EDWIN TORRES, IN CONVERSATION ABOUT THE BODY IN LANGUAGE: AN ANTHOLOGY
In Edwin Torres’s poem, “The Begin of Maybe,” from The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker (2001), the body is grappled with, there are a push-pull of questions, sufferings, and the desire to both keep what is inevitable at a distance, while also experiencing it head-on:
Maybe sick sick this was
body-had me a time
this body had me
in time I had seen
and I, m is my ism had kept on
I had kept this body at bay
a bad badness I had
I was wicked-sick with had
when will sick-wicked-with have me
This brief excerpt frustrates linear notions and ways of thinking about the body and mind. It is a gender-fluid poem that incorporates a mélange of pronouns; it is funny yet also devastatingly dark. I find myself returning over and again to this poem for multiple reasons. I read it years ago, and was struck, then, by its play, by who and what it reminded of—its Beckettian repetition, its echoes of Gertrude stein—but recently it has taken on new resonances. The back and forth negotiations with the body; the transience of moods, ideas, thoughts; the brief pleasures and unavoidable pains all swirl together in a short poem that contains all the characteristics of Torres’s singular creativity and thinking: it is welcoming to the reader, yet it possesses a deep level of theoretical inquiry that opens up new ways of being in the world. This double gift to readers is how I think about Torres’s body of work, and how I continually experience his new collection of essays.
The Body in Language: An Anthology, is a wondrous collection of disparate voices who present new perspectives on the body in art through explorations of the body in language. Edwin Torres is a New York City native and the author of nine books of poetry including, XOETEOX: the infinite world object, Ameriscopia, The PoPedology of an Ambient Language, and Yes Thing No Thing. His fellowships include NYFA, The Dia Foundation, The Poetry Fund, and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. His work is widely anthologized and he has performed his multidisciplinary bodylingo worldwide.
Charles Kell: This insightful, pleasurable, and thought-provoking text changed for me in many ways over the last few months. I started reading it, spending time with it, sifting and sorting through its disparate voices in October/November of 2019. When March of 2020 hit, I was in the middle of rereading it, in the middle of switching to online teaching, and many of the essays took on new, deeper meanings. The prescience of the book really hit home. What immediately jumps out are the integral and intricate negotiations of thought, body, voice, being, and artistic practice; it is pleasurably disorienting, both inviting and challenging. Its mélange of voices, thinkers, ideas swirl around and inhabit the body and ask how the body exists in the present moment. As we have adjusted to even newer ways of teaching, working, and being, as we are struck with worry over those sick and suffering, and those who are out of work, how has the book changed for you? How has your specific relationship to the book, your thoughts on the body-in-language changed over the last six to eight months?
Edwin Torres: The book was such a labor of devotion over five years, I feel strangely embedded in its continual removal from my inner continuum…if that sort of inverse outlooking has any purpose? When you dive into a specific calling, and that’s what this book was for me, there is no question to the doing, so the trajectory itself has resounding echoes that linger, what I might call post-hearing, i.e. I know it so well it’s hard to grasp what’s changed or hasn’t, i.e. I’ve let it go but it hasn’t let me. My relationship to the book is a different conversation than my relationship to the subject. It seems to me, that the model for the body’s awareness in language has become louder in poetry, more present in culture, since the book’s arrival…though, being between the covers, as it were, of both body and language, I’m more attuned to that frequency than before. Like an early morning walk in the forest or on the streets of Avenue A, where you hear things you’d never hear if you weren’t tuned into that morning—I’m tuned in now. “And here / someone sits, watching the horizon, thinking in / halved tongues, progression of colors, water, odd lines.” from Marcella Durand’s poem in the anthology. I feel the book’s reason was always here before its arrival, as if the book gave voice to my own progressions, my colors, my odd lines—how marvelous to have brilliant writers constellate your sensory vocabulary, I’ll be referencing their text from the anthology throughout this interview.
There was an atmosphere surrounding this project, one I had to act on in its time, and again, when I wasn’t ready for it. In the sense of completion, carrying through an object’s plan, a life’s given arc—the book called to be created, gathered, trajected through. And once in that mind space energy field, the action you’re given is to accept what unfolds and engage. I felt as if the assembling, the searching for its home, the production…all manner of editorial happenstance that anyone putting together an anthology can relate to…were guiding me to completion. I’ve learned, in performance, in poetry-making, that the voice of the thing you’re creating is at times, larger than yourself, and this spark, this continual fulcrum through the dynamics of your allowance, you learn to trust it, to move aside, to let the form impulse into yourself. I think it takes a while to build that trust within, to care for the things you don’t know, in poetry and in humanity.
The book’s structure has a built-in prescience, where the chapters, organized as whole bodies composed of 4 elemental forms, allow for constant re-invention, as you turn back and forth among the elements for new bodies. In this grand shift of ideology that the world has been given through the pandemic, the notion of singular bodies coming together for one, takes on added complexity as isolation informs autonomy. Healing selves, empathy, illness, diversity, the space to live impactfully…have all been compressed. How that translates to language-making is still forming. I wonder about the effect that social media’s immediacy has on transparency? Are the events shaping us, or do we look for answers in older work, BC (Before Covid)? And how, in turn, to take the speed of reception and remember the tactile elegy of the page, the book form itself, as a transforming medium. The digital swipe of a smartphone at a reading, takes on added isolation for the audience, watching the poet on the mic, swipe through their work. Sculpting the air with words and glass before paper, but that’s another tangent…well, maybe that speaks to a sort of displacement, for us in the audience, for the writer at their words.
The disorienting nature of the anthology’s aliveness is rooted in a certain formality to its design. There are ways to utilize the grid structure of a book’s interior design that lets the text live on the page without interruption, for the reader to not think about the typography on the page but to read it. The graphic formalities of kerning, line space, rivers of white, flush left…the time spent crafting a page of text so that the spacing is evenly distributed within its proper margins, contributes to the reader’s unspoken ease while holding the page. As my Typographer professor told me in college, know the rules so you can break them. The book’s function as a blank slate for the mélange of voices and ideas, owes as much to the formal structure as to the content.
CK: I am fascinated how you designate the sections and artists within elemental demarcations—Fire/Sulfur, Water/Salt, Earth/Mercury, Air—and also different headings—Foundation, Creation, Emotion, Thinking—and how each artist inhabits the space while seemingly overflowing into other spaces. In your introduction you state “The intent is not to categorize or restrict but to explore, to reshuffle on each re-reading.” We are list makers, we like to categorize; we like to try and put things in order; however, we know, ultimately, that categories are arbitrary, and are meant to interweave and overlap.
Similarly, the range of artists represented in this text is quite astounding. Can you, Edwin, touch upon your curation of the book, and how your selection both fits in and overflows from your categories? Also, I think of the body as something one is simultaneously trapped in and wanting to break out of or away from, and I feel this sense is intricately tied into one’s practice of creation. Can you, as well, talk about the body as it relates to the practice of art?
ET: The aspect of a book’s trajectory has always interested me as a Graphic Designer, how you move page to page, to arrive at an embodied voice, opens the framework of what a book’s journey can offer. So, I had that in mind, to apply that thinking to poetry, I wanted to see how to organize all these voices into movement, page to page. Considering an anthology with a theme as broad as the body, sequencing the pieces alphabetically was too confining, too much of an arc. Over the course of the book’s curation, I gathered all sorts of visual reference…thematic touch points around the body, representations of what movement looked like, depictions, mimesis, scattered scraps of ontology…my main inspiration came from visuals, more than writing. While I certainly acknowledge the bounty of literature written around the subject, I purposely avoided writing as guidance, wanting to give the collection its own linearity, rooted in the senses.
I had a swipe folder, maybe a Pandora’s Box, for visual touchstones. Western thought has long identified a wide variety of concepts as being masculine or feminine. Fire and air are masculine while earth and water are feminine, for example. The sun is male, and the moon is female. These basic ideas and associations can be found in multiple schools of thought. As the body’s intersectionality gets explored, divisions start appearing that make you realize how we’re continually in shift, our parts aligning/unaligning constantly, incomplete tectonic organisms in continual facets of separation. I think of Amy Catanzano’s ideas on Quantum Poetics, how the wake we leave before and after connections are entanglements of each other. The allegories for completion began to emerge, from internal and external divisions. Science, organism, spirit, there’s so much information that supports the body’s many dimensions—how then, to parallel that with language? Looking at some separations, with an ear on what could equate to structure, I dived into what felt right for a book about what makes us whole.
I found an image showing five elements circling around a holistic center, something about completion, about the parts making the whole, jumped out at me. I did some digging and the tendrils lead me to five elements and alchemy. I was wondering if a body is composed of elements, and this book is a body, why not have the book composed of four sections. So, the initial thought was to separate the book into four chapters, four elements. I started assigning each piece to its element, quickly realizing that every piece encompassed every element in varying degrees.
Because the particulars of linearity resemble something close to path-making, I started recording the following body planes: Celestial > Crown > Third Eye / Etheric > Spiritual > Throat / Astral > Transitional > Heart / Mental > Physical > Sacrum / Emotional > Physical > Navel
If we go further into that cave, the stages of a brain’s creativity: Median > Core > Left Right / Frontal > Split > Front Back / Transverse > Surrounding > Spirit
And of course, this can go on, the resulting poem out of the vault of language is exhaustive. I kept returning to a sense of recompletion, how to allow the reader to compose bodies on their own every time the book was picked up. After so much time, mired in fracture (for the body) as well as order (for the book) the notion of modular elements appeared—instead of worrying about larger main sections why not individual smaller sections/bodies composed of just four pieces each. Dividing the number of contributors by four resulted in exactly 14 chapters/14 bodies, with a key at the bottom of the page signifying what element they represented. The imagination is placed front and center by alerting the reader that each piece/each self, does in fact contain each element, and that the order in the book is merely for mobility, piece to piece—a bit of perfect imperfection, very human to me.
We are given imperfections to qualify our doings, our goings, our becomings, as the humans we are.If to enact anything as a residue of what we’ve been, as a landing spot for what we might call humanity, where is the body’s responsibility to self? How do we navigate our particular lifetimes formed of repetition, something I’ve written about previously, repetition I mean, see there, how I embodied the self’ing that I repeat, by saying it, again? I wonder how language can form itself to equate our internal complexities, to the body’s rhythmic impulse, the organic lifeblood that Will Alexander traverses in his work, he writes, “As to sacred elevation, or protracted flow across interior ether, I can only signal myself as the inexplicable emerging from the zero field.” Encompassing the narrative of poetry’s protracted flow, is maybe my own verbose way of depicting how poems exist in a landscape of continual transformation. The space on the page—coming from performance, where I experienced what it was to have space in front, space behind, space for sound to vibrate as it reaches the audience’s ears, to then reach back, to me—my physical self, a myriad of impossibilities, right there, re-conjured onstage with language and air and sound, for a room of receptive beings—the environmental creation of poetry’s eco’esis, as it were. How to implement, what I know is an experiential offering in the dynamics of poetry’s architecture, to the physical dynamics of a page—this is the quandary, the challenge in presenting a rebirthed physicality in the act of its thing’ness, the body’s perception of skin as a tool for transformation.
In the anthology’s collection of questions, there’s an environmental awakening being offered to the brain, if the brain will allow it. And I think that’s where poetry can navigate the challenge, all the subtext and neuro-directionality that re-formation can bring to language for new openings manifested by a poem…are ways to move through the body, by entering the brain. Sounds like serious surgical imagination, though, the holistic body is supposed to merge brain with body—can poetry do that? I think so, if we don’t think!
There are infinite meditations from various modalities like Sensory Awareness, Alexander Technique, Contact Improvisation, among others…where we’re asked if we can separate thinking from feeling. I see that as asking the brain to stop asking, to surrender thought by becoming thought. As CAConrad writes, “I have no sense of failure when I am with you / everything matters because everything / hurts someone somewhere as it is mattering.” How to navigate that trajectory, where the body just is—no emblem no recourse no mission, just body—while having access to so much history, affirming our place as complex humans, which only broadens our continual mattering, based on having a grip on what is or isn’t perceived failure? My run-on questions are not looking for answers you see, but context, alignment, maybe connections to unlock.
Can we assign troubles to our travels, is that too tricky, to resort to alliteration for easy entry, or is that the purpose of mammalian instinct, to broaden our question-making by bringing in familiarity, aural stimulation, that unlicks a door? (hah, I wrote unlock and got spell checked to unlick…which is so much more effective). Trusting the mistake is what we cultivate as word-people, to misquote William Carlos Williams, “no mistake, but in things.”
CK: Urayoàn Noel’s essay, “Uneasy Bodies,” mentions the notion of the flâneur and complicates this idea in many ways, by noting,
The intervening twenty years have been an attempt to refine but also unlearn the walking-poems of the modern city. For, as much as I admire the flâneur’s freedom, 2015 New York is not Baudelaire’s city: it is an increasingly gentrifying, one-percenter city, the city of Occupy and Eric Garner, where the young, black, and brown remind us that city bodies are often uneasy. (16)
What I love about Noel’s piece is how he takes the thought of “uneasiness” and redirects it specifically toward a new way of thinking and creating. Noel posits: “What I am imagining is something like an alternative body politics” (19). How has the “political body” changed for you over time, from your first concerns and interactions, to this moment? It what ways is this book a mapping of that change?
ET: Urayoàn has a brilliant mind, incredibly restless for knowledge, “uneasy” with the quo, diving into qua—one of our many mutual interests are to complicate ideas. And yes, I do love that essay, redirecting/remapping the self by using our city bodies. Growing up in the South Bronx, my city roots inform my feet, my steps, that pavement never leaves your walk. One of the aspects around the editing process for me, has been how many tangents off the driven path I’ve been given, how many tendrils become research, the diaspora of infinite page-turning, i.e. what I’ve gotten myself into. Urayoàn beautifully taps into that essential fountain for change, for us to imagine an alternative.
The body changes when it’s ready to accept the change, when the next plane presents itself to match its existence. What that plane sets forth is unknown, but the body’s ready for that transformation…whether waking up, asleep, in love, diseased, the body reacts when it senses. I think a city, a government, a body politic would operate similarly, or can it? During the times of my growing up, I didn’t give body politic its name because I was in it. When in something, it is everything. Whether poem or systemic torture/racism, if you’re in the modality of your perception, the attached operatives of description lose theory to become breath. “And they love us and they beat us and they beat us until the bureaucrats command them to stop loving us / To control another’s body, the bureaucrats say,” writes Daniel Borzutzky.
And so, the notion of Noel’s flâneur as benign cultural observer, is no longer viable. The alternative proposed is to get involved—an observed action that can take many forms, but you can’t just watch anymore once you’ve grown from an insular exploration to include your world. As a cultural worker, I look at that as initiating the body into your actions, where is the change in your body that you see in the world? Where is your interior voice coming from, and how can that reach the world you want to live in? Your body’s interior politic, how to access that churn? Among the richly mined performers that his essay mentions, Pedro Pietri, Latasha Diggs, Pablo de Rokha, is the New York Dominican poet Josefina Báez (there were many more contributors that could have appeared in this book, where was the cutoff, where was excess? Instinct runs side by side, but, not to get sidetracked)—she’s a sentient performer infinitely tuned into the political body. Noel writes, “There is uneasiness to Báez’s performance that marks her Dominicanyork as both a symptom of and an alternative to the globalized city.”
To paraphrase James Baldwin, whether or not police listen to poetry, to write of moons and flowers will not bring attention to guns and injustice, or can it? We know the answer is yes, it’s my role to be difficult in possibility. There is a subtle dominion in the power of language—to infiltrate that unknowing resonant cognition, requires the tiniest amount of release, to then direct that information into tellable cognition requires agency. Here is where the body politic can experience the movement of poetry’s wide expanse.
As very much not an expert, I imagine the reason politics has not changed in my lifetime, is how deeply ingrained the human condition is for balance. The Saints and Sinners must have equal play, the Yin and Yang is in our makeup, our drive for equanimity begins in the unequality of our individual bodies, in the purpose to the dynamics of the journey—that peeling away is in lore as ancient as any cave drawing.
My first concerns for something I’d call politics were seeded in my last name. I don’t think I called my Puerto Rican-ness political until my adult life, as a performer, when someone came up to me after a performance and told me that people were starting to pay attention to me and that I had to represent my people. A burden for anyone, looking for a people. What does one do with responsibility if you don’t recognize it? A question any parent is familiar with. I didn’t want to be told what I was doing, I didn’t want it named. Definition was needed for others, for me, it was my personal dynamics that kept me on a path. In time I realized that that specific kind of journeying could be considered “process.” The assemblage speaks to me before the pattern. Which brings me back to the unease posed by Noel, I think poetry IS the alternative body politic—the modern metropolis, continually itself, in the architecture of language.
[In what ways is this book a mapping of that change?]
Which leads to the second part of your question, how does language map this book…how to map that change, if there is one, as a through-line from the first breath-drawn page to the last? If we can see an alternative body politic as one manifested by language, i.e. a habitat consisting of civilization’s order system, I would imagine the book proposes a system of parts to construct shifting narratives, adaptable to the reader’s entry points. If society has tiers to its organism, the body’s reaction is its map.
Making the book modular for varied entry points, like in a poem that doesn’t have one narrative and allows multiple entry points for multiple interpretations, creates a system of parts; can the body politic that governs society, work as synchronous alchemy? By acknowledging that every part of society contains all elements, fire/water, masculine/feminine, etc., the book’s stanza’ed mapping tells us that the order of the narrative is not important, the arc is adaptable, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” thank you Charles Darwin.
So maybe the book’s gauntlet is to form society as a system of interconnections, no hierarchy of emerging/established writers, teacher/students, artists/dancers—the system of our adapted sensory intelligence, given room to physicalize movement among the many—how soon would that society collapse or thrive? Acknowledging our differing systems of justice, could the body politic evolve into a hybrid party system where every language is allowed its voice…maybe the book’s dare is to thrive or collapse, as a poem might, as a people might, as a poem.
As in pools of nucleic vortices, as individual pools along a shore, as in volcanic rock formations, are we pools of water at day’s end, in the low tide, each multi-verse, our individual element to map?
CK: Michelle Leggott’s text, “Small Stories from Two Decades,” strikes me for its intimate recollection of the author losing her vision: “It is twenty years since one small incident changed the way I read and think about the world” (174). It makes me think of how I often take my body for granted, not only through certain identity privileges, but also its physical and emotional state. I am free from physical pain and can navigate a world specifically designed to my abilities and body. I am free from any intense emotional/psychological maladies that affect me on a daily basis. Another remarkable facet of this collection is, again, its focus on disparate bodies, bodies that are differently abled. How has incorporating these voices and bodies of difference complicated and pushed the way we might regularly think of the body and its relation to creation?
ET: The body is so taken for granted. Language becomes a visible muscle, as the tongue is the only actual visible muscle…I think we tend to believe our body will be there, so the brain takes over and starts all this language stuff. The book, for me, serves as a reminder that we’re talking all the time, in many languages; internal, external, spiritually, emotionally, biomorphically, silently, ad infinitum…the ability for missed listening is greater than what we hold onto.
I think of the pieces by Jennifer Bartlett, Anselm Berrigan, Jonas Mekas, Joon Oluchi Lee, Noelle Kocot, others, along with Michelle’s, all in their own way, are ecosystems of empowerment—so stripped away and powerful in their delicacy as to redirect the reader’s awareness of their own body. I love how the form of their representation allows for unveiling, to sort of meet the world where the world is ready to be met. To enter the inner workings of our innate knowing, where the body has to adapt to function differently.
This idea of being differently abled is fraught with complication, society is interested in familiar loopholes, the status quo that Urayoàn points out. Whereas poetry allows for entry points that tap into our inner traveling all the time—our ability for creativity’s affirmation of our very own complicated humanity.
In the anthology, Charles Bernstein writes, “the poetics of disfluency and disability is the horizon for a querical poetics of de-arrangement,” footnoting that statement to Michael Davidson’s Concerto for Left hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body, Charles’ essay is a compendium of fascinating footnotes. By aligning various templates of “pata-querical” alternatives as honings of ability for new cognition, Charles brings about a salient truism…that it is our differences that make us whole.
Selfcare is an engaged wisdom, where listening is a tuning that we nurture with language. The abled human is a tuning instrument, gifted with internal discernment. The body’s mobility is a constantly engaged sensory mechanism, when some senses are diminished others sharpen…it’s really an amazing feat, the allegory of our biological differences. The anthology had to include as many physicalities as possible, so as to make difference = world.
Coming at poetry from my multi-tiered confusions, I’ve tried to explore what fitting in means with my own work…realizing the ability to frame yourself within your own uniqueness is a long road but ultimately, unavoidable. Incorporating a range of voices was not only necessary for the anthology, but reflective of my own exploration on process. The function of difference is to complicate cognition—to investigate its porous de-arrangement, on the way to something else.
CK: One of the most affecting essays is David Rothenberg’s “The Body Speaks Whale,” where the author uses whale sonograms to teach deaf children in the Dominican Republic to sing. Rothenberg relates that sonograms are “perfect for explaining sound in a sense outside the aural, and combining this with feeling, vibration, and movement” (86). What the author shares is how people experience sound in extremely different ways, and one way is through vibration. This brings me back to the emphasis on difference. You have incorporated various artistic practices alongside various modes of thinking. This incorporation makes me think of philosophy and theory, of different ways we think, read, and acquire knowledge. Another thing I love about this text, Edwin, is how you place highly theoretical moments next to more straightforward engagements with thought. However, one is never privileged over the other, but rather they feed off of one another. This fascinates me to no end. How do you incorporate these various trains of thought and being into your work and life? How does accessible work mix and meld with work that some might consider challenging?
ET: David’s wonderfully written essay has such compassion for all forms of living on this earth; the whales, the deaf boys, the water’s function as transmitter and environment, the sound’s function as vibration and lifeline. The phenomenology of poetry’s capacity to enable the poet their many lifeforms is embodied, in vibration, by the elements—the alchemy of imagination itself, our deepest runes for challenging perception.
In performance, the vibration of the aural, with you as centralized emitter/emoter, is a lifeline to your new language, created in the new realm of the experiential. I consider the blending of philosophies, cultural awakenings, interspecies dwell-making, all forms of our lived experiences, are what we have at our fingertips as realm-makers. Ways to acknowledge our continual transformation into learning, into beings we access for further intuition—the being of our naturalized humanity, as it were…all these plateaus are there for us to acknowledge. There’s a certain amount of grace in that humility, that we don’t know the steps we were given when we arrived. That we are allowed intuition its disfluency, as posed in the earlier question. You know, it’s a matter of arranging the question for entry. How to pose the expected porosity, for the deepest immersion. The essay by Stephen Vitiello incorporates his lived experiences with sound installations. I think there’s a beautiful parallel there, with David’s essay. Where sound is reinterpreted into its environment, how Stephen is examining our lived cognition with an aural entry point, the museum setting, the open-air barn, the World Trade Center—how to extract sound from a given environment, into becoming the listener, into becoming the realm within. How the emotional surrender we exalt in art, is given new awakenings according to juxtaposition.
And then how David looks at an existing sound source and is fascinated by its translation, its interpretation, to then bring us together as human beings, and we share that commonality in our wanting for connection. We connect with the boys interpreting the whales because we want to sing with the whales. To communicate with living forms is our mission as humans. Stephen’s fascination is in our interpretation of space, of volume as divined (perhaps spiritually perhaps biomorphically) out of extracted sound, from field, from recording, from feel. Both Stephen and David’s inner sounds, beautifully brought to a world outside their making. The commonality of Stephen and David is in calling. We are called into our listening, as human beings, we are given time’s breath to respond. Poetry assembles a lineage of responses for the body’s language to transform.
The book’s variety of artistic practices is reflective of our differences as modalities of being. How we think inter-develops our entry points into our different selves. I tend to get lost in the complexities of our communication by not landing on one genre in poetry, one “style” whatever that means. I love the narrative blurring the absurd blurring the abstract blurring the performative blurring the page blurring the sound blurring the theory. I get lost in placement that way, at times that can get the audience lost in where I belong. I’ve lost that desire to know where I fit in and get lost in category unwillingly. I’ve accepted that resolve by now, and realized, with this book, that all those differences were integral to the book’s trajectory. The different species we become as poets, are worthy of placement, in our world, in our hearts—we are all complicated, and that’s okay. I guess that was a driving underpinning throughout the assembly and curation of this book.
A note here about publishing and the value of an alert captain, Tim Roberts at Counterpath Press was so incredibly supportive throughout the entire process, encouraging, decisive, because the book was not commissioned by a press, I was given time—a most valuable partner for any process—to figure out production logistics as well as the dynamics of an alchemical journey. My endless gratitude for his leadership!
So, I wanted to have levels of language available that portrayed what poetry’s beckoning of possibility has always represented to me. If we’re equating the body to language, we would have available to us our patterned existences, our beginning utterances of language, our infant scrawlings and screams, our adolescent awakenings, our first loves, our broken skins, our political turmoil, the extraction of a life from its society, the experimentation of a body giving birth, ingesting objects, excising self-trance from mind…they’re all there to exist in formation. The society of body as figurative integer is in our language. I wanted the straightforward and the high theory, as you say, to exist between the covers. Our realms of soft ability are magnifications of our desires for connection. Placing all that complexity in one book, was an awakening of sorts, a mélange of mutual awakenings.
My own work is in constant process, something I’m still figuring out, however I do know that it’s continually calling me out. My early sketches that may become poems, the scrawls awaiting their line, how far does one travel from their given origin, to extract, to land on something, continually in shift? I won’t say adrift because that implies lost. There’s a power in acknowledging shift, as you transmute through the areas of your life, as the integral field empowers your given name, one created by a body in the throes of language. It seems as if I’m just now, after how many years, catching up to what I think I’ve been wanting to say. So, I wonder, what is challenging, and what is life? Are the answers in the animals? Do I want to know the answers, of course, yes, of course, no, the insurmountable curiosity of a lived life is there, for a lived hearing. The answer would seem to be in listening, so this book…maybe the drive of its function, is to champion hearing, reception, above all else. The message brought forth, the poem manifested, has to come from the body sensed, doesn’t it?
CK: Chloe Wing’s “Skeleton Notes” is phenomenal! I am drawn toward her emphasis on teaching and the word “educate” as a “leading out process,” how it can be transformative. Also, I am struck by your note, Edwin, before the essay, relating Wing’s notes as “imprinting in the student that day’s lesson as a personal re-direction, a language to change the body and allow new choices to inhibit an unhelpful habit” (282). Looking at these drawings, these notes, I start to think of writing and art as palimpsests, always-already here, being built upon, used, repurposing things that have come before. The skeleton makes me think of the body as palimpsest as well—all of the marks, scars, indents, and individuals one comes into contact with and how they are written on the body.
How does the body work/act as palimpsest in your art? In this book? Also, and I want to end this lovely conversation with a note on teaching: this book has a simultaneous feel of “practice,” of art, and also “teaching,” that there is immediate work being done, but also that this book acts as a guide in many ways, but not in any didactic, exhaustive frame. It is welcoming, pleasurable, disorienting, insistent, challenging. How does your teaching inform your work? How does your art inform your teaching? How has your teaching adjusted over the years to incorporate the multiple bodies, multiple voices you have come into contact with?
ET: Another fantastic question, I love these bridges you’re presenting, the aligning of trajectories! Chloe Wing, along with Georgiana Peacher in the anthology, both, in my core, earth/heart shattering—unknown to the literary world and deserving of their own chapters. Chloe Wing was the Alexander Technique teacher & mentor for my wife, Elizabeth Castagna’s Alexander Technique certification. Elizabeth is an AT practitioner, as well as an artist, her poem in the anthology is deeply affecting. Her first solo art show at a NYC gallery, had been previously arranged to open for Sept 13, 2001—two days after the bombings of 9/11. During the summer of 2001, while creating work for the show, Elizabeth kept notes during the creative process. She called these notes, “after thoughts,” they were compiled and displayed as individual note cards under each painting in the show, eleven total. Her title of the show, “after” connected to the paintings created after specific life-affecting moments or conversations she’d had during the previous year. I bring this up because there’s enormous prophetic empathy in those notes—a prophesy born of the show’s title and the resulting poem from the gathered notes, displayed after the subsequent tragedy of 9/11. How our bodies acknowledge events outside our temporal enactments, connected with a shift we may not be aware of in the events we unfold as carriers of our time.
Chloe Wing’s inspiration and guidance have shaped Elizabeth’s work, as an artist and as an Alexander Technique teacher. Chloe’s singular ability to impart her ancient wisdom with that North Carolina warm-Southern openness was a powerful settling that remains with you for a lifetime. It’s something that I wonder, about poetry’s language to affect our own ability, as in the principles that the Alexander Technique imparts on our understanding of our spine, our literal standing, our structure—to deal with particular injuries or paths we’re given, how to deal with what we’ve been placed in, our given possibility. Can poetry, similarly, intersect with that sort of interior note-taking, to bring about change from within?
The book’s perspective on including poetry in the same covers as healing practices, is a chance to infiltrate that divide. When is poetry not healing? It has always healed, but poets aren’t supposed to say that without sounding cliché. The notion of healing can be an emotional state, whereas poetry’s emotion comes from its language, a metaphorically re-imagined place. What is the direction for where the intellect allows information its place? “I want to go to there,” as Tina Fey mumbles in one of her signature Popeye-esque throwaway lines, those quick side-cracks often say more than the main. How do we enable language its groove for finding settling, for searching what cracks in our psyches’ need to be filled? Poetry is as much a body practice as Alexander Technique, as Acupuncture, as Crano Sacrial. The ability for continual transformation lies in reframing obstacles, reframing hierarchy, discipline, words on a page, body.
Chloe’s multi-layered teachings enveloped many modalities, she would take from Chogyam Trungpa’s Warrior training, from Sensory Awareness, from her main teachings of Gurumayi, she would wrap her wonder around all that inspired her and make it her own, a model for empathy and search. Looking at those skeleton notes is a wonder, there are thousands she did, we have a scant few in our possession. She would hand one of them to a client after a session, scribbled thoughts, focused arrivals, homework for the next session—the layered palympset of approach over diagrammed sensory-making opens the body’s language. To learn from a master teacher like Chloe, who knows to hear their own teaching, is to capture the improvised moment—improvised after a lifetime of absorption, for whoever hears it—to mark semblances of exoskeletal transformation, to capture what is fleeting as indelible.
One aspect of AT is about understanding habitual patterns, how the skeletal structure absorbs our navigation, and how we can listen to that scarring, learn from it and adapt. Our marks have always been there, the healing/learning process is to unearth them, to recognize that shift, and adapt. The thing about poetry is that it lives to be unveiled not understood—to not necessarily adapt but be, to claim its presence by being unapologetically itself. The markings, the scars of a lifetime inform the poem. Practitioners of body work investigate the ancestry of our trauma, injury, ungroundedness with an eventual goal in mind…whereas poetry’s immediate goal is to dig into areas of understanding and misunderstanding, in effect, to claim no goal as goal…no ground as ground. Well, for me anyway, I don’t want to claim an entire discipline’s agenda. The language mined for cognition is a routed underpinning, and I love the myriad unveilings that language intersects.
I imagine the body is always intertwined with its own arrival. The pain that drives you to survive your upbringing is what you access for survival as an adult. Accessing a body’s survival is a richly cathartic entanglement. The poem’s work is to manifest the moment, a palympset of negotiated entrances, how is a poem anything but a body, an ecosystem, a society? The work of the body in language is to tap the iceberg for what lies in wait.
How perfect to end this fabulous conversation by way of teaching, by way of Chloe. Poetry enables the visitation of our human characteristics a place for gathered infiltration, a moment for us to look at what we imagine, to see where we allow what’s possible, to perhaps, accept our own possibility, our own impossibility. And how the core of the book is around connections across all languages. How our teachers are the world we listen to, the world we make. Indeed, there is immediate work—in the elevation off each page, the scholarly dissections, the immersions of our gathered eyes over so much emotion, the teachings inside the work, detailed by the livingness of insistence. “Body is receptor is language is transmitter is body is amplifier is language is eraser is body is effluent is language is slip is body is burial ground is language is reactor is body is detonator is language is incubator is body is resolute is language is plumage is body is scaffolding,” writes Jen Hofer.
<< CODA >>
Okay, here’s my coda, because that previous paragraph seemed like a perfect ending. I conclude by exploring the nurturing of an acceptance for possibility—which is that “poetry” comes later, but initially, where is your ability for transformation? Where is your interpretation of a world you continue to evolve in? There is a certain amount of didactic exhaustion, as you put it, that comes from that sort of restlessness, from my own questions on fitting in. To consider one’s practice as one’s teaching opens many paradigms. I think my primary influence for teaching has always come from the Bauhaus. Where a painter was also a writer, a choreographer, a musician, a photographer—I learned that the boundaries we give ourselves can be incorporated as languages. The process of our understanding, how the world enters the framework of our grounding, there’s a lifeforce in that flow.
I came to poetry through graphic design, discovering that my favorite Futurist typographers were also poets, ignited a spark I was ready for as a twenty-something East Village wannabe-punk. The infinite space of a page in its transformation as landscape for typography and form, were instrumental in my perception of matter as language. Its prescient though maybe on track, to have this anthology exist, as a reverberation of my earlier work. In its mining and assemblage, the gathered murmuration is sort of a lulled wave through much of what I wrote about while finding my steps, without realizing the continual drive of body in so much of my work.
I wonder how that came to be? How did I insert myself into the body, before I knew I was doing that? How do the whales hear the boys? The answer of course, is in the periphery of development, how I see in a student’s early work, that meteor just waiting…a sort of cosmic enforcement of one’s place, before they see it. Inevitable, that arc, the multiple bodies I’ve encountered across so many chambers within, how they meet your particular opening when you’re ready. I try to instill that in my workshops, to be ready for perception wherever it leads. The chapters in this book are a balance to time, to thrive in a certain releasing that has no boundaries—yet the structure in work that exists for many generations, has a reason for continued relevance across many of society’s continual disruptions. The body’s systemic trajectories are mirrors of society, as you settle to disrupt both society and placement.
From Anne Waldman, yet another astral plane in this anthology, “What I learned: nature was not pure unchanging, there was no ‘real balance’ / What I noticed: that I might ‘catch on’ to noticing.” The capacity for learning is up to all of us, up to the body inside the language. That “noticing” is something to cultivate over a lifetime. To incorporate the pool outside your own, with all the voices you absorb. The contributors to this anthology gave me such incredible trust and patience to develop this book using their voices to form something individual, a literal embodiment of field work as language. And then these questions of yours Charles, that mined into the book’s structure so ravenously, and got me digging, thank you for that opportunity. I love ending this interview on multiple voices, a perfect distillation of the book as a body, our porous society, our vox populisten.
Additional projects:
Boog City: essay – “Of the New of the Flesh of the Word: Thoughts on Miguel Algarín“
Manifold Criticism: essay – “What Breaks Still: World-Making As Poetic Interruption“
El Rizo Roblado: poem – “BootFack In The Trenches: Redefining The Modern Minority“