Julie Carr, Eleni Sikelianos + squirrels

Babes and bots, 

Fall! Fall is happening! It's frigid when I bike to school every morning and I think the bones in my hands will push themselves out of their flesh. I am tired and stressed and everything is a bit harder because it's darker now. And that's okay I think. 

In checking out the speakers at the two events this week, I found Counterath Press and came across a fellow blogger! Jose Antonio Villarán's book, Open Pit, is out with Counterpath Press and was nominated for the Northern California Book Award. How cool! And one of the founders of Counterpath Press came to CSU. How cool! Her name is Julie Carr. This amazing organization has a weekly food bank, community garden, and exhibition space, AND they publish books. I think sometimes I forget that there are other presses, sometimes more interesting and compelling presses, that do cool work that doesn't get eaten up by the institution or revered prizes, work that is wild and non-normative and big. I love that. Sometimes I let the institution steal my joy or tell me I have to be a certain way to make it in the world, and then I remember places like this exist. 

I’m losing it, like my mother did,

cause the first time I say the thing

will never be the last. Today’s list of forgotten words,

talus and crypt      and a word for what binds

so tirelessly the five of us

to our mouth-sounds sliding upward

- From "Morning Weekday Sky Cornea" by Julie Carr

And at this same reading was a woman named Eleni Sikelianos, who went to Naropa and worked with Amiri Barka and Alice Notley. And she played music like Joy Harjo and had listeners participate in her poem. And Julie Carr read in front of a film composed of images of her family, distorted and overlayed. In this reading, she contended with her eugenicist great-grandfather and Jewish grandmother. 

And it was so wild and thrilling to see people, squirrely, hybrid people do their squirrely hybrid things in a room of squirrely listeners, people on their phones playing games, people writing poems, people listening with their eyes closed. On my best days, I see myself at the front of this audience. 

bore back to the salamander you

once were straggling under the skin

grope toward the protozoa

snagging on the rise toward placental knowing

 

who developed eyes for you agape in open waters

 

the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in

directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your

hagfish spine who

 

will bury your bones

- From "Your Kingdom" by Eleni Sikelianos

I love the word squirrely--a dear friend of mine uses it to describe our work which is, for all intents and purposes, chaotic. To be squirrelly is to be overwhelmingly interested in the metaphorical, physical, emotional, spiritual, queer, non-conforming universe that is this universe, to see openly and honestly intrinsic connections. Sometimes, to be squirrelly is to see connections no one else can see, to write them as though they can, to assume the reader is in our brain because to be squirrelly is to recognize there is no brain, not really, there is only a co-creation of content made and re-made between the work you've produced and the way people consume that production. To be squirrelly is to love that production openly, to let it intimidate normativity. 

Maybe, I think, I'll get a squirrel tattooed on me somewhere so I can remember the complicated facts of myself. Besides, squirrels have bushy tails, and I'm a huge fan of that. 

Red Squirrel by Harro Maass

I'll leave you with a favorite of mine, Georgia O'Keefe standing, only sort of posing, by her work. I'd call her squirrelly, too, but I don't know how she'd feel about that.  

Thanks for taking a bite out of the sandwich with me! 

XOXO

BLT