Genres
julie ezelle patton: Arkitext—
julie ezelle patton is a permaculturist, poet, performer, and artist based in Cleveland, Ohio, and New York City. This issue of Chicago Review, in progress for several years, takes a multi-decade look at patton’s intertwined practices of writing, performing, curating of buildings, ecology, and community.
In conversation with approximately 100 pages of unpublished work by julie ezelle patton are critical essays, responses, and interviews. Contributions are by the issue’s collaborating editor, Jennifer Scappettone, as well as Lee Ann Brown, Abou Farman, Gabe Flores, Arcey Harton, Andrew Levy, Janice A. Lowe, Yates Norton, and Jonathan Skinner.
Interspersing these works are color photographs documenting “The Building.” The Building… “a.k.a the Salon d’ Refusee and Let it Bee Garden, is a teeming giant—a book-building or building-book that enframes acts of maintenance, curation, and landscaping. patton (sometimes) resides in and maintains a 6-flat in the Glenville neighborhood of Cleveland; the space is both a home and a total work of art.”
The feature concludes with a chorus of new works celebrating and responding to patton by writers Will Alexander, Carla Harryman, m. nourbeSe philip, Ed Roberson, giovanni singleton, and Cecilia Vicuña.
Bio: julie (jubilee) ezelle patton’s shifting terrain of media, disciplines, and chancy collaborations reflect simple habits or rituals of following one’s nose, ears, eyes, and other senses: Baring witness. A 2015 Foundation for Contemporary Art Poetry Awardee, its Womb Room Tomb installation honoring artist Virgie Ezelle Patton was featured in The FRONT International Triennial, 2018. It is the author of Notes For Some (Nominally) Awake (Yo-Yo Labs) and an edited selection of its concrete, visual, textual and ecopoetics from the 1970s to the near present is forthcoming from Nightboat Books.
From the Preface—
“patton constructs out of language and its units of expression, repairing and suturing phonemes just as loose pieces of the assemblage works that live in the units of her Glenville home are reattached and arranged against existing form(ul)ations in expansive constellations. This work is iterative and provisional, evidenced not only in the continual process that characterizes its making but also in the recursions and circles of sound and sense that build the poetry itself. Her constant diagnosis of the iterability of forms—an iterability explicitly framed as a re- or up-cycling of found materials, words, sounds, and beings—theorizes precarity through a focus on liveliness. Performance becomes the way to interrogate the assumed isolation of poetry from other practices. Out of necessity, such iteration is stilled by its appearance in the pages of Chicago Review. It is our hope, and our expectation, that patton will continue to iterate on the works presented here, that they may not look the same tomorrow, that we are opening a conversation on and with this practitioner’s work more than closing it, that we have held space rather than determined it. This feature, too, has looked different by the week: poems have left and entered and left again, images have moved in and out, pieces have been rearranged and placed next to every other piece—testing the inflections and prodding accident.”
Special Feature Contents—
RESPONSES
James Garwood-Cole, Kai Ihns & Clara Nizard, Preface
Jennifer Scappettone, julie ezelle patton and the Geopoetics of Unrequited Care
julie ezelle patton & Jennifer Scappettone, Stanzas in Conversation
julie ezelle patton & Arcey Harton, A list of seventy-to-ninety-year-old chill, competent, ethical, sharp Independent Contractors & Public Servants who go beyond the call of booty (cash) and have aided us by & by
Lee Ann Brown, Summa julie
Yates Norton, Let it Bee: Thoughts for My Friend julie ezelle patton
Andrew Levy, Word Dance: julie patton’s Uncommon Proposal
Jonathan Skinner, julie patton’s Let it Bee Garden and Poet Tree Mitigation Program: Selected Correspondence
Janice A. Lowe, Spontaneous Composition: julie’s Musical News
Abou Farman, Ghosts of a Ghost Town Performance
Gabe Flores & Arcey Harton, An Interview
POEMS & WORKS
approx. 100 pages of unpublished work by julie ezelle patton
color photo documentation of works installed in “The Building,” a.k.a the Salon d’ Refusee and Let it Bee Garden, Cleveland, OH
CHORUS
giovanni singleton, Here Hear Now… A Pink Oracle Reading
Ed Roberson, Touching the Hem & patton collaboration
m. nourbeSe philip, To Whom It May Concern
Carla Harryman, Into a Detroit Spirit’s World
Will Alexander, from Charismatic Spiral Part II; Note on julie’s Compound
Cecilia Vicuña, 2 poems
Fiction—
Stephen Mortland, Nativity
Marzia Grillo translated by Lourdes Contreras & Julia Pelosi-Thorpe, Have A Seat, Dear
Interview—
Ethan Hsi & A. Ng Pavel, Soma Sema: An Interview with Mircea Cartarescu
Nonfiction—
Chris Hosea, “Like the Voluntary Disappearance of Space Between Me and You”: Jennifer Soong’s Interior Music
Malcolm de Chazal translated by Sara Nicholson, from Magical Science
Poetry—
Joseph Minden, from Answerlands
Ryan Nowlin, Fortune and Solitude
maya rose, Four Poems
Kat Sinclair, 3 poems
Ada Smailbegović, from blue eggshell discrete actions in a moving geometry of time
Roberto Tejada, from Carbonate of Copper
Reviews—
Peter Gizzi, Fierce Elegy reviewed by Stéphane Bouquet translated by Lindsay Turner
Ludovico Silva, Marx’s Literary Style reviewed by Alexander Millen
Justin Hopper, ed., Obsolete Spells: Poems & Prose from Victor Neuburg & the Vine Press reviewed by Michael Casper