One Pause Poetry Project
March 1st, 2012 Comments Off
Emily Carr reads at the One Pause Poetry Project, http://www.onepausepoetry.org
Begun July 2011 & directed by the very fabulous poet Sarah Messer, the One Pause Poetry Mp3 Project is a national digital resource for teachers, students, readers, & listeners. Each poet is asked to record & submit three mp3 files to the site: one poem of his or her own, one by another poet, & one poem for kids. You can listen to me reading Emily Dickinson’s “Why Do I Love You?,” Lewis Carroll’s “The Cheshire Cat,” & my poem “yolk (v.),” which is from my first book, Directions for Flying (Furniture Press 2010), & which Marie Howe chose as Winner of the Winter 2008 So To Speak Poetry Prize.
You can also hear & watch performances by some of my personal favorites—like Paisley Rekdal, Mary Jo Bang, Suzanne Wise, Clayton Eschleman, Jerome Rothenberg & Mark Cox—as well as my former University of North Carolina-Wilmington colleagues Michael White, Sarah Messer, Emma Bolden & Patrick Culliton.
As American writer Josephine Johnson reminds us, poetry was honoured in the old days. It had a place in the social framework. Poets were “voices of wisdom, bearers of tidings good, bad, true, invented,” they were “newsmen & singers.” Perhaps the time will come again when poetry is honoured. Perhaps the time for poetry is over. For the moment, at least, poetry is still free it is a beautiful waste of time, energy, & dollars it is changing the world entirely forever, & I invite you, dear Readers, to enjoy!
Conversation Hearts for the Chinese New Year
February 14th, 2012 Comments Off
Life is so unreal I think that we seriously doubt we exist & go about trying to prove that we do.
~ Miss Morgan
Dear Valentine,
Click the link below for Conversation Hearts for the Chinese New Year: A California Lyric, my photo essay/ love poem. (What I like to do is choose “full screen” for the slideshow.)
Conversation Hearts for the Chinese New Year
- #5 Without Your Catskin
You can also read *more* excerpts from my Tarot novel, Name Your Bird Without a Gun, in Front Porch: http://www.frontporchjournal.com/.
The latest issue features George Saunders, Thomas Lux, & me!
Love & rockets from Santa Cruz,
Emily
P.S. I never wanted to be a love poet. (For whom?) (Who cares?) (What for?) (Why do “we” care?)
One probably cannot say it to often: poetry is, among other things, an activity which discovers its object; which surprises itself with meanings it runs into, & passes sometimes with apologies, or recognizes with a start like an old friend in a strange place.
The measure? That it makes us get real about ourselves as we really are.
There can be no doubt, either, that the work is therapeutic & projective; in its creation the poet endeavors to confront, & overcome, the nightmares of living in a violent & vulnerable world.
(Not limiting love to the erotic but drawing attention to endeavor, struggle, social change, & political action.)
P.S. (I never wanted to be another California poet.)
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Performance
December 17th, 2011 Comments Off
Dear Reader—
footnote to forfeit is ransom notes on top of love poetry on top of rumors. The two particular adaptive techniques I used in composing footnote to forfeit are Wite Out & collage. I used Wite Out to obliterate the poems collected in the 1972 Peter Pauper version of Emily Dickinson’s love poetry. Then, (like the author of a ransom note), I collaged short lyrics over the Wite Out by cutting & pasting individual letters from a variety of printed media.
I composed this artist’s book during a Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in December 2011. This video captures its debut performance— after reading brief excerpts from my first two books of poetry, directions for flying & 13 Ways of Happily: Books 1 & 2, I play a slide show of scanned images from footnote to forfeit & talk briefly about the historical evolution in artistic sensibility & the factors in modern culture that lead me to work in this kind of form.
footnote to forfeit is the second in a series of the six artist books. Excerpts from the first, The Weights of Heaven, were published in the Summer 2011 Adaptations Issue of the Western Humanities Review & are available for purchase online at http://www.hum.utah.edu/whr/. My goal in this first volume was reconstructing a memory without revision: to live the trauma, as Jacques Lacan explains, rather than simply articulate it, which is, of course, the essence of trauma itself. The palimpsesting of the 1968 Vintage edition of Sylvia Plath’s The Colossus was a way of literally enacting the emotional & aesthetic challenges of owning up to the consequences of one’s choices.
I found that I liked transforming the machine-made aspect of Plath’s poems (the reproduction) & turning them back into something handmade, the way our experiences themselves are handmade before they are “saved” & reproduced. Writing in this way, as I saw it, undermines commodifiable categories of “usefulness.”
In footnote to forfeit, I turn to erasure to transform memory, personhood, the female body, the text, from things (as commodity) to events (as “matters of care”). The layering (like sediment) of texts foregrounds the processes of intervention & interpretation involved in any reading—of self, of sex, of history, of memory. By combining Wite Out & collage, I attempt to account for life’s essential incoherence: the way our experiences misstep or mistake, mishear & get lost in “what might have happened” or “what never happened” or even “what should have happened.”
Something’s always being forgotten (or misremembered) that we don’t notice. Sometimes not getting the story the way it was intended can be the very thing that makes it successful. It’s the flaw that dazzles…
footnote to forfeit #13: Coy Choruses
Lost and Found: 33 Hidebound Notions Concerning the Stuff of Memory
November 27th, 2011 Comments Off
Call For Donations
33 Hidebound Notions Concerning the Stuff of Memory is about sustainability, raw material, for being composed (with equilibrium, staying cool), & for being compost (heated up).
The techniques used in composing 33 Hidebound Notions are intended to undermine commodifiable categories of “usefulness” & to transform the thingness of the text, to create an experience.
SEND YOUR ARTEFACTS: photos, fragments, memories, memorabilia, mistakes, missteps (I have lots of those), rumors, facts & truths.
Your donations are both welcome and necessary for this experiment in biodegradable thinking.
Consider: this is your opportunity to speak to the poem directly, as to a person at the breakfast table. Tea leaves on the china slope of the hour. The archive as live: a strategy for composing selves, for stories being decomposed & recomposed.
ALL SPECIES OF ARTEFACT are welcome. Send them electronically as word or pdf files to ylimerrac@gmail.com, or query for an address for donations via snail mail.
Click here for the poster: 33HideBoundNotionsCallFor Donations.
~
Speaking frankly, memory is a problem. (Life was never anything like it said it was after all…
33 Hidebound Notions addresses this certainty head-on: the past is a fact that must be accounted for somehow. In the Age of Information Culture, the autobiography matters when & if it changes how remembering happens. & vice versa. How remembering happens makes life swerve in a productive way.
For me the autobiography is not some therapeutic genre of bargaining, sentimentality, compromise, or conventionality. It is about responsibility & optimism.
The autobiographical gesture is instinctual rather than (as in a memoir) instructive and seeks to transform what it touches—memory, personhood, the female body, the text—from things (as commodity) to events (as matters of care), where “care” includes as science and technology studies scholar Maria Puig del la Bellacasa advocates in “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things,” everything we do to maintain, continue, and repair ourselves so that we can live as well as possible in a world wiped clean of answers.
This is (as I see it) a way of exploring the moment, as American novelist Dorothy Allison writes, when someone who is somebody real who had come from somewhere, & who had been hurt in specific, deep, & terrible ways, teeters on the brink of becoming “the sort of person who…”
My goal? To generate hope, not by turning away from memory but by grappling with it.
NOTION 1: Filmed at the Fernwood Resort in Big Sur, California
on October 31st, 2011.
With many thanks to Carol Selby of Quincy, Illinois!
NOTION: 1
Carol Selby taught me third grade at Adams Elementary in Quincy, Illinois. She retired this year & mails me this book: “My Old Cat, Molly,” typewritten & hand illustrated by Emily D. Kruse.
Essential & inexhaustible (like a circus act): Emily D. Kruse is always there, implicitly telling me how to act & what to think, what I like & don’t like, who I am.
Sometimes I believe I made her up. Other times I wonder if she will continue to pop in at every crisis in my life to remind me of what I have been, & what I am not, & carry on her own separate but similar crisis under my nose.
She is saintly, thin & essential. A patriotic carnivore in patent leather heels, long accustomed to Velveteen. Her nipples like wild strawberries.
In a strapless white evening dress she seems to have her eyes over my shoulder looking at someone who stands behind me, a little to my left.
She is deeply involved with faith & with education. She is haunted with ambition. She doesn’t eat. She drinks orange juice slowly—& with deliberation. She likes: Chopin, cocker spaniels, Agatha Christie, squeeze butter & couscous. She would never: drink, have sex, swear. She sees a dietician & a social worker, on off weeks. Already she knows there’s a way into it & no way out.
She is like Achilles: running as fast as he can, going nowhere.
Already the person she most wanted to be—the person who in effect would allow her to stop writing, changes shape, changes direction.
~
Mostly whatever transitory fiction I call my childhood—benefits from this strategic amnesia. This shameful invention. The intentional dysfunctions by which, as American poet Charles Baxter writes, we lose track of the story of ourselves, the story that tells us who we are supposed to be (a psychologist or a pianist) & how we are supposed to act (devoutly).
The Russian novelist Nabakov, for example, never remembered as much as in the efflorescence of his language he wrote. Memories flourished in his language.
I interpret this to mean: the death of the ego.
Never mind that memory is a slot machine. Sometimes it is just for fun, sometimes it is serious, but always it holds the promise of a payoff: escape.
Three Dramatic Situations Concerning Poetry
October 1st, 2011 Comments Off
Dear Readers & Fortune Seekers,
Click the link below for information about upcoming readings & recent publications! My tarot novel is finally making its debut…
ThreeDramaticSituationsConcerningPoetry
Love & Rockets, Emily
Happy Birthday!
July 17th, 2011 Comments Off
DEAR READERS & FORTUNE SEEKERS,
Welcome to my first annual birthday reading. This one’s Real Canadian, straight from the backstairs of a lovely downtown flat in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where my best friend Erin lives & just got hitched.
Erin Wunker & Matt Eakin just before the civil ceremony at Point Pleasant Park.
I’m reading from Name Your Bird Without a Gun, my Tarot novel. I started working on this manuscript just over a year ago, while on a poetry fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center (April 2010). I continued working on Name Your Bird as the Writer-in-Residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida (June-July 2010). I finished the manuscript after moving to Santa Cruz last Fall. This is its first public appearance… (Other excerpts forthcoming in Web Conjunctions & Gargoyle… more details soon!)
Some strands of this work forage into issues of beauty (as agency) versus the beautiful (as thing); desire (how it looks) versus love (what it means); the problem of becoming a person you did not intend to become; & the links between questions of beauty & that of living well: not, as Liam Gillick writes, “limiting beauty to the visual but drawing attention to the beauty of endeavor, struggle, social change, and political action.”
The story takes place in that moment when someone who is somebody real who had come from somewhere, & who had been hurt in specific, deep, & terrible ways, teeters on the brink of becoming “the sort of person who…” The narrative articulates the tension between being a person & feeling like the idea of a person: a mistress, or The Adulteress. This is as I see it intended to address un(re)solved feminist problems: how to reconcile erotic longing with monogamy & how to publicly voice the most private experiences (after they’ve stopped being theoretically fashionable)?
Whereas my first book, directions for flying, investigated what it is for a woman in the twenty-first (post-feminist?) century to be a housewife, & my second book, 13 ways of happily: books 1 & 2, explored the constitution of happiness, Name Your Bird Without a Gun attends to Fortune: act & consequence, judgment & circumstance, desire & sin, the mechanisms of all these forces & how they operate on the heroine.
The story is not just a background on which the Future is written it is a part of the Future itself.
Close your eyes. Ask a question.
I mean it.
Close your eyes & ask a question.
Don’t ask a silly superficial question.
Make it good. Make it worthwhile.
Open your eyes.
Click on the link below & receive your Fate…
Love & fog from Halifax,
Emily
Poetry in Motion
June 15th, 2011 Comments Off
POETRY IN MOTION
is finally in motion!!
Our first event is this FRIDAY, June 17th at noon at the Seabright Beach.
We’ll meet just to the left of the main entrance, look for the chick with all the poetry tattoos on her arm!
Bring: a yoga mat & a water bottle.
Plan for about 60 minutes of strategic muscle exhaustion.
If you’re on your lunch break, it’s ok to come late or leave early (as long as you promise to stretch).
Friends & family welcome!
No pre-registration necessary.
Suggested donation: $3
Click here for more details (& a cute flyer!).
Future events will be held sporadically throughout the Santa Cruz area.
So check back for weekly POETRY IN MOTION updates!
June 9th, 2011 Comments Off
Dear Reader,
Welcome to if she draws a door, my Poetry (in Motion) Blog.
We’re still under construction here so if you don’t see “Poetry in Motion” on the side bar yet, it’s coming! & if you don’t know what I’m talking about by “Poetry in Motion—you know who you are & you know what you did! (Stay tuned, more details coming soon…)
You’re just in time to join me for the Santa Cruz launch of my second book, 13 ways of happily: books 1 & 2, which was chosen by Cole Swensen as the winner of the 2009 New Measures Prize & just published by Parlor Press this January!
I’ll be doing a tarot & tattoo reading at Felix Kulpa Art Gallery (107 Elm) in downtown Santa Cruz Saturday, June 18th at 7:30 pm. Free & open to the public, & with autographs! After party at the Red (1003 Cedar).
That’s SATURDAY JUNE 18th: mark your calendars (you know who you are!)
It’s not everyday that you meet a flesh & blood poet (we are a dying breed), so don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity. Plus: aren’t you just dying to know what my tattoo really says?
Yeehaw! Emily Carr, Poet
Click this link for more details… A Reading by Emily Carr, Poet
