Category Archives: Studies in Place

The Arrival Is in the Questions: An Appeal for Active Allyship

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I spent the past year abroad as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, living in five different countries to see how the design of cities made space for residents to identify with their streets and neighborhoods, and also to see where there was a disconnect that made urban residents feel far away from the places where they lived. This past weekend, I traveled to Appleton, Wisconsin to meet the other thirty-nine 2011-2012 fellows. Throughout the year, I had wondered about their projects, and about how they were doing as they managed and reconsidered their questions about international gay rights, approaches to fiber art or the cultural implications of fashion. Sharing space with the fellows brought home the idea that each of us has spent the whole year looking and in so doing, we’ve learned both how to look and that the maintenance of the state of looking is its own point of completion.

One of the fellows, whose project focused on relationships between science and spirituality in the Middle East, said that what she learned on her Watson year was that she was most interested in the critical thinking that came with asking questions of how systems operate and fit together, how two opposing ideas can both hold truth, and how it becomes possible for one person to disagree with someone else’s conclusion, but to respect the process by which they came to it. She said that she arrived at a place where to be comfortable in a constant state of asking questions was an end in itself, which she found both liberating and challenging.

I continued to think about a commitment to process as a point of arrival as I spent parts of the weekend talking about my experience as an openly and visibly transgender Watson Fellow. In some respects my Watson year was singular, because I viewed everything I saw with an awareness of myself as a trans-bodied researcher. In many respects, however, the fact that I understood my body to be a possible point of contention in contexts where I could not necessarily navigate the culture, particularly in the ten weeks I spent living in Ecuador, was common among the experiences of many of the Fellows. In the situations on my Watson year where I felt especially comfortable, it was because someone in the community had made it clear that they were an active ally, that they supported my inquiry-based approach to living, as well as my state of being trans, whether or not we ever talked about it, which in turn enabled us to move beyond my gender and to engage as individuals sharing a room or a park bench or a Tuesday morning.

What distinguished active allyship for me was that instead of being told that it’s okay that I’m trans and that I’m supported in my trans experience, an active ally made an effort to show me that they were interested in engaging with me holistically. In cases of passive allyship, often what was construed as support felt like it was turned on its head, the acceptance of my transness becoming a badge of progressivism instead of the means of engaging with another individual. With an active ally, there was space to talk about the questions I had, or the questions they had, about gender or about anything. There was a commitment to asking, to wondering, and to co-generative support as an end in itself.

In coming out eight years ago, the people in my community who made me most comfortable were those who communicated not only that they supported the fact that I was transgender, but that they supported my ongoing exploration not as a temporary process of deciphering my queerness but as a continued deciphering of my humanness. Where passive allyship was static, ie: “I support you as you are,” active allies provided dynamic supported and expected it in return.

We learn from our allies what kinds of questions we have the space to ask, and, as a result, what kinds of questions we are willing to ask of ourselves. The language of “coming out” implies a point of completion, but it doesn’t account for the evolution of our identities, something that’s just as daunting, and just as essential as coming out itself, and which requires as strong of an ally as does coming to terms with being queer. This may require a shift in how we see allyship, and even in how we see our own process of self-development: less as a series of sequential arrivals and more as an arrival in its own right, embedded in a commitment to ongoing inquiry.

Renovating the World for an Instant: The Middle Path (Redux)

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In the week and accompanying extra days since I interviewed Patience Hodgson of The Grates and put into motion a reading of what her lyricism does at its best, and at its heart, that same model – a middle path, of sorts – keeps raising its hand, making itself known. On one my of final days in Sydney as a Watson Fellow, I finished my reread of Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude in a final pitch to get myself mentally ready for my reentry into Brooklyn, which took place on Wednesday. In the novel’s final pages, the protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, drives west listening to the 1975 Brian Eno album Another Green World for which he explains his love with the language of none other than Patience’s adaptive, inclusive and fleeting middle path:

“I considered now that what I once loved in this record, and certain others…was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in…and that same space, that unlikely proposition, was what I’d eventually come to hate and be embarrassed by…Another Green World was…too fragile, too yokeable – I wanted I tougher song than that. “

He goes on to say:

“We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris, when “Bothered Blue” peaked on the charts, when a teenaged Elvis, still dreaming of his own first session, sat in the Sun Studios watching the Prisonaires, when a top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world for an instant, when schoolyard turntables were powered by a cord run from a streetlamp, when juice just flowed…A middle space opened and closed like a glance, you’d miss it if you blinked. “

At the end of the book, this is the final and encompassing big idea that Dylan, and with him, Lethem offers up. In one way, it enables the book to recognize itself as its own middle space – like Patience’s middle – fought for and earned, and like Dylan’s – ephemeral and alinear. Coming home, I tried to strike a middle space between the two characterizations of middle spaces – to understand that while the enduring, encapsulating, flow-state moment is what we’re looking for – a moment that’s beyond critique or even synthesis, that stands as a model for what a moment, an experience can contain, and greater than that, what human experience can contain – and to accept that it’s also impossible to occasion these moments.

Patience’s practice of “welcoming to the middle,” of recognizing “two kinds of right” is to create an environment in which the perfect, indecipherable middle spaces can occur, or even to recognize the potential middle space in all spaces, as if a perceptual difference keeps each moment from existing in an ethereal “middle space” from its current existence in the general swamp of all things. A middle space, perhaps, is a normal swamp of a moment whose parts all line up, whose features are adjacent and linked, held up in parallel wind.

I’ve thought of this especially often in my first couple of days back in New York – a place sought out for its potential middle spaces, a place in which much of the unspoken culture of being a New Yorker is to be both aware of their potential and disgruntled at their low-frequency, their pesky ability to happen more often to other people. Sydney is in many ways designed to make middle spaces, designed to generate moments that seem surrendered to their own synergy. On the way to the airport, a good friend called Sydney “a porn star of a city if ever there were one,” which had me wonder if Sydney’s fragmentation and its contrasts – its committment to beach as much to office tower – makes the ingredients of the potential middle space just numerous enough to allow them to come together without ceding to the constant New York onslaught of input, the synthesis of which makes for a real New Yorker, as it does for Lethem’s Dylan Ebdus, and arguably for Lethem himself.

Leaving does this too – creates the opportunity for perfect, contained and non-replicable middle spaces – and so a beautiful cadence of final weeks in a place designed to mark the existence of middle spaces the way I might have caught fireflies on some July night fifteen years ago raises the challenge of New York as a place in which to find middle spaces and, with that, as a place in which to find a sense of place itself.

New York, then, becomes a city that thrives on the potential of the middle space, where a middle space becomes sweeter and more rare for its synthesis. To make a middle space out of New York is to steal it, the theft itself creating the opportunity for the singular alignment of the middle, the moment, as Patience argues in which all imaginable factors are included in, as Dylan argues, a space that opens to their singular and fragile alignment, and that, for Dylan, a New Yorker at heart, always, close just as quickly.

Patience and Dylan disagree about the frequency of the middle – do we live in it? does it “[open and close] like a glance?” It seems that to live in a city is to acknowledge that both are true, that while there’s always the potential for the affirming, synergistic middle space, we’re rarely open to it, rarely in possession of the features that would allow us to see it. Are there people, places, ways of being that help us cultivate our relationship to these moments that, for both Patience and Dylan, demonstrate how it feels to be human in a way that’s unnameable? Does it, as Dylan suggests, just open and close, visible or not on its own terms?

Surrender and Fight: The Grates and the Limitless Relevance of the Middle Path

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Yesterday I sat outside the café of Surry Hills’ Single Origin Roasters with a high-spirited if under the weather Patience Hodgson, lead singer of Brisbane-based band The Grates. Meeting Patience was more like being collected by the patron-saint babysitter of the after school program of my infinite lyric-driven deconstruction of The Grates three-album canon than it was like being with a pop figure, an icon, which squared with her assessment that she’s not a rock star, although, she conceded, “people know me.”

Individually, Patience and I each had infinite things to say about the canon of The Grates, me working to meet Patience where she’s at by means of my encyclopedic synthesis of years of wearing in the music of The Grates like tennis shoes for elasticity and magnetic fit. Together, though, we came up with a theory – new to both of us – that posits a logic behind the singularity of what The Grates do: most basically, that The Grates create a new breed of classic pop song middle path, a way of being in and of the crowd that pulls in all possible influences and ideas and that often holds two opposing ideas at once, which is diametrically opposed to the immersive and willful ignorance that characterizes what the pop song is most often permitted to be. Basically, The Grates have figured out how to make negative-space pop songs, pop songs that dance with their ghosts. We took a few minutes, as we talked, to figure out how this works.

Patience and I germinated this theory by talking about “Two Kinds of Right,” the song we agreed was the strongest on The Grates sophomore album, Teeth Lost, Hearts Won. Patience explained that she finds herself, as a matter of course, surrendering and fighting – that the navigation of any set of feelings is inherently a balancing act - and that any influence is a relevant one. Patience and I worked our way through a few other songs, thinking about how a middle road is maintained by means of its inclusion of all things. We thought about the anthemic “Welcome to the Middle,” a virtual homage to the idea, as well as the atmospheric reach of “19 20 20,” which features a main man who’s: “up yeah he’s stealin’ stars / my baby put all his faith in mars,” literally working to the limits of his galactic wingspan to maintain the features of a socially relevant position.

To bring the theory back to its origin, “Two Kinds of Right” itself defines its protagonist by means of a larger galaxy, Patience singing: “And it’s so easy to see / When it’s bigger than me,” the very idea of being “Two Kinds of Right” suggesting that any position, any way of being is inherently a synthesis of its influences, themselves outside of, larger than, what the protagonist can contain. This position is echoed further in the bridge of “Burn Bridges,” the kickoff song of Teeth Lost, Hearts Won, which asks very basically: “What’s the sum of everything?” an appeal for the inclusion of all influences if ever there were one.

Patience and I recognized a tendency in other bands interested in creating a multidimensional pop song to pull the listener out of “the middle” and into an alternative position – to create a protagonist who is in opposition to the weekend everyman of, to bring it back to 2010, a song that makes a classic middle road like “Telephone,” or “Tik Tok.” The Grates, while grouped often in that dangerous family of “alternative” bands, aspire to make what Patience referred to as “a pop song, but more than a pop song,” holding up the same everyman relevance to the listener, but bringing along the referential kitchen sink that most pop songs actively obfuscate.

The language of “fighting,” for instance, is shared by The Grates and by Ke$ha, in “Tik Tok,” in which she challenges: “Tonight, I’mma fight / ‘Til we see the sunlight,” a position mediated by Patience in “Two Kinds of Right” through her balance between the fight and the surrender. Whereas both “Telephone” and “Tik Tok” advocate for the exclusion of outside sources – to be left alone, to stop the calling, to push boorishly forward, to not come back – “Two Kinds of Right” isn’t afraid to take stock of what is, to indiscriminately let it all in.

There’s a profound and tricky radicalism to what Patience advocates for by means of there being “Two Kinds of Right,” particularly as it pertains to the classic capacity of the pop song to hold the road of one clear idea, one ham-handed trope. The Grates, in this way, make an argument, over and over again that the pop song can be about the multifaceted process of living, about exploration and inclusion as opposed to taking on a fanatical and diminishing performance that banishes the dimensions of living, the uncertainty of the resolution of a given moment, the many ways any one situation could go.

In so doing, The Grates have figured out how to make a pop song that is, as Patience put forth, “a pop song, but more than a pop song,” one that itself surrenders to and fights its understanding of what a pop song is most commonly asked to do and that asks the listener for the same bravery in turn. In short, The Grates have figured out how to make a pop song that holds us as listeners to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous adage that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

There aren’t a lot of pop songs that raise the listener to the level of first-rate thought. As Patience reminded me yesterday, there are a lot of things that the music of The Grates does, but this one may be the most resolutely innovative, the most quietly radical. Certainly, it raises the stakes of what a pop song can accomplish and how deep into the valley of our own compartmentalized thoughts it might encourage us to go.

making “space to create” new urban systems: an open proposal to chashama

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to chashama,

I spent the past year living abroad as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, which meant, for me, that my primary occupation was to think about urban space and its uses, as I worked on a project entitled: Cities in Transition: Identity, Narrative and the Changing Urban Landscape. I spent the fall of 2011 in Toronto, Canada observing the magnetism of Harbourfront Centre, which draws in thousands every weekend from the possible reaches of the Greater Toronto Area. I spent the winter standing on the streets of Quito, Ecuador’s old city, the first to be designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, considering how the legacy of a space makes itself present as that space extends into the future. I spent the spring exploring Sydney, Australia’s infinite network of suburbs and their distinct sensibilities, and the City of Sydney’s curious and often brilliant unification of art objects and the public sphere.

In the course of my Watson year, I’ve interviewed planners, artists, cycling advocates, designers, social innovators and many others who spend their lives thinking about one or a number of facets of the relationship between how a city is designed and how it’s inhabited. What I’ve tried to do as a Watson Fellow is to listen both to how residents talk about their cities and how individuals involved in a city’s design and operation talk about their work, in order to see what it would look like to build a bridge between how cities are lived in and how planners and designers prepare for their future.

In thinking about that relationship – between urban identity and urban design – I’ve been particularly interested in the role artists play, especially artists who work and show their work in public and publically-accessible spaces. I’ve come to believe that the role of the artist is singular in this process of creating channels for interplay between the lived city and the realm of design, as the strongest art objects engage with their viewers to generate new ways of looking, a skill residents need to learn in order to see their city in new ways. In this way, public and publically-accessible art becomes a crucial feature in creating the kind of structural change necessary to make the work of urban advocates both relevant and useful to residents and to continue the conversations that push the innovation of urban systems forward. To this end, I see the work of chashama as central to the development of the ideas and practices that will be core features of the conversations about New York City’s future.

As I bring the implicit questions of my Watson year home, I’d like to continue to explore the role of artists as crucial public actors, a feature of artists’ work that chashama both heightens and extends. With this in mind, I’d love to work with you to profile a series of artists working with chashama who are furthering the project of how we as New Yorkers look and learn to look at our city and how that looking is embedded in our design of the city’s future. It is my intention that such a profile series will bring into the foreground both all of the ways we see our city and how the evolution of those ways of seeing is itself crucial to how we direct, explore and envision the city’s future.

This is a project that could extend in many directions, but it feels like a good place to start.

Let me know your thoughts.

All the best,

Davy Knittle

davy.knittle@gmail.com

chashama at work: a review of chashama 461 gallery’s bait and switch

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Several weeks ago, Urban Omnibus, a production of the Architectural League, profiled the work of Anita Durst, founder of space-repurposing arts organization chashama, which gives artists “space to create” in donated under-used spaces for performance and exhibition and subsidized artist studios. In speaking about chashama’s work, Durst highlighted its greater mission as being based in the incubation of artists in the name of neighborhood enlivening and sustainability. Durst’s intentions for chashama’s spaces are extended and deepened by the show bait and switch, which opened in chashama 461 gallery on Friday

The premise of bait and switch, curated by Chiara Di Lello, is to provide a space that subverts the now-standardized culture of cursory looking by displaying artworks that redirect the viewer’s attention and encourage an engagement attained only by sustained inquiry. While the beginning of the presentational text on the postcard reads “In today’s culture, the average viewer…” the show is interested in neither “today’s culture” nor the “average viewer,” as it creates a series of relationships that comment not on culture or the normalized qualities of viewership, but on the very basic act of developing a personal and enduring relationship with an art object, and extending from that, with a space, an idea or a practice.

The show puts into action exactly what Durst explains as chashama’s ideal, by creating a space that incubates not only the work of local artists, but also invites the city into the gallery by putting many of the features of the city into necessary conversation with each other by means of the art and where the work sends its viewers back into the city with thoughts of what’s possible for New York.

Work such as Olivia Swisher’s Increasingly Problematic: Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner, does what New York does at its best, by creating a conversation that begins in questioning and encourages the viewer to explore the piece, first in pursuit of that question and then for the joy of connective looking, moving between the painting, created by Swisher dancing with paint-covered feet on a sheet of paper, and the contact sheet that displays the stages of the act of making the piece, to explore both the process by which the work was made and the conversation between the piece’s elements.

The work displayed in bait and switch ranges from a clear and presentational subversion of the expectations of the illusive “average viewer” to the show’s strongest pieces which make space for both a singular and unifying experience of looking, where the strength of the piece relies on the viewer’s commitment to an extended engagement with it. This is especially true of Laura Meyer’s wallpapers, which open to an endless recombination of patterns the longer they’re explored,

and of Queena Ko’s Untitled (Stoop Series), which situates a structural refiguring of the discrete features of an iconic New York space and returns the space of the stoop back to its compositional elements, only after it attains the viewer’s attention by means of its familiar subject matter.

bait and switch does for viewers what chashama has done for its artists: it creates the opportunity for the independent generation of expansive ideas, themselves extended by collective inquiry. chashama has sent the artists into the gallery to make a show whose compositional whole makes each piece work harder, and the show sends viewers back out onto 126th street with new ways of looking for the compositional synergy of the city itself.

bait and switch is on view at chashama 461 gallery (461 w. 126th Street) until July 7th, daily from 12-7 and by appointment, with abbreviated hours on July 4th

“The Common Air that Bathes the Globe”: On Diversity in Innovation

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Next Saturday, Community Brave, in collaboration with Social Innovation Sydney will run a day-long symposium entitled “Diversity in Innovation.” The event is designed to bring together Sydney’s LGBTQI community with the social innovation community to “build networks, collaborate in education and harness the power of social connections to fulfill their project needs.” While I’m looking forward to the event immensely, both to giving a talk entitled “The Accidental Bully: Asking Queer Questions” and to seeing what comes of the day, it felt necessary, in advance of the event, to take the time to reflect on “Diversity in Innovation” as a concept within itself.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been re-reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, both to remind myself of Whitman’s great American myth, the America that I, too, as a young American poet still have in my sights, and to prepare myself to return to the States in just a few weeks, going home to Brooklyn and padding around Fort Greene Park remembering that Whitman was there. When I stand on that ground, next month, I want to be ready to make space for Whitman, and so I went back to the text.

In the course of going back, I found that Whitman’s take on diversity raised questions for me about what place diversity might have in innovation and, more pressingly, whether the work of innovation, as Whitman sees it, is antithetical to diversity at its best. I took the following excerpt from “Song of Myself,” the first long poem in Leaves of Grass, lines 327, 344-348, 353-360. Here, Whitman argues for a comprehensive diversity that includes all ways of being and, seemingly, defies being innovated or optimized:

Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,…

A farmer, mechanic, or artist…a gentleman, sailor,

lover or quaker,

A prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician or

priest.

I resist anything better than my own diversity,

and breathe the air and leave plenty after me,

These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands,

they are not original with me,

If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or

next to nothing,

If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing

If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle

they are nothing…

This is the common air that bathes the globe

This is the breath of laws and songs and behaviour…

 

If, as I’ve argued previously, the work of a social innovator is to re-strategize approaches to civil society and its mechanics, embedded in that process is necessarily the act of choosing a set of best practices. Social innovators are born optimizers. The tenets of social innovation are grounded in seeing what is and improving its systems, and therefore in having expertise on the ideal systems used to approach any particular issue, within the framework of social innovation. To put forth an ideal necessarily privileges a way of thinking, or several ways of thinking and a course, or several courses of action. This flies in the face of Whitman’s assessment of the thoughts that make up a global approach to collectivity that: “If they do not enclose everything they are next to nothing.”

Whitman advocates for an approach to diversity in which all voices have the opportunity to align themselves along the premise of basic human connectivity, a “common air that bathes the globe” in which Whitman says: “I resist anything better than my own diversity,” where that self is a collective self, as it often is in the text, and where to “better” the collective diversity would be, very literally, to optimize it.

The selectivity of the voices involved in the work of Social Innovation is determined by the belief of those voices that they warrant being heard, and the belief of the greater community that those voices are especially valid in a discourse that nonetheless promotes equality. People of any background can use the tools of social innovation to become changemakers, and this is powerful, but those tools are still limited, and are still managed by a limited set of channels and a limited set of thinking.

If innovation is really interested in taking on the work of “diversity,” the work, Whitman would argue, that’s central to perpetuating the kind of global impact social innovators like to talk about, then those conversations will have to include diversity of approach and diversity of goals as well as diversity of background. The field of social innovation invites people of all backgrounds to come together to think in a particular way with a particular tools. Many other fields also do this. If innovation is the approach of the future, it needs to be open to greater structural experimentation to compliment the great diversity of applications it currently puts forth. The social innovation community will, in short, need to diversify its current definition of diversity. In order to do so, it may need to become clear on what constitutes that original definition in the first place.

Whitman puts forth language that suggests that some of the biggest opportunities for change are in changes to collective thinking, which in turn require changes to collective language. Social innovators are pedagogically oriented toward action before they’re oriented toward discourse, and yet there’s immense power in seeing a fundamental change to collective language as its own action-oriented goal.

What’s so powerful, to me, about Whitman’s language is that he identifies a common human element and speaks of diversity in a way that celebrates the myriad approaches to being human, without trying to choose one set of voices to lead the way in the singular celebration of others. Innovation, it seems, might make Whitman nervous, if it necessitates the privileging of certain voices and modes of thinking, if it comes prepared to optimize before it humanizes, albeit in the name of the greater human cause, where Whitman raises all his human characters to their optimal human expression, their best selves, and mandates that we, thus unified, follow his lead. For Whitman, humans are at their best when they can celebrate their basic collective humanness, and so to optimize in a way that detracts from the multivalence of that celebration is, so Whitman would argue, to move in retrograde.

Is it possible to lead the way for necessary, productive change while supporting a diversity of approach as well as that of the voices included? What if we changed the kinds of thinking we included in our definition of innovation? What if the first step toward innovation were based in understanding our respective language for talking about our world and, most importantly, for making space for the “common air” of collective human experience that our language supports?

“In Which the Past is Always Available”: Cy Twombly’s “Three Studies from the Temeraire”

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I grew up familiar with Cy Twombly’s work from regular trips to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where one room is devoted to his Fifty Days at Iliam, but I didn’t begin to learn how to engage with his work until I spent a school holiday at the museum with my high school girlfriend, who has a lifelong and symbiotic relationship with art and art making. On that day, we sat with Twombly’s series and looked and talked and worked to develop a relationship until we reached what I now regard as the experiential art museum ideal: a sense of ownership in our experience with the paintings, a home ground in Twombly’s work.

Because I didn’t begin to develop an academic interest in art history until my final two years of college, I have a particular attachment to the artists whose work I learned to love before I amassed the academic tools that helped me figure out what the work was doing – relationships I developed on the grounds of observation and instinct. This year, encountering the work of those artists (an unusual mixture of Thomas Eakins, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko and the photographer Andreas Gursky, among others) in different museums around the world feels reliably like a homecoming, and so when I came across the Twombly series “Three Studies from the Temeraire,” in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the room itself felt immediately familiar.

Cy Twombly, Three Studies from the Temeraire, 1998-99. Art Gallery of NSW.

The wall text that accompanies the series highlights Twombly’s engagement with the idea of a uniformly accessible past, of “the trajectory from the present to the past and vice versa” that provides a “continuity of human, cultural and aesthetic experience in which the past is always available.” There’s a particular strength in the fact that the paintings call Australia their permanent home, and that they sit on land both historically accessible by sea only and containing over 40,000 years of human history.

As an American in Australia, I’m consistently struck by the discontinuity of old and new. By the standards of American colonization and the subsequent gain of independence from its colonial protectors, Australia’s 20th century separation from Great Britain is mystifyingly recent. Growing up in Philadelphia, which was founded in the 1680s, Sydney feels like a young city, despite its late 18th century foundation. Australians often talk about themselves as citizens of a young country, and yet in the Sydney Basin there are rock carvings that are purported to have 40,000 years of history, which is nearly impossible to reconcile with the discourse that sees Sydney as a “new” place.

To the make the argument that Twombly’s work communicates the idea of an accessible past is also to suggest that, by means of Twombly’s model, the relationship to the past is fluid, that there is continuity between what is and what was – something that I wonder about often when considering Sydney’s history during my tenure as a temporary Sydneysider.

Twombly’s series communicates this by means of an endless current of viewership, in which it is possible to find a connective path between the panels in both directions, the progression of the boats across the canvases from left to right suggesting that the rightmost boat will continue onward, and the partial boat extending from the leftmost side of the left panel suggesting that the progression could just as easily continue in the other direction.

One of the ways I read the series was to consider it as a study in the progression of one boat, where the direction of movement is unclear. In this reading, the boat is morphed by the process of travel, having greater or shallower depth to its body, carrying a heavier load as indicated by the saturated color partially covering its body in each of the panels, effectively allowing the boat to shed and reconstitute itself in travel.

In reading the panels from left to right, because the first two panels contain boats that extend to the horizontal edges of the picture plane, in the rightmost panel, the boat commands the full horizontal space of the canvas, where it is situated in its journey even as it sheds its pigment to its environment below, where it’s paused in a magnetized balance between the pull of the ships and the pull of the rightmost extension of the canvas, thus creating a limitless present with a marked route back into the available past.

Thinking about Twombly’s interest in creating process-based linkages to antiquity, (where the ships are both a mode of transit and a figure with a long, progressive history; the ships are both the means by which antiquity is reached and the symbol of antiquity itself) it brings to mind Harold Bloom’s characterization of Walt Whitman’s four major tropes in Leaves of Grass: death, night, the mother and the sea, all of which are both destinations of and vehicles for seemingly endless transit, all of which can be used to move from the limitlessly antique to the present and back, where the movement can be omnidirectional. Where to investigate the innate human qualities of the present is to draw an innately human path back through their history by means of these tropes.

In my reading of Twombly’s series, to draw this path to antiquity is to understand that those ships will eventually have their own homecoming, arriving at a final present, and yet as soon as they do, that present will serve as another link, back through their past and onto the future present of another series of ships, which creates a template for the development of a connective engagement with the past that Sydney itself could do well to use.

As I consider the final weeks of my Watson year, which is full of things that soon will be superseded by another present, but which I’m not ready to let go of, to find these lines, these ships that link my continual present to a dynamic and evolving relational past means that there is hope for the ongoing relevance of these experiences. As Twombly might argue, there’s hope, too, for their availability to a future present, to catalogue them, as they happen, as integral features of a linked and forward-thinking history.

The Natasha Trethewey Experiment

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In my poetic work, I am frequently the author of poems that have the character of minestrone soup. To read one of these poems is to be aware of many of its ingredients, confused by some that are harder to identify and tempted to vacillate between focusing on the fragmented whole and pushing to unify the admittedly somewhat disparate parts. It doesn’t come as a surprise then, that while many different engagements with poetry are interesting to me, as a reader, my favorite poems are often grounded in abstraction.

The reverse side of this engagement is that I’ve often had difficulty developing a relationship with more literal or linear work – work that feels as if it presents one enduring face, as opposed to the tenuous multiplicity of the soup-poems I work to corral into some semblance of useful behavior. Several years ago, I began to face that difficulty head-on. In the spring of 2010, as I geared up to write my senior thesis in poetry, I took on a project with the poet and rapper Josh Smith (you can check out his new album here) to write a short collection of poems. He focused on responding to the work of Electric Lady Studios around the year 2000 and I focused on responding to the first two collections that won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, in 1999 Natasha Trethewey’s Domestic Work and in 2000 Major Jackson’s Leaving Saturn. 

I thought again of Domestic Work this week upon the announcement that Trethewey will serve as the 19th US Poet Laureate. In many ways, Trethewey is the Kennedy of poet laureates. At 46, she’s one of the youngest ever, and is markedly younger than the poet laureates who have most recently preceded her. What makes the comparison especially apt, though, is the reasoning James Billington, the librarian of Congress gave for the selection of Trethewey, saying of her that: “I have an affinity for American individuals who are absolutely unique, and I think that this is one.”

When I first read Trethewey’s work, I had trouble identifying this uniqueness, but in the course of writing in response to Domestic Work, I began to understand the singularity of Trethewey’s poetics. There are many poets who write about female experiences of domesticity, fewer who write about the history and memory of black women in the American South, but still, topically, Trethewey is far from alone. Coming to Trethewey’s work with the understanding that a good poem should be an exercise in pull and movement not unlike walking a difficult dog, I found her work tame, passive, until I tried to take it apart.

In working through Trethewey’s poems, figuring out their mechanics, working to understand how they fit together and what different features of the poems call on each other to do, the weight that they ask each other to carry, I was blown away by their implicit and exacting sense of balance, exemplified by the excerpt below from the collection’s title poem: “Domestic Work, 1937”

But Sunday mornings are hers—

church clothes starched

and hanging, a record spinning

on the console, the whole house

dancing. She raises the shades,

washes the rooms in light,

buckets of water, Octagon soap.

As a poet, what amazes me about what Trethewey is able to do is that she orchestrates a masterful relationship between placement and motion. In creating a space, she is able to move from an identification of the physical: “church clothes starched” to its movement: “the whole house dancing,” to the impetus for its movement: “She raises the shades/washes the rooms in light.” To nest that network of action within the first line of the stanza: “But Sunday mornings are hers—“ is to use the resonance of the space to make a magician out of her protagonist, a person who, permitted to use their agency for their own purposes, can use the most basic tools to transform the domestic space into a private and radiant spectacle.

In many of her poems, Trethewey highlights the secret magic of the people – usually women – about whom she writes. Trethewey’s figures are able to make celebratory the most common spaces and activities, to find in their repetitive, confining and servile work a cause for rejoicing. This – the ability to rejoice in whatever the features of the basic day put forth – to use our own time to “wash the rooms in light” is something that, if it were taken seriously, could help reshape how Americans see the ideals of American experience – ideals that are in serious need of recalibration. While this sort of change is a tall order, I’m proud to be a young American poet under the auspices of a poet laureate who believes this sort of change is possible, and that poetry is a necessary resource for bringing it about.

The Poet as Anthologist: A Lived Experiment in Jerome Rothenberg’s “Anthology as Collage”

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The newest addition to the family of commentary at Jacket2 magazine is the ongoing blog of the poet Jerome Rothenberg, “Poems and Poetics.” Rothenberg, like Erica Kaufman, whose Jacket2 blog I wrote about last week, is one of the number of poets whose work I spent time with as I began working on my own current manuscript during the summer of 2010. My project began as a documentary poetics project of sorts, conducting interviews with West Philadelphia residents about the physical, psychological and narrative remains of the 1985 bombing of MOVE, a radical collective, in a raid planned and orchestrated by the City of Philadelphia. In the course of my experimentation with various documentary approaches to poetics, my mentor, the poet Elizabeth Willis, guided me toward Rothenberg’s work.

What’s particularly fascinating to me about Rothenberg is his interest not only in the potential for documentary engagement within his own craft, but the idea that the craft of anthologizing the work of other poets can be its own process of assembly-as-documentation. In his most recent post in “Poems and Poetics,” he revisits the 1973 anthology he co-edited, America a Prophecy, which he describes as: “not so much a ranking of notable American poets as a juxtaposition of disparate, often incongruous voices, putting collage or assemblage at the service of a new omnipoetics.” What strikes me about this particular approach is that it uses the role of poet as anthologist to suggest a parallel engagement of anthologist as poet, in that it employs the internal logic of selectivity as used in the composition of a poem to give the greater unit of the anthology its own internal structure. In this way, the anthologist is able to use the individual poems in the anthology as discrete semantic elements to create a collective whole that strives, as Stein says of Tender Buttons, to “mean names without naming them,” thus creating an anthology that is not edited or organized but curated, an act of craft itself.

For example, the second poem in America a Prophecy is an excerpt from Whitman’s Song of Myself (1855), which includes the lines: “Writing and talk do not prove me / I carry the plenum of proof and every thing else in my face.” In his description of the work of his anthology, Rothenberg argues that it too carries the plenum of its proof in its face, in its complete and presented self. The singular logic of assembly in an anthology, Rothenberg argues, should be its own guide. Rothenberg strives to create, as Whitman presents, a complete logic proven by its whole and not by its distillations. To read an anthology, under Rothenberg’s description, is to be opened to a larger framework that is both grounded in the poems themselves and is necessarily greater than the possible features of its distillation.

In considering Rothenberg’s idea, I thought of my favorite anthologies, namely the Cave Canem anthology, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, which I liked immediately because it makes a composite place from among the places of its poems, and, in so doing, it created for me the suggestion that a successful anthology generates a complete spatial sense where the development of a relationship with the features of the anthology is a process, in reading each poem, of going somewhere else within the anthology’s greater landscape.

As Whitman notes, the possible ingredients in an anthology are, in any moment, complete, and so to compose with them is not to prove their existence but, as Rothenberg might argue, to find some of an infinite number of connective threads in order to make a distinct landscape. Do poets become, then, anthologists of their own experience?

Just as in her writing in Jacket2’s commentary, Erica Kaufman explores the work of the poet as teacher, specifically pulling apart the impact that a poet’s creative work can bring to the classroom, I find myself considering what Rothenberg’s anthologists as collage-makers brings to their poetics, and, in turn, what a poet might encounter were they to approach their own work as a project of anthologizing. If Whitman’s plenum of proof is carried in his face, does the poem become a collage of that which he contains? Is the poet necessarily an anthologist? The anthologist a poet?

If We Deaccessioned Stein to Another Sonic Wild: An Open Letter to Patience Hodgson

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June 1st, 2012

Dear Patience,

In October of 2009, I was twenty years old and living with my girlfriend and her four housemates on a street designed for houses with extensive New England backyards. I had fallen in love with the aesthetic of The Grates in June of 2008, on the strength of an interview you had done in 2007 with KEXP in Seattle. Once, that next autumn, we listened to “Carve Your Name” 300 times in a week and her housemates didn’t kill us, which makes them saints.

As I fell in love with The Grates, I found that the aesthetic of a song like “19 20 20” did to the unit of the pop song what Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons did to the possible V formations that words in flocks can learn to take in poems. By this I mean that what you did not only remade what a pop song could be, but reassigned and recontextualized what its guts were, what could be at its heart.

As a writer, I was especially drawn to your intergalactic command of the dimensions of language that created songs with one foot in the literal and one foot in its reinterpretation. Lines like: “my baby’s up yeah he’s stealin’ stars / my baby put all his faith in mars” did the work to make the songs big and wild, vehicles of feelings in the uncatalogued way feelings are, in a manner that felt new to me. When I felt big things, they had a human-size kind of bigness that was often represented in a way that tamed them past recognition. You made songs that let that bigness be big, and you did it by telling it like it is, in all of its non-literal glory, in all of its dimensions of reach.

Throughout the evolution of The Grates, your performance has given each song its own element, in a way that’s continued to evolve with the albums. The evolution of that extra kick is something that critics have loved to write about as a one-dimensional sexual awakening, which does to your work exactly what you’ve been so careful to not do to human experience as its contained in the pop song – it diminishes your craft.

As a student of poetry, which, like your work, is its own kind of bridge between text and sound and visual design, I kept thinking of your songs as the same kind of experiments in prosody as Stein’s Tender Buttons. A line like: “What is the use of a violent kind of delightfulness if there is no pleasure in not getting tired of it,” feels complete, and refuses to settle into one reading the way the network of inputs makes a song like “Two Kinds of Right” endlessly renewable.

I routinely came back to Stein when I thought of you because, like Stein, you just did something else. Your music employs the decision that the components of what a song could be have been misused to the point of divorce from their meaning, and you put together the raw material to make songs that make a big space that functions by means of its own logic – a logic that feels active and complete. This is why the way you’re written about is eternally frustrating – because those writers refuse to go beyond the standard tools of their basic process in the ways you’ve gone beyond your own. Your courage to remake the features used for creative work itself has directed my inquiry as a writer, and as I’ve done my own work, I’ve thought about your music. I’ve been guided by it.

Fast-forward almost three years. I’ve been living in Australia, in Sydney, for the past three months to do some post-grad research. Like a good deal of American expats, I feel like I could make a home here if everyone I love didn’t live in the States. I’m in Australia for another month and a half. In my time here, listening to your music has been a guide in a different way, since I’m on your home turf. I’ve thought more about what you do and why it works, and I’ve thought until I’ve felt ready to do the writing about your music that I’ve always wanted to read.

If you were down, I’d love to come up to Brisbane and conduct an interview, in order to write the review that I’ve spent the past three years waiting to be written by someone else. The review that explores what it is that your music does, and the perfect and specific logic of the songs themselves. Never in my American life will I be closer to Brisbane. Never have I encountered an artist’s work that’s made so much sense, that’s used the space between the literal and the possible to make its own sonic wild in quite this way.

Let me know.

Meanwhile, thanks for doing this work. It makes every difference.

All the best from New South Wales,

Davy Knittle

davy.knittle@gmail.com