Fay Mtn : Poetics of Stony Flows, Part 1

 

 

 

I.              Niedecker & Barad

(1968) Lorine Niedecker in North Central[1]:

In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock

In blood the minerals
of the rock

(2007) Karen Barad in Meeting the Universe Halfway[2]:

“The world is not populated with things that are more or less the same or different from one another. Relations do not follow relata, but the other way around. Matter is neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things” (136-137).

“In an agential realist account, discursive practices are not human-based activities but specific material (re)configurings of the world through which boundaries, properties, and meanings are differently enacted. And matter is not a fixed essence; rather. Matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency” (183).

Matter is always already an ongoing historicity (151).

As Barad has it, the subject does not precede the action, but is cut into subject-shape by the intra-active engagements with shapes cut into object cloth by the very event that necessitates being a-part. No doer, strictly speaking, before the doing. Then time may or must be reconfigured as non-teleological. The subject’s being in time reformulated by the reformulation of being-subjected to a clear-cutting. Let me try this again: no cause and effect à no passage of time. No à logic.  

Here are queer time-bodies, made non-narratively, non-teleologically in the instant of their interfleshy discursive breaking-apart.

Queer materialities, meshflesh, revolutionize temporal ontology. Being in time as now as durational, as pointillism, as teleological, as iterative, as suffusive, as edgeless, as dissociation, as through. Thorough. Being in time might be as rock, as alive as object, as mineral. Being in time might be bloody. Being in time might be the stoniness of blood. Being in time might be archaic-organic, as stone. Sedimentary. Or rockiness may be suffusive, edgeless, dissociative.

Non-reproductive timescales under a regime of horizontal generationality. Coral, for instance, cross “contaminating” multi-generationally, transforming the evolutionary tree to quilt. In other words, we do not only re/create “down” or “forward” but back, across, back, over. Animal blood is made lively by its undeniable rockiness. Mineral randomness is not random, but a matter of space. Generationality is geographical. Continents make up bodies and reproduction makes up space and is made up by spatial flows.  

 

 

 

 

Fay Mtn is the author of the chapbook Body of Water (New Note Poetry) and the artist's book Poem Composed for a Long Book, created in residency at the Western New York Book Art Center. They are a PhD candidate in poetry & poetics in Buffalo, NY.

 

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[1] Niedecker, Lorine. North Central, London, Fulcrum Press, 1968.

[2] Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, Durham, Duke University Press, 2007. 

Wade Bell : And So Monty’s Magazine

from Report from the Reid Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

 

Monty and I met at the inaugural meeting of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta in, I believe, 1976. Convened by Aritha van Herk and Rudy Wiebe, it was held in an office in Edmonton’s warehouse district. You could feel the excitement in the big room, sniff the nerves. Arrivistes like me who’d barely had time to conceive of ourselves as writers were going to have an organization!

My only publication, The North Saskatchewan River Book (stories set in Edmonton and Jasper), was newly out. The major downtown bookstore refused to carry it. Claimed it insulted the city. It did. But still.

I didn’t think anyone had read it but Monty had. A model of calm and collectedness, he complimented me on it. Hearing my name, Bob Kroetsch bustled over and showed excitement for it too. So four people knew I existed as a writer: Aritha, Rudy, Monty and Bob. Heady stuff.

After the meeting some of us went on to Reg Sylvester’s house, I believe it was, to drink beer and chat. In the living room people had clustered around Aritha, in the kitchen around Rudy. Bob, Monty, and I, like fish in a stream, headed for the back yard.

 “The Yard” (Monty Reid, 1976) (abridged – sorry, Monty)

          The yard arranged for convenience
                                         Yellow caragana
              purple, white lilacs
                                             Birds glide in
                                         from another yard

We pulled some lawn furniture together, sat and began talking. People poked their heads out the door but we must have looked wholly absorbed because no one joined us.

Energy flowed from Bob. I saw it enter Monty. I can’t remember what was said before one of us, or maybe all three at once the way it can happen sometimes, brought up the idea of a literary magazine. Neither Monty nor Bob thought there was one in Alberta. At least not one that might have cloaked itself in the avant-garde mantle.

What to call it? Suggestions were offered but none accepted so we put that search aside to tackle one that was even more essential. Who would run it? Who be managing editor? I thought Kroetsch would be too busy. I guessed that Monty thought so too. I dreaded the responsibility that could land on my shoulders. I wasn’t known to be particularly reliable. Besides, my job in the oilfields left me enervated.

So when Monty volunteered I was grateful. Bob smiled. You could see the teacher in him.

It wasn’t that Monty wasn’t busy. He had his poetry plus teaching or another fulltime job, for all I knew. But he had the enthusiasm to get a magazine off the ground and, as it turned out, the stamina to carry it beyond the initial impetus.

And in volunteering he provided us with the name. He lived in the town of Camrose so it would be The Camrose Review.

No one ever looked prouder.

That it was a success, publishing in its first three issues, Patrick Lane, Ron Smith, Michael Ondaatje, Barry Nichol, Sharon Thesen, Robert Hilles, Douglas Barbour, Erin Mouré, Myrna Kostash, Bruce Hunter, James Cooper, Mary Howes, Phil Hall, Sharon Riis, Stan Dragland, Blodgett, Harris, Sorestad, Banting, Barclay, Wallace, Rodriguez, was largely Monty’s doing.

Fine poet; enthusiastic, discriminating editor.

And when The Camrose Review arrived with the subtitle, “A Journal of Lutheran Thought,” well, that descriptor did not go unnoticed. But it did go unchallenged. It was just Monty. Pure Monty. I can see his wry smile.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wade Bell: Born in 1941 in Stettler, Alberta, and at the age of one week was moved by my mother to an Edmonton tenement where we lived in wartime food rationed poverty. Joining the RCAF my father had left her pregnant. I went to Carleton University, wrote my first book in Ottawa and stayed in the city to work for the CRTC.

Following a devastating marriage breakup, I quit the safe government job and went travelling.

Back in Ottawa in need of money I drove taxi, the lone Anglo in a French crew stationed at the bus depot. I saved some money and I left to travel again.

Through a series of fortuitous connection made in Ireland I was invited to spend three months in Spain. I went and stayed five years.

Many of the stories in my three subsequent books are set in Barcelona or the Catalan countryside.

With a Spanish bride and needing money I came back to Alberta to work in the oilfields, mostly in the wilds of the boreal forest. 

I am now 81 and living in Calgary. In addition to my four books, I have published over 50 stories and poems in literary magazines, anthologies and text books in Canada, the US, Japan, Denmark and Italy.

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Douglas Kearney

Sho, Douglas Kearney
Wave Books, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Douglas Kearney [photo credit: Bao Phi] has published seven books, most recently Sho (2021), a National Book Award, Pen American, and Minnesota Book Award finalist. Buck Studies (2016) was the winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, and silver medalist for the California Book Award (Poetry). Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection, and Starts Spinning (2019), a chapbook of poetry. His work is widely anthologized, and he is published widely in magazines and journals. Kearney teaches Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities where he is a McKnight Presidential Fellow. Born in Brooklyn, raised in Altadena, CA, he lives with his family in St. Paul, MN.

You’ve described your work as a kind of “performative typography,” a phrase that just sings across a whole range of possibilities. How do you feel this element of your work has evolved across the length and breadth of your work-to-date?

Thank you for this question. I’d argue that any typeset poem is a designed object; but when the design hews to more conventional typography (in English, say, left margin aligned, consistent point sizing, etc), a practiced reader perhaps doesn’t notice the decisions they’re making about where to begin, proceed through, and end a reading of a poem. When I think of what I’ve been calling performative typography, I mean to mean poems that make us conscious of our active participation as readers and the inherent agency of that activity. Most of my development in this vein has paired technology with compositional possibility. The bulk of my praxis has used page layout software and, as such, has pushed a bit at the idea of spaciality as a means of creating associations even when sentences do not. It has also been important to me to use similar typographic styling within the performative typography poems to assert similarities between those and the more conventionally-arranged ones.

Where I find myself now—and these aren’t in Sho, though there are some published on the internet—is in a closer conversation with hip-hop sampling techniques. These poems are more truly collaged from found sources, marking my interest in the textural as well as the textual.  For these poems, I compose them in photoediting software, often revised from freehand drafts in my journals.

There is very much a sense of music and rhythm in your work, one that plays off such wonderful collisions and contusions of rhythm and vernacular. Do you see this as an element of performance? How did this emerge?

I’ve grown up listening to hip-hop, so what you describe richly as collisions and contusions has accompanied my own life almost long as I can remember. Yet, hip-hop music expressed through rap felt close enough to the kinds of rhetorical performances that featured in my Black household and block that I understood it simultaneously as folk music and commercial music. I sometimes have to remind myself how dynamic and weird it is to hold those two characterizations as the music and culture were developing in real time with my listening.

Another important aspect of collision and contusion (a new C&C music factory!) was that where I grew up—Altadena, CA—was nestled right in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. Sometimes when we would drive around, the valley would make the radio station signals careen into one another. Generic and cultural interruption were features of my radio listening, an audio equivalent to seeing signage in Spanish, Armenian, and Chinese logograms while looking out the backseat window of a car.

Your work has long been known for an engagement with a variety of political and social concerns. How do you feel your response has evolved over the space of your published work?

When I first started, I think I was deeply invested in the fiction that I had all of the answers. This led to a style in which I wasn’t trying to understand people—including myself—rather I wanted to project certitude in a way that diminished its power. Understand, I’m not interested in creating ambivalence when I don’t feel it. Like: white supremacist-driven domestic terrorism is f_ _ king evil. Certainly. Yet I am interested in blending/bending tones to create unsettling effects. I want myself and my reader to think about what we assume is the response that makes us comfortable and what happens when we question that response.

I find myself pushing back against false equivalencies, it’s why I’m wary of simile and metaphor. I’m often less driven by literary effects that remove the reader from the conscious act of reading, seeing letterforms on a page, so I find myself being more deliberate and sparing of images than I used to be. But I don’t know how programmatic I am about that. Sho draws poems from as far back as 2008 and while I did revise the poems to speak to each other, I wanted many of them to retain their particularities and peculiarities. Thorns.

Still, one of the things that I find exciting about a praxis of intentional constraint is that when I change constraints, I’ve rewired my approach. I once wrote an opera in a counterfeit language. It was my MFA Thesis at California Institute of the Arts (it was called Jungaeyé then, but it’s published as Benbannik). In the act of creating the language (‘Ngmbo), I realized it wasn’t enough for me to focus on words for nouns and verbs. The real complexity was imagining prepositions and conjunctions, prefixes and suffixes. When I finished the first version back in 2004 and wrote in English again, I found that my sense of syntax had fundamentally changed. It was wild!

If syntax is a significant component of how a culture organizes its sense of the world, how it presents that ordering and its values. I find myself treating syntax—thus, prosody—as a political and social concern. I imagine, then, that the content and execution of my poems is that engagement your question names.

The beauty of working any art form for an extended period, naturally, is in the realization of just how much we might not know, and creating as a way through which to discover. I’m curious if you had any particular poets or writers that prompted, or even confirmed, some of these thoughts or directions in your writing?

Harryette Mullen changed everything for me. When I read S*PeRM**K*T, I realized that a poem could focus on the systems of rhetorical play associated with the Black praxis of signifyin(g). A poem with this orientation didn’t have to center images, but language itself as a site of dynamic emotional, intellectual, and political engagement. Pun, repetition & revision, and irony became the devices that meant the most to me and they’ve animated my poetry ever since. I had encountered signifyin(g) in my parent's house, parts of the community, and hip-hop, but Mullen’s work struck me as the apotheosis of it.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Sho was completed? What have you been working on since?

As far as poetry, I’m working on two manuscripts. I Believe I Been Science Fiction Always, which actually coalesced at the same time as Sho took shape. IBIBSFA pushes the visual poetry absent from Sho into a direction that I find as textural as it is textual. There’s a series of poems that imagine armor pieces via Afro-Diasporic musical practices; several poems combining image and text to consider the preposition “over” as it relates to cultural practice and tropes; a long poem that works with and about time by way of turntablism. Fun stuff. The other manuscript is called Mysteries! Give Me Power. The sentences that seem to want to cleave together in that manuscript have been a trip to think and feel through.

I’ve a collection of craft/critical writing—the lectures I wrote for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. That book is called Optic Subwoof, and Wave is putting that out this fall. There’s stuff in there about banter as self-destruction, visuality in poetry, taxonomies for violence in poetry, and my lifelong ambition to be a werewolf. I’m working on a children’s opera and a monograph on dramaturgy as a strategy for listening to Black music. Fun!

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: Sharon Dolin and Gemma Gorga

Late to the House of Words, Sharon Dolin, translated from the Catalan written by Gemma Gorga
Saturnalia Books, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • International Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

Sharon Dolin is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living (2016), Whirlwind (2012), and Burn and Dodge (2008), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry.  She is also the author of a book of translations, Gemma Gorga’s Book of Minutes (2019), and a prose memoir, Hitchcock Blonde (2020).  The recipient of a 2021 NEA Fellowship in Translation, she lives in New York City, where she is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and directs Writing About Art in Barcelona.

Gemma Gorga was born in Barcelona in 1968.  She has a PhD in Philology from the University of Barcelona, where she is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Spanish Literature.  She has published seven collections of poetry in Catalan: Ocellania (1977), El desordre de les mans (2003), Instruments òptics (2005), Llibre dels minuts (2006) which won the 2006 Premi Miquel de Palol, Diafragma (2012), Mur (2015); and Viatge al centre (2020).  She is also the author of a prose journal of her time spent in India entitled Indi visible (2018).

I suppose this is a kind of chicken-or-egg question,but what was the process of simultaneously building both a book of translation and a selected poems? Were the poems first gathered for the sake of selection, or for the sake of translation? Were there questions you had to solve that might not have emerged otherwise?

Sharon Dolin: I was already acquainted with Gemma Gorga’s work through my translation of her book of prose poems Llibre dels minuts (2006), which appeared as Book of Minutes in 2019. So when I decided I wanted to continue translating her poems written in lines in 2017, I first began by translating her then most recent book Wall (Mur, 2015), but soon realized that certain poems were more successful in English than others. It then occurred to me that a Selected Poems might be a better idea and so I began to translate poems from her other books. Much of my selection process was by intuition: That is, I read through the poems and decided which ones appealed to me as a reader; then I worked on the translations. If I was not satisfied with the poem in English, I discarded it in favor of another. At some point, I believe early on, I had chosen the title for the collection, Late to the House of Words, a phrase from the poem “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall,” and that choice led me to make sure I translated any poems that were directly concerned with issues of language. Of course, I had already noticed a preponderance of poems that were in love with words, with the dictionary, with the richness as well as the limits of language, so I intentionally highlighted those poems in this Selected Poems. Gemma Gorga was a delight to work with and seemed very happy with the choices I had made for this selection from her six books.

Gemma Gorga: The book wasn’t conceived as a simultaneous work. Actually, Sharon explained to me her idea of gathering poems from all my previous books and arming a representative anthology. Of course, I couldn’t be more happy and grateful. But, from that moment on, this book was her work: she selected the poems, translated them and wrote a prologue which I think is key to understand the collection. But, as you can see, my role during the process has been rather discreet.

Gemma, having yourself done translation work, how was it seeing your own work shift through translation? How involved were you, if at all, with Sharon through the process?

Gemma Gorga: The first impression is kind of vertigo, like living in a recursive world: while I translate a poet, I’m being translated at the same time by another poet. And while I, doing my own translation, have to solve all the tricky aspects inherent to language, I know that my translator will have to solve this same kind of problems.

But, at the same time, I chose not to be too involved in Sharon’s translation process, because a translator needs a lot of space and freedom of movements. Of course, I tried to answer all her consultations, but without interfering too much in the final solution.

What other Catalan poets should one be reading to further expand upon the context of Gemma Gorga’s work more generally?

Sharon Dolin: I do think it’s important to read the poetry of Francesc Parcerisas, who was one of Gorga’s teachers. About other Catalan poets, I defer to Gorga herself.

Gemma Gorga: Catalan poets are, of course, my closest tradition, my immediate reference. Names such as Joan Vinyoli, Maria Mercè Marçal or Màrius Sampere are the dearest to me, since I grew up as a poet under their shadow. This said, since very young age I was eager to know other traditions, so I began to read as much translated poetry as I could. And this turned out a fundamental school.

Gemma, given your engagement with English-language writing, have you noticed an influence upon your writing in Catalan? Or are you able to keep those trains of thought separated?

Gemma Gorga: I see translation as a great school to learn and improve my own writing. We generally think of translation as a constant struggle with “impossibilities”, while I see it as an infinite source of “possibilities”, a place where I find solutions that I have never thought of before. Being bilingual Catalan-Spanish all my life has taught me to take advantage of the richness that each language contains and has made me realize how interesting it is to build bridges between languages. So I don’t want to keep those trains of thought separated; after all, they are heading to the same place.

2022 Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist interviews: David Bradford

Dream of No One but Myself, David Bradford
Brick Books, 2021
2022 Griffin Poetry Prize • Canadian Shortlist
interviewed by rob mclennan

The 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize will be announced on June 15, 2022.

David Bradford [photo credit: Sarah Bodri] is a poet, editor, and organizer based in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). He is the author of several chapbooks, including Nell Zink is Damn Free (Blank Cheque Press, 2017) and The Plot (House House Press, 2018). His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, filling Station, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Guelph and is a founding editor of House House Press. Dream of No One but Myself is his first book.

Dream of No One but Myself is very much constructed as a book-length project, writing around the live and loss of your father. What prompted you to tell the story of your father, and that loss, through the form of the book-length poem, or even poetry at all?

You know, I had a mind that, if I was going to come at this flashpoint in my family history, in my family’s historical debris field, I was gone really come at it, so as to only do it once. Because writing, iterating, editing, presenting this book has been to learn a few things all over again: you can just keep cycling back through the process of these kinds of family histories, revelations, realizations. They stick, but the body forgets their feeling a bit, can want them unlocked all again. So, if I was going to do this, show the depth of the mess, I was going to dig deep enough to feel that maybe the digging could never end and you had to just call it—the end, that is. The openness of a hybrid, braided together bunch of coordinated, iterative forms all somehow poetry gave me room to explore the levels and questions I felt I needed to shape that kind of book.

So, an element of that I wanted to shape at the book level was sparked and organized by the felt experience of the sick trick of the dead, abusive parent: the way there were things about him I could only safely wade through, accept, empathize with once he had passed. Things that leave me ready to let the dead him back into my life but not the live him, were that an option. Basically, the insights of this book required death, and their staying power depends on it.

With that in mind, I think this book nurtures a relationship with haunting—a coming to terms tensioned by the impossibility, for me, of coming to terms with him when there was still a person to come to terms with. And the terms of that tension haunt themselves: the attempts below, the attempts above, the attempts out over there, haunted by the attempts over here. The ectoplasm spilling over from one form—one rip and cut and suture—to the next, to get goofy about it. There’s an element of letting it all through, then channeling these literally unspeakable tensions in the spectrum of ways all of this history is encountered and re-encountered, going through those motions knowing where they can’t go, to see where they can and can’t go, to put a reader through those motions too. To take readers through a spectral, gestural record of channeling the wake and drift of this personal, historical accrual, this urge to do some magic on it.

The uncontainable nature of this kind of family histories that comes back around and around, has no final answer, maybe just an end to the questions—poetry gave me a lot of room to explore the impulses all that entailed for me.

What do you think the form of the poem allowed you to articulate that might not have been possible had you worked the same material through the form of a memoir, or even a novel?

The thing about poetry for me is mostly permission to encourage my thinking to give in to the forces that give the genre its heft—the attention and tension.

The family stuff in this book started as a hulking lyrical essay, but I didn’t like any of the options before me for taking that work into a nonfiction publishing space. It didn’t feel like nonfiction processes would get me as far as I wanted to get with using up this material, going all in with the mutual haunting, bidding that stuff goodbye.  That initial lyrical essay form also felt too editorialized for this irresolvability I was trying pattern, move on from, document: the essay pulled all the emotional strings, it tried to get the words right (even as it said it didn’t believe in the right words), and as is, it was kind of unbearable. It took a while to put together, but it felt like the surface, or the first layer.

So, turning to poetry—first with the idea of the soft erasures, the grey-and-black versioning technique—got me to keep digging, keep layering and re-arranging, keep growing the verbal and non-verbal gestures that left the record of this material feeling just barely exhausted (I hope), and gave its tattered, lossy fabric its due.

I guess my idea or ideal of poetry gave me the space to contain and really go after the stakes of that effort in a way non-poetic forms didn’t feel like they would.

How important is sound on the page as you work? Do you feel there is anything lost at all in sound or cadence through working on the page? What is the difference?

I think about the fraughtness of the decision-making processes involved in holding this kind of family stuff, family debt, family mess together—how much I ask readers to go through that process with this book—and I think my intense attention to sound, and working that out on the page over the last couple of decades, helped prepare me for that. Sound is so important for me, but same as the fraughtness, you can at best lay out and hedge for possible readings, give the reader some tools to work with in sounding out these poems.

But no matter the tools—line breaks, half rhymes, white space on the line, the careful aeration of erasures, the propellent or halting use of sometimes jarring periods—something of what these pieces sound like to me, or sound like coming from me, is always lost on the page. The beauty in that is something is always gained, too: the way it sounds to the reader, the decisions they’ll make in hearing these pieces out.

I guess that’s one big difference: the reader’s in charge on the page. It makes me want to hear them read what they hear. Because I can’t really sound that out myself.

Was there anything that writing through grief revealed that you weren’t expecting? Are the poems in Dream of No One but Myself part of a longer, ongoing process?

I think the text-book nature of the abuse came for me a bit. Some of these things you take to thinking about them as just “difficult” or “not good.” But calling them abuse can take a minute, or at least it did for me and my mother, both individually and together.

One embarrassing thing about trauma, particularly amidst and in the aftermath of contexts where you’re just going through the motions of it, is it’s true form sort of hides from you, then reveals itself plainly. There were lots of those moments in the process of writing this book.

A maybe even fleshier thing that revealed itself, though: how little my mother and I understood—how little we could understand, given our orientation to him—how few words we had, and how little healthcare was truly available to my father in terms of what he was dealing with mentally. A key part of the process for this book was asking my mother to confirm certain details over and over again. Some of the ups and downs that were challenging him emerged more clearly in those talks. And the complete uselessness of the institutions at this disposal, same as at other times in his life, also emerged more clearly, if unsurprisingly.

In terms of a longer, ongoing process: I really, warmly, deeply hope the answer is no. I’ve done a lot of thinking and growing out of the thoughts I laid out in for this book, but in terms of writing, this feels like it’s it for me. The whole point was to get to where it was done for me, even if, in a greater context, it might never be done for me.

Have you been writing much in the way of poetry since Dream of No One but Myself was completed? What have you been working on since?

For better or worse, I jumped right in to the next thing when I completed my penultimate draft of the book in spring 2018.

I had the idea to do something less personal, maybe lighter. But that very quickly turned into Bottom Rail on Top, poems about dominant Black and white histories of Blackness in the antebellum South set against the day-to-day of the personal present—my present—that mediates it.

It’s a two-hander, in a sense: it brings together two strands of poetic sequences, popping back and forth between the experience of learning about and arranging all of these big and small Black histories and places and their echoes and contrasts in comparison with my life, the way my body does and doesn’t carry, the way I do and don’t want it to carry, the legacy of that past. It’s a project first built on a lot of the conflation I saw at play in Black radical theory that’s had a major impact on my work: the way a straight line is often drawn from slave narratives to, say, the Harlem Renaissance and then to us now. And in a way, I believe in that line. But I also believe that so much of my life—even amidst the racism and mindfucks and creative rub of being this kind of body in this kind of modern world—looks a lot like mastry, to borrow Kerry James Marshall’s phrase. So many material itches, so many supply chains ending at my door, so many platforms, so much modern self-making, so much funding, so much stuff, etc. Or to put it another way a bit more couched in disparities among Black people in the present, I need to acknowledge what it means that I’ve been called upon to speak, sometimes on behalf of… And as Hortense Spillers and Fred Moten have articulated crucially but too occasionally, that call means I’ve already become estranged from some of conditions I’ve been called upon to articulate. The problems of that estrangement, alongside some of the important echoes I describe above, are things I wanted to explore and describe on the page. Among a lot of other things to do with some of the ways Black folx formulate Blackness for themselves outside of the monolithic.

So, there’s a lot more I could say, but I worked on that a couple of years, then worked on it some more with Diasporic theorist Michelle M. Wright, which was an invaluable experience. And now I’m entering the editing stages with Cecily Nicholson, thinking about a few things we might add to it. The book should be out in fall of 2023.