Four poems by julie ezelle patton, originally published in CR 67:02/03/04: Arkitext, can be found here starting 1/24/24.
The idea we all had for one guiding spine of the issue was that Jennifer Scappettone would interview Julie Patton, drawing out methods and themes and seeking to focus answers to a series of curiosities developing over the past couple of decades. julie patton isn’t one for sitting still or speaking staid statements out of a void. As such, this “interview” unfolded as dozens of conversations over the course of two days in The Building: sometimes in the kitchen over an omelet of foraged herbs; sometimes within a room or stanza’s installation, as she added and subtracted elements (a map scrap tacked to the wall where paint peels away from the ceiling in a large continent shape, or a badger mask pitched atop a shadeless lamp); some chats were in the basement exhibition; some in motion over the wetland across the street. Imagine these sentences as walks: patton thinks in transit, in the air, in song, in dialogue and collaboration (in “chora-geography”). The conversations have been edited for readability, context, and clarity.
§
jep: If we zero in on the side of my work as it concerns s/place—my term for splitting the diff between space and place—then I perceive this site as a living sculpture, an Arkitext, or a house-book that can go under (water) at any time. Pillar to post–PovArty. Or Climate Shame’s FEMAtic roof. Prayer ascends the building’s air shaft—open heart of the building complementing kitchen hearths—and kisses the sky. Rain snatches words on the way down the drain, and leaves dry them.
Hearing aid or loudspeaker, the acoustics here are pitch perfect. We opened up the building for the 2018 FRONT Triennial, and “activated” this column of light with music and poetry. If you open a top floor window and speak at normal volume to someone in the basement your voice can be heard as if standing right next to them. The various exhibits spaced throughout the entire building were accompanied by this meandering score filtering through the central column.
Tired of the constant chatter and noise accompanying art, I insisted on silence. Guests drifted from room to room, floor to floor in silence. Womb Room Tomb, an installation built around closets filled with my mother’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, writings, and prints, was dedicated to meditation, her most cherished groove and mine. Each room had a silent “actor” or docent carrying out common household duties. Sweeping, washing a window, writing at a desk, arranging flowers, sewing, pacing, drawing—labor and domesticity—and the mystery of temporal bodies carrying out what humans have done for centuries. I wanted the building to heal everyone in the listening field of their particular bodies. Their eyes, as fingers or vectors grabbed our attention. “Shut up!” said the building as bodies wrapped around its spine.
JS: Which is the column? Is it this wall or the air shaft between the two homes—the building that I’m staying in, and the building that we’re in now?
[performs chute noise] All of the above and more since there are also, on each side of The Building, north and south, vertical stairwells and laundry chutes. The hundred-foot-long interior passageways tunneling through each suite, as well as the fireplace chimney, suggest horizontal columns or tunnels. Silent witnesses, empty volume columns unless penetrated by material bodies. Fireplaces shoot—or chute—cold or warm air and carry sound. And if one isn’t careful, they might also channel gossip.
Thus limned and in limbo, vacillating and vassalating between continuing the struggle of sustaining what’s left of a co-op in order to save a building, to save the work contained and spilling out and away from it. Still. Because that’s how we move throughout the complex: up, down, and nomadic in the sense that we caretakers or stewards lack fixed abodes in this here here, but perennially circulate down into the cool of the basement during summer and up to the toasty top floor during winter. Booking this always under-booked (“Black people can’t have nuthin’!”) affair cleaved in two by public and private concerns.
§
I have always dreamed of going back to college and having the luxury to take my time and study and explore… But because of the politics at the time, I remember people saying: “You don’ t want any adulteration.”
What was that all about?
Not frying your mind politically. Okay, colonially…?
Like not selling out to the institutional… paradigms?
It was about not fraying. For me it was more—and still is—the issue of finding money or time to do so. It was common enough to hear people complain about “overeducated fools” or “book sense,” versus what some called “Mother wit,” but most of the focus was on “Go get that education,” with some dissenters who advised: “Just go get that first degree. You’re good after that.” Then there were “street scholars” who weren’t just, according to stereotypes, holding up walls and playing the dozens. They functioned like stand-up libraries, book mobiles which could walk and talk, passing around Richard Wright, Garvey, Baldwin… existentialism, especially Sartre, Russian literature—with an emphasis on Dostoyevsky—and debating differences between serfdom and slavery on into the night. With its lines, passages, and dog-eared corners, “street smarts” were a different kind of book look. But of course, I’m recalling when a Black person couldn’t be caught dead with a book. One grade school American songbook had us little children singing “Old Black Joe”!
I don’t even know that but I’m sure it’s offensive—so it was an adulterated folk song?
Or it was some minstrel song. I can still recall performing French minuets with white cotton wigs… I never studied French. But from what I remember of it from the second grade, it seems you had to learn it throughout the public schools in Cleveland, so there were all these Black people from my generation with some familiarity with French.
Because they were also the colonists in the area. Right?
Not as much as Detroit or farther north into Canada, but French was treated as the language of erudition. It still is in a way, and I hear it as a frequent vowel sound ending in Cleveland’s Black community. Inthe names of some of the children we worked with from across the street. Names ending with an a. Oo la la. Yeah, so as I was saying… the song “Old Black Joe [sings briefly]…”
I’m looking at this Swinton’s Word Primer. Your basic relationship to English is in reaction to these colonial, racist curricula, these standardized curricula.
Yes. In part.
I can’t ever really understand your age, but would this have been in the ’60s?
Yes. But I also grew up with Bank Street Readers. Minimal text and great scenes of outdoor life, puddles. Words marching in columns, girdled in lists, and recited, like “Like/Not-Alike,” contrasted with the sonic field of a couple dozen children on the block playing jump rope and other outdoor rhyming games.
When I first started performing, I used Grammar Can Be Fun, a police manual, amid other examples of found literature, along with my own texts. I was working at Teachers & Writers at the time; not as an artist, but as a nonprofit management intern. That’s how I fell in with the poets. The spaces for recitation were jarringly white, plain and blank as paper—perfect for experimenting with voice in contrast to more embellished talking walls such as could be found in churches and Carnegie Libraries. These were music and art salons that operated out of private houses black in the day. That’s how I caught a glimpse of my flat.
Is there a Carnegie Library here?
There’s an abandoned one on the next block. That library had a huge skylight, an open courtyard. The natural light coming through the skylight was beautiful. These were practically gilded or adorned like religious spaces—same with banks. One could read walls and ceilings while parents were otherwise engaged. And get lost in space.
Artist Sandra Payne, former director of New York Public Library’s Young Adult Services for many years—and now deceased—shared my enthusiasm for the giant-sized—to a kid—practically walk-in books. I call them “talking books.” Sitting low on three-legged stools gave the impression of being inside the space of the story book, while the librarians served as ventriloquists.
What? Really?
One reader, librarian and ex-Karamu dancer Roger Mae Johnson, was so popular that people would line up outside the door just to hear her crack a book and bring words alive. And so you were in the words, the woods of language. For my first performance series, I made a large mock-up of Grammar Can Be Fun. I treated the audience like a class of dunces. I wore a 1950s-style girdle, a pointed bra on the outside of my clothing, and a plastic wig. And I punished the audience. My wacky persona was based on my memories of hearing the swish-swish sound of hosiery and women’s foundation-wear as my female teachers went up and down the aisles helping people. Soft architecture. With boning, metal stats, and garter-belts.
When and where was this?
At Segue [the New York reading series curated by James Sherry], when it was on Eighth Street, and at the Cleveland International Performance Art Festival. This goes back to me feeling like an interloper or imposter in a world I really didn’t know much about. Just exploring, playing around—claiming hidden spaces. A witch, infiltrating other disciplines.
And what did you say earlier about abuse?
Sometimes I was language; the role of language can be abusive. “Pronounce this word,” and that’s an order. Or, “No, it doesn’t say that.” Or, “What does this mean? Are you dim? You dem?” And handwriting, too, this staying between the lines. Other times I would give exercises to people to do… And I really liked the materials of the educational world, which inform my poetics to this day.
It has to do with spatialization, being in the room. Normally I’m creating an installation from the materials that I’ve brought: I sometimes arrive with two black attaché cases, and whatever I’ve grabbed is what I work with, but I make a mess around me. These days it’s the newspaper, tearing up current events. Language is messy.
It’s my love of books—and then my anger or frustration toward them, from growing up in the days when the language in the books was telling me, “You are inferior” or “You are illiterate,” yet straining to find great beauty in the sounds, numbers, fonts, and meaning.
I went through a period where I subtracted consonants, stripped the bark off of words to entice my audience or public classroom to ear the errors or missing letters, then redress them. If they could. For instance, [reads from text] “inses ips out our ise or addy acton is at the ark.” A different kind of Pig Latin. One time I requested the audience—whom I treated as somewhat illiterate —to remove items of lothing and read the labels: “Open mouths wide. Now lip around.” “Point, enjoy soil anointed moist spoil young garden before what is in this bird’s home, why a red robin cannot peel grim chicken. Which cabin do they live in with catnip timid kitchen? Cool whip them finger lickin’ guys or gals,” or “As we went from our oak grove we found a lame dove. Loathsome love come undone Sun now world behest intone gold sundown with what the Moon done best. So leave that mess on the floor in bins nest no less accept than we… Oh, we who swill well swells have long done cloak floor drove honey through oak door the lovey dovey note next,” and so forth. Sound poetry. Nonsense; fall through old books, and a room of your own, until the books take over your house and you must shut them up by turning their word-covered “spines” to the wall. Unhinged. And vice versa.
I think this is making sense…
It is? [laughs]
So, we can focus [the issue] on a series of things which are both architecture and book? The Building, plus material like the primer as a book environment—and works of yours like Grammar Can Be Fun, which are also crafted in response to phenomena like the Carnegie Library as a “talking” environment. “The Big House Syndrome” was an instance of you creating a “re{a}d coat”—an example of clothing as what you called “the first architecture,” but legible like a book when you opened it up… And you’re responding in that piece to both the Cleveland Museum of Art and a particular room in the Brooklyn Museum of Art where you performed from the coat and its writings?
Oh, that’s another infiltration project or pose. And too complicated to go into here, but suffice it to say that I went into the Brooklyn Museum dressed as the Cleveland Museum. I was a “flasher” in a vermillion-red maxi coat lined with postcards reflecting the Cleveland collection. The backs of the cards were filled with notes about life and art making in the little house I grew up in, not too far from the big houses which dominate that part of the city. I was misread as a typical patron until I opened my coat, one wing at a time, and began randomly unpinning the cards and improvising from them one by one. Soft architecture in hard. At one point someone suggested I turn around and look at what was behind me, and at that moment I realized I had painted myself into the corner of a painting depicting three sisters in similar colored coats. Kismet! It was a very large painting with life-sized figures. I appreciate that piece because, for one, it was a badass coat—lightweight gabardine—so I could move about very freely, and also because the guards had no idea what I was up to. If buildings could talk and walk. And why can’t anyone, even an always-broke, ephemerally working Black woman, build or embody her own museum? Every house is a potential archive. And now we have, outside of institutional say-so— also on East Boulevard in the 44106—the Cleve Museum of heArt, in honor of my father Cleve.
So that work is made in response to the architecture, and it also creates its own architecture. Then there are the environments here in The Building, which are different Arkitexts. [gesturing to the corners of the suite] The corner that’s about the Middle Passage, or the corner that’s about the birds, or the corner here, which you didn’t even tell me about yet… which features Angela Davis’s head, an Indigenous woman with a tea filter over her face, and the fishnet.
Well, the contents of my visual improvisations change context, even floors. It’s how I file stuff I save from the trash bin. Or heal. Myself or whatever something represents or makes me think about. Assembling is animating beauty or mitigating pain. The two often go together. Waste is grief so this [The Building] is a trauma ward. I prefer empty meditative space, living with as little as possible. That’s why I’m always clearing house. I think I’m always trying to get back to the tiny house I grew up in. From the outside, having “nothing ” was “poor,” but to me it was rich with time and space. To make things. A little bit of baking soda, vinegar, salt over the shoulder, and boiling went a long way. [laughs] Now there are long aisles full of… crap. I never let go of the simple life or adapted to harboring plastic. Can’t stand to touch it and it hurts my eyes so I feel as if I’ve spent my entire life pouring music into glass jars. There’s a place for every thing. To a town and country girl. A woodsman like me stuck in the past. 1979 was where I drew the line. In terms of growing up and away from roots.
Dustbin in one hand, pushpins in apron, I inevitably come across something worth saving or finding another use for. Such as the brittle net filter which now veils the face of a Native woman.
A floating world… and I also get a kick out of hearing what others read into these precarious rebuses and curios. Someone once said that this particular room resembles a twisted nineteenth-century museum of history. [laughs] Now I walk into visual art museums and it looks like they’ve taken up the charge of anthropology. Without formal apology. They just clean their noses with representational bodies [laughs] while centuries of blood hang in the balance.
Ninety-nine percent of the insect carcasses here—cicadas in particular, bones, fish, feathers, and other discards—come from these environs. I will display its beauty. Minimizing my contribution to landfills, I use my nails to dig into and tear around a paper body, then go “T–A–C–K”—a holding pattern until time tells me where it goes. So these are time pieces: discards piled up over time. My sense of deep repair of whatever’s re-represented by the image. Let me become nothing… yet everything, and leave a bard’s footprint. I like bound wings: constraints, limits. Such as existing literature or quotidian debris that washes ashore cusp of hand. I’ve avoided publishing books so far. I use existing books. Always have. Lie-buries. And like most people, have an inherent dislike for my voice. I feel as if I am playing at representing LANGUAGE, pointing fingers at me the wrong way. Embodying another perspective or voice. Class clown gave me wiggle room, persona—mask. What kind of fool I am. Foul mouth, too.
And as with the maps, various animal menageries come about as hand prayers for a broken world. Only thing permanent is impermanence. Trauma ward, drama pest. I don’t think of myself as an artist or poet in the sense of having the time to sit down and make something and say, like Jesus, “It is finished.” [laughs] I would love that. Except I consider chairs to be an unnatural spine-destroying structure. [laughs] And if you think that’s bad—look what happened when it led to the table and all the other planes where wars are planned. Desk job to field marshall. And practically every room in The Building has a desk, chair, and writing supplies; stamps, scissors, various papers, etc. in case inspiration hits, registers: from Poet’s House to Fred Sanford’s house. Made of love a caper and paper but not so much the kind one can cash. Or seeks approval for. Scooting across surfaces hands fly off walls or desks traversing imaginary planes. Anyway, [laughs] for my purposes, walls get to be desks as I am always moving across a Holy See of floors. Old growth wood pressed into service, holding up earth planes holding up other planes. Waiting for whatever crosses my threshold.
Thresholds were made for making an entrance [laughs]. You could practically see the curtains parting when my peoples entered the house or a room. They danced. And glowed like chandeliers. And the rooms cracked up with laughter. “Afro-optimism.”
Whenever I tried to get information about enslavement in relation to my ancestors, my great-aunts and -uncles just talked about the body. They’d say, “Oh Grandaddy had a straight back!” Or my dad would say, “I don’t lay in bed. I get up movin’!” And whenever my mom’s people crossed a threshold into a space they “cut the rug” a little. Did a little glide or slide. Strut they stuff. Homes, basements, salons, living rooms, and backyards were the performance-hosting spaces. I’m a jitterbug, too. I don’t feel I make any things, so much as they happen to me. On the move between rooms, sweeping. Vistas. To be. Who’s doing all this. “Not I,” said the cookie jar. On the receiving end of wonder and gifts I just scoot or scat across surfaces or onto the nearest piece of paper around, material in hand. I’m a mess [laughs]. You ever see a performance stage floor after I cut up in ’em? I never had a room of my own growing up, let alone a bed, so here I am, making room for myself.
A clearing in the forest of living. Look at these oak floors! You remember my Ninth Street apartment, Jen. I just gots to have a big hole in the middle of the floor to cut the rug, move through chores, or get on top of it with a sheet of paper and draw or sew. I crawl like a baby. And cry, too. I used to do so in ink, when I was a Core Resident Fellow at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in ’82. I came off the wall and created room-sized installations only to come back on to walls now… [writing in the air, gesturing with both hands as if sound were arriving in head]. Hearing with eyes and seeing with ears. Exploring the limits of perception. [Pointing to Wetlands collage of animals, human body parts, and ships, then gesturing to floor as if throwing ink around with a brush, then almost as if playing percussion.] ‘Cause when you crawl around or work on the paper with ink, when you throw it up against something, you get the sound implied by the thrust, the rhythm. [Moving away from the book and gesturing as if to conduct an orchestra or sweep in the air.] You know how if you’re sweeping, you start singing a song, like cleaning house, la de da da, it’s prosody, it’s rhythm, it’s the measurement between… [continuing to flip through Wetlands book] I’m not precious about anything. I tear things up… People can make what they want out of these images… [pointing to a figure in a collage and reading.] “Art by God.” I like this figure’s well-delineated little booty.
§
[flipping through Wetlands book] A friend of mine, Chris Jones, brought me this book filled with mulberry paper, from India. It was the paper that attracted me, pulled me into the wetlands it was before, now dried and bound. I started out with very spare drawings or markings. And that’s what I liked. I intended to maintain a basic minimalism, then the detritus came in, took precedence because one always has to deal with waste, mitigate it in one way or another. The scale of this habit grew and intensified and took over my life because the contents of my house were constantly under fire via demolition and other destructive methods—harassment via my NYC land devil in extreme ass. [flipping through collages that include photos of patton in cypress swamp] Wetlands are filled with duckweed and plants breaking down—fossil fuels—over time. And empty of humans. Places which feel out of this world. One feels like dinosaurs are going to come out of the tall plants and muck.
So this is actually somewhere in the Midwest?
That’s around Cleveland.
Wow.
In my youth there were between 200,000 and 300,000 trees. But now there’s about 100,000, and the urban canopy is around thirteen percent. Andy Warhol once said, “I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever hope to own.” Cleveland Metroparks appear to have heard Warhol. However, switching from treeple to humanitree, Other examples of flourishing—such as Black uplift (in what became Leaveland and now seems to be Cleveland Clinic, Ohio) and white anxiety about integration—fall back to the usual police state pushb[l]ack, then the redlining of spilled blood. Such as what occurred when Ahmed Evans, the Kurtz-like leader of the New Libya group, one of dozens of local Black nationalist projects, decided to resist. Going in and out of my old neighborhood over time, the newly christened “Land,” has inspired me to use Tulsa as a verb, saying Cleveland was Tulsa’d… in a roundabout way, using other means and methods to put a chokehold on Others. And on the watch of various seemingly sincere b(s)Lack officials, which should lead to discussions about class dynamics.
Most of the old nationalists I run into say that the Glenville uprising of ’68 (two years after the equally fiery “Hough Rebellion”) was in response to an “Intifada,” which is not a surprising term, considering Pan-Africanism, the role of Islam, and by extension, an ever-present preoccupation with injustice in Palestine, the Black Panthers in Algeria, and so forth. And all of this in and around East 39105th Street which was once referred to as “Yiddish Downtown.” I sometimes joke that I grew up in an American Levant of sorts. In any case, ex-Korean War vet Evans used the $50,000 in funding that Mayor Carl Stokes (the first Black mayor of a large city) provided to his “Afro Culture Shop and Bookstore,” two blocks from my childhood home, to purchase guns. Years ago, Russell Atkins confided that when he arrived on schedule to teach poetry at the center he espied a huge cache of weapons and split. That was the beginning of the so-called Glenville shootout.
The shootout occurred some distance from the mixed-class, tree-lined residential streets of Glenville. But that’s not where the fires were set. The sky was monstrously red. We couldn’t stay in our home due to the threat of being consumed by the flames and everyone was taking turns watering down roofs. Watering down the night. We spent the night on the corner of our block with other families, under the same streetlamp that late-night crooners on their way home from work pooled around singing everyone to sleep as if living in one block-long bed. “Sing that one again!” someone might yell. You could feel everyone listening. Inside the deep peace elders set the tone as we followed their lead out of respect. And then suddenly the little plastic army men we used to play with sprang to life with real rifles and real jeeps! The National Guard had arrived. And curfew.
So who set the fires, and who put Black real estate genius Winston Willis out of business, and who set the Jazz Temple on fire, is more complex than the official record claims. If you ask the people. Or Arcey Harton, who at the age of twelve, “went home and looked in a mirror to see if he had something wrong with his face that he didn’t see,” trying to comprehend why some white shopkeeper offered him a rag, a bottle, and kerosene to make his business disappear! Since the Glenville legible in Adrienne Kennedy’s “People Who Led to My Plays” or Nishani Frazier’s Harambee City: The Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland and the Rise of Black Power Populism was Tulsa’d, people have been putting out all kinds of fires. Ever since. Living under fire—it’s hard to get past skin. Drapes.
Perhaps this project, dwelling space, and Arkitext, might be an organized hoard or a time machine assembled and reassembled by me, the Curator of Trash. Perhaps it has to do with trying to house myself in some way, because of so much loss. Existential homelessness. Loss of my old neighborhood due to the conflagration of 1968; loss of my NYC apartment along with everything else that went with living in NYC, from poet friends to the opportunity to work with amazing musicians. Out of sight, out of mind NYC is. For the most part. And at the same time, in Cleveland I’ve only been invited to read my work on one occasion—an invitation about twenty years ago from R.A. Washington to open for Will Alexander. I’m like a fish out of water in the 216. Detroit has been more welcoming. Alas, you can’t be a prophet in your own hometown.
I grew up in the era of hand-me-downs or making, scrounging, thrifting your own clothes. What I do with words. The family house on Olivet contained eight people in about 800 square feet. Indoors was for sleep and slamming screen doors. Jay Fellows wrote, “Writing has the pleasure of the door.” And boy did they revolve. Upstairs there were seven more family members. Next door there were thirteen children. Skip a house then there were ten, six, five, nine and on and on and on. Children doubled up in beds and narrow closets which contained only a few changes of clothes per child. And we seldom saw the floor except to pin paper patterns to fabric on top of it to sew. I have a memory of my mother or elder sisters fitting patterns to my body to shorten or lengthen them. Sheer things intrigue me. Voile, silk and the bio-logic of shimmering wings, skeletal leaves and pressed flowers in the vitrines of the Twisted Naturalist haven on The Building’s top floor, which are a constant reminder to stop and step gingerly and to handle fragile worlds with care. I decided to be “backwards” instead of surrendering to the loud over-stimulating and hyper-illuminated, machine-driven world of techno-optimism—or what Russell Atkins bemoaned as gadgetry. Abou Farman once said that my mother’s work was all about bodies. I guess so. Especially as one generation gave birth to another, limbs flapped in common beds, or houses opened up to swallow sleepovers. Bodies upon bodies as fur nature cushion skin papered over growing or shrinking frames. Animated pattern people, makeshift families, bodies hiding bodies, flaking, burns, wounds, scabs. Is there any wonder I hew to the ephemeral? Especially now that I know my family ended up in Cleveland due to a lynching. Same with Arcey’s.
I experienced the 1966 Hough Riot as well. I recall the surprising tang of smoke damage and how it lingered all about. Not “riots” but rebellions. Perhaps even more personal was the 1970 fire in which my mother lost all but one painting. That haunts me still. Which is why I am daily terrified about being responsible for her work in this place. It’s all that is left. And it’s a lot. That fire occurred in the “Back House,” which was a long-abandoned edifice before the sculptor-professor at Karamu, Duncan Ferguson, who went out of town for health reasons, asked my mother to take charge in his absence. The kiln was the culprit. And my little brother who had pushed a stuffed chair against it and left. The fire department was only two short blocks away but it took them forty-five minutes to arrive. I loved that body of work. All abstraction. Thick painterly impasto. Crazy thing is she regrouped and relocated to another property closer to downtown, along with other artists. And on the very first occasion she went out of town to NYC to find out if her dinnerware won the award for the firm she worked for (it did), she returned to an empty studio. Everything was missing. Sometimes I suspect that those big canvases adorn someone’s wall to this day and pray they will surface.
This society is deeply presentist. I think it’s just an incapacity to hold history and the weight of it, with all its characters, all the anonymous characters, as well as the handful of heroes whose names are easy to memorize.
You know what, I think the one thing that’s come clear is that I feel I will have failed if it’s all about me and my I. Everything is a collaboration. The materials make the work. I merely animate the channeling, lending my body, my hands to the interactive process.
I feel that a deep relationship with these things has to do with when you grow up with a creative person and you see them create from what looks like nothing. I watched my mom illustrate, design plates, do calligraphy, and much more. I’ve saved those pieces, I think, because I know what she went through to earn a living to buy her supplies and support her habit… It depended on her hands, creating greeting cards or flowers for people, so when I see this trash, what looks like trash, I’m amazed. By like, a box of cereal. All the stuff that is designed—elements and images. A likeness between a plant and how it’s depicted. That’s a labor. And we just throw them away. Therefore when I’m cleaning I’m gleaning—junk mail! I keep a pair of tiny stork-headed scissors in my apron pockets along with push pins or that gummy stuff, but I’m usually so impatient I simply tear around the parts of images worth saving using a fingernail as a blade. We’re the Apron Society. In tribute to my father and all the mothers I can still see wiping their hands on their apron. My father wouldn’t think of cooking with street clothes on for hygenic purposes. And we children had to put on pinafores, smocks, or coveralls to avoid messing up good clothes. Life is precious. Thinking about the nature of trash and what’s “garbage” might make one crumble, disassemble. How we treat the world and each other. Who and what’s discardable, able to quickly assemble, line up. Be torn or shredded. Thrown away, thrown up and out. Gaza to gauze, vaporized. I used to think Soylent Green was far-fetched. Not anymore. Glass is so beautiful. So is cardboard. I love boxes so I must be a cat. During my childhood, we the children roamed the streets looking for bottles of milk, soda, etc. It all went away and returned, and with it perhaps a sense of life cycles not unlike changing seasons. Someone designed these bottles; their brief existence is tied to ancient sand beds, fire, and careful handling. That’s when I decided it was better to go for crazy—if sanity means getting used to being wasteful, and throwing evolutionary miracles away.
It’s the question I ask myself when it comes to the word art: how can it be “art” if it’s wasteful? If it leaves dumpsters of landfill behind? That’s my litmus test. Artists have a high bar of polluting the planet to make art, unless the message makes up for it. Art stores are a zoo of BS plastic toxic consumer crap too. That’ s part of the reason I defaulted to poetry. I must say if I’m anything it’s a Paper Doll regardless of the medium, tools, or discipline.
§
I decided I have enough stuff. You live long enough, you don’t need any… I just need to go back and recapture the beauty that is all around. Anything can be beautiful. But then we throw these things away without thinking… This is what kills me. “This product is so good for you, blah, blah, blah,” but the container for the product is trashing the earth. So how good is it? When it comes to the trash I’ve curated and piled up like shifting wall, floor, or ceiling logjams, they’re not so much improvisations—a now overused word for lack of a better description—as much as evidence of a survival pattern. I don’t have a habit or practice of trying to make “art” or even poems. It’s survival. I’m trying to get language to talk about itself, showing its seams and unseemliness at times. I’m getting dirt to talk about itself. Other times I’m called to transform or cover up something I don’t want to see… Be it bareness, a crack in a wall. Working with what’s most immediate to my body, using the materials at hand.
In animism in Japan, everything has a life. When you have a doll and you throw it away, it’s burned ritually. I used to live in a place called Ōsu Kannon, which was named after the temple to the bodhisattva of compassion. Objects are vested with animus, and so you need to thank what you throw away. It’s like the Marie Kondo thing… which, ironically, became this capitalist trend of how to have a minimalist home, dealing with the sickness of overconsumption.
I took what I called a vow of “povArty” after I left Houston for New York. And soon afterward I also took a vow to remain low-tech—no matter how challenging—and to only use the simplest available materials. Partly because I liked the idea of constraint, setting challenges, limits to a tendency to sprawl. But more importantly, because of the toxicity that I experienced pulling prints and doing darkroom work at the Lower East Side Printshop—and from growing up with a mother who painted in the kitchen. The smell of turpentine did not improve my appetite. So I landed on basic pen and ink. Other times watercolor, plants, ink, fish skin, berries, hair, ochre from fire, soil smudges, and so forth.
I used to work very large but then I ended up in a very small place on the Lower East Side, and all I could handle were books. I liked the restraint for the same reason I use a walk-in closet to meditate in. Like being in a womb. When I was about twelve I moved into my parent’s closet and lived under their clothes. I had grown tired of sharing the bunk bed with four of my six siblings. This behavior goes down to picking up tiny flowers or loose hair with tweezers and gluing them to old shorthand books. I beamed when poet friend Sean Killian said it was “miniature work.”
Walking, sweeping, braiding, cleaning, etc. implies rhythm. And then the modulation of time registers with mark making as a strong component of my work. But it’s also often about me not determining anything. So there’s no I, in that it’s almost like reading animals out of clouds. If something appears, take it as a hint. Hidden in the inner world of the paper. The uni-verse in it; until what needs or wants to seep up (like oil from a wetland), which was already present in the materials, beats its way out of the pulp to the surface to breathe, take in some light. I scribble. I play at being a scribe. Or the fool who speaks truth to power.
But then when I got away from the Art World, I ended up contemplating the space of the book as an object: what is it? And what is “text?” And what is “reading?” I decided very early on that reading and writing is broader than what applies to literacy and literature, or the idea of the written. Where I grew up, a “reading” was something you went and got from the seers and sayers of the neighborhood! People who trained and studied in particular Black spiritual traditions handed down to them from generation to generation. Direct transmission, energy fields. Black survival required penetrating and translating other kinds of “texts” and understanding dream language. Many of those lineages died out. Alternative “schools” of thought…
Looking back, I have this memory of unfinished parts of the city, of things being far less slick and paved over. As gangs of roaming children the city was ours. I get the feeling there was another race or category that seems to have now been erased, or at least smudged, and criminalized and that what seemed most obvious on the streets of the city at the time was the dichotomy of Children and Adults. Boom! Babies seemed to be everywhere. And we were fearless about earth, about puddles, insects, being dirt dabbers, making mudpies or picking at our sores. There were no paper towels to be had. We depended on the Rag Man. You could hear his calls at the other end of the street. “Rag Man, Rag Man!”
Some neighbors maintained dirt yards. Swept them and themselves ritually “clean.” Grass was for the birds! On occasion, when I get an inkling, I plait or braid long sweeps of grass and lay it down in mounding sweeps. Instead of mowing. Otherwise it is, to the bourgeoisie, an unkempt Afro pro-be-oliced by plant-blind authorities who think this country should look like baronial England. Don’t show no kinks! So vegetable gardens were grown in back of the house. Some people believed in “switching” or “whipping” their collards to make them “grow right!” Consequently there’s Yardening or Gardening. Arcey recalls his father, whose family left South Carolina in a horse and buggy when his dad was four, complaining about people who “turned grass to dirt and dirt to sand,” and he didn’t mean it in a positive sense; but what he didn’t know was that it was part of a tradition that harked back to Africa.
Who knew that that part of the city was part of the Lake Warren Sand Barrens, which stretches all the way up to Toledo, Ohio? Found materials we used to sink hands and feet in. A life poetics: like playing in a sandbox together. You don’t want to be in the sandbox alone. So the work is not about me, per se.
Mine is a practice of, I hope, tithing. I was advised that “one cannot take in without emptying out”—that’s where the collaboration comes in. That’s not a style, just like “experimental poetry” is not a style, or whatever. For me it’s more about how I survive. In the moment. It’s an evolutionary leap, hopefully.