A photo by Tabea Huth of an urban beach boardwalk development with a mural of a pink tree.

Una foto de Tabea Huth de un malecón urbano y playero con un mural de un árbol color rosa.


A poem by Lester Robles O'Connor in response to the photo.

Un poema de Lester Robles O'Connor como respuesta a la foto.


A translation into Spanish by John Pluecker of the poem.

Una traducción al español por John Pluecker del poema.



Where does originality begin? / ¿Dónde empieza la originalidad?


Les invito a una presentación de un librito nuevo, Undone, que se publica como parte del Kollektivo Dusie 2011. El libro reúne fotos y textos que produje como parte de un proyecto-El catálogo de sentimientos-que hice en el 2008. (Sillas que se caen y pantalones que se desgarran y lluvia emotiva.)

También leeré textos más recientes que he escrito en los últimos dos años en Tijuana como parte de la maestría que hice en la UC San Diego. (Hombrecitos que caminan de la mano y ríos que crean espacios y juegos peligrosos con el género.)

Proyectaré imágenes de los dos proyectos durante la lectura. Los textos vienen siendo en español e inglés con unos toques de francés y karankawa.

Espero verlos allí.

+++

Please come out to a reading of texts from a new chapbook, Undone, which is being published as part of the Dusie Kollektiv 2011. The book includes photos and texts from a project-the Catalogue of Feeling-I did in 2008. (Chairs that tumble over and ripping pants and emotional rain.)

I'll also be reading more recent texts I've written in the last two years in Tijuana as part of the MFA I did at UC San Diego. (Little men walking hand in hand and rivers that make spaces and dangerous gender-play.)

I'll be projecting images from both projects during the reading. The texts have ended up being in Spanish and English with some occasional flourishes in French and Karankawa.

I hope you can make it.



I lived without you for two years,
but I'm not better without you. I
don't want to be. I don't.


- Dahlia Molloy,
a.k.a. Cherien Rich
played by Minnie Driver




The Detail Collector puts it well:

in the wake of all-day coming-alive returning-to-self laughter
what i presumed to be mostly dead
turns out
is thriving
on the other side of the border

Amen.

Cerebral + Sexy!


Cerebral in San Diego:

NEW WRITING SERIES PRESENTS
UCSD DEPARTMENT OF LITERATURE MFA GRADUATING CLASS OF 2011:

COURTNEY KILIAN, JOHN PLUECKER, and KAITLIN SOLIMINE
Three Readings

Wednesday, May 18, 2011
4:30 - 6:00 p.m.
Visual Arts Facility, Performance Space

Free and open to the public

+

...y sexy en Tijuana:


¿O será al revés? Or is it the other way around?

¡Vengan! Come!

Porque hay que partir de un principio
esencial, que el mundo en que vivimos es
inventado. No creo que el arte revele la
realidad, al contrario, la inventa, porque la
realidad es intraducible.

- Ferreira Gullar

Every queer kid should have a queer mom.





I remember wandering through a community garden full of flowers, then sitting on a bucket. A community garden. Brushing up against mint and breathing it deep. For the first time it seemed. Or were we sitting on a little bench in the middle of the riotous greens, a place to sit and wait for the feelings to come. Someone to sit me down and listen, to help me to make sense of an increasingly complicated world, growing more and and more tiny and suffocating by the minute. Stuck in the spirals in my own brain, dealing with this different me poking his/her head out.


Suddenly, an older lesbian had invited me to her garden, to walk around, to dig in the dirt, to plant some vegetables and flowers. I still don't really know what exactly was happening to me at that time. (My memories are difficult to access and confused in the best of times, but with the added thickness of trauma, I have little sense of what happened in reality or if reality stopped existing for a while. I think a gap grew between that thing called reality and my brain.)


This woman walked me through the garden and showed me the roses (this is a rose), the peonies (this is a peony), the tulips (this is a tulip), the tiny spring buds (this is a bud). I had forgotten the sky was so large and so blue. I had forgotten the wind was blowing through the trees, that somewhere thousands of feet above the earth cumulus clouds were rearranging and rain was forming to nourish these plants.


For the first time, on that bucket in that garden, crying out of my eyes and nose and mouth, I received the gift of queer intimacy, of queer support and queer love. An elder stepped into the void in my world and the void in my sense of self and community. An elder named what was happening to me. A person gave names to my fears, my worries, my tears and my struggles. A woman helped me to recognize my own softness, my own woundedness and to help me put myself back together again. No, not back together again, she helped me to be all my pieces, beautiful and broken and solid and mushy and green, for the very first time.


This patient lesbian
called a punch a punch.
A rose a rose. A death
threat a death threat.
A blade of grass a blade
of grass. Homelessness
homelessness. Mulch
mulch. Abuse abuse.


Suddenly, I wasn't the insane one or at least the only insane one. Maybe we were all crazy in this fucked up world. And maybe that was okay. But for once, I wasn't the person at fault, the guilty party, the one to blame. She wouldn't let me blame myself anymore for what was happening to me.


For once, I burrowed my hands in the earth, got dirty, allowed myself to breathe again, to forgive myself, to be queer for myself and for her, most deeply, for her, for an us that I was experiencing for the first, earth-shaking time.


I wish every queer kid could have a queer mother to guide him, shelter her, lead xer through the weeds (this is a weed) and the lavender (this is lavender), through the rosemary (this is rosemary) and the irisis (this is an iris). To name the things as they are. To point out the beauty in broken things. To imagine how we might live without being fixed.


Happy Mother's Day, Linda (this is Linda).


Feminism: Transmissions and Retransmissions

The first book-length translation of the work of Mexican feminist activist and social critic Marta Lamas is now out. Translated by your truly.

The book is the first in a series called Theory in the World edited by Gayatri Spivak and Hosam Aboul-Ela, dedicated to translating, publishing and disseminating theory from the Global South. As the info page about the series states:

Despite the flurry of interest in translation studies, markedly less emphasis has been placed on the process of translating theoretical texts, especially those originating outside of Europe and the U.S. This series breaks new ground by translating book-length theoretical works and taking up the issue of the doubly marginalized text. Theory in the World asks a scandalous question: is “theory” different when produced in the postcolonial world? Has globalization changed the picture? Has localization, touching on transnational gender roles, embodiment, non-Western poetics, reading practice, and canon-formation survived? Finally, it asks how the classical questions of translation studies become altered in this previously ignored geopolitical context and looks at the ways literature and the pedagogy of the humanities take account of these alterations.

Exciting!

A veces :


: la celebración enmascara la corrupción mejor que la denigración :


: y la decadencia llega a ser otra manera de facilitar la impunidad.




If you're around UC San Diego this
Thursday, May 5, 2011
7:00 - 9:00 p.m.
Literature Building, Room 155 (de Certeau)
Followed by a Reception in Room 138 (Lettau)

More info here.

A Report from the Front

In this case the front is last night's So Much I Want to Say: An Evening of Performances with Future Plan and Program Authors curated by Steffani Jemison at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. Future Plan and Program is a publishing project featuring book-length literary works by visual artists of color. Shockingly strong work. In this case these are words appropriated from said performances as a means of reviewing, participating, collecting, archiving, remembering, saying. Appropriation makes exchange out of property, maybe. In the best of cases. In the worst of cases, the property is just taken, stolen, removed.

(As an extension of that point, I feel a bit strange, uncomfortable posting these copied notes from the performances. I am guessing most of the artists have Google Alarms on your names and will stumble on this eventually. I copied down words from each of your pieces during the performances. In the process of copying, I surely made mistakes and desired those mistakes and I definitely added some new words and made different pieces than the ones you performed. I see this as a way of being in dialogue, exchange. It is a process based on taking though, so knowing taking has a history, all feedback is welcome and will be responded to.)


1.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Writers's block. The circumvolutions of stopped minds. You get the idea.


2.

All the dead voices
make noise like feathers.
If you can't transcend, you might as well descend.You can start from anything.
The silence clamors in my ears.
Let's confront each other.
Impossible.
What if we gave thanks for our mercies.
Where did all the corpses come from?
These skeletons?
Words fail. Is that not so that even words fail at times?
I am not a historian.
We embraced.We were happy.
Let's just keep going. The things you put into your head are there forever.
However much we resist, we're barely contained.


3.



(I/this feeling of awkward/us)


4.

Don't worry about what others are doing. We are all doing the same thing in a different sequence.


5.

Spiritual warrior or one who is warlike. This is not a real name. To become a freer name in the process. On the other hand, a title explains. We've reached a point where the images aren't enough⎯a title appears. The typeface is feminine⎯strong and confident in the middle of the frame.

(We have no way of getting to things anymore.)

In case you ever find yourself asking what the right thing is.

(Different is MLK without his voice. When his words become a title.)

Malcolm X thinks there are plenty of good people in America. Consider the today of the past. He is no longer a boy leaving the hood. The writing on the wall. They're not representative⎯they're instructive. I suggest giving up. Make yourself vulnerable. Be moved by the spirit of the show. Open yourself up to the opportunity of being used.


6.

that looks like me
1959
in the middle who
plugs
down
locked up line.
my siblings.
a baby a desert a wizard to
fit in the weather
he was raped.

(Pay attention to the tap dance. Or don't. Slideshows are the epitome of boringness.)

a common reaction that you have to do
you stamp your feet
this is cutthroat
i tell him "pancreatic ducts"
the tap dance,
more steps.

blue bonnets and a black man in a blonde wig.
until you're tired.
of the tap dance.

(Play with boringness.)

Out of the David Bowie the den.


Sources

1. From the performance of Two Poems By Michael "Truth" Graham & Khorey "Greatness" Smith
2. From the performance of Better then Than When Life Was Babble? By Harold Mende
(Acted by Autumn Knight and Michael Kahlil Taylor)
3. From the performance of The Discussant By Jina Valentine
4. From the performance of So Much I Want To Say By Ayanna Jolivet McCloud
5. From the performance of The Didactic Possibilities of Film Titles By Martine Syms
6. From the performance of Adventures in Babysitting By Jibade-Khalil Huffman

The tragedy, proclaimed, as they made their way up the crescent of the drive, no less by the gaping potholes in it than by the tall exotic plants, livid and crepuscular through his dark glasses, perishing on every hand of unnecessary thirst, staggering, it almost appeared, against one another, yet struggling like dying voluptuaries in a vision to maintain some final attitude of potency, or of a collective desolate fecundity, the Consul thought distantly, seemed to be reviewed and interpreted by a person walking at his side suffering for him and saying: "Regard: see how strange, how sad, familiar things may be. Touch this tree, once your friend: alas, that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange!

- Reading Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry on a plane to Houston while tuning out the aggressive conversations of two men in the window and aisle seats fighting over the model sitting in the middle, while perched on a curb at the corner of Taft and Clay, while leaning back in a car with the windows down under a Montrose oak, watching a bird struggling to pick up a twig twice its size and fly off to somewhere safer than the middle of the street. Touch this tree! Alas that that which you have known in the blood should ever seem so strange!

Thankfully, Jen Hofer is writing on the Internet. Quite a bit. Which from what I can tell did not really happen previously so much. Or at least not in as a direct blog-like format. So you can read her marvels at FuturePoem as she discurses on Alan Gilbert's new book Late in the Antenna Fields and declares a set of instructions for suggested art work:

5. Instructions: Narrative tucks information in.

Arrange the books on the shelf according to gradations of color.

Every day for at least seven days, make a poem, paragraph, painting, performance, sculpture, stitched piece, instruction piece, or dessert, taking inspiration from a suite of three books from the same color-field.

Send documentation of the results to chris@futurepoem.com.

Or, respected reader, you can think her thoughts with her at jacket2. A blog of sorts. A journal of trans positions: in transit: in transition: in translation: in motion: in the between:

I can't think about or through poetic language outside the context of the denial of human rights and the silencing of dissent -- in fact, I'm not sure I can think of anything outside that context. And yet what captivates me in the video of the march demanding the return of Carlos René Román Salazar alive is less the language of the demands (though that too is compelling) and more the edges of the buildings against the sky, the backdrop of mountains, the expressions on the faces of people unaware they are being captured on video, the uneven rhythm of many bodies moving not in unison, the kids who whistle and gesture at the camera, the light mobile against the colored surfaces of walls. That is: it's the poetry that captures my attention -- not exclusively, but also not separate from the more immediately instrumental demands of the marchers.

Keep up with Jen on the Internet. Just try. Craig Santos Perez is also on jacket2. Check the flyness. Fly with that check. I resolve to read the New York Times less and jacket2 much much more.