Sunday, March 14th, 6:30 PM
A Celebration of Haitian Culture: Benefit for Earthquake Relief

Please join the Poetry Project , Danspace Project, Ontological-Hysteric Theater and St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery for a celebration of Haitian culture. All proceeds from the evening will be donated to Partners in Health: Stand With Haiti. http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

Tickets to the benefit are available for advanced purchase here, and will also be sold at the door. Please visit the benefit blog for updates and ticket options. http://benefitforhaiti.wordpress.com

Thanks to our friends at Ugly Duckling Presse for printing and donating the gorgeous posters!

I’m probably not the only person in this room who first discovered the poetry blog through Stephanie Young’s highly esteemed The Well-Nourished Moon. She is also the first person I knew of to post photographs of poets and readings on the internet and the first person to make my name appear on the internet, which gave me the feeling that I had somehow “made it” and led to a period of unhinged self-searching – but more than anything, I realized that poetical loneliness would never be the same, that poets are social, if awkward, people, and this new technological engagement could and would facilitate collective experience / what I know today as my community.

Her most recent book, Picture Palace, called “an anti-lyric-memoir-sob”, engages with autobiography “as a process rather than a product” (that’s Stan Apps in ON 2). Apps points out that in traditional memoir “the reader is not mired by language” – however, Young sees the state of being overwhelmed by language as a prerequisite for something to happen to her person and by extension the person of the reader. This is not a poet who would never “unfairly limit us to description” especially when writing about the several that we are (to paraphrase Bachelard) in our trial lives in childhood, or the complexity of the kinds of interconnectivity and solitude we seek as adults. Please welcome Stephanie to the Poetry Project.

George Tysh was born in Passaic, NJ, and educated in Detroit. In Paris in the ’60s, he edited Blue Pig with poet David Ball, and collaborated with conceptual artists Christian Boltanski and Sarkis. From 1980 to 1991, he directed LINES: New Writing at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a series that brought more than 300 authors to read and discuss their works in the Motor City, and (with poet Chris Tysh) edited In Camera, a project devoted to works of the sexual imaginary. His latest collection, The Imperfect (United Artists Books), completes a sequence that includes Ovals (In Camera) and Echolalia (United Artists Books). Currently, he teaches at the Roeper School in Birmingham, MI.

In the book Dream Sites, George Tysh responds to the Dieter Roth drawing “2 Times 5 Trophies” – a drawing that shows a Rorschach-like blot, a bust of 2 facing each other with speech balloons springing from their heads each containing the word “trophy” – with the lines “Poetry / dreams up / its own rewards”. The rewards of Tysh’s poetry are here apparent in his rigor, concision and wit.

The content of his new book The Imperfect is on one hand less overtly erotic than Echolalia, on the other hand, he, always “very hot brain” (to quote Bob Holman) comes to achieve eros in language itself, through craft. There are few poets who are as wildly successful at allowing poetry to lead “to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to the blending and fusion of separate objects” (That’s Bataille). Tysh appeals to our senses, which of course means our bodies, eyes, ears and tongues, with linguistic fusions such as “sees / it seize / my inner seas.” And mustache / must ache / mind over matter in / a body of thought”. Please welcome George to the Poetry Project.

March 3, 2010

I envision this as workspace: a place to build a form, to gaze, to know or to try things out.

Did you know there is a field of poetry therapists?

Picture of Sylvia Plath in the chapter on depression in an Introduction to Psychology textbook. Sometimes its a photo of Virginia Woolf,  Great, my students who are mostly non-writers, like to point it out whenever I talk about the life of a writer.

“John McPhee has described writing as “mind-fracturing, self-enslaved labor.” Each day, he says, brings a “new form of writer’s block.” He elaborates: “You suspend the normal world to reproduce the normal world. It is a suspension of ordinary life.” from an interview in the LA Times.

Introducing a writer at the Tenth Muse Series. “…writing about the shadow of a toothpick on an apple” John Ashbery.

“Writing is waiting.” India Radfar

“Its as if the language wants to say this.” Attributed to Bernadette Mayer

Dream: in my cousin’s living room, a family gathering for mother’s day.

My own thoughts are that my teeth, jaw and neck problems are based on my timidity, of self censorship. My speech, my voice. A life long struggle over shyness.

Bought two signed copies of Just Kids, by Patti Smith, as gifts for my die hard Smith friends at St. Marks.  But first I will read one gently, with clean hands, without coffee or tea, opening slowly and turning the pages with care. Saw them online going for a hundred bucks each already.

Listening to Democracy Now in the morning. Cindy Sheehan coming to town. Thinking about how she never sold out and has not been seduced.  Think back to around Christmas of C.A.‘s request to take part in a (soma)tic poetry exercise for a speech against troop escalation in Afganistan. I was in the throes of grading and teaching, so I missed the deadline and finished it too late for him. He graciously read it later, and liked it.

March 4, 2010

David Nolan’s memorial at St. Marks Church. I never knew him very well, he was quiet. I recall him at sound board with John Fisk and I marvel at his patience to sit through marathon readings. At one point, about 15 years ago he purged himself of worldly possession.  He gave me a victorian bedspread, striped bell bottoms, vintage flag. All of which I still have.

Notes from Baldwin – Sheinfeld  conversation at the college where I teach.

For the past two years Prof. Gary Sheinfeld, a close friend of James Baldwin, has read the transcript of a conversation he had with Baldwin, it turned out that this was the last conversation/interview that Baldwin had in the United States. The conversation took place over dinner and in a cab on the way to the PanAm terminal at JFK, in 1987. Sheinfeld read his own part and Dean Tim Taylor read Baldwin’s part. I brought my class.

Notes from the conversation:

Everyone needs a friend to tell the truth too….The self is a journey….

Betrayal is always self betrayal….When in love {I] crawl towards the broken glass…. Trouble of telling the truth…pressure to lie…. Europe is not the center is not the center of the world….Most people want to be saved…. If you are afraid to die you are afraid to live…. Leaving home in the hopes of saving my life. How do you explain that to a 5 year old girl [his niece]?   I’m afraid of flying. ,I hate PanAm,  I’m afraid of London….. If you’ll be my witness, I’ll be yours.

Last night teaching “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” I ask the Russian students to fill the class in on the context of Tolstoy’s time.  A hot debate erupts over the meaning of Tolsoy’s famous line, “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore the most terrible.”

Dear Readers, welcome to the Spring issue of the Newsletter, the final issue of this season. I knew from the start I needed to buckle my seatbelt but we’re almost through and I think I just have a bump on the head. Don’t worry, our doctors have checked me out and I’m good for another year. However, there is going to be a significant amount of staff/artistic support staff turnover so expect to see some new people on the masthead come September.

After five years at the Project, Corrine Fitzpatrick has decided it’s time to do something different, like zigzagging the equator in a quest for eternal summer or getting a job at Starbuck’s for health insurance. Seriously though, we’ve worked together for all of those five years so “the break-up of our camp” will be a big adjustment, but please join me in wishing her well post-Poetry Project.

I also want to report that after exhausting negotiations with St. Mark’s, we have secured a lease. As we feared, the rent increase is high, and we’ve had to forfeit use of the Parish Hall on Saturdays. Our Saturday Writing Workshop will now be held in a rented room next door in the Rectory.

Robert Duncan said “Responsibility is to keep the ability to respond.” While being your host for the past three years has been the job’s joie de vivre, I will need to take a hiatus from coordinating the Wednesday Night Reading Series next season in order to focus my energy on development and raising funds to meet these new obligations. I have appointed Joanna Fuhrman to the position at least through January of 2011. As many of you know, she is a terrific poet and an experienced curator.

On that note, we have three special events coming up in April for our annual Spring fund raising week. On April 28^th, Alice Notley will give a solo reading in the Sanctuary, with a reception to follow. Her new book Reason and Other Women is just out from Chax Press. On the 30^th we have a two-part event for the book We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry by Daniel Kane. Kane will moderate a talk with a group of poets and filmmakers, followed by a film screening. Finally, on May 1^st, we’ll have a performance of John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror for Six Voices arranged and directed by Jim Paul. Admission for each event will be $10. You can find more information on the calendar and our Website. We’ll also be sending out an email appeal that week offering people the chance to show their support through making an online donation.

Thanks for checking in and I hope to see many of you here in the coming months.

Stacy Szymaszek

The recipients are:

DANCE
Luciana Achugar, Brooklyn, NY
Miguel Gutierrez, Brooklyn, NY
Pam Tanowitz, New York, NY

MUSIC/SOUND
Luke Fowler, Glasgow, Scotland
Okkyung Lee, New York, NY

THEATER/PERFORMANCE ART
Nature Theater of Oklahoma, New York, NY
Rabih Mroué, Beirut, Lebanon

POETRY
Michael Gizzi, Providence, RI

VISUAL ARTS
Fia Backström, Brooklyn, NY
Leslie Hewitt, New York, NY

Congratulations to all!

Many of you know David through the countless volunteer hours he spent at Project events helping us with sound and guiding us through technical knots. He spent all of New Year’s Day, this year and last, along with David Vogen, making sure each performer everything they needed for their performance, and making sure the Project always got the highest quality recording. It was clear that he got a lot of joy from the work that he did for us as well as so many other organizations he was connected with. He loved being here and we loved him and will miss him dearly. Look for an extended obituary in the Fall issue of the Newsletter.  Our deepest condolences go out to David’s family and friends.

His family asks that in lieu of flowers donations be made in David’s name to one of the community and arts organizations that he worked with during his life.

East Village Community School – 610 E. 12th St., Rm 205, NY, NY 10009 Attn: Mary Talbot

Poets House – 10 River Terrace, NY, NY 10282 Attn: Jane Preston

Theater for the New City – 155 1st Ave. NY, NY 10003 ATTN: Crystal Field

WBAI – 120 Wall St.10th Fl. NY, NY 10005 ATTN: Morning Dew

The Poetry Project – 131 E. 10th St. 10003 ATTN: Stacy Szymaszek

Probably all comparison is specious. At least wrong. There was feudalism and then there was capitalism. There were horse drawn carriages and then there were cars. For a while there were both and it was natural to compare them as ways of getting somewhere. Or the telephone as a way of communication soon to be replaced by ‘texting’ message.  (The mayor of Las Cruces, surprised by the sudden wave of opposition to the development of a privately built ICE Detention Center, proposed to my friend Dana that they ‘text’ on the matter.) I suspect that the invention and proliferation of instant text exchange has altered the face to face encounter – speech upon being in physical proximity is no longer self-evident. As far as manners and etiquettes of compassion in our new textual spaces, I suppose we just need to figure them out. When I think like this I think maybe it isn’t true that there is nothing new under the sun. Maybe that is all there is. Negation, replacement.

There are three books on my mind this week. They are kari edwards, Bharat jiva (Belladonna/Litmus, 2009), Spring Ulmer, Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay, 2009) and Catherine Wagner, My New Job (Fence, 2009). Each of these books, written during the oughts and published on the eve of their demise can be placed under the category defined by Wagner’s serial title “Everyone In The Room Is A Representative Of The World At Large”—although perhaps the more accurate phrase would be “Every body in the room represents and receives the world at large.” These books, two of which are poetry books and one, Ulmer’s, is a book of poetically informed essays. Ulmer’s essays study the self as part and parcel of our moment of genocidal current and aftermath. Note: here the collective first person ‘our’ that I am utilizing is informed in part by the premise of Ulmer’s work: in times of virtual representation, we are not only overwhelmed by information and reality, we become it. Aware of the world and its injustices since her birth, being born and growing up in rural Vermont in a kerosene lamp-powered house her radically-left parents built, Ulmer writes of brokenness as hers and also not her own. “An Atlas of the Itinerant Nature of Perspective,” which touches upon her study and time in post-genocide Rwanda (I keep stumbling over writing that, thinking the concept impossible, there is no post-genocide), ends with the line “I will then concede that Abraham’s broken heart is much more broken than mine. There is, of course, no comparison (45).” Since this quote is out of the context, I will explain that what I think is being said is that while there is no comparison, neither is there a clear line of demarcation.

edward’s book, Bharat jiva is in some way a poetic-political-existential-spiritual accounting of her year in an intentional spiritual community in Tamil Nadu, India. The book, like our list of 1970’s movies, ends bleak, perhaps even bleaker than its beginning: her final attempt to find hope in community has failed edwards, it’s the same as every other flawed attempt to get beyond consumption, and the spirit-murderous branding required by consumption (for more on this see Rob Halpern’s excellent essay “Reading the Interval, Reading Remains” in Bharat jiva’s companion volume, NO GENDER, published simultaneously by Belladonna/Litmus—in this Halpern publishes edwards’ emails critiquing ‘community’). The flip side of the abandon and rage and frustration implicit in Bharat jiva is an accounting that the poet brings onto her self-same body alongside every other body (once again, ‘our’ as radical ego collectivity). A passage from the preface reads:

“…when we mention the people, we do not mean the confessional body of the people, we mean the particularly itinerant bodies in mechanic flux, preaching freedom beyond flesh pamphlets of authority, concealed in blind devotion.” (3)

Through the duration of the book, this preaching, edwards’ critique, her attempt to render a different story through witness and poetic action is (now, from the aftermath), “replaced by a generous claw/with nothing to say (115).”

Wagner also makes a statement of poetic negation: “If a poem is active/Its action aborts in you/A colored light flies into black.” (36) Overall, My New Job asserts a practice of poetry as a shared fact, if not reduced than joined by the grunts and sighs that are the facts and banality of contemporary work and getting by. Not without pleasure, penises, vaginas and good fights with lovers, the poem is brought into the world physical body with sound gestures, and nursery rhyme, and commercial jingle

STILL not finished review

but productive day and feeling

GÜT

like a fine mama

SHÜT

putting down some

RÜTS

like the lost queen

TOOT

TOOT

TÜT TÜT TÜT

These poetries, which all put the subjective body forward as a shared space suggest to me that yes, the fantasy of ‘wandering on alone” is forever gone and that ‘our’ bodies, behind screens that watch us back and no longer able to be removed to some colonial outpost, are in fact themselves the site of our new public, our new commons.

Epilogue

Though I’m fairly sure I didn’t get very far in the great project of considering confinement in our times I did learn something about blogging in our times which may after all be critical to the thinking about confinement in our times. Every time I mentioned the blog to someone, their response was inevitably, “Oh you blog???” The way they might inquire if I were a skier, or a practitioner of S/M…”So, you’re into S/M?” And this appeals to me as an analogy because like skiing and S/M, blogging is in fact, not something I ‘do’ but rather now something I have tried, done, dipped into like I have dipped into so many things that one can ‘do’ with no intention of sustaining them as a practice in the way that I practice things like swimming or getting tipsy or sitting on the couch and watching tv or reading New York Magazine talking to Dana now often on the telephone since she has moved so far away. Like skiing and S/M, I find blogging does have its fun but is too much machinery, too ritualistic, its accountrement of too many steps, so much always themselves in the same way for me, i.e. the ski lift and its line, the leather and its fittings, the constant presence of the format. Perhaps holding onto a fantasy of escape, I prefer my watery little dream world where I get to just jump in.

[Note: you can listen to Catherine Wagner read “Coming and I did not run away” in our Audio section.]

In an interview I recently came across, Joanna Fuhrman quoted Wittgenstein’s “There is no private language”, a rich statement for people, poets, often engaged in conveying our private worlds. Fuhrman, too, recognizes that language is formed in the public sphere for the purpose of communicating in the public sphere. Poems are a public language, though the number of those who choose to participate may be, as she points out, less than the number of Americans who are interested in genital piercing or dressing up as Anime characters for toy robot conventions. Her new book is aptly titled Pageant, a public entertainment consisting of a procession of people. The poems appreciate elaborate display while exposing artifice, for instance in clone school no one looks the same but everyone is. Elaine Equi calls Joanna “a witty visionary for our virtual age” and calls the work “exotic and mundane, retro and futuristic at the same time. Pulsating with surround-sound and a panoply of ‘neon fluid special effects…”. Please welcome Joanna to the Poetry Project.

John Koethe’s most recent book is Ninety-Fifth Street (HarperCollins). From 1973-2009 he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the first Poet Laureate of Milwaukee. His collection Falling Water won the Kingsley Tufts Award. North Point North: New And Selected Poems was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2005 he was a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, and in 2008 he was the Elliston Poet in Residence at the University of Cincinnati. He is currently the Bain-Swiggett Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.

John Koethe’s new book, Ninety-fifth Street, features a painting by Rackstraw Downes, an ideal artist to have in mind as we begin our encounter with poems that are deeply concerned with compositional rigor, the architectural space of imagination and human engagement with environment. It is tempting to say that these poems are about confronting mortality but I think, taking a cue, from Koethe himself, they are poems about poetry, or time, or better yet poetry as “a way to live through time.” Places once inhabited by the poet – San Diego, Milwaukee, Berlin and the very idea of selfhood as a place to be inhabited or vacated– are activated by memory, the only way we have to understand history. While making distinctions in place, at the same time Koethe suggests that place can be reduced “To a bare concept, an abstraction that extends ‘from sea to shining sea’. As in his past books, there are moments of disarming first-person acknowledgments such as, “My life is fine, though not the life I’d wanted or imagined,…” that give the reader (this is from Edward Hirsch) “the sensation of thinking itself, of a certain fleeting daily, solitary consciousness rescued from oblivion and help aloft”. Please welcome John Koethe to the Poetry Project.

Poetics of Speed

What is a blog and how do you do it? I had a plan and now find myself surprised to be without internet so I can’t get into facebook to check on my list of bleaker 70s movies and where is the Melanie lyric? But I was talking about confinement and there was a thought about the body in the interface, and my anxiety to not meet the fact of speed, of easy speech, and what if I forget my lines? I’ve been fixated on a notion of the poetics of speed and how badly, truly I fail at this, how disappointing I often feel when I’m looked upon to speak and cannot. I’m amazed at Eileen Myles’ ability to rise when she’s looked to, and speak/testify to the injustice, even suggest something new. When I see something bad I begin to grunt, because I find I must say something, yet when I turn my grunts into slow speech or writing it hardly gets any better, I’m accused of being negative, of getting in the way, my mental meandering generally unrecognizable. (Are there not multiple languages and can’t we all be talking at once?)

Both Gertrude Stein (“Composition as Explanation”) and Paul Virilio (Speed and Politics) recognize the 20^th Century as the one in which turns in military strategy (of the 19^th Century) become the rhythm by which everything turns in the 20^th, i.e. the masses militarized into a constantly roaming shooting machine, through cities, across continents and over oceans, deployed in total eternal war, whose civilian arm is the affordable automobile. Stein makes the point well that military advances are always a hundred years behind and so does Virilio, citing Carl Von Clausewitz as the 19^th century engineer of the strategy that would serve the bourgeois cause toward domination of the proletariat—by the method of uproot, displace, keep them moving.

“In order to know one must always go back” (Stein, Lectures “Plays”)

Besides using the above spin as a statement/complaint against speed pressure, besides pointing out its relation to confinement–as my friend Rick Karr points out in his PBS special: the internet too is a highway upon which we move as directed, paying toll collectors along the way–I would like to use it as an opportunity to acknowledge some movies from the 1970’s (and a few from the 60’s) which perhaps theorized the present tense of our ‘dromological progress.’

“Let’s make no mistake; whether it’s the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, Olympic champions or travel agents, the military industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction , into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds…” (Virilio 136).

In the mid 1970’s (I was born in 1963) I began to feel that something was going on and that I was going to miss it…like the waft of bread from a bakery whose load has already been trucked away. I could smell it, but I could not see it. Based on that sensation, I built a nostalgia for an imagined time of resistance to domination—and responded quickly to any opportunities I had to join radical collective action in my sphere. And then in the 1990’s I stopped…to write poems and make connection to other people writing poems. This too felt like a potential, but different, means of resisting, by joining in imaginative activity with others, and in building a viable counter-culture. My imagined late 1960’s, early 1970’s life—the one that I had just missed–was one which (in my imagination) expressed idealism, connection, advancement of thought, the sense of possibility.

So it came as a surprise to me when I returned to the movies of my youth and found my lover to be correct when he said that they always end worse than they began, offering an even bleaker picture of the world.  This is not our expectation of the movies we watch today, which all seem to end with a joyous wedding.

I don’t have the facebook list or the internet so I have to speak to the ones that are fresh in my mind. Spoiler alert! Some movies and their endings: Dog Day Afternoon (end with the cops shooting Sal in cold blood), The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 (original version), Soylent Green (“Soylent Green is People!”), Death Wish (kids keep being cold blooded criminals, the vigilante architect keeps killing kids), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (we know how it goes, and that it is 1969 but can’t resist, Burt Bacharach soundtrack and all) 2 Lane Blacktop (ends with the love object taking off with some guy and the film reel, it’s image of the lonesome drivers, catching fire), and my most recent favorite, and one that has truly haunted me since watching it on ‘instant watch’ – George Lukas’ first film, the beautiful, high design THX:1138 (filmed in then spanking clean and space age state of the art BART stations). THX 1138 ends with THX (pronounced ‘thicks’) climbing out of the structure, circumventing his first attempt at escape into the inescapable hell of the superstructure (see dromological progress), pushing up the manhole, standing up on the OUTSIDE, only to be silhouetted by a skin melting, melting sun.

Not hopeful, these films take as their  premise that everything is all fucked up, the system has us all by the balls and our options are only ever diminishing. What I find remarkable is how willing, how spunky and resistant the characters are, knowing the system is bigger than them and will eventually do them in. One of my favorite lines of all times is Al Pacino playing the queer bank robber Sonny Wortzik (aka John Wojtowicz) negotiating hostage release with the cops saying “Kiss me. When I’m being fucked, I like to be kissed a lot.”* Rather than making good with the system that has the better of them, they do their own thing.  They don’t act against the system in order to beat it, they resist because they still can. Which is maybe as ‘outside’ as it gets.

END

*For John Wojtowiczs’s dramatization of the story see “The Third Memory” by Pierre Huyghe

The internet is working, I’m about to send this to Stacy but quickly, here are some bleak 1970’s movies my ‘friends’ on facebook offered:

*Note: Dystopia or not, things are always getting worse.

McCabe & Mrs Miller

Taxi Driver

The Wicker Man

Fox and His Friends

Don’t Look Now

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Carrie

Chinatown

The Stepford Wives

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman version)

(And it’s 1968, but it seems like an important precedent): Night of the Living Dead

The Conversation

Killer of Sheep

Wanda

Night Moves

Blow Up

Picnic at Hanging Rock

The Champion

Five Easy Pieces

Two Lane Blacktop

Vanishing Point

The Exorcist  (no kidding: my father took me to see this when it came out, I was 9)

Apocalypse Now

The Last Picture Show

The Night Porter

The Kremlin Letter

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Caddyshack

The Last Tango in Paris

Klute

Nashville (“the ending appears bright but this Altman” says PSJ who offered this one)

Boesman & Lena

Mean Streets

Saturday Night Fever

Jesus Christ Superstar

Star Wars

Jaws

Panic in Needle Park

“the first Godfather film? What about King of Comedy, the ending of which is at least weird, if not bleak?”

Shadows

A Woman Under the Influence

Faces

Ali or Fear Eats the Soul

The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant

Alice in the Cities

Oh, and here is the Melanie:

“We were so close, there was no room

We bled inside each other’s wounds

We all had caught the same disease

And we all sang the songs of peace.”

YOURS in struggle,

Rachel

(Note: “Melanie and the Movies” postponed until next week)

Just “Hey” is frequently how my students begin an email to me (and this despite a long schpiel I give at start of each semester on how they can call me Rachel or Professor Levitsky whatever is easier/more comfortable for them). I confess I find it crushing, and distancing, though I know that it is meant to be casual and familiar, at least meant as some sort of non-deferential treatment. I miss ‘dears’ and ‘hellos.’ I even miss my name or being called something which designates me as more than a random body. I know I sound sickly nostalgic. And I know that in the movement into casual, non-descript address, there is some deliberate eschewing of formality deemed oppressive, manners rejected as antiquated and hierarchical forms.

Again I’ll quote Dana Greene who helped me with statistics last week – I have a long sustained conversation about liberation with Dana, she is the interlocuting voice in my thinking about Confinement. Dana tells a story that when visiting facilities researching Restorative Justice, at a Maximum Security Prison in the mid-west where she was hosted by two elderly ex-school teachers, let’s say Mrs. Pinewood and Miss Jones, perfectly coifed and neatly dressed, who ran a Life Skills Program which included instruction in writing skills. Mrs. Pinewood and Miss Jones designated all their students as “Mr. …” and demanded formal address. At one point in the day, one student picked up a candy out of the bowl on the teachers’ desk and was reprimanded “Now you know Mr. Allah that those candies are meant for our guests.” Later at dinner the ladies told Dana about how they had another sort of communication with their students in which they deposited certain items, writing tools, notebooks and the like, into the trash bins on the way into their office and these were retrieved by the guys in the know.

In my fantasy about courtesy I imagine it as a kind of commons, a collective space that creates more room for difference and distinction and in the case of this story, maneuvers of resistance. The informality, the heys, the lack of hellos in advance of speaking, seem to me to assume not a level of equality, but a level of affective sameness, in which the salutation, the moment of assessment, is skipped. An this lack of assessment makes us vulnerable, puts us on the defensive. Individual and defended, of course we need to create our own safe insides, frat houses where it’s okay to be a little bit cruel.

Sincerely,

Rachel Levitsky

P.S. Thank you Cara for pointing out the construction of the ‘inside’. I think that’s right, there is an impulse or a conceit amongst poets to create an alternative universe as a way out. Interesting and troubling. I thinking here that any inside is the inside (I too like to be inside). And of course there is no generalizing, every poet I know has a different life. I was talking to ETG yesterday about the television show “House” (an inside we can both enter for untold hours) and how it works on a similar premise, ranks close again the “outside” (e.g. the investigator of House’s vicodin/methadone/booze addled days at the hospital) to protect the fragile but complete system inside of the hospital. For those of you who don’t watch television, imagine Sherlock Holmes as a brilliant but ill-mannered and unwashed doctor, and Watson as the slightly effete, squeaky clean chief oncologist and a super petite, succulently curved, determinedly jewish, hospital chief as Irene Adler — http:/ /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Adler —the only woman who could ever slay … A mutually protective theater of cruelty, when push comes to shove they sometimes have each other’s back.

P.S.S. Disclaimer: I was not raised in the ways of politesse. My chaotic working class parents and people put their fingers in their plates when they ate on plates and not directly from the big dish and did not, as matter of course, great a person with a salutation when addressing someone/encountering someone anew. My father, horrified that he had raised one just like himself used to bemoan the fact that he had not sent me to ‘finishing school.” I did not end up in finishing school but in October, 1993 I wandered off to Mexico, alone. I happened to be there in January 1, 2004 the day of the Zapatista rebellion and participated in some supportive organizing from El D.F. Always I found myself mesmerized by the universality of courtesy and what I perceived that it enabled, politically.R