bombay gin

Kristen Park at Naropa’s lit mag, Bombay Gin, wrote a lovely question-filled review of Sleight.  I have always wanted to visit Colorado.

click on mag for the current contents

And this volume has some beautiful work too–Bhanu Kapil, Vanessa Place, Ana Bozicevic, Ronaldo Wilson, Dodie Bellamy, Lily Hoang.  A wonderful v-day.

julia

Between my degree at Iowa and my entry into the PhD program at Temple University, a decade intervened. During those ten years, I married, earned an MFA in poetry at Syracuse University, a PhD in fiction from the University of Georgia, and published my first book of poetry, Unfathoms. Circumstance, compromise, and various choices placed me for three of those years in a suburban cul-de-sac halfway between Athens and Atlanta with two and then three small children. I was not dancing, and that tangible absence in my life was not a good thing.

Meanwhile, I watched my brother Alex move from David Parson’s Dance Company to Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas before incurring a career-ending back injury. My sister Taryn was also translated: she moved from the Joffrey Ballet of Chicago to Hubbard Street Dance Company before becoming the director of HSDC’s second company. My younger brother Misha worked with several postmodern companies in Chicago and Seattle as dancer and composer before beginning training as a yoga instructor. Talking with these artists—my siblings—it occurred to me that a singular unswerving path through the world of dance was not a commonality; at the very least, there were other models. Perhaps one of those alternate routes involved returning to dance with tools developed elsewhere. I could hope.

During my PhD in English, one of my three areas of concentration was literary theory. I was drawn to texts that addressed poetry’s attempts to transcend its own materiality: how words were used to get to something beyond words. All art might be described as engaging in a similar project, but I realized that my chosen fields—poetry and dance—in transcending their own materiality somehow also transcended the self. Language and the body are materials inseparable from identity. I began to look for literature and theory that reflected on a particular artistic goal, that of moving beyond the personhood of the artist.

One theorist, in particular, stood out: Julia Kristeva. Her writing resonated with me because her psychoanalytical background detailed how experiences can shape identity, because she wrote about how writing and language cannot be divorced from the body, because she spoke of motherhood/daughterhood as undertheorized and generative realms, and because she acknowledged the history of gender without insisting on gendered attributes as essential characteristics of the artist; in fact, the majority of her examples of feminine écriture were drawn from literature written by men. She also wrote about depression and melancholy in exhaustive detail, and not primarily as mental diseases, but as fertile states for art production and the search for meaning. In her later life, she has written philosophical novels and been accused of dilettantism. I connected to her writing on many levels.

As I studied theory, I was simultaneously drafting my creative dissertation—a novel about a performance art form that does not exist. The characters were based loosely on my siblings and their relationships to dance and with one other. I was beginning to focus on describing the indescribable—somehow making dance live on (or just above) the page. Another theorist I was reading at the time, Theodor Adorno, describes the art effect I was attempting to capture in my work:

In each genuine artwork something appears that does not exist. It is not dreamt up out of disparate elements of the existing. Out of these elements artworks arrange constellations that become ciphers, without, however, like fantasies, setting up the enciphered before the eyes as something immediately existing.

Without going into the problematics of this quote (how can one know what a genuine art work is?), reflecting on it and passages like it forced me to articulate my own reason for studying art—to talk about what is never quite there. I have never been interested in simply recording observable phenomena on the page or stage, although that is a necessary aspect of what I do want to do. My fascination lies in what art points to—its potential sources and meanings… its beyond.

Specifically, I want to discuss artistic implications that are impossible to simply paraphrase: the unsayable and often painful experiences that both necessitate and are made manifest in some works of art. I want to talk about how an artwork made from the stuff of the self (language and/or body) reveals and communicates its elusive meanings to its audiences, its performers, even its creator. I want to witness the transformation of artistic urgency into an artistic product capable of moving others. Julia Kristeva references, in the very last sentence of her book Powers of Horror, the moment when keen suffering becomes art: “the sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us.” I want my writing to dwell on and in this overwhelming.

pina

Inspired by my brother’s and my sister’s early successes in dance, after receiving my literature degree I moved to New York. I was on scholarship at Alvin Ailey. I took additional classes at Paul Taylor and Ballet East, telemarketed for the Fred Astaire ballroom studios, paralegalled and auditioned. I saw performances: David Parsons, Momix, Ailey, Joffrey, the newly formed Complexions, Paul Taylor, etc. In January of 1995, Pina Bausch came to BAM and performed “Two Cigarettes in the Dark.” I felt inadequate. Although I’d always been less interested in performing than in choreography, I knew that most who achieved success in the latter began with a career in the former. In March of ‘95, I folded my between-xmas-and-New-Year’s overtime from a midtown law firm into an Air Pakistan flight to Paris to visit my aunt and clear my head.

The month-long trip changed me. I decided I couldn’t stay in New York; Manhattan made me tired in a way that kept me from loving what I loved. I applied for my MFA in dance and in the fall of 1996 I moved to Iowa City. There, in class I watched a video of Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring projected large. This time I wasn’t wounded by the virtuousity of her dancers. Her use of their talents was instead a revelation.

I no longer saw technique as a personal obstacle; it was simply a prerequisite for a certain type of vision. Here was unabashed emotion. Here was absolute commitment to movement and a desire to say something. I felt the desire, the need; I cared less about its exact translation. I learned later that my response Bausch’s work was not the only possible response. Some of my friends saw her work as over-the-top, her theatricality as excessive and “speak-y” yet narratively opaque–a combination they were uncomfortable with–and the impact of her movement too reliant on the training of her dancers. This last was voiced as a crime. I began for the first time to think about dance-writing, about defending my choreographic ideas, and about describing what initially felt indescribable. Oh, and I was taking poetry classes on the sly.

For the first time I began to seriously consider combining my two worlds. I dipped my foot first into the creative side of things: my master’s thesis for my MFA in choreography at the University of Iowa was a text-based, highly theatrical piece called “How Words End.”

None of the words were my own.

virginia

My senior seminar paper at Yale was written on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Woolf’s slender book was a response: asked to deliver a lecture on “women and fiction,” she records her initial stalling. She has a difficult time settling on one interpretation of the task:

The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like; or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them; or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. (3)

The last suggestion, the most difficult, the most tangential and contorted one is the one she chooses. It was as an undergrad that I first heard the term écriture feminine (feminine writing), a term coined by Hélène Cixous in her 1975 essay “Laughing with Medusa.” Feminine writing promotes the idea that gender is inscribed in the structure of language. Woolf, who seeks a non-traditional approach to her subject matter, who “should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer—to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantel-piece forever,” by resisting this duty, engages in écriture feminine; her essay becomes a political act against a reductive and singular conception of knowledge production.

Virginia Woolf’s writing dances. It does not walk quickly and quietly to its place in line: it loops, sparks, and waltzes—linking its electric excesses back into itself. By refusing to be tidy, by incorporating imaginary figures and histories alongside autobiographical musings and meditations, her 114-page tome references volumes and volumes of women’s writing that had not been written, that had yet to be written, that should yet be written. Woolf’s project appealed to my long-established contrary nature, but also showed me what a blending of forms was capable of accomplishing. Part didactic lecture, part revisionist history, part herstory of Shakespeare’s fictive sister: A Room of One’s Own began to convince me that the act of collage was a legitimate and instructive way to approach both the attainment and the dissemination of knowledge.

jane

I realized as an undergraduate that I had an awful memory. Or an odd one. My clearest childhood experiences happened in two places: 1) Inside books–the heavy curtains and windowseat where a young Jane Eyre read were in my mind more definitely drawn than the sequestered nooks where I escaped a houseful of siblings. 2) At dance–I took a thousand ballet barres, struggling with a form unsuited to my form, endlessly and alternately picking myself apart and finding myself in movement: all between sunsets in a long mirrored studio whose wall of windows faced west.

Art-making and art-experiencing were the methods through which I forged my core, my understanding of the world. But knowing this did not immediately lead to the related epiphany: that my books and my body were connected. How could they be? I accepted the common wisdom that dance and writing were entirely separate spheres of action, that my two chosen loves would never meet (wouldn’t they fight over me?). I felt the same way about artistic creation and scholarship; drawn to both, I was convinced that an invisible barrier kept one from the other. My traditional English background, deeply steeped in Bloom’s Western Canon, suggested that crossover projects that melded academic with creative writing made for muddled, watered-down versions of both.

But these tacit prohibitions—between dance and writing, between academia and art-making—they never sat well with me.  I kept staring out my windows wondering if there was another way to look at things. I was always a bit contrary, hard-headed, devoted.  I blame it on Miss Eyre.

newyear

what is it? a midwinter mulligan. that doesn’t feel true. a chance. a roll. a luckshot through the worst of it into some other side. where light begins to last rather than diminish. 2012 is another one, to be sure. let me not squander. anything.

on naming

H. L. Hix asked me a question about A Beautiful Name for a Girl on his blog site In Quire.  I enjoyed answering.  Here’s a little excerpt:

I love names: the singularity, the known-ness of being named.  But it is also a terrible thing—to be named.  One thing is not another; we insist on it, I think.  So names are prisons.  My reason for writing many of the poems in this book is to insist that one can be one thing and also be another.  To show how these prison cells are membranous—possible to pass through.  As in birth.  As in death.  As in coming home from work, or being needed, or the timetravel of a long train ride.  We are capable of being other.

post xmas

Strange season, this past one.  We colored yesterday and I napped some (odd for me).  Took a walk down through the unbustle of xmas day on Main Street.  Semi-surreal 4:30 sunset.  Some people eating at Green Leaf.  The boys played much Magic with Danny.  The stuffing was good.  The beat and spinach salad–better.  Kind of wishing it would snow.  Kind-of wishing is the feeling of the day. Koen’s and my handiwork below.

Oh… and a voracious reader wrote about Sleight on xmas.

…it’s about bodies and space and discipline. It’s about more than that, too: ambition and motivation and desire, and art’s relation to its subject matter and its audience, and family, and connections between people. It’s sometimes almost-frustratingly abstract, not-entirely-articulated; it’s got touches of magic that never get explained away, or explained at all. But mostly it’s delicious and engrossing, and the kind of book I don’t want to say too much about.

Windowing

–P&W posted a paragraph I wrote on my recent/longterm obsession with windows.  Below are two pics of the window I look out most days as I am writing.  My kitchen/diningroom view.

Winter has its perks.  Egg nog and leaflessness.  Naked sunsets.

sleight, hold the sleight

This one from Amelia Atlas (what a fantastic name!) at the Barnes & Noble site.  Call me odd, but I’m tickled that anyone not drawn to impossible worlds finds as much to like about mine as she does.

Cut away from sleight itself, the novel is a moving portrait of mental illness, of sibling love and rivalry, and above all, of the destructive power of great art over its performers. It’s a shame that we can’t see what Lark and Clef create; we can only make out their scars.

Again–I may be strange, I know I am, but retracing a world from scars sounds to me like a gorgeous project.  I really enjoyed reading this review.