OCTOBER GRAVITATIONAL

Centrifugal Exercises in Poetic Attention

The Gravitational: A Craft Meditation and Prompt 

I’ve been curious for a while about prose poetry, its wild emergence onto social media as a form of cultural activism in a time of war. When does the content of a poem find its most evocative shape in the paragraph? This LitHub article, “What Sets Prose Poetry Off From The Lyric” refers to the ‘lyric poem’ as an enjambed form featuring observations of emotional state, often directed at or in relation to an object of romantic love (a traditional definition I find insufficient, arguable on the grounds that all poetic writing inevitably features personal emotional states, which makes the necessity of differentiation perhaps quietly misogynistic.) This Writers.com essay concedes that lyric essay and the prose poem share many characteristics and have no authoritatively established differences, but claims that lyric essays tend to be longer than more experimental with form and genre, and more interested in creating an experience rather than recounting or explaining one. However, I would argue that the lyric poem often has narrative, and often deploys the aside, the etymology, images for historical context braiding heavily through the lines with similar agendas to prose work. The heart of the debate seems to be the degrees to which a piece pivots on ambiguity and suggestion, with more indicating a lyric essay over prose poem. I think I just accidentally wrote one. 

It was my original intention to follow up on my post last week with a short essay extending its analysis of the current genocide in Gaza as a direct outcome of generations of imperial rule under Britain—a slicing-up of the world into arbitrary cartographies so blood-hardened that few stop to remember who made them, and for whose benefit. Explication slid into litany, a rehearsal of horrors not remotely of the kind I was excited for this month. I am as committed as I am helpless, as aware of the effect of sustained, unrelenting attention as I am the fatigue of livid grief, the weight it draws into daily breath. It’s not sustainable. Rather than write the essay I meant to write, I fell into a flow state, writing something in a shape and form I’ve never before been called toward until six in the morning, when my roommate walked out to start their day and gaped at finding me exactly where they last saw me. My lyric essay teases the question, “What’s on your mind?” to its edges, pulls apart all the necessarily related open questions spiraling through my psyche, and finds the connections in between based on explorations of the gravitational pull of each preoccupation. As Octavia Butler writes, what we pay attention to grows, so we best be aware of what has our attention, work out what needs watering, when best to do it, and when best to lay off lest our ardor kill off our power. 

On just a few hours of sleep, I’m struggling with what one does with such a piece. A thing I love most about poetry is its egalitarian form (bested perhaps only by dance); beyond basic literacy, all one needs is a writing utensil and a surface. However, the industries that allow for poets to become poets in the world, like publishing, are still organized and sustained by capitalist logics. I was advised that it would be unwise to publish on Substack a poem that might appear elsewhere with a larger readership, somewhere with prestige perhaps, somewhere that might pay and have the eye of editors who might inquire after more work. Though this is part of what a thriving literary community looks like, the pressure to publish or perish poisons the well for me, as do the hierarchical nature of the publishing industry, the ever-shrinking pool of well-funded and run literary journals, small presses going off the rails financially, ethically, politically, or interpersonally, the push toward continuous production and visibility that I can’t help but experience as a toxic interruption to sacred practice. I submit rarely, publish far less than I could or want to, and am berated and encouraged in equal frequency by my peers. (I’m working on it, I swear. More so in my head, admittedly, but I am.) The operationalist language and structure of the game put me off despite my years of administration and grant-writing–or perhaps exactly because of them. 

My hiatus from administrative support labor and choice to steep deeply in poetry until I’m (hopefully) thrust back into consistent paid work again has returned to me an old-new attention, a distrust of language and its structures as invented to contain, simplify, and reify. Subverting the languages in which I specialized is a detox practice. It liberates the visceral, cosmic, atomic movements of lived experience that Jasbir Puar calls “neoliberal eugenics lifestyle programming” and would have us too ensconced in desires for relief, consumption, upward mobility, and security to bother to notice. These are languages of intelligibility in our inheritance of white Western tradition that sees, as Audre Lorde reminds us, life as a problem to be solved. The space between making and unmaking is always a becoming, and what I’m molting is any investment in over-familiarized forces that deaden, including certain genres (the grant application, the cover letter, the work email), how they impose themselves into our lives with their capacity to draw up and box in with their false authority, not unlike dominant languages that bend the world to their image. Aracelis Girmay shared a lesson she recently learned in a magical conversation with us as a Visiting Artist for In Surreal Life: In English, humanizing the Palestinian takes effort and work, and continues to fall short of the project. In Arabic, apparently, no such effort is required.

I have not discussed this with my Arabic-speaking beloveds to test it for its nuances, but I considered the diction I would use in all of my languages–English, Italian, Bengali, Spanish, some French–and attempted to plot the alignment with full humanity possible in each one. The results are inconclusive, in part due to holes in my vocabularies. But consider that for a second. Think seriously about what that means about what we can and cannot think when we think exclusively in one language or register, believe in its structures with faith in our perceptions, untrained in looking at its rigidities with suspicion and actively alienating ourselves from it to hear the worlds that live within and between. Terms like “insurgent,” “preexisting condition,” and “work ethic,” the kinds of violence they do with the grooves they cut in our brains. Read Gal Beckman’s excellent article in The Atlantic, “Beware of Language That Erases Reality” on this failure in a call for ceasefire signed by a host of poets and writers. It reminded me of being in high school, operating so continuously in three languages that I became devoted to the malleability of syntax and its power, hyper-aware that nothing I spoke could ever be “mine,” “native,” defining somehow of the core of me. For so long, America’s Englishes blinded me to false comforts, and remade me into the immigrant who keeps their head down, follows the order of the day, dutiful. I can’t help but think of Candace Williams’ poem, “Memo:” from her debut collection, I Am The Most Dangerous Thing (Alice James Books, 2023), which I recently read to prepare discussion questions for an upcoming November Book Club at Brooklyn Poets. (Book Club events at Brooklyn Poets invite visitors to drop in for free; no book purchase required, no prior reading assignments, nothing but your time, and an honest interest in the workings of poetry. I strongly recommend it, and I design the questions for the books assigned to me as ones I wish I had the chance to discuss over tea with a friend, or better, in a classroom.) It’s a shortie, so I’ll share it here: 

MEMO: 

Due to unforeseen circumstances

I am forced to lay off 20% of my friends

effective immediately. 

A climate of deteriorating privilege

means I must tighten the alignment between emotional labor 

and future growth opportunities. 

Change is difficult:

these decisions are not made lightly.

Those affected will receive

severance tied 

to years of kinship.

I appreciate the civility and support of the team

as I secure our long-term competitive advantage. 

Williams writes “Memo:'' as a declaration of personal boundaries in her interpersonal relationships in the language and structure of an impersonal boilerplate layoff email in which its recipient is unceremoniously sacked. Candace Williams writes about the labor conditions of black women in America, but reading this poem in our current context in which many of us are reassessing our tolerance for uncritical both-sideism, exploitation of the intellectual and emotional labor (read: pain) of Arabs and Muslims around the globe, the poem hits a bit different. The things considered inherent values that justify the cleave: “future growth opportunities'' and “long-term competitive advantage.” How she turns the language of productivity against itself to justify withdrawing labor. How growth opportunities are also moral and spiritual, the choices we make that give us the edge we need to remain alive with integrity in a life where we refuse the mediocrity of precarious comforts as the trade for silent complicity. These are the kinds of language alienations that make us alive to the container, the necessity of smashing it to pieces and making new homes from its parts. 

This is a long-winded way of saying that I will not be publishing the lyric essay originally meant for Substack, despite my impulse to. Instead, I offer a prompt drawn from my experience of writing it: As an extension of the question “What’s on your mind?”, ask what has gravitational pull, conscious or unconscious, and write a list poem in which each unit is its own experiential world nonetheless tethered to the others by feeling and context. Imagine the mechanical device you might imagine has that name, and model your poem around its movement and/or desired outcome. I think of a centrifuge; its close-up sound ominous, helicopter blades beating their way here in the distance. Title your poem with the word “Gravitational” as a noun that refers to and defines the genre or style of your poem. Please share your experiments with me if you attempt it. Whoever you are, it would fill my heart.

Events and Announcements: 

Poets for a Free Palestine at The Poetry Project, St. Mark's Church
On Thursday, October 26, The Poetry Project is hosting Poets for a Free Palestine, a free evening of poetry, performance, and solidarity. Participants include Andrea Abi-Karam, Mirene Arsanios, Lara Atallah, Carolina Ebeid, Abou Farman, Isabella Hammad, Kaleem Hawa, Adham Hafez, Benjamin Krusling, Ladan Osman, Sahar, imogen xtian smith, H Sinno, Kamelya Omayma Youssef, and Mohammed Zenia Siddiq Yusef Ibrahim. Join us to hold our grief and strength together. 

Czaerra Galicinao Ucol’s Pisces Urges New York Karaoke Party
Badass queer Filipinx Chicago poet Czaerra Galiciano Ucol, co-founder of grassroots poetry org for poets of color Luya Poetry is celebrating the release of their debut chapbook, Pisces Urges (Sampaguita Press, 2023) with a–get this–karaoke party in Queens, NY on October 27. Trust the Chicago crew to keep things fresh and spicy, people. Come encounter this young and clear-eyed radical maker at Pisces Urges Literaoke Edition. 

Recommendations, or Invitations to Replenish Power through Pleasure: 

Refusing to let the conversation about atrocity in Gaza and so many other places–Yemen, Somalia, Ukraine, right here in America, and so many more– requires replenishing energy to be able to engage again. I noticed the depths of my engagement fatigue and my despair starting becoming inextricable. We need sources of solace, joy, inspiration, distraction, and levity. So below I include some of the things that have been lovely, exciting, or just plain fun for me recently. 

The Poetry Gods Podcast
I’ve had the enormous gift of finally becoming a participant in Jon Sands’ widely beloved Emotional Historians online poetry workshop this month, and attending SupaDupaFresh, a monthly and seasonal poetry gathering and reading curated and hosted by Jon Sands. Adam Faulkner, Jive Poetics, Mahogany Browne, and Rico Frederick. Both experiences have ignited a flurry of burning questions about poetry, community, what love looks like with others whom we may not know, may not come to know beyond our mutual and consistent showing up, its own kind of knowing. At SupaDupa, practitioner and educator on inclusion strategy and a beauty of a poet Adam Faulker, author of The Willies, read the words “noisy sugar” and collapsed the whole room, inducing a face in me Elly Belle might have caught candid: 

This dual nurturing of workshop and reading series led me to old episodes of The Poetry Gods podcast, hosted by Jon Sands, Aziza Barnes, and José Olivarez. I dug up the episode with Adam Faulker in which the poets, as usual, have a fascinating discussion about the force of pop culture and the structures of our attention, how it makes meaning in and for us, of us, etching emotional texture into our daily lives. Faulker thinks and writes deeply about what it means to be a white queer child living with a father who struggles addiction finding so much of himself through hip-hop and pop music, often made by people whose race or class backgrounds he doesn’t share who were conscious of being sold as products. It made me think newly about my commitment to cultural and artistic engagements, how none ever feel “mine” enough to be mine, its failure to exist for me as the alienation edge of my particular eye. I recently also fell in wild devotional love with the craft and spiritual orientations of Vietnamese-American trans poet Paul Tran via In Surreal Life this week, and tuned into her episode on The Poetry Gods from seven years ago. Pulling a single line from it should be enough to send you running to it. Tran, on finding the queer and femme poc poetry slam community at Brown University: 

I think demographic-wise, it was a very white school, very, very wealthy school, that yes, had a huge commitment to diversity and inclusion but the ways that they did that didn’t necessarily support someone like me. But I thought all these poets who were so powerfully talking about what was going on in our lives, in our world, who took care of each other, who lived what they wrote to the best of their abilities—nobody’s perfect, but the community and the worlds that they were imagining in their writing were the worlds that at their heart, they were working toward in their real lives. …It showed me that inside this world that was the university, we had our own world, and I didn’t need to be part of this other thing that neglected me, that tokenized me, that only valued me so as long as I was excellent, or could substantiate that their commitment to liberal progress was advancing, but instead I could be part of this intimate world where people actually saw each other.

SISTER, PREEEEACH! 

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: Charif Shanahan and Marie Howe 
I remember rushing in the rain late to a poetry reading at Columbia University where Meena Alexander, whose class I was taking at the time, and Marie Howe read together in a small, crowded conference room that allowed for so many on their feet that I suspect we were breaking fire code. I don’t remember where or how I was first introduced to Marie Howe’s work–perhaps it was Meena, so much I have come to love deeply find its root in her sneaky influence on my life-–but I became obsessed, carrying both What The Living Do (W.W. Norton, 1997) and Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W.W. Norton 2008) around in my bag for weeks, gushing about her over dinners with friends. It stuns me to realize that it must have been a decade or more ago, now, but I remember the enormous mane of hair that always makes me think of California, sunnily witchily in her power on my attention from the moment I laid eyes on her. Someone in the audience asked her when she makes time to read, what her rituals are, finishing the question with, “...do you read in the morning, or…?” Howe laughed, delighted, an open sound like bird wings, saying what a delicious idea that was, reading in the morning. When she recovered, she said, “I live with a girl who wakes up talking.” To refer to her daughter this way, as the beginning of a story, a full human being who doesn’t belong to her as an object. I’ve held it in my mind ever since, occasionally inspired to look over at my child self with her wide array of needs, and say to her in jest, “I live with a girl who wakes up talking.” Since, Marie Howe was named Poet Laureate of New York State in 2012 and has grown increasingly concerned with the sacred work of honoring the interdependence between humanity and nature, a world from which we irresponsibly claim ourselves separate and over which we deem ourselves entitled to enact sordid, avaricious destructions. 

I was introduced to Charif Shanahan, an extraordinary poet born in the Bronx to an Irish-American father and a Moroccan mother through various routes, but only properly immersed myself in his work this week as I researched him for his Visiting Artist talk for In Surreal Life tonight. Shira Erlichman, chief guru of In Surreal Life (one of my many revolving titles for her, not her words), served as an editor to his collection, Trace Evidence. Among many other extraordinary gems, I found a discussion between him and Marie Howe on a The Poetry Magazine Podcast episode in which they discuss ecopoetics and the sacred, and since listening to it, I’m carrying its healing and righteous resonances with me in the mundane activities of my day. Strong recommend. 

Spooky Season Recs:
Despite (to spite?) the real horrors of the world, I have remained committed to absorbing as much of the horror genre this month as I can. I had the pleasure of going to see this year’s A24 high school horror movie Talk To Me with an internet friend made from the POC poly community who shares my penchant for the macabre, and fell rather in love with the expressive triumph that is Sophie Wilde’s face. The film asks interesting questions about grief and the lengths we’ll go to assuage our distress, the breadth of the collateral damage that comes from crossing sacred lines to believe what you need to believe to survive your shattered mind. Save for some slight laziness on certain details and a rushed, slightly arbitrary ending, I enjoyed it thoroughly and was squirming in my seat for almost its entire duration. Worth the movie ticket. 

When the release of It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror was being promoted by The Feminist Press last year, I was in love with a filmmaker who was willing to indulge my curiosity and growing appreciation of horror as an inherently queer, romantic, and often highly conservative genre that has only grown more self-referential and metacritical in ways that require deeper and wider knowledge of classic and cult horrors movies than I have. We had made grand plans of watching each movie and reading each chapter simultaneously across cities, a project I found so romantic that when the relationship fell apart before we got to it, I couldn’t bring myself to borrow or purchase the book. One of the chapters is by Carmen Maria Machado on Jennifer’s Body (2009), a movie that a brilliant ex-student of mine raved about while thinking about gender and sexuality. Obviously, I was piqued, much to the student’s delight and rapid disappointment when I said I didn’t see a way to screen it in a tenth grade class on Global Literature. I finally had the opportunity to watch it with my roommates last week, and was thoroughly gratified. Diablo Cody and Karyn Kusama clapback at the hatred for Megan Fox for being too beautiful, too sexy, too outspoken, essentially too powerful for comfort, turning her into a demon teen named Jennifer who feeds literally on the endless, unwanted male attention that reduces her to a body. She gives back as good as she gets, but not without the intervention of her comparatively homely (lulz) friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried), who is obviously, painfully, yearnily, and hilariously in love with her in one of the more tickling performances of obsessive and repressed teen homosexuality I’ve seen in a hot minute. I can’t wait to find and read Machado’s essay. Queer heartbreaks, it turns out, are survival experiences, even with the small tendrils of insanity they leave behind. 

In the same vein of feminist critique of nonsense aesthetic pressure, yesterday I made brunch and had a snuggly horror double-feature day with a new, excellent friend who sought to correct my lack of familiarity with the film Death Becomes Her (1992) starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Bruce Willis, and Isabella Rossellini. The toxic desire for endless youth and the industry that fuels it, often lacerating people’s mental health to ribbons, is pushed to its most logical conclusion in the mental distress of Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep), an incompetent but fabulous actress obsessed with her body’s submission to the natural laws of time. Having come up working class in Newark and thrust into the limelight, she is fundamentally insecure, the kind of woman whose life force is drained by fear of her own aging. Her childhood frenemy Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn), is shown to us as comparatively “normal,” an intellectual sort of good breeding with sensible shoes. Helen introduces her fiancé, a brilliant plastic surgeon (Bruce Willis), which is the first act in a hilarious tale of obscene one-upmanship that dramatizes and critiques the comparison and competition present in female friendship under patriarchy, and invites Streep and Hawn to have an absolute ball. So did Rossellini and Willis, though Rossellini is such a system-jolt of a vision that I can barely make words, let alone betray her role in the plot. Willis is likely given too little credit for his comedic genius in this movie. There are myriad things I could say about this movie that make it wonderful, but I’ll offer what little I can say with no spoilers: It’s a great script full of surprises, so delightfully fuckin’ 90’s, and the performances and their meta critiques of the nature of performance through camp and slapstick are absolutely spot-on. It’s clear that every single actor is having so much fun that they feel like they must be getting away with something, which is my favorite unsung genre. We also watched another new-to-me classic, Trick ‘r’ Treat (2007), a wild surrealist romp and tidy narrative cycle that cautions against disrespecting the day of the dead and highlights the inevitable consequences of intentional moral failure, which, weirdly, inspired me to walk through Greenwood Cemetery this week and understand what it means to me to live cheek-by-jowl to a hallowed site for the dead while living with necropolitics on the mind. 

Until later this week, or early next week–whichever time descends minor wisdoms upon me first. Refuel, reset, and stay loud. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.