go to understand who I am and where I’m headed. All these answers, and the tensions between them, led to the first great conversation of our seminar. When writing is being used to judge how well you did, it can be hard to take up writing as a tool for weaving together all the threads of a complex thought. But we like that tapestry. And I like the reminder: when we’re working together across perspectives and trainings, we can step back to ask, what do our tools do? What do we want from them? Who told us to use them that way, and what other things might I want to do with this shovel, this pen, this question?

                And because I love writing as a puzzle you get to remake for yourself, here’s a riddle from the poet Symphosius (late 7th or early 8th century) as translated by Richard Wilbur. The question is (as the question so often is) what am I?

                “Long daughter of the forest, swift of pace,
                In whom old neighbors join as beam and brace,
                I speed on many paths, yet leave no trace.”

by Azlan

574: “TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE” (Ross Gay)

                “I have since begun cataloging delights that I will save for a future date, which, while stacking delights in itself is a useful activity and practice (sounds like a Denny’s pancake breakfast special: Delight Stack), it defeats this book’s purpose of TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, which I actually wrote on my hand in the bathroom of Darn Good Soup in Bloomington today…” Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, page 107-8

                This from near the beginning of Ross Gay’s 35th delight in The Book of Delights, as he’s reflecting on his project of writing a delight every day (more or less) for a year. As he’s noticing patterns, five months in, in how he looks for delights, how he writes about them. These words meeting me.
                This also being the page I opened to just now after my love and I came back from a late summer walk, the evening cool and then warm as we washed through it, muscles waking up after a day inside, fireflies flying their fires, neighbors walking their dogs, the zipline carrying a kid across the playground (and the kid carrying the zipline into his games). Which is to say: I also notice patterns. I’ve been writing Uproar for 570-some weeks. Which is to say: I sometimes start “saving up” Uproar posts, making sure I’ll have them. Have enough. Which is to say: that saving turns away from what I love most about Uproar. Remembering, that is lovely. (Just yesterday my love recalled something funny we’d said, and said it again, and without meaning to I said “good remembery!” Remembery like a spell, like magic, I think). But instead of saving up because I’m worried about having enough, these posts for me are about abundance. About what I’m surrounded by and enmeshed in. Abundance of thought and creativity, abundance of lives and relationships, abundance of community powers and vitalities and delights. 
                TEMPORAL ALLEGIANCE, Gay says, “means, simply, dailiness.” The dailiness of walking into this. The dailiness of being met by so many wonders, and meeting them, open armed and ready to join not just with the possibilities I’ve saved up but the daily possibilities lighting like fireflies or pausing to chat like neighbors.

by Azlan

564: “Where Are You Going?” (Davies & Aduba)

                “Where are you going with this?” 
                “Don’t know. Won’t know till I get there.” -Paul William Davies and Uzo Aduba (who voices the line), The Residence 

                I didn’t post this on Monday because my partner and I were camping for a few days, out in the woods. Trees to listen to. Downy woodpeckers to meet. Moments to share. It was so good to be out of our usual rhythms. 
                Last week my friend Ishita and I talked about reverse outlining. She just finished her PhD. I have one more year in mine.I’ve been going back through all the different notes and chapter drafts that make up my dissertation-in-progress. Looking at these pieces. Thinking about what needs to come before what, what needs to be cut, what needs more detail. There’s something wonderful in that practice. Somewhere—in Letters to a Young Poet?—Rainier Maria Rilke quips something like, “When you give someone flowers, you arrange them beforehand, don’t you?” Editing can be arranging flowers: considering shapes and colors before I offer them to you, hoping you’ll like them.
                While I’m arranging, I’ve been writing new poems in conversation with a few friends. We give each other a starting place, like Lampshape or Smudged Mirror, and then (usually that same day) we sit and feel and listen and write and follow the images that come up, the memories, the words, until we are somewhere, and we call that somewhere a poem. We share it with each other. We don’t know where we’re going until we get there. That’s how we find ourselves here.

by Azlan

554: “The Bees Belong” (Ross Gay)

                “The worker unfolded the sign that said the bees belong here as much as we do, orienting it so pedestrians could read it…”
                -Ross Gay, The Book of Delights, pg. 211

                From some perspectives the yard outside my front door looks a mess. Last year’s dead stems akimbo, matted brown leaves, a few crocuses pushing up. I’ve been walking by and saying hello.
                A few weeks ago a neighbor and I chatted about solitary bees. When I think about bees I usually think about hives, about honey, but as far as I understand (to that burst of brown leaves and back, maybe) most of the bees from where I live are solitary. As far as I understand (a little less far, this time) most of these solitary bees live in the ground, but some of them will snuggle up in dead stems or hollow wood. Snuggle in for winter. Until it’s warm enough to wake up. Which is one of the many reasons (my neighbor said) they’re never in too much of a hurry to tidy anything. No good to be asleep and have someone come and stack you and your bedding in the waste pile. And how sickening to be the one doing the stacking?
                I’d heard about nesting solitary bees before, but since I chatted with my neighbor, I’ve been saying hello. And listening. I haven’t seen any of them yet, so this evening when I walked by I said how are you doing. I said I’m sleepy, too. I said spring’s coming but it’s still going to freeze tonight. And they were quiet, if they’re here. I spoke softly so as not to disturb them, and then went in to make dinner and crawl inside my blankets.

by Azlan

553: Satisfied Hunger (Ava Nathaniel Winter)

                “more alive / for having satisfied a hunger.” -Ava Nathaniel Winter, Transgenesis, pg. 7

                I often think about hunger as a destructive thing, a selfish thing. I have been taught to think that way. And, I realize, to hunger that way. Hungry to consume, to take, to take away from another. Ava Nathaniel Winter reminds me: aren’t there other hungers?
                And there are. So many. I’m grateful for the reminder. For instance: today as I walked with my friend we were hungry for the conversation, for sharing it, for walking together. We were hungry for intricate patterns of hands and knees and hips and swinging arms and glances, and hungry too for the rain that scattered over us. Rain that might (I think now, reading Winter) be generous in its loving hunger for grass, for ground, for trees and creatures walking through its laughter. 
                For instance: my partner is traveling, and I am hungry for the quiet of sharing space, for the stretch in an early spring evening when the sun has gone down and the rain has picked up and we are sitting for a long time before we look over and see each other. Share that: that loving glance. I’m hungry for it, and more alive for having satisfied the hunger.
                For instance: I am so often hungry to hear my friends’ voices.
                For instance: my partner and I first read this poem out loud, together, lounged on the same floor where we often lay side by side listening to the rain. We were hungry for the poems we read: for Ava Nathaniel Winter’s words, Ai Qing’s images, Fatima Asghar’s rhythms, and so many more. Poetry for me is sometimes a hungry thing: words hungry for sound, sounds hungry for sharing. Blooming, weaving hungers, tasting growing hungers, growing like grass does, and more alive for its embraces and satisfactions. 

by Azlan

550: “this tree has been here” (Ada Limón)

“this tree has been here
all this time, and I didn’t notice.
I swear, I’ll try harder not to
miss as much: the tree, or how
your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets
coaxed all my colors back.”
-Ada Limón, from “The Tree of Fire,” Bright Dead Things pg. 15

                I had an argument once—call it a conversation, call it a tiff—with a friend who preferred botany to poetry, and wasn’t sure why I was reading another book. 
                “It helps me see the plants,” I said.
                “I can go outside and do that,” they said.
                “It helps me—well, appreciate them.”
                “I can go outside and do that if I want. I could go out and do that right now,” they said.
                And perhaps they could. We were sort-of roommates at the time. I went off to my room in a huff. They went off to theirs. I still think about it. I wonder what they were seeing when they went outside. We planted peas together later that year. I wonder what I meant by “see.” What Limón means by “miss.” I think—or maybe I feel: the maple that shook me today with its height and its lean and its balanced weight, that maple is so many things. A home, of course, to more creatures than I can count or name. A fountain of sap for syrup to my neighbor who taps it every year. A bare statue, this time of year, saying I sleep and also I’ll wake. An ocean of shade in humid summers when a dog and I both pause, mouths open, panting. I want to be present with more than my idea of things. A tree: it’s own wide, deep life, woven through with the breath of the windows and the growth of the bacteria along its roots. What else? What more? What colors, coaxed and alive in the interplay of bark and skin and swaying limbs?

by Azlan

543: “Willful Forgetting” (Jack Halberstam)

                “Of course we all engage in willful forgetting all the time […] If we get a new phone number, for example, the old phone number must be forgotten or else its retention will keep rewriting the new one. Learning in fact is part memorization and part forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure.” -Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, p. 83

                Two days ago my love and I were at the coast, listening to the water on the rocks, the murmur and wash of the waves. Long slow dances of gravity, motion, erosion. My love said, “I love the sound,” and we stood waist deep, listening.
                Earlier that day we played Pokémon Go. It’s a game of accumulation: just now my character’s carrying 2,780 pokémon. It’s a game that, like so many of the capitalist productivity narratives I’m enmeshed in, keeps promising more, and better, and hold onto this. One of the reasons Pokémon Go keeps appealing to me is that it promises that you can catch everything, have everything, hold onto everything, level everything up. Though of course, that isn’t really what I want at all. Or rather that’s one way I’ve been taught to want, but it’s not the only one, or even the one I most often choose.
                The light played in the water. The water washed among the rocks. Of course learning—being—loving—take time. I usually think they take time because of the hours that go into love unfolding. Into learning sinking in, like water into earth. Into being. Re-reading Halberstam, I think they also take time because of the uncounted ebb/flow in which ideas wash away, get lost, mingle back into subconscious and beyond before rising up in different patterns. A wave. A sound of rock and water. I let myself forget to post this yesterday, as I sat and laughed and talked with the part of my family that is close by. This morning I sit and forget the distance between me and other parts of my family who are far off, and for a moment I forget all the miles between, like we’re looking at the clouds together. I wonder: how often do we find our way to our loves and our families, in part, by letting some things slip away?

by Azlan

535: “This Is How” (Layli Long Soldier)

                “This is how you see me the space in which to place me”
                -Layli Long Soldier, Whereas, p. 8

                Just now I’m loving reading Layli Long Soldier’s poems as instructions. Or maybe, better, as a kind of script or choreography: an invitation to move through the world in certain ways and then see what’s changed. What’s growing. This is how you see me. I’m walking these steps, steps suggested by her words.
                I think this is one of my favorite approaches to language. Well, that’s hard to say. I have so many favorites. (1. The way I called “Jarrett!” to a friend, and she heard me, and then instead of walking apart we were walking together. 2. The way Anya told me “I usually harvest the seedpods and then kind of crinkle them on a cookie tray,” and now we’ve gathered arugula seeds from the garden to plant next spring. 3. The way my partner calls “Hello honey bunches!” and I call back “of oats!” and then maybe one of us invites us out for a walk. And that’s just getting started). I think I mean that I keep hearing language described as communication, the shuttling of information—“gather the seeds this way”—and while I love that, I also love them as a path to walk. I’m not telling you what you’ll see. I’m saying, look at this space you’re in, look at it this way. “This is how you see me the space in which to place me.” What do you see?
                A script. A piece of choreography. An invitation. A reminder. A walk.

by Azlan

528: Reading to “Stay In The World” (Bec McBride)

                “If I don’t read, I get distracted from what’s important to me […] reading helps me stay in the world.” -Bec McBride, in conversation with me today

                At 11:30 this morning the world felt wonderful: Bec and I had been in the park for an hour, sitting in dappled light, catching up about our families and friends, our hurts and how we’re healing, our delights at recent cooler nights. At 5:30 today I was in a real low: a new big chunk of work had landed on my desk, crunching the work already there as it made space for itself. I didn’t know how I would handle everything. And there was something else. My mind clutched, hard knuckled. My beloved Maria José helped me pause for a moment. Helped me remember to step outside. She went with me. Crickets hopped through the grass, and we breathed.
                Lately I’ve been thinking about reading and writing as kinds of worlding. Of making world: of making our world look and feel certain ways. Every day there are so many forces pushing me to world the way they say. Today some commercials, celebrating how world is a chance to buy happiness or bask in “deserved” comfort. My hustle culture to-do list, insisting world is where nothing will ever be enough. News stories about political madmen insisting world is a war that always needs more killing. Posts from activists proposing that right now world is resisting the systems set up to consume us, while building solidarity among all those who resist toward justice. In last week’s post I read Joy Harjo: “Rain opens us, like flowers.” This evening Maria José and I stood outside. I tried to read the trees. They breathe what I exhale. I exhale what they breathe. World as a breath we share.
                For me, reading is one way to slowly, deeply, and sometimes in a momentous whoosh put meaning together. I like reading sounds and silences, movements and words. And learning from Bec, I think I read to find ways back toward the world I choose to keep help making.

by Azlan