TRIPWIRE 16 : PERFORMANCE/WRITING

So much has been said that has spoken to all of us, about Kevin as a writer, about Kevin as a supporter of so many writers and artists, about Kevin’s gift for making us all feel like we were stars, about Kevin’s incredible relationship with Dodie. Kevin’s inclusion of me into the world of Poets Theater gave me laughter, lasting friendships and joyous moments of being a ham. He taught me that it is ok to laugh at what you love and to love the ridiculous in everything (including one’s self) with depth and heart. In 1994 he wrote the play Flophouse for the tenth anniversary of The Lab. In it we jumped to the future and at the end he wakes to find Dodie telling him it was all a dream. He asks her if he is “more divine than the sun and moon?” She answers that she doesn’t “have an answer to that one. Not yet.” Jump now to the future again and the answer is most clearly yes. All my love to Dodie and to everyone who was blessed to know Kevin Killian. (Michelle Rollman)

The first element of the new issue of David Buuck’s TRIPWIRE: a journal of poetics I went through was the lengthy “Kevin Killian Tribute,” titled “A Poets Theater Tribute to Kevin Killian,” around the late San Francisco writer, editor and enthusiast Kevin Killian [see my own small tribute to him here]. The feature includes tributes by Eileen Myles, Scott Hewicker, Cliff Hengst, Karla Milosevich, Craig Goodman, Michelle Rollman, Anne McGuire, Wayne Smith, Tanya Hollis, Steve Orth, Lindsey Boldt, Maxe Crandall, Arnold J. Kempt, Carla Harryman, Lee Ann Brown and Tony Torn, Susan Gevirtz, Laynie Browne, Patrick Durgin, Norma Cole and Jo Giardini. “I honestly don’t know what to do with this moment in time when my peers are dying,” Eileen Myles writes, to open her “Don’t Go.” She later on writes: “There was always a youthiness about Kevin Killian. To be young is to be an unabashed fan. He had it as an elder. Kevin had a marvelous instrument for effusing, his changeable expansive reckless grand dame elegant surprising voice sourced from an endless bucket of light from somewhere that scattered love and fun and wit and bitchiness around us all and offered a lawn and a fence to hold us in.” Scott Hewicker begins his tribute writing: “The first play I saw by Kevin Killian was Life after Prince at Kiki Gallery in 1993. It was a beautifully messy spectacle in a cramped gallery full of people. What was exciting about it was its unpredictable mix of amateur flatness and high camp. I’m not sure if they were always fun to sit through, but they sure were a lot of fun to be in.” To introduce the section, editor Buuck writes:

In addition to his work as a poet, novelist, memoirist, biographer, literary organizer, and Top-100 Amazon reviewer (not to mention holding a full-time day job), Kevin Killian made time to write or co-write (and often direct) over 50 Poets Theater plays. Almost always performed as staged readings, with one or two rehearsals, minimal sets and costuming, Kevin’s Poets Theater work demonstrated a commitment to a community-based, non-professional ethos where sociality and shared laughter was as important—if not more so—than how the work may have lived on the page.

At over three hundred pages, there is an enormous amount going on in this issue worth looking at, including an absolutely fascinating interview Michelle N. Huang conducted with Mei-mei Berssenbrugge and Teddy Yoshikami around a writing/dance collaboration the two of them did .As Huang offers as part of her introduction: “I first encountered Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s work in graduate school, where her poem ‘Fog’ became something of a touchstone for me as I worked through my dissertation on molecular aesthetics and posthumanism in Asian American literature. When I learned the poem was part of a triptych on the transitional states of water—the poem ‘Fog’ preceded by ‘Mizu’ (water) and ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ (ice)—and that all three poems had been created as poetry/dance performances during the early 1980s in collaboration with the Basement Workshop, the foundational Asian American Movement organization in New York, I wanted desperately to see them. My search led me from the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory (where one of the 80 copies of the artist’s book containing ‘Mizu’ can be found), to uncatalogued boxes at Beinecke, and eventually to the choreographer, Theodora (Teddy) Yoshikami, of Morita Dance Company, who still lives in New York. She had given the VHS tapes to the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at New York University, where they waited in a box, for me (I felt) to find.” This is really is an interesting interview, especially on a project forty-years distant that hasn’t (it would appear) received the acknowledgement, critical or otherwise, that it deserves (should interviewer/critic Huang be considering putting a volume of this text plus a critical introduction together, say, the way Wave Books produced Lorine Niedecker’s Lake Superior?). I would even say that this interview is worth the price of admission alone (I would also say that for the Kevin Killian section, so I’m basically telling you that you would be wise to pick up a copy of this issue). The interview, also, is immediately followed by a stunning four-part poem “YOU ARE HERE” by Berssenbrugge, the first part of such reads:

We’ve powerful analytic tools to simplify an experience, so we can absorb it emotionally.

There’s joy in transmuting a supernova into science and wonder, at the same time.

World’s a net of relations in which appearance is one; to correlate the visible with the personal makes it real.

Seeing, a kind of consciousness, materializes its form.

Then everything constellates out to the farthest star.

The issue also includes numerous other features, from poetry to scripts to a whole slate of book reviews at the end.

Trish Salah, Lyric Sexology Vol. 1

Impersonation doesn’t mean what you think. This is the introduction to this book, my introduction, my lyrical sexology. Lyric Sexology. This is one of the things you need to get straight. This is another, you there in your later age, your so-called 21^st century: I am not a transsexual. Or an intersexual, or a hermaphrodite. (Hermaphrorditus can write her own damn book.) I am not any of those things you have words for now. You don’t have words for what I am. What I was was this:

I was a dude.

Then I was a chick.

Then I was a dude again.

Hah. You didn’t think we said “dude” or “chick” in what you call ancient Greece, Hellas of the Hellenes, etc. Think again.

Here is what you don’t have words for: What is a seer? What is beyond knowing? How can I write you now, a now impossibly out of joint with your own, knowing you will read this? Knowing you? Or what is a sex in time? Without?

You do not have a word for snakes or gods or sexes. You only think you do.

You do not have a word for the meeting of snake sex god in one word’s divided knowing, a knowing one divided word.

Seven years is what I was as beyond, a beyond, and inside too. So, impersonation doesn’t begin to describe it, but suppose it did. Suppose

I began to describe you. (“Tiresias, impersonated.”)

I’ve long been curious about the work of Kingston poet, fiction writer and critic Trish Salah, a name I first heard during those early 1990s Montreal days of Corey Frost and Colin Christie’s ga press. Salah’s latest release is Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 (Montreal QC: Metonymy Press, 2017), the first Canadian edition of a title originally published in 2014 by New York publisher Roof Books. The author of a previous title – Wanting in Arabic (TSAR, 2002; 2013) – Salah’s Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 suggests the opening salvo of what will continue, at least to a second volume, if not further. There are elements here that read as memoir, something she plays with as she writes through the legendary Greek character Tiresias, and one can make a rather obvious comparison to Anne Carson writing the Ancient Greek figure Griffin in her Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998). In Lyric Sexology Vol. 1, Salah composes her own blend of book-length lyric essay and long poem on metamorphosis, gender and expectation, and one that includes references to Ovid, Glee, Ed Wood, Atlantis, high heels, mythologies, National Geographic, Gail Scott’s Heroine and the October Crisis.

Salah’s essay-poem Lyric Sexology Vol. 1 is an ambitious work that combines the lyric with the narrative, writing out poems that wind their individual ways around and through each other; writing out, even beyond gender, the potential elusiveness of identity itself. Through the voice and character of Tiresias, “a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for seven years.” (Wikipedia), a character mentioned in numerous works by Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Ovid, Salah is able to explore and articulate an identity that was never fixed, but one that evolved as Tiresias did, and as his/her own situations required. As Salah writes in the poem “Godtears”: “Her break with form was primarily intelligible as wanting the impropriety of your hand / in me, sous la table, the exquisite corpse giving way to hewn simply exercises / (spoonerisms) in French or Greek.” In an interview conducted for CWILA: Canadian Women in the Literary Arts by Morgan M Page/Odofemi, Salah writes:

Viviane Namaste talks about the autobiographical imperative, arguing that when non-trans folks approach trans people, not only are they only interested in hearing our autobiographies, but they feel free to discount everything we might have to say that isn’t about autobiography. And on CBC this morning, Janet Mock remarked that the media’s treatment of trans people hasn’t changed significantly since the early 1950s press coverage of Christine Jorgenson. Mock framed her own memoir and media interventions as attempts to push back against the narrowness and othering that has come of treating trans people as if we are solely defined by our transness (as opposed to other aspects of our identities, histories, experience, expertise and interests), and also as if we are curiosities to be known about as opposed to being people one might engage with.  This relates to a point Julia Serano and Talia Bettcher make, that cis folks feel entitled to especially scrutinize and doubt trans folks’ self representations, positioning us paradigmatically as imposters or deceivers. In autobiography we appear as singular beings, at best as exceptional individuals who have triumphed over adversity to actualize ourselves, but more often as curiosities, outliers among humankind, who confirm the normalcy of the non-trans reader.

All that said, yes, it is a problem that there has not been either a critical apparatus or a broader public for our creative work, and that is tied in some ways to Viviane’s critique of the idea that the only or primary reason we might possibly have for writing is to satisfy the curiosity of, and/or educate, a non-trans public.

In a review of the prior edition at Tripwire, Zoe Tuck opens: “Trans women poets: raise your hands if you have written poems about or in the voice of Tiresias? Although I’m not sure if there are enough trans poets AND trans poets who have written Tiresias poems to call them a commonplace, I will cop to having written a few. The figure of Tiresias looms over the search for precedent.” Tuck continues:

The wit masks a real concern that has dogged transgender history and queer history before it: who can we claim, either in the past, or across cultural boundaries, as being  one of us? Put another way: is there a universal category of gender?

Through writing a whole volume through and around Tiresias, Salah is able to write out beyond the purely physical, and beyond the initial, and somewhat expected, poems that Tuck suggests have already been composed; by composing nearly two hundred pages of this first volume of Lyric Sexology, Salah manages to write through Tiresias, as well as utilize the legendary Greek figure, as a way to explore the very nature of fluidity, concerning gender, sexuality and the core root of self, bringing in all the cultural expectation, uncertainty and complications that come along with such shifting.

The simplest equations are subtraction.

A “dog never loses its savour.” Arab slavers.

Fawn smear from the mouth, eye sockets

Tell me about your history, the one to come. (“Tiresias as Cuir (on the run)”)

 

Tripwire #12 : AKA VANCOUVER

paint under sticky licks of amber finishes

here this canna lily medicine ornament

for use on a journey

this air

fresh commodity

mouthful of water a liquid gem

lead in the blood of your children

may we all

feathers incline in planes side by signal

encased I fly some thousands of miles home my life

has not yet covered on foot

streams below stream by pink the plane races

the sun western lines deepen red. sun wins and I win (Cecily Nicholson, “Rebuilt to Oar”)

I’m very taken with the issue #12 of David Buuck’s Tripwire out of Oakland, California, constructed as a hefty feature on Vancouver writing, “AKA VANCOUVER: WRITING FROM THE UNCEDED COAST SALISH TERRITORIES.” The opening section includes an absolute ton of new writing (and some visual art as well) from Mercedes Eng, Anahita Jamali Rad, Amy De’ath, Cecily Nicholson, Danielle LaFrance, ryan fitzpatrick, Roger Farr, Sonnet L’Abbé, Phinder Dulai, Jordan Abel, Rita Wong, Stephen Collis, Andrea Creamer, Fred Wah, Jeff Derksen, Christine Leclerc, Carolyn Richard, Donato Mancini, Renée Sarojini Saklikar, Lawrence Yzhak Braithwaite and Tiziana La Melia & Vanessa Disler. The works included in this list are just incredible, and represent some of the finest contemporary poetry to come out of Vancouver, and a list of writers and writing that you need to be paying attention to right now. And, while I agree that the work should stand for itself, I still would have liked to see an introduction of some sort to the section, just to have a sense of the framing of this section of nearly one hundred and sixty pages of writing and photography from Vancouver. How was this issue compiled? Etc.

Focusing heavily on the intersections between language and political poetry that have been building in Vancouver for quite a long time, it is important to note that editor/publisher David Buuck is also engaged in an ongoing activism, both in and beyond his own poetry, such as his participation in BARGE — The Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics. One might say that Oakland, California and Vancouver, British Columbia exist as sibling-communities, given their shared aesthetic of experimental writing and activism.

My life is a ferris wheel. Chairs rotating around a pin. I’ve never known true happiness, true compassion for another person. I can applaud the architectural firm that made this sentence possible, though I find it hard to think at this level for long

The poets are coming. The Avant-Garde is Coming. We all need our vices. I want to break the fourth wall. THEY should pay our tabs.

I suffer like you have no idea. You can help me with this. Every thing I have done is because of an injury. Give me a smile. Not so big.

Now think of “the Social” as a waiting room, in a Care Facility, by the beach, under construction, one minute past Happy Hour. (Roger Farr, “from The Care Facility”)

Further into this Vancouver issue, Tripwire #12 includes sixty pages of a tribute to the late Nanaimo, British Columbia poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) [see my obituary for him here], including uncollected writings, essays on his work, remembrances, an interview, archival material and other pieces, by Culley himself as well as Elisa Ferrari, Louis Cabri, Colin Smith, Rolf Maurer, George Bowering, Lisa Robertson, Chris Nealon, Lee Ann Brown, Stephen Collis and Jonathan Skinner. One of the first pieces to really strike in this section has to be Rolf Maurer’s short essay-reminiscence, “Peter Culley, Pleasure Poet,” that provides both homage and overview of Culley’s work and life in and around Vancouver:

Peter Culley emerged from, instead of into, the West Coast literary mainstream, in the early 1980s. Jack Hodgins had been a high school teacher, and early mentor; the painter Mina Totino and the poet Kevin Davies were classmates. His elders saw Culley’s promise and his first book was named Twenty-One in part beause that’s what he was when Oolichan Books issued it. Culley later more or less disowned that book, not because of any bad publishing experience, but because even as it was going to the printer his poetry was turning away from the first-person I of those poems to the camera I at the centre of all his later work.

For his part, Louis Cabri includes materials from Culley’s reading in Ottawa in 1991, via Cabri and Rob Manery. Cabri writes:

In Ottawa, Ontario, Rob Manery and I ran, with our poetry magazine, hole, a poetry event series called The Transparency Machine, and Peter Culley presented in it on Nov 2, 1991, at Gallery 101. Peter selected texts to contextualize his poetry (this was the simple idea of the series), and we distributed those texts in newsletter form weeks before his event. The event was an informal discussion during which Peter projected his texts with the aid of an overhead projector. What follows are the invitation card to Peter’s event, three of his six selected texts including from his 1987 chapbook Natural History (after Gilbert White) (Fissure Books, ed Susan Lord), and a photo Rob took of Peter reading. The Transparency Machine event series idea has continue over the decades under different names and in other cities, most recently in Vancouver through the Kootenay School of Writing with additional help by co-curators Ted Byrne, Listen Chen, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Donato Mancini, Cecily Nicholson, and UNIT/PITT Projects.

To round out the issue, there is an impressive mound of further pieces, including a conversation between David Buuck and Danielle LaFrance and Anahita Jamali Rad on their former collective/journal, About a Bicycle, and critical pieces on works by Cecily Nicholson, Mercedes Eng, Lisa Robertson, Catriona Strang, Jordan Scott, Jordan Abel (two pieces: including one by me) and Colin Smith. I’m deeply impressed by the heft and thoroughness of this Vancouver feature, perhaps the finest I’ve seen in a journal in some time.

And, as Buuck reminded me recently, the first ten issues are available on the Tripwire website as free downloadable pdfs.