·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

A current challenge is to look for signs (text, image, etc.) that work as collective epiphanies of life in this City, if not across the nation, globe, etc. That is to explore the ways in which individual and collective psyche emerge in an identifiable configuration. The process is probably most taken from some combination of Jersey Grotowski’s, Towards a Poor Theatre, and the principles of Arte Povera. The brief sum of which is to work the streets and - not ruling out the complex - to find texts and images within simple and/or found materials. The additional task is not to belabor a critical definition of any discovery. In fact, the primary impulse is to use eyes and ears - or any of the other senses - reveal what makes for awe. I don’t mean awe in a shallow, romantic sense. But to find those situations in which the senses are penetrated in such a way as to make you stop in your own tracks, either for a second or an enduring space of time.

Sometimes I remain awestruck without any understanding why at all. The image below - at a construction site across from the park at the corner of 19th and Dolores - has nailed my attention for several days.

On a simple level the artist may be making some statement about the sad psychic consquences of getting screwed up on drugs. “1906″ implies that such an experiences it equivalent to the devastation wrought by the San Francisco earthquake(the original fires of which destroyed everything in this very same neighborhood) . Yet, on another level, the image penetrates beyond such a reductive simplicity. The obdurate, tear-filled character of his fright (his terror) appears more as a global agent of collective terror about to be overtaken by uncontrollable forces, ones that operate without any sign of compassion or redemption. It’s a universe without sympathy.
Whether it’s a collective prophesy of the global condition, or a condition that is one among many that is always present, I do not know. For whatever reason, I find the face remains a compelling image, incredibly raw and uncomfortably resonant.

Is context everything? No. One lives - or has the opportunity - between zoom and focus, between the microcosm of the particular and the multiple approach of the the broad. Mythology, legend, narrative - no matter how conventional or avant are drawn (created) from the inherrent juxtapositions or coherrences of the picture.

Additionally we find the rescue angel and hero surrounded in previous and consecutive panels with language, the particulars of an alphabet, each of the carefully constructed letters pronouced with strength and authority.

Isn’t it curious - now that we witness the death of the well made book, particularly with the desecration of typography, design, good printing and paper - that we who remain believers in The Letter - go to the streets and contemporary grafitti to feed our habit, our vocation??

(Comment box cannot be opened - spam, spam - but my email address is in top sidebar. I can reproduce your comments on this site).

I (Stephen Vincent) and George Albon will be reading tomorrow evening in San Francisco at Books & Bookshelves at 7:30.
Books & Bookshelves - David Highsmith, proprietor. is located in the Castro at 99 Sanchez St (at 14th).

It will be nice to see you there. If it is thirst and poetry that drives you,
Management advises to BYOB.

Fuller webby details, go to:
http://booksandbookshelves.blogspot.com/

Undercover of night, they first appear - The Bicycle Ghosts - as this one, last night, on Cumberland off Dolores. Gas prices go up, and the dark bike-horse ghost appears, an eternal, rolling punctuation mark here among notices of GRACE and CHEAR.

The public imagination - plundered by ghosts - is suddently sundered with messages in which fossil fuel poisons the present, past and future. Or, simply put, cars = danger, engines = danger, exhaust = danger.
The earth is dying. The earth is dying. Lay down your dumb weapons. Or,
Rise, bicycle, rise.

& yet, as for a long while they must, cars will sit neither silent nor benign. Yet, we welcome explosion of messages across immobile wheels. Or, unless you are in a Hell-Bent greedy, collective, self-destructive rush: Alter reality or die.

A few weeks ago, I phoned my mother for a little conversation. Frankly, I keep thinking she is about go over to the other side. Typically, as I often do, I ask,
“How are you feeling, Mom?”

“Oh, it’s been wild around here.” She almost seems giggly.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“No, I don’t think that will be for the benefit of either of us.”

I remain unsure of the source of my mother’s sense of authority. Or, if she is just covering up for not having the words that can describe, say, the dream from which she has woken.

Othertimes, even when makes a paraphrase, she can be relatively precise.Before reading her Marriane Moore’s poem, The Steeplejack, I ask her if she can describe what such a person does?

“Yes, he’s up there doing his thing.” She tosses that one out, as if she has a ready image of a man hanging on to the side of a pitched roof. I suspect there were many more such men up the sides of chimneys when she was young.

Yet, there is her theme of a constant loss over which she has absolutely no control, at best, an angry sorrow. I read her Marianne Moore’s poem, Dahlia, and ask for its meaning.

“I used to know what it is all about. But I don’t anymore.” She brushes away the question.

Maybe we are hearing the voice of a once generation quite insistent in its desire to learn and authoritatively comprehend the way things work. Pehaps. Or maybe it’s just one of the illusions carried by the leaders of any generation.

In the midst of my mother’s recurrent depression, I ask, “Mom, do you know what I mean when I suggest it is good to practice radiance.” I often suggest to her that if she beomes radiant, she will make us happy, as well as her own self. And who know what happens on the other side. “If you arrive radiant,” I suggest, “Folks will be happy to receive you.”

She does not answer.

“Mom, what does it mean to be radiant?”

“To come out and be yourself.” Such a simple, straight ahead answer. It gives me a quick flash memory of times when her faced glowed. It was usually after she and her friends had showed thier stuff and won a political battle against one conservative interest or another.

Sadly, I suspect she has given up hope on any such dignified concept of ’self.’

Often I put a vase of beautiful roses or dahlias in front of her on the kitchen table.
The flowers make her face brighten with delight, an immediate sense of pleasure, one that is quite contrary to her depression.

Gosh, I wonder, whatever number of years from now, what will I think if my son and daughter begin to imitate ask me all these, maybe, silly sounding questions.
Minimally, I will enjoy my children’s patience and company. Additionally, I hope my use of language is just as appreciated, interesting and remembered!

Episode I As my mother goes breathing

As remains my calling (!), I continue to spell my brother, David, to take care of my 92 year old mother on Friday or Saturday evenings. He is a longtime Board Member of the Masquer’s Theater in Point Richmond. As pictured above, after dinner, he dawns a flashy shirt and tie and goes off to sell raffle tickets to the folks in line before the play begins. When we finish our dinner of Swedish meatballs, my mom and I continue sitting at the kitchen table. Without the sound on, I keep an eye on the television and the Celtics/Pistons play-off game. (During the College and NBA play-offs I become a basketball fanatic. On the table, however, I have a big thick copy of Marianne Moore’s Collected Poems. As most always, unless the poems are too sad, my mother welcomes the opportunity to hear me read aloud. Last week, I read Moore’s poem, The Steeple-Jack, much to her pleasure. It is also favorite Moore poem of mine. I remember when I first read the poem in 1960. It was in a small paperback anthology that I took to Paris for my junior year at the Sorbonne. It was a cloudy, almost rainy day and I was standing still on the sidewalk in a line of students waiting to get into the University restaurant for lunch. A perfect weather for the gray, seaside New England village pictured in the poem:

Durrer would have seen a reason for living
           in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at: with sweet sea air coming into your house
in a fine day, from water etched
        with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish. 

Much talk and authority goes to DNA these days. Curious it’s power to shape lives - or trace the shape of a life as evidence of presence, particularly a criminal one. Yet, DNA is not at all visible to the naked eye.

I don’t have anything against mystery, as such, indeed, karma attribution aside, things are mysterious enough, and that provides excitment. Like, I understand, the New York Police routinely refer to homeless people as skels as if they are actually skeletons, a species that is already doomed!
I find the fact of the cop’s expression as both sad and mysterious. Certainly not my favorite kind of mystery.

Today I like the mystery of association. The way I can see my mouth, maybe even my face, reflected in the face of my first grandchild. The way the genetic spiral keeps circling about itself, that double-helix in the DNA manifesting as visible flesh veiled over blood and bone! Grandfather and son as ships meeting, touching lightly and passing in the proverbial night.

It’s July 4 - Independence Day - & it seems important to get out of the way from the omnipresent, much too familiar Red, White & Blue. Not to be counterpatriotic, but even that if you want. I just think it’s important to liberate other colors, such as apricot and/or peach, whatever may be their multiple variations. That is, liberate oneself to look elsewhere, and, simultaneously, witness the way other colors have no problem declaring a presence, such as this rose on Church Street:

Without much manipulation, it appears quite willing to make him/herself known, gently chubbing its body - its open, pale peach petals - over the black iron fence staves and rail.
A rose is a rose, and all that, Gertrude! Beyond, or into the object (the rose), I suggest, maybe the most important issue is the way one stops, looks intimately, then says Hello there, Rose, or whatever comfortably passes, as such.
Perhaps, it is a Rose by another name. As, no doubt here among us, lovingly and/or despairingly, there are many who call a country by so many other colors, so many other names.

This is a much belated Haptic response to the Saturday afternoon (May 30 - 31) part of a Conference that I never quite got ‘my arms around’ - tho it gathered together many interesting poets - both as speakers and audience. At its core, its subject was the violence or sense of violation - that poets and (poetry) communities can visit upon each other (in person, publications and/or blogs ). Definitely is a good quesiton to address. I suspect the meta-question is whether or not it’s possible any poet(s), and/or new aesthetic proposition (such as say Language Poetry ‘back then’) can assert and position itself without doing personal and/or collective damage?

It was more of a protective dancing around the “larger” edges. (I suspect also that people attending wanted to keep the spirit of things ‘positive.’) I do not know whether the creators of the Conference, which included poets Chris Chen. Cynthia Sailers and Stephanie Young, will decide to re-ignite another gathering to keep ‘the probe’ on, to continue to make the discussion more transparent, more protective. The need to face (unmask) the mix of gender, ethnic and aesthetic issues (& let’s not forget ‘class’), however, is undoubtedly at the core of much fire in the culture at large (and have been for a long time). How to organize and moderate a forum which does not go up in smoke or silence is inevitably a brave challenge.

Maybe it was the distancing from the subject - and not being able to get a full handle on it - that made my own mind blur. Instead of listening for content (tho some of it was moving and wonderfully articulate, indeed ‘unmasking’) I found myself moved to make the haptics now set within these paragraphs. In effect I was more taken by letting my pen (Faber-Castelli, India Ink Brush) follow the voices - that is to follow a line or a shape of argument; to register tension, anger, humor, sometimes pleasure. In spite or on account to Conference’s title, I did not sense the expression of much overt aggression or violent sentiment (not that that was the objective).

Sometimes I was astonished by the way different poets - while reading from their papers - would structure their sentences, or delve back and forth across an idea while pursuing an answer to a question, a kind of thinking out loud. It was interesting, for example, to let the pen follow Rob Halpern’s talk/argument in which he presented the editorial challenges of gender, Lang Po, New Narrative, et al, faced by the late Steve Abbot in a late 80’s San Francisco magazine called Soup. Rob’s manner of presentation was to argue through multiple propositions, then construct and test temporarary resolutions for each, all while almost impossibly putting the entirety into one extended sentence.

Rob’s charge with the language was, perhaps, similar to the proverbial cowboy putting multiple lasso loops around the head and belly of a steer that refuses to lie down with one throw of the rope! Whether Rob finally quelled his subject is probably beside the point - he certainly knows how to passionately raise the details of an issue, as well as keep the haptic pen moving without stop, except for the circling of a loop/a knot - the temporary resolve - before launching into the next proposition.
The Haptics here may give, at least, a mirroring sense of the twists and turns, as well as luminous moments, continuously woven, as they were, among many voices during the Saturday afternoon part of the Conference. Indeed, I was registering more than voice, but the tensions, currents, rises and falls - variously vibrating as both rhythms and melodies among the audience(s) with whom my pen was joined for the aftenoon. Wonderful stuff, actually!

Follow-up notes by the organizers & others can be found here:
href=”http://sptagrression.blogspot.com/”

All “Haptics” copyright, Stephen Vincent