THE AMERICAN SECURITY AGAINST FOREIGN ENEMIES ACT
What most displaces you.
Have you visited
Somalia. Have you ever crossed a border
In a boat, by night, to another land.
Sir, in all how many died.
Is your wife considered meek.
Point to Mecca from right here.
Why is our court Supreme.
What does “The Sound and the Fury”
Mean to you. Who was Huckleberry Finn.
Has your husband ever travelled to Afghanistan.
In Sharia, when a woman’s hair is loose,
Is she a prostitute or slave. Do you understand what “Red State” means.
Do you speak American. Here,
Read that aloud.
Our story isn’t a file of photographs
faces laughing under green leaves
or snowlit doorways, on the verge of driving
away, our story is not about women
victoriously perched on the one
sunny day of the conference,
nor lovers displaying love:
Our story is of moments when even slow motion moved too fast
for the shutter of the camera:
words that blew our lives apart, like so,
eyes that cut and caught each other,
mime of the operating room
where gas and knives quote each other
moments before the telephone
starts ringing: our story is
how still we stood,
how fast.
-Adrienne Rich
“FORGET that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself.” -Mina Loy, Aphorisms on Futurism.
“Since you are no stranger, no guest, On our earth one does not earth a second,– one births oneself like a ring and the rings link like chains together.” - Abraham Suztkever, To My Child.
“I hate in New York when visitors lure me to some tall building and expect me to know where things are. What’s that bridge. I don’t know. I know the world from the inside (alone), and outside it’s pretty much some idea of the feeling I’m in: political events, a poem, or my beliefs about this time.” -Eileen Myles
“People are lonely places, you said.
I often go days without touching anything.” -Austen Rosenfeld
I have an essay up at Hyperallergic about performance and video art that curls up with literature: The Intimate Art of Active Reading
The artist in the photo is Anya Liftig, one of my favorite Brooklyn performance artists. I’ve been wanting to write about her work for a few years now. I saw her perform in February, and then saw Lisa Tan’s work at the New Museum soon after. In between I was telling my writing students to put their laptops away. I first heard Elfriede Jelinek’s nobel prize speech years ago, and thought that she might be talking about performance art when she asked, “Is writing the gift of curling up?”
I have a new essay up on Lit Hub about the origins of Catherine Lacey’s Nobody is Ever Missing cover: What Should a Book Cover Do?
I was thinking about text as a way to assist in the savoring of an image, “savoring” being a word I heard Roni Horn use years ago when talking about the text in her paintings. A good cover doesn’t tell a reader how to see something, but extends the content into the tangible world.
“I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often those patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.”
Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland
Ode to Every Thing from John Bresland on Vimeo.
“Something I can’t say without drinking.” -Biana Stone
I have a short essay up at The Marina Abramovic Institute’s new literary platform IMMATERIAL. It’s about family folk lore and flirting with art.
Sophie Calle, Raquel, Monique
What’s underlined most heavily in this exhibit, what for me is more distinctly framed than even the exhibit itself, (for the art is in a church instead of museum, further blurring borders that designate it as art at all) is one word: Souci. Worry. It’s written on the wall outlined in butterflies and it a glows in a white silhouette in the center of the pulpit. The mother said, Don’t worry. The last word lingers. The daughter is an artist so she hangs it on a wall, puts it on display. I understand the impulse to worship it.