Kate Cayley, Melanie Marttila, Mahaila Smith, Susan Gevirtz + Noah Berlatsky : virtual reading series #33

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, originally prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Kate Cayley : “Mary Shelley at the End of her Life, Recalling the Monster”

Kate Cayley has published two short story collections, three collections of poetry, and a young adult novel, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US and the UK. She has won the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, and an O. Henry Prize, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among other awards. She is a frequent writing collaborator with immersive company Zuppa Theatre, most recently on The Archive of Missing Things and This Is Nowhere, and her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, The New Quarterly and The North American Review. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.

Melanie Marttila :“Imagined”

Melanie Marttila has been writing since the age of seven, when she made her first submission to CBC’s Pencil Box. She is a graduate of the University of Windsor’s masters program in English Literature and Creative Writing and her poetry has appeared in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, and Sulphur. Her short fiction has appeared in Pulp Literature, On Spec, Pirating Pups, and Home for the Howlidays. She lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.

Mahaila Smith :“My Lethal Fear of Being Consumed” & “Overhang”

Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young femme writer, living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like learning theory and writing speculative poetry. Their recent chapbooks include Water-Kin (Metatron Press 2024) and Enter the Hyperreal (above/ground press 2024). Their novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is newly published with Stelliform Press. You can find more of their poems on their website: mahailasmith.ca.

Susan Gevirtz : reading 3 excerpts from the book AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger : “so they drove…” ; “Prologue / [to be read in Aviation English]” ; “Brief History of the Sky: A Manual for Air Traffic Controllers”

Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat). She is based in San Francisco.

Noah Berlatsky : “One Day Gravity Stopped,” “On Finding the Creature,” “Time Will Fuck You Blues” and “True Love”

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His full-length collections are Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), Gnarly Thumbs (Anxiety Press, 2025), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger, 2025) and Brevity (Nun Prophet, 2025).

Susan Gevirtz : The La Brea Tar Pits [from Movies & Food]

 

 

 

 

In a vast field, before the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was built nearby, between Wilshire boulevard and Fairfax, there were immense pits of oozing oscilating tar –alive – not ancient like the skeletons of the wooly mammoths and mastadons revealed as the tar lurched, bubbled and poured over them.

My father enjoyed cemeteries and maybe this was the ultimate cemetery –one whose interred you could see gyrating in their primeval death.

It was early morning, about 8:30 and chilly for LA. We bundled in jackets against the light fog. Or it was an afternoon so bright that the sky seemed like it might disappear into another stage set. We never went in the evening –but we could have –there were no fences, tickets or explainers. There were flimsy bollards around the perimeters. There were maybe three pits, each covered by a pavilion without walls, held up by posts. We usually stood at the edge of the biggest.

For how long would we stay there looking down?

I asked my dad some questions that he couldn’t answer.

We always wanted to go again, my siblings and I, we were never refused. I could tell that it was a rare place as exciting for us as for grownups. We detected this in the attention of our Dad’s body as he gazed into the tar. He went silent. We followed.

Mastodons were here, exactly where we stood, when it was savannah. Sabretooth tigers hunted here in Pleistocene forests. Now it was an immense scrubby field with a few drinking fountains: Hancock Park.

This swath of Wilshire, including the tar pits, is still called “The Miracle Mile.” Many movies have been shot here. I’ve seen none of them. One is called Volcano another Earthquake – but the tar pits are not a result of volcanic activity – they were formed seismically through multiple intervals of uplift and faulting that allowed crude petroleum to seep to the surface from underground deposits over the last 50,000 years. The shallow petroleum pools entrapped and preserved millions of fossils representing over 660 species of plants, organisms, vertebrates, and invertebrates.

In 1910, it was the Salt Creek oilfields, dotted with oil-well barracks. It was seven miles west of Los Angeles. Before that it was the La Brea Rancheria.

When the bones rose above the tar for a minute you could see whites of ribs, craniums, unidentifiable skeletal parts.

In Los Angeles way before Los Angeles was here. Way before we woke up that morning and got in the car. Before parents, but maybe not before the ocean and palm trees.

Did it ever stop roiling, blowing methane bubbles, lurching, turning up bones?

What is under the earth? The past? No, layers.

Archaeologists call it “a carnivore trap” since so many carnivores were killed when they chased prey who ran into it. They couldn’t escape the bubbling tar, which is asphalt, the lowest grade of crude oil. Now migratory birds get stuck in it. Asphalt preserves bones, mummifies the ancient by throwing it into view —a clock that keeps and kills time.

What made the tar constantly move?  

I found the names of the layers at home in The World Book Encyclopedia for Children: “lithosphere, asthenosphere, mesospheric mantle, crust, outer core, inner core. The geologic component layers of earth are at increasing depths below the surface.”

Where were the subternauts I wondered? John Glen had recently landed on the moon. I wanted to be an astronaut who went in the other direction. I collected rocks, mostly quartz --and shells from the beach. A start to making contact with the first layer.

When I went down, my father would accompany me. I was sure.

Travelling through the lithosphere into the asthenosphere and beyond, I’d speak rock and see in the dark. Time would compress under the weight of the layers. When I surfaced, my mother would barely have realized I was gone, though I would have descended through eons of schist.

Persephone would lead me –she who is named for disaster “destroyer of light.” She who knew how to navigate a subterranean love. Are the outer and inner cores named after Kore aka Demeter, Persephone’s mother? –She who roamed the earth in anguish at the disappearance of her daughter abducted by Hades? —Demeter, goddess of agriculture who mourns in the fallow Fall and Winter when Persephone was required, wanted(?), to return to Hades –Demeter-Kore who became joyful and returned to tending the earth’s cultivation when she and Persephone were reunited in the Spring and Summer?

I was a girl who could also access the molten.  

At night, I fell asleep with my eyes open. As long as they remained open the witch who stirred her cauldron of boiling, lurching brew, couldn’t enter my room. Open-eyed I saw the tar pits at night when no one was there --mirroring the vivid L.A. sky – white bones surfaced as underground stars. Coyotes howled for me to go out and join them. Mountain lions rambled at night in our canyon.

In the Fall the smell of fire was often in the air. On the way to school the car radio reported a new one, out of control, in our area. “Could it burn our house?” I asked my father. “No, never.” he replied. That afternoon my grandfather appeared in front of school to walk us to his nearby house. We’d been evacuated. From the safety of TV, we watched our street blaze, trying to detect our house through the flames on screen.

Could the tar pits burn? Had they already burned?

In despair and rage Demeter ravages the earth’s surface in the Fall, scorching acres, to reveal where the abductor has hidden her daughter. We call it “fire season” in California and other Mediterranean places.

It was the summer when I was ten years old. My Father no longer lived with us. My mother enrolled me in Mr. Quiggley’s summer program. He read the Iliad aloud while we seven kids, ages 8 –13, dissected pregnant sharks in a church basement. Or, he read us purportedly “Chumash” tales, then piled us into his station wagon for a visit to the past aka an “archaeological dig.” Delicately, as he’d demonstrated, we brushed encrusted earth from objects barely detectable to the untrained eye --obsidian arrowheads, mortars and pestles, among other “artifacts” plentiful in the ground of early 1960’s LA.

When I was twenty-two I sent bones I’d found in a field on the island of Paros back to myself in San Francisco. The postal clerk asked me to open the box for customs. The Greek women in the Post Office exclaimed in horror and reprimanded me for stealing bones. Maybe they thought the bones were human –though no human could have a femur that large or a skull of such narrow shape.

In what movie does a girl send bones to herself? What travel trash book shows that women know how to descend and return? I didn’t tell anyone that I loved the smell of gasoline and was excited to pull up to a pump anticipating the fumes that would enter the car.

How to make a movie of a girl’s profession as a subternaut, her training at the edge of the La Brea Tar Pits? Skillfully she descends riding gravity thermals, scanning the chthonic for those trapped in the roiling sludge. She gets lost with them, mostly men, in the inchoate. Then she guides them to the surface. Adept of extraction, under daylight she bestows gifts. Then many forget and believe they are the alchemists of insight. Believe they can make wheat grow and navigate netherworlds.

Lost again, they return for more from this child Inanna and her underground sanctuaries, miner who feels and speaks for those who can’t. While she, shining, able and glad to be of service, runs after her dad’s stray tennis balls –and begins to wonder whether she has the right job?

It would be an abstract film. Maybe by Stan Brakhage. It might never name its location. It would invoke the tar pits as texture and atmosphere. In it a young woman might eat six pomegranate seeds -- not knowing that to eat with one’s captor forces one into eternal captivity. It would be projected on the surface of the Tar Pits on a moonless night. It could be called “The Miracle Mile.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Susan Gevirtz’s most recent books include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat), and Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang). “Sun Worship,” an excerpt from her manuscript Guide School, is a recent chapbook from YoYo Labs. “Doctor Shaman,” another excerpt from Guide School is a chapbook from above/ground Press, and “The Guides,” another excerpt, is a forthcoming chapbook from Antiphony Press. She was associate editor of HOW(ever), a journal of modernist/innovative directions in women’s poetry and scholarship. In 2004, with poet and restorer of maritime antiquities, Siarita Kouka, she founded the Paros Symposium, an annual meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. Gevirtz was Assistant Professor at Sonoma State University, California, for ten years, and subsequently taught in many MFA in poetry programs, the Visual and Critical Studies and MFA programs at California College of the Arts. She is based in San Francisco.

Susan Gevirtz : from Guide School

 

 

 

[ ]   

 

The triplets set off in opposite directions

One crowned by fire     One enthroned in water        One in a halo of air

So thread their maps
to thaumaturgic
wish

Like Strabo --a mercenary of motion

 

The triplets can’t be identical though they trick you to

start rivers
rumors       

 

a raptor

among the migrating birds

bearing GPS

the paragogues look up

so light the wick

let quandary burn in the foundry

ash chronicle

 

 

 

Nouns drop out   muscles slacken spasm        organs prolapse  tastebuds dim

Evidence collectors crowd around reading rings on fallen trees

An-archeaologic as taxonomy
skeletal locations minus viscera   

 

The wish to be disembodied is the wish to escape history

 

 

 

 

                     Memoratz

 

…this feeling that I is really the last person who reads or writes.                                  
                                                                        --Julia Drescher

 

 

Dark tourists of Bessarabia

As for access my faces
only imitation

slides on loose scree
of mirror neurons

Not theirs either
river, creek, not our portage

or your reply though I hear

 

 

Someone changed their mind

Someone said no one’s home

hung up

inverted

the letters

skeletal

of those who carry
does
recall
build
muscle
or

like a baby switched
at birth whose
faces evade
relation

just like
we nocturnal and diurnal cross
paths invisible in light and night
bear, stalker, coyote, surveyor
So

 

maintain
Days
Unstable

 

family a viscous engine oil
fluid accusation
predator tales

 

 

 

 

 

Susan Gevirtz's books of poetry include Burns (2022) Hotel abc (2016) Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (2010) Thrall (2007) Hourglass Transcripts (2001) Black Box Cutaway (1999) PROSTHESIS :: CAESAREA (1994, reissued by Little Red Leaves, 2009) Taken Place (1993)  Linen minus (1992). Her critical books are Coming Events (Collected Writings) (2013) and Narrative's Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (1996).

 

Gevirtz works with Prison Renaissance and Operation Restoration as a writing mentor to incarcerated people. She has collaborated with many sound, visual and performance artists. In 2004 she and Siarita Kouka, Greek poet/restorer of maritime antiquities, founded the Paros Symposium, an annual translation and conversation meeting of Greek and Anglophone poets. With Kouka and guest organizers Helen Dimos, Eleni Stecopoulos and others, the Symposium has met since 2004. She is based in San Francisco.

“We will disrupt nothing with the fullness of nothingness”: a conversation between Susan Gevirtz & Julia Drescher

From April through the beginning of May, Susan Gevirtz (SG) & I (JD) had a conversation conducted through email about two texts: Beverly Dahlen’s essay “Tautology & the Real” & Clarice Lispector’s story “That’s Where I’m Going.” These two texts provided edges to lean on & fly from: below is the conversation that resulted (edited somewhat for clarity). Dahlen’s essay may be located here (page 215 in the pdf). The version of Lispector’s story we used is in The Complete Stories, Katrina Dodson, translator.

***

(JD): I have been trying to think of questions to begin a conversation about the Dahlen & Lispector, but I have found it (wonderfully) difficult to do this, as it feels reductive(?) BUT perhaps that just means that questions might be collaborative/ might just develop out of a conversation. Below, I have just tried to throw a few things out there based on the beginning of Dahlen's essay...Let me know if you have something different in mind, though — I am very much open to other places of interest. (I have numbered them to make it seem like they're anything like "coherent" thoughts, or like I am using the form to trick the content into appearing:) magic!)

In "Tautology & the Real" I am struck by Dahlen's use of the word "progress" twice to refer to how she learned what "tautology" (& "redundancy") meant: “errors fatal to the orderly progress of thought”. Too, there seems to be a morality associated with tautology (& therefore progress?) in how its meaning is taught:  “To commit tautology was to be guilty…”

Lispector, too,  brings this question of progress along, even just with her title...& both seem to have a suspicion of (linear) progress— I want to think about this suspicion, perhaps in relation to poetry &:

1. place & time (i.e. since progress depends on arrival (& since tautology is associated with *not arriving*: then, where? when? exactly)

2. the relation-as-change (in Dahlen:  “What wears out is the real world of roses & moons. What changes is our relation to the real, & this change changes everything.” & in Lispector: how she keeps seeming to repeat/go in circles with the "I/me" *as a means of* 'getting to'(?) the "we" etc.) & a 'Nothing' both Dahlen & Lispector seem interested in

3.       Progress: “movement toward an outcome or conclusion” > so, is a tautology just a question refusing to conclude? As a means of remaining open? (Dahlen seems to be thinking of this in relation to language & poetry)

(Another interesting/related inquiry might be folding in/bearing in mind the definitions for "Tautology" & "Real"? i.e.

1.       Tautology: (one definition)—“unnecessary or superfluous action or word”

2.    Real: — “having a necessary, in contrast to a merely contingent, existence” >

3.    So that: What existence ISN'T contingent? Who (since it's always a 'who'?) decides the necessary-ness? (&, of course, in relation to progress—who decides what that is? — in poetry particularly:)

(Fun fact: etymologically, "Real" was apparently first associated with royalty-what was "real" was "worthy of a king", characteristic of royalty/nobility with regard to "power, wealth, or dignity" )

(SG): Yes absolutely, I think Dahlen very clearly implies that there is a morality associated with committing tautology. A whole order of gendered symbolic power and morality. 

"Tautology represents the case in which there is too little information for progress. Redundancy, on the other hand, represents an excess, a pile-up, a chaos of information.”

Later, in a very dense paragraph that I am not sure I understand, she uses the word “progress” again. It’s hard to excerpt this paragraph or this essay because it’s so dense and each word, each sentence pivots on the previous and the next, requiring a reading backwards and forwards at the same time, but I think that with this next use of “progress” she means that Spicer’s tautology was a kind of complete humanistic (?) system similar to a belief in the complete stable referentiality between things and words. Then she quotes Blaser as saying that Spicer, "regarded magic as ‘matter of disturbance, entrance and passion…’. So magic is opposed to Spicer’s tautology because, as Dahlen says “implicit in the theory of correspondence” is a belief that one can (… be at home in a world of unified and shared meaning).” And that is why that reigning sixteenth-century concept of progress, that version of being “at home in the world,” was in league with those who killed witches who practiced a magic guided "by the impulse to disrupt that order.” It’s funny because at first I thought Dahlen was on the side of Spicer and those who embrace tautology over progress. And now as I reread I think that maybe she is on neither “side” but has gone through tautology to another side and there found a magic witchcraft, that is to say a poetics, that disrupts both orders, and points with Lacan to “an emptiness which is the place of the real.” She doesn’t extrapolate but I am tempted to say she implies that no matter which bodies practice this it is a practice gendered female and is disruptive to a social order that relies on a belief in the one-to-one direct correspondence between things and their symbols — like, to be reductive, a priest and the true words of God.

(JD): I agree about the excerpting! The backward & forward movement in reading this essay is delicious & makes me think about the motions of reading in relation to (dis)place(ment).

I mean, I think Spicer never felt he had “a home in this world”—including the poetry world — & I think the poetry is all about questioning the reader/writer’s sense of this, making them uncomfortable, thwarting even the desire to feel at home. I think if there’s a “nostalgia” in Spicer’s poetry, it’s actually for disturbances—past & future/possible ones — & maybe, too, for disturbances that are always already present but “look like” (sound like) absences/lacks. (whenever I say ‘think’ I also always mean ‘feel’ as well—these are interchangeable for me, just FYI).

(Here I should also confess(!)to you that that whole argument(?) about words & things—it just doesn’t interest me LOL. I think when Dahlen talks about Stein, I agree with her disagreement with what Stein says etc. yet I am still drawn to the idea that the attention paid to it is a distraction—too, that’s it’s always conceptualized as a “loss/lack” “a gap”—that’s suspicious to me (even Lacan’s “emptiness which is the place of the real” I can’t read/hear without thinking of histories of coloniality/misogyny etc. etc. However, I am certainly still open to the idea that I *should* be thinking along these lines. But, for instance, in the Lispector piece, I get the sense that this is not the ‘real’ question interrogating the reader/writer—that, while different from, language is just as ‘real’ a thing as the things it points to or says…I don’t think she’s concerned with it & I am interested in the way in which she uses tautologies as a means of/a form for disruption (of both the self & the language for it) as a means of attempting to respond to the call/the question of love & the we…)

The Dahlen & the Lispector read together, along with your comments above, has me wondering about the connection AND correspondence of poetics to witches, disruption, & the interrogative as related to this modernist argument about the disconnection of language from the “real things” they represent that Dahlen works thru with Stein & Spicer, Lacan, etc. i.e. where “practicing witchcraft” is this twisted, complicated (entanglement!) thing: like, in terms of the witch trials in Salem, where what a woman says, what children say becomes what is considered real by their saying it (from/in a political position where *generally* this speech is always already suspect as speech, from/in response to a threat by those who benefit from excluding such speakers from the notion/experience of power in a political order). We (the Cotton Mathers etc.) believe in the devil, we believe you (any other) are always already impure/traitorous & against our order (because, of course, it *is* against you) & therefore we believe you are susceptible to the devil etc etc *so show us that we’re right*, affirm for us that what we believe is real.

& then, too, at the same time & in the same place what is also happening (thru & with the above) is this fucked-up means by which those who feel they are entitled to “feeling at home in this world” can recognize-as-a-means-of-not-recognizing their role in making this world shitty for everyone— for instance I see it as no accident that the whole Salem “colony collapse” begins by focusing on Tituba….what is that called—transference? “The act of conveying from one place to another”—wherein bodies are “made” into places—to be fixed & locatable as a means for owning, to be a fixed & locatable point (to be made), a place to offload your guilt your sins your pathologies that will hold them/bear them in the fantasy that this will make life more bearable for you….etc. etc. (exhausting) etc… So that “progress” seems reduced to (a need for) a comfort that is limited/exclusive to those with political power, reduced to the need for only one timeline to really matter (?)…

All this(!) to ask: does this kind of “political progress” you were speaking about: “being at home in the world” linked to “a whole order of gendered symbolic power & morality”: Do you feel this as (a real) tautological constraint? &, if so, is it connected for you/do you have a relation to this constraint in the how &/or why of your writing/reading lives?

(SG): Yes. It is a real constraint. But 1st I need to do some sorting and reminding for myself: to be clear what I/we/Dahlen mean by “it” : in the beginning of her essay Dahlen puts tautology in opposition to redundancy: “Tautology represents the case in which there is too little information for progress. Redundancy, on the other hand, represents an excess, a pile up, a chaos of information.” We are taught, she says, that these are errors that have in common the “the idea of repetition.” I agree that we are taught that these are errors and their wrongness is enforced as a law. You can call it grammar or institutional mores or whiteness (which has many symptoms, among them my alliance and/or ease with the idea of trespass without punishment— there are places my body and thought have been able to visit that are part of privilege I’ve assumed, incorporated (corporeal-ized). Its enforcement is mostly invisible, or we are so accustomed to its voice and command that it goes unnoticed and thus it is ultra pernicious.

Later Dahlen speaks of repetition as a sign of desire and a relation to the real. While she brings up Lacan even later in the essay, I think she has in mind a Lacanian idea of the real from the start. Later she quotes Lacan, “The real is the impossible.” And she goes on to say, “It is what is excluded (or in Lacan’s terminology “foreclosed”) by language, by the entire order which he named symbolic.” In my own work I am very interested in what is excluded— as much what I do not allow in and need to examine, as discarded consciously or not, as in the relation between the writing and its alleged subject. This last especially is, I think, an imagined relation like the relation between the real thing and real word, like the relation between repetition and desire— I’m with her on the idea that there’s always excess, never one-to-one correspondence (or only as a bait and switch until the next association is exposed —And that this is the fissure, the disruption, we’re going for. And that this disruption thwarts progress and I have no interest in poetry that progresses unless its progress is redundant. It’s as if she’s suggesting that the repetitive nature of tautology and redundancy is the symptom that reveals desire and our failure to satiate it. Fuck satisfying desire. No need to even try. Or to try not to try. Desire has us, not us it. In this realm I think I am aligned with her in my work in the sense that I am, and have forever been, interested in thinking that does not register on the page as developed essay-like thought. Tautology is one form that can take us there. So can some forms of redundancy (as Dahlen says “A rose is a rose is a…” would not work as well if it weren’t a rose. This is where the poet comes in…).

I think I understand your suspicion or just downright disinterest in the “gap” “lacunae,” read sign of the vaginal or feminized, error, space of the wrong… of nothing. I am aware of this possibility as one in a spectrum of possibilities. I am wondering, does it (all of these possibilities) assume an outside of language? I wonder whether another problem with the concept of “the real” is that it assumes an outside of language? If it does, that would be a huge red flag for me. I believe there is no outside of language. The political implications of believing there is an outside include some of the problems you and I list above. If there is an outside of the “real” — an outside of nothing— who occupies it? What speakers and bodies? I think it would be the ones who are not white, the ones who have not learned to properly discard tautology and redundancy, the ones who in the culture symbolically represent the outside: the colonized, the vaginal, etc…

OR, do all these possibilities refer to the plenitude of desire, kept pumped by the repetitions of redundancy and tautology — as in what Dahlen says in the end of the essay: “There will always be a reading of ‘nothing,’ in which it is full, rather than empty.” Maybe she suggests here something I hope and aim for: a subversion of the symbolic order by use of its concept of nothing. If those signs signify emptiness as error, we will disrupt nothing with the fullness of nothingness.

Yes, I agree, Lispector also is thinking in a parallel territory - even in her title. And yes progress implies and depends on arrival at a better destination than the previous. But does tautology really depend on *not arriving* as you say above? Or does it depend on arriving and arriving and arriving but not necessarily at a better place (as a progressive arrival- or view of history- implies) but at, as she says, “I at the edge of wind.” The “at” means “the edge of wind.” It is a place, though not a place with a proper name. Still it is a place that is also, as the next line shows, the title of a book, “The wuthering heights call to me.” So it is the place of a call and the place of a book. A place is a time in which something happens. I am called. I am reminded of writing; in fact as a writer I respond to the call and my response is a place in time that is an action— in the next line she says, “I go, witch that I am. And I am transmuted.” So I am wondering here whether Dahlen’s witch and Lispector’s both propose a practice that is not tautology or progress but what Lispector here calls “transmutation.” She says more in the remaining lines of the essay about what might count as her version of transmutation — a different poetics-place from Dahlen’s I think, but maybe with some overlaps.

In the discussion about Salem particularly, you are describing an order, a condition, I recognize and believe is very palpably still with us, alive, well and kicking —kicking people out, calling them other things, maybe not witch, but the equivalent. Are you saying that this order is itself a tautology? Do you think Dahlen means that?

(JD): I think I am saying that it (the order) IS a tautology—insofar as it is a political reasoning that exists to continually categorize Others as unnecessary/unreal (to its order) *so that* it (the order/people who believe in this order) can categorize itself/themselves AS necessary/real (& therefore not “dependent on” those deemed unnecessary—even though the whole reasoning is *based on* this kind of exclusion from the necessary/real). i.e. the tautology is just a re/affirming of an exclusionary idea of “humanity” (**without recognizing** this form as “an error” of tautology).

          I *think* Dahlen points to this, yes. As just one example of Dahlen pointing to this in her essay: In the paragraph that begins “More than forty years separate these works…” (this is after the quote of the Spicer piece from After Lorca):

“So the real is that which is left out or left over, that which is always necessarily beyond the frame of the painting or the margin of the poem. The induction of so-called real objects into painting serves, like the repetition of the word ‘rose’ in Stein’s poem, to demonstrate the lack of the real…A ‘newspaper’ is not a newspaper; its self-referentiality within the painting is a tautology, a hole in the painting that reminds us of the essential illusion of art.”

OK, so: this is super-interesting to me, & I feel like there are multiple “moves” she’s employing here (a “newspaper” has a self!) but in terms of *also* thinking in the vein of the tautological condition we’ve been discussing, “the real” here is aligned with “that which is left out or left over, that which is always necessarily beyond the frame of the painting or the margin of the poem.” (my emphasis) So that which is excluded (those who are excluded) from “the real”, are shown (as absence, as tautological hole) to be crucial to (the idea, the representation of) it. & then, that last phrase, I can hear as something like “a hole in politics that reminds us of the essential illusion of the law” : obviously, not what Dahlen means at all, just what her essay (& thru our discussion) disturbs me into thinking (I guess like a ‘line of flight’ that pulls me?). BUT not, to my mind, unrelated, given that the exclusionary practices of politics, of the juridical etc. can be “sent thru” to, can be functioning in, ideas about representation in art, how/why someone might “practice art” etc.

(That “sent thru” is a Fred Moten formulation (&, really, he’s one of the people I often just find myself following around because he “disturbs” me in the best/challenging sense) BUT, while I am drawn to what he says about “being sent by/what sends thru,” I also am mindful that I can’t just throw myself into that whole hoc—because, what *also* wants to be (& has been/is)“sent thru” me is whiteness, the juridical-man, etc. (I guess he might say what wants to “seize thru”, as distinguished from “sent”)—& so disturbing that as much as possible also means remaining suspicious of myself in a general sense, recognizing(?) when I fail at disturbing this function, when I perpetuate it etc. etc. I am here, too, thinking-as-following what you said above about the “excluded”, the “fissure, the disruption we’re going for” etc.)

So, again, I *think* Dahlen points to this, yes, AND ALSO the idea that the form (of tautology) might also be able to do *something other-than* this…

          In regards to your question about “not arriving”: I don’t know: I guess what I was trying to think about was: if progress is a “movement toward an outcome or conclusion” then this indicates a *fixed place* wherein “refuge” [home] could be found/achieved & so arrived at…whereas tautologies—“spinning one’s wheels” as Dahlen says—seem to indicate the motion of a refusal of the place you’re stuck in *without* leaving/being able to leave that place (i.e.(?) “That’s where I’m going”).

That the enclosure/constraint of tautology re both historical/literary ones & its “general”/administered meaning (which I vaguely associate the accusation of this—as Dahlen relates it at the beginning of her essay—with putting someone back in their “proper place” by deeming their speech “unnecessary”, “superfluous”)—that working thru/in/with this can also be a “cover” for “flight” within it: a recognition of disturbances that are already there (hiding-as-a-means-of-showing) etc. which might require giving up the desire to “arrive” at a place-like-an-answer/escape?? So that this makes me think about placeless space? Is there a placeless call a placeless response as a kind of different timing/timeliness? Unlocatable (in flight), disruptive of the idea of the locatable, the real? & then so maybe this is akin to your “Or does it depend on arriving and arriving and arriving but not necessarily at a better place”

Given “transmutation’s” etymology of ‘thoroughly beyond’ I think I agree with your take re Lispector’s & Dahlen’s practices…maybe the question for each (& maybe where there’s that difference you mention) is “beyond what/who/when”??? beyond even this question?

The whole "I at the edge of wind" followed by "wuthering heights" is just amazing in terms of reading & displacement, the motion/what happens in reading—& I see it as related to the "we" inasmuch as one way to read this is "the place" she becomes/always is *is part of the weather in the book of wuthering heights* — that's some awesome witchery! (&, not that I would at all argue this is what she was pointing to, just that our discussion is making me think of it— but those beautiful lines about the dog at the end, now I am thinking about how they hung 3 dogs as witches in Salem...)

Then, too, I wonder: if you are already conceptualized as disturbance (to a political order, to a REAL unified meaning etc.), how do you/ can you practice (say) a poetics of disturbance? (maybe that’s not a real question??)

Reading your responses above also reminded me of this Blanchot quote I have been thinking about:  “Flight is the engendering of a space without refuge.” (& I don’t read the use of “engendering” lightly at all).

(SG): Hmmm… I like the way you’re thinking about the fixed place and the refuge, I think you’re right that we’re in the realm of “the motion of a refusal” —  a refusal of the place one is stuck in while being stuck in it. This could, and does I think, in both essays, apply to so many things: to gender, to “the real”, to who/what counts as a witch — and to the “Flight” in the Blanchot quote (witches really do and don’t take flight through the air, do and don’t perform transmutation — or so it appears to anyone who doesn’t understand their other logic and method). I am left wondering—what is “Flight”? Shall we, can we, should we replace “Flight” with “Writing”? Is “Flight” here interchangeable with any other word or idea? Or why bother interchanging? You said above, “this makes me think about placeless space? Is there a placeless call a placeless response as a kind of different timing/timeliness?” Is that the place of the book?

I realize that when I read what Dahlen said about tautology — that we are taught early on that it is bad, that it is a “spinning one’s wheels” — I was imagining a slight irony in her “tone” or  suspension of commitment to the things we’ve been led to believe. This way of (perhaps erroneously) reading made me have a shred of hope for tautology, and think she might too, like maybe it could be a means of the kind of “motion of refusal” you mention. So a surreptitious recommendation to take the being trapped in what we were taught is a wrong use of language and bend it our own ends. Maybe this is the sense in which tautology is useful, or a transmuted tautology could be useful? Can we take the reprimand and rule against tautology, read (as you say above) the disciplining against it that our early encounters mandate, the rules against improper speech and bodies, can we use that “enclosure/restraint” for our own ends? If there is really no flight out of the house, then are flights of imagination the only flight available to us? Flights of imagination by which we recognize and reveal disturbances? Can there be a placeless real that is not empty (though possibly redundant) in its desire to keep taking flight? What is a practice of the beyond? Are either or both of them showing this to us in this writing? Can we point at anything that is it?

I wonder— is the kind of displacement we read/see in action there in Lispector’s lines, the action of the beyond we’re trying to name? Or rather that I wish to point to (like a hunting dog?) and call something…? Is displacement the place? Thinking of Sun Ra’s “space is the place”…

Wow incredible, I didn’t know that about the dog hangings in Salem! How savage women are in the intimacy with things as wild and domestic as a dog… If anyone could hear the grand  proportions my talking out loud to my dog have taken in the last 8 weeks alone with him they might at least take me in for questioning… Very curious how you see yourself practicing a poetics of disturbance in your work?

(JD): I feel very little difference between writing & reading.

(SG): Me too.

(JD): (this would also be in agreement with you about feeling “no outside to language”, I think, & what “the real”/the word-is-not-the-thing argument has traditionally assumed to be able to point to i.e. that “outside of language” that relates to my disinterest/suspicion, & that I think by the end of her essay Dahlen *is* rejecting)

(SG): Yes, as in an outside of language would equal an outside of the book or an outside of a piece of writing —where you & I might feel a permeable membrane.

(JD): So, generally, I try to practice a poetics of disturbance thru how/what I read & hope, I guess, that it comes thru to disturb the poetry—or also to disturb the “self” that is writing it, wanting to regulate it, etc. I read what I read to be unmoored from what I think/feel generally. This makes me want to consider a poetics of disturbed reading (which I think Dahlen practices in her essays & her poetry, but I am not sure she would agree?).

(SG): Yes, beautifully put. I too try to practice that —someday we could make a list of the many shades of disturbance we long for and try to find in reading. I think Dahlen would agree and probably does attempt this.

(JD): I have always been interested, too, in how (the act of) reading disturbs/can disturb. Lisa Robertson: “…it was Rousseau who said that any girl who reads is already a lost girl” (lost to what? to who?).

(SG): Yes!? Exactly— then I want to be lost. I read to get lost.

(JD): So, right now, I am thinking along the lines of this thru my childhood experiences. For instance, my parents didn’t finish college so it was made very clear to me that I was *definitely* going to get a degree etc. BUT often I got in trouble for reading “when I shouldn’t be”—inappropriate reading, reading “excessively” (which meant not for a grade in school) —reading as tautology AND redundancy!

I *think* where my reading ‘disturbed’ them was when it was interpreted by them as a “motion of refusal” (of, say, ‘family’, the ‘family picture’ at church etc.), & read by others outside my immediate family as a refusal of housework/childcare in a rigid-gender-norm sense (& still is!!!). (I mean, this really is a “same-as-it-ever-was” situation to a certain extent, the “spinning the wheels” that creates exhaust—& I am also speaking perhaps too broadly here).

One meaning of “disturb” is to stir up trouble—which, of course, implies the trouble is already there/present (& now I am thinking of witches again!)—&, too, more often than not, whoever/whatever stirs up that trouble is transformed into being the trouble/the problem (i.e. to point at it is to “become” it).

(SG): Yes - Bubble bubble toil and trouble.

I love the idea of reading as tautology and redundancy and thus disturbance in the form of EXCESS! 

The scene of the family is definitely the crucible of so many different kinds of reading—love that you’re looking into this. The “reading is a waste of time” idea fascinates me because it does lay waste to time as we know it outside of reading.

& I’m pretty sure we’ve talked about Freud’s injunction against girls reading- in Dora — equating it with the dangers of other erotic activities, especially masturbation, if I recall correctly.

(JD): What all of this also has me thinking — & related to the Blanchot quote—is that (for me at least) reading/writing IS a flight (that is also a dive), but not in the escapist vein (though sometimes people’s perception of it as being so is what might “disturb” them about it?). If it is “a space without refuge” then it (also?) disturbs that political/literary order we’ve been speaking about (that regulates ‘the female’ of me at the same time as making a false promise to the white part of me that I could be “included” in its supposed freedoms etc etc., which is one way it can seize thru me)—which means it’s a place of continual difficulty & preparation (i.e. no “arrival” at some redemptive/exceptional place).

(SG): Yes. I couldn’t agree more. A perfect place to leave the conversation…

Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat). She is based in San Francisco.

Julia Drescher is the author of Open Epic (Delete Press). She lives in Colorado where she co-edits the press Further Other BookWorks with C.J. Martin.