Laynie Browne : on Daily Self-Portrait Valentine

 

 

 

 

My Daily Self-Portrait Valentine project began when I saw a show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in early February of 2024, by the artist Melissa Shook, who during the 1970's did a project where she took a photograph of herself every day for a year. Many of these were nudes, all black and white, mostly shot in her New York City apartment against a blank wall, sometimes with a plant, and sometimes including her young daughter.

I found the work incredibly moving, and on the spot decided that I'd create a self-portrait every day for a year, and that I would begin on valentine's day, 2024 and finish on valentines day, 2025. My intention was a commitment to myself—to a durational project that was a love letter to the essential invisible inner being, and the hope to approach, draw near, make and stay in contact—with those ineffable aspects of "Self."

I also wondered why it was that I did not only dislike the idea of creating a self-portrait, but felt a strong aversion to the project, even revulsion or disgust. The concept, to me, was shameful. But what exactly was shameful? An image of a woman, myself, or the idea of confronting one's reflection in a series of writings, drawings, collages, paintings and photographs? I wondered why I could not think of many examples of female poets who created self-portraits in writing.  I wondered what I might learn through this process.  I thought about the classic Buddhist meditation technique of mirror gazing. I remembered one teacher telling me that women she'd worked with who were victims of abuse had violent reactions when she gave them mirrors for this practice. The women flung them to the floor in anger and frustration. They did not want to see themselves.

What was it exactly I had been avoiding? The imperative to find out was suddenly urgent. My resistance to the act of self-portraiture was my catalyst and prompt. What was underneath this nearly paralyzing dread? I vowed to investigate through daily practice. Every day for one year I created self-portraits in writing and in visual mediums. All of the writing, collage, drawing and painting was made in notebooks in the early morning. Mostly, I was attempting to contact that essence of "Self" which is beyond the physical, beyond thought, the changeless unnamable aspects of being. This timeless spiritual question—"who am I"—is one which I am endlessly attracted to—the exact opposite of the idea of "what do I look like."

The act is to finally look at what I've been avoiding, possibly avoiding for all of my life. To approach the question: why the idea of rendering oneself in one's art appeared to me abhorrent. And then, to turn that into its opposite. An attempt at self-acceptance, self-love. To say the word valentine softens the premise. To reflect on what's actually there, is a "pre" "face" to what is not visible in the physical form but defines us nonetheless—the face we present before having a face. Not what has happened to me, not how many years I've revolved around the sun, but what do I make of this self, here, and now.

Later when I read more about Melissa Shook, and a statement she wrote about her daily self-portraits I was struck by what she wrote about her mother:

"Having forgotten my mother, what she looked like, what she was like, how she treated me before she died when I was twelve, has been an abiding concern. Not remembering meant, to some extent, having to create a self without the foundation of remembering much about those first twelve years and trying to raise a daughter without remembering having been a child."

Also much later, I realized that of course I'd been inspired by Bernadette Mayer's important work Memory. Mayer's work Memory is not "self-portraits," yet the durational nature of the work, the vast quantity of photographs and writing, and the audio recording played in a gallery where the photographs were displayed—are all important influences, as is her entire oeuvre.

In my own self-portraits, I quickly learned that though I'd always hated being photographed, that when I photographed myself, that impediment was removed. It was only me behind the camera, so what did I have to fear?  For the first time, I relaxed. Wanting to share this experience, I began to photograph friends, always beginning with a conversation in which I asked these friends, primarily female poets, what was the photograph they'd always wanted of themselves. I wanted to know how these women wanted to be seen—and to create the photographs for them based on their visions. This collaborative process is one I am continuing beyond the year-long durational project.

Currently Daily Self-Portrait Valentine exists as more than four hundred pages of writing, thousands of photographs, and hundreds of drawings and collages. My hope is to create an audio recording of the writing to be played in various settings where selections of the artwork will be displayed, as well as print versions of this work.

 

 

 

 

Laynie Browne’s recent books of poetry include: Apprentice to a Breathing Hand (Omnidawn, 2025), Everyone & Her Resemblances (Pamenar, 2024), Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter 2023), and Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists (Wave Books, 2022). She co-edited the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press) and edited the anthology A Forest on Many Stems: Essays on The Poet’s Novel (Nightboat). Honors include a Pew Fellowship, the National Poetry Series Award for her collection The Scented Fox, and the Contemporary Poetry Series Award for her collection Drawing of a Swan Before Memory. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Nada Gordon : on Copium

 

 

 

 

 

For the past three years, I have been receiving IV infusions of ketamine to help me deal with constitutional melancholy worsened by the widening gyre: 45/47, the pandemic, work difficulties and indeed overwork, and feelings of existential despair.  The infusions are extremely effective. I initially took them at long intervals, but now go twice a month for optimal results.

Ketamine, which was invented as an anesthetic for both people and animals (kitties!), was observed by emergency room practitioners to lift, almost miraculously, people’s depression, according to patient testimonies. It is a psychedelic medicine, but it’s not like LSD or psilocybin; it’s neither multi-sensory nor long-lasting.  I might see hints of visuals, but not full-blown hallucinations.  More than anything, it’s intellective.  Because it is “dissociative,” it liberates me (at least, while under its influence) from patterns of thinking and assumptions about how the world is structured.  It’s phenomenological.  I seem to float above my life and society and even nature for the purpose of disinterested (though not unemotional) observation.  I both burrow into these phenomena and see them anew. 

It is largely known as a party drug, a use to which I’ve never put it and honestly would not want to.  It’s better suited, it seems to me, to interior exploration.  Although I’m decidedly NOT a new age type, I have experienced something like a shamanic journey led by a flying white fox; I saw myself in the womb at the moment of conception, inhabiting three subjectivities at once; I observed my hardworking ancestresses dyeing textiles in a dim stone building.  Often I find myself in a little boat on a misty lake like Lake Inle in Myanmar.  Occasionally I’m a Heian aristocrat just barely dipping my sleeve in the water from my yakatabune.  It’s sublime, especially because accompanied by the custom playlists I lovingly make:  oud, qanoun, ancient lyre, Bach, Scarlatti, lute, shamisen. It’s as if I hear this music as I never did before, and it makes me tremble in adoration of human genius.

Sometimes infusions have a key letter, like on Sesame Street; “this infusion was brought to you by the letter O.”  Sometimes certain flowers, gems, and keywords make appearances.  I often find myself feeling deep appreciation for people who were important to me in my past, and sometimes I even forgive them.  Exquisite natural places both experienced and not-yet experienced show up, as do interesting narrow streets in ancient cities. Possibilities for projects and things to make and design present themselves. The medication helps to gratify my great desire for novelty and adventure.

Although I have felt, in the past several years, sort of bullied by institutions, the infusions are full of affirmation of what I have been able to accomplish and have given me ways, even just small ones, to move forward despite how fucked the world has become. Thus:  Copium.  I came upon this word and knew instantly it was perfect for the poem I was in the process of writing, whose raw materials were the post-infusion notes I scrawled in a teal notebook.

The problem, of course, with drug writing, is that it can be trite: “whoa, dude, the universe is expanding…trippy!”  I don’t think I was entirely able to evade sounding faux-profound in that dopey (pun intended) way, but I did my best to use my poetic defamiliarization toolkit to compose this.  In any case, I’m glad to add my voice to the pharmaceutical genre. 

 

 

 

 

Nada Gordon consists of a head, neck, torso, two arms and two legs. Since reaching adulthood, her body has consisted of close to 100 trillion cells, the basic unit of life. These cells are organised biologically to form her whole body. She is the author of Folly, V. Imp, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, foriegnn bodie, Swoon, Scented Rushes, Vile Lilt, The Sound Princess (Selected Poems 1985-2015), and Emotional Support Peacock. The initiatory sentence of her blog at https://thesoundprincess.com/ reads: “The impulse to decorate is, as always, very strong.”.

Buck Downs : How to Be Alone With Someone Else Who Is Also You

 

 

 

 

There are things that I think it’s important to tell you about how I work that aren’t important at all; not to the experience of reading the poems, that is. Maybe in some inside-baseball sense, for people who collect poetics the way my friend David collects baseball cards: he buys a pack whenever he goes by the place, which is not every day, and because he is prepared to be surprised and grateful, he routinely gets great surprises out of it.

Whatever poetry I am making at any time has its roots in a source-text I created some seven years previously; I have been about that far behind for several years. The gap is long enough that I have forgotten what I wrote in any specific sense. The stranger I am today meets a stranger I was, at the cross-road of an interminable text.

The ideal is to ransack the profoundest scribblings of my heart with the same cavalier devotion that Tom Phillips brings to Mallock’s A Human Document or Ronald Johnson to Milton’s Paradise Lost. I fail at that, of course – the ideal is ever only the burst that gets you out into the field, and gets discarded in favor of whatever game it is you find when you get there.

It seems that seven years before I wrote what would become the source-text for these poems, I was listening to a lot of John Prine again. He is one of the comets that passes through my night sky on its way through, taking up all my attention for a time then singing off into the cosmos. And Comet Prine was passing through my sky again, in the season when I came to write.

And so, “burnt orange” talks back into “Bruised Orange”, after a fashion. Things get turnt, sometimes as hard as they can be without breaking, and sometimes breaking all the same. I have a sense that John often hides a song within the song, purloined-letter-style. Other times, the song starts out to be one thing and ends up being something quite other, as in “Jesus: the Missing Years”. The word I use to describe this phenomenon is, “realism”, and John Prine is one of the most realistic writers I know.

There’s an ‘anyway’ in “a photo I saw but do not have” that echoes that song’s tone of protective diffidence; the phrase ‘bought the farm’ shows up as well, although in both cases it is at least unclear that it happened at all. Many of these things have never happened, despite being founded in the details of everyday life.

 

 

 

 

BURNTORANGE is Buck Downs's fourth above/ground chapbook, after Shiftless [Harvester] (2016), The Hack of Heaven (2017), and Another Tricky Day (2020). Buck divides his time between Washington, D.C., and Ellisville, MIss. His latest full-length is Exit Style, available at buckdowns.com