·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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Haptic (A): The First 100 Days of President Obama, March 13, 2009
Craig Santos Perez reads from his poetry at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco.

Craig, who I know a bit, delights in mischief. Born on the Pacific Island of Guam, he comes from one of the USA’s furthest colonial possessions. American soldiers and families outnumber indigenous residents.
Yes, the mischief is political and satirical, but not entirely. Unincorporated Territory (Tinfish Press) is his relatively new book. Both the poet and the poems have a way of delivering facts - upsetting facts - in Craig’s disarmingly, elegant manner. We learn, for example, the number of days in a particular week in which it’s impossible to swim in the sewage filled waters around the island’s beaches overlooked by houses built for their omniscient marine views. These are the tropics as infused with the trash of international consumption without much of a whit of attention or care from the mainland owners. This is poetry from an island that may be well called Detritus -except that there are real people with living cultures and poets such as Craig who have emerged to protect, reclaim and further whatever, nature and/or persons who have managed to survive - and maybe take what’s valuable from the presence of ‘these others.’ On that count, and clearly manifested in the book, it is interesting to see the ways that Craig translates the work of Charles Olson into the history (literary, Melville for example, and otherwise) into his take on Guam and the South Pacific. It’s refreshing to see Olson - the much too often now beat up and obscured dog of American writing - get a fresh burst of life and use in this work.
Above all, in these times, it is great to see writing used as a public tool to transform views and histories of spaces here and beyond. This is a quick, ‘darting’ mind that is definitely ‘on the case.’


Haptic (B): The First 100 Days of President Obama, March 13, 2009
Stacy Szymaszek reads from her prose and poetry at Small Press Traffic, San Francisco.

Stacy (as I know her) gives a great rendering of the figure of Hart Crane - the way she is enthralled by his red hair and striped French sailor shirts. Growing up she is mid-western and sexually opaque. The initial image of Hart Crane - in the surprise discovery of a small town library - is an invocation for the exploration of her own queerness - the criminal character of the yet to be explored interior self. The revelation of the center part of her reading is an extended unfolding of the discovery and process of bringing the hidden self out a darkness into an illumination. When I look at the haptic, it seems to suggest that. The dark, circular rhythyms of applying the ink propel the circle of the open, luminous space. At least, that’s my guess (and I don’t want to prejudice other kinds of readings.) Then the reading unfolds into an exploration, witness and acceptance of New York as her ’spatial home’. Ironically the fresh work does not seem sexually themed or explicit - it seems more a tender opening to the world and the City history as it opens up before her on a daily level. Yes, there is an erotic character implicit is such caring attention. I come away from the reading with a sense that ‘the things’ of her work, multifarious as they can be, have begun to really fly.

She was reading from the chapbook: Orizaba: A Voyage With Hart Crane (faux Publishers),