featuring letters by:

Frank Sherlock, Brandon Holmquest, Nadia Berenstein, Benjamin Lansky, Nestor Perlongher (translated by Steve Dolph), Christopher P. Miller, Lyssa Tall Anolik, Sara Manheimer, Priscilla Paton, Bela Shayevich, Ish Klein, Samuel Lang Budin, Eileen Moeller, Evelyn Sharenov, Catherine Gaffney, Carolyn M. Martin, Megan Milks, CA Conrad, and Chris Pearson

and art by:

Pete Deevakul, Guillermo Srodek-Hart, Eric Trosko, Andrea Stanislav, Tami Demaree, Mike Calway-Fagen, and Misako Inaoka

Copies are 8 dollars (plus shipping). Send check or money order to:

The Wild (c/o Laura Jaramillo)
35-20 35th street apt D2
L.I.C., N.Y. 11106

e-mail laura.jmillo@gmail.com for information on shipping prices, etc.

my sister’s dog got hit by a car, she said, i need you
to come over and get rid of it before she gets home.
the dog was small. we wrapped it up in a trash bag
and took it to the dump. i had to heave it over the
fence, which was higher than i’d remembered. the
dog hit the top of it and fell back on the pavement.
the plastic snapped in the wind. i picked it up. fuck,
she said, standing back by the car, do you need help.
with each lob i turned away with a fuck, the brown
thud coming back to me. the car was running, traffic
racing past. i loosened my collar, squatting at the
fence, then looked over my shoulder. come on, she
said, hurry up it’s cold!

development

i cornered a mouse on the counter and it slipped into the sink.
i had a frying pan, the future was mine.  so why don’t you wanna
get a house, my wife asked, opening the shutters.  there is a flaccid
no which we say means yes, prostrate on the polished surface.
let’s build condos here, someone says.  spread the word.
windows go up and cats look out of them. the cats believe
they are playing with something.  i am not quite the cats—
i don’t know what to do.  i feed the cats.  i chase myself
around the house.  the house must not leave the house.

rain

mom, i’m gonna kill the cat, rudy says.  when he says mom
he also means rain. some of the rain right now is cat piss.
the cat pissed on my t-shirt, rudy says.  so wash it, his mom
says.  the water sparkles in his ears. he puts his hand in the
shirt, in the piss, then smacks his mom in the face—how do you
like it, he says. then they’re screaming at each other and
throwing things, colors splashing into colors. it’s all rain, it
doesn’t matter. afterwards he lies like a fish on his bed, chin
over the edge, eyes blinking.

Ryan Eckes lives in South Philadelphia.  His poetry can be read in XConnect, Fanzine, Cue: A Journal of Prose Poetry, the ixnay reader 4, PhillySound, in his chapbook when i come here (Plan B Press, 2007), and on his blog, Old News (ryaneckes.blogspot.com).  He has an MA in creative writing from Temple University, where he currently teaches.

The Evil Bird
from Cañete, Department of Lima

As in ancient times, the inhabitants of this place, especially on the farms, have a superstition about the Evil Bird.
They say it announces the death of any individual, singing on the roof of the house of the one who is going to die.
And that is why they call it that: Evil Bird. This animal has a horrible appearance: black feathers; large, bulging eyes; to see it is frightening. It rarely comes to the village; it lives in the countryside, generally in the most beautiful trees, almost hidden among the leaves.

The Appearance of Human Beings on the Earth
from Jauja Province, Department of Junín

In remote times, what is today the valley of Jauja or Mantaro was covered by the waters of a great lake, from the middle of which protruded a rock called Wanka, resting place of the Amaru, a horrible monster with a head of flames, two small wings and a toad’s body that ended in a great serpent’s tail. Later, Tulunmaya (Rainbow) fathered another Amaru in the lake, of a darker color, as a companion to the first, this latest one never reached the size of the first, which had acquired a whitish color in its maturity. The two monsters challenged each other for supremacy over the lake, where the rock, though of great dimensions, was not large enough to provide a resting place for the two together. In these frequent struggles, the violence of which raised waterspouts to great heights in space, agitating the lake, the big Amaru lost a large piece of its tail to the furious attack of the younger.
Irritated, the god Tikse unloaded a tempest over them, the tempest’s lightning killed them both, and they fell, undone, with flooding rains over the already agitated lake, increasing its volume until it broke its banks and emptied itself to the south.
When the valley had been formed in this way, there came forth from Warina or Wari-puquio (which comes from the words: “Wari,” an unprofaned hiding place that guards some sacred thing or being; and “puquio,” spring) the first two human beings, called “Mama” and “Taita,” who up to then had remained for a long time under the earth for fear of the the Amarus.
This pair’s descendants constructed, later, the Temple of Wariwillka, the ruins of which still exist today.
Today, it is generally believed among the Wankas that the Amaru is the serpent that, hidden in some cave, grows until it makes itself immense and, taking advantage of the winds that form during tempests, tries to scale the sky but is destroyed by lightning among the clouds; and according to whether the the figure of the Amaru in the sky is black or white, it presages a good or bad year.

The Fire-breathing Cow
from La Calzada, Department of San Martín

The people of La Calzada tell that a long time ago, beside the enormous hill that rises up beside the road that runs to Moyobamba, a beast always appeared, with the appearance of a cow, with long twisted horns, breathing fire from its mouth. The people gave it the name of Vaca-Huillca (Sacred Cow). This animal threatened to destroy the village with the fire that it threw out in gushing streams.
The inhabitants, full of panic at such a terrible threat, and convinced that they themselves could not make it disappear, resolved to solicit the services of a magician from Pomacochas. They sent a commission to that place, with this goal. The magician, in exchange for a handsome fee, came to La Calzada. And making use of his practical witchcraft he defeated the animal. They say that the monster moved to the lagoon of Cochaconga on the plateau of Pishcohuañuna, where it is supposed to live to this day.

Brandon Holmquest is a translator, poet and fiction writer who lives in Queens.

He shifted and saw me. He offered me a bite. I accepted. It was a fireball of a tomato, delicious, its tang flooding our mouths and trickling from our lips down to our chins, tickling our necks, tingeing our white T-shirts pink at the collars. It could have been just another tomato on a vine, stuck there round and shiny, swelling, waiting to be plucked and eaten, with brothers and sisters just as ripe, just as ample. But this tomato was extraordinary. I’d never tasted anything so rich. The stranger and I surveyed each other coolly as we chomped, and I felt the beginning of something, I didn’t know what exactly, take root in my body.

I love tomatoes. His name was Paul.

On our first date we went to Mama Mia’s, a Ninth Street hole in the wall. Paul’s idea. They knew him there. I imagine he wanted to impress me with his capacity for making quaint friends like Guillermo and Estelle, the septuagenarian owners of the place. They embraced him heartily and gave me an affectionate once-over with eyebrows raised, I believe in impressed approval. At the time, I was charmed: He likes elderly Italians. He is perfect.

We had just fallen into the rhythm of a smooth tete-a-tete when our salads were served, striking us silent with their opulence: a generous array of sliced tomatoes arranged upon rippling leaves of romaine with grated mozzarella sprinkled on top. O! And a creamy Italian sauce to die for. I looked at Paul and smiled. Paul smiled back. My heart bubbled with joy as I plinked a tomato slice into my mouth and chewed. I looked at him chewing on his tomato slice as he looked at me chewing on my tomato slice, and I knew this would be a relationship that would last.

He had felt it, too, he said many months later, when we remembered with fondness that first date, the first of many such dates, many such tomato-filled salads followed by traditional Italian dishes and slow walks along the river. He was a talker, oh yes, fond of sweeping declarations and eloquent with his hands; our favorite topics were gentrification, environmental racism, urban art, and tomatoes. I love tomatoes. Since the day we met so gloriously amidst the tomato vines at the farm, we had been back to Mama Mia’s twenty times at least, enough for Guillermo and Estelle to know our business and give us dessert on the house from time to time, usually when we were arguing, which naturally became more frequent as time wore on.

He took me back to Mama Mia’s to propose. Not marriage, but a partnership. A committed partnership. We had politics, you know. Guillermo brought out our salads, and Paul brought up that first date, that moment when we had gazed at each other with forks mid-air and plinked tomato slices into our mouths simultaneously. He claimed to have known right then, right there, that we would make it. We would commit to one another, grow old together. Darling, he said, will you be my life partner?

I looked down at my salad. He had jumped the gun a little, I thought. I didn’t want to think of such things; I wanted to plink a tomato slice into my mouth and savor its garden flesh. But looking at him looking at me like that, my heart surprised me, thumping like it wanted out, like it wanted to jump right out of my chest and nestle inside his. Our hearts would grow old together. We were in love.

So I looked up and said, yes, darling, yes, I will. Paul let out a huge breath and reached for my hand. We clutched each other’s hands and smiled, our eyes glistening, then kissed each other lightly over the table. I was glad then that I hadn’t started in on the Male Answer Syndrome baiting, a game I’d picked up from one of our femarchist friends and grown fond of over the course of our relationship. Paul might have reneged, which, by the way, should be pronounced with a soft g because it sounds better and more appropriate that way. Paul always rejected my pronunciation-as-use theories of language. I have to get them in when he’s not listening.

That night we had a long bout of polite sex and then we went to sleep. When I woke up, it was early morning, and my chest was rattling noisily. Something felt wrong inside me. I was numb on one side, and my chest was swelling visibly, as though my rib cage was expanding. I must be having a heart attack, I thought. Exciting, and highly unusual for a woman my age—but I have always been special. Then I started coughing uncontrollably, so hard I feared I’d hurl up my esophagus. That was when Paul woke up, alarmed, and started whacking me on the back, saying are you all right, darling, are you all right, and, should I call the hospital, darling, I’m calling the hospital. He made for the phone. I batted his arm away.

By that point, the skin between my breasts had begun itching uncontrollably, and I couldn’t help but scratch. I scratched and scratched, digging deep with my fingernails until, abruptly, I tore through my skin—it wasn’t painful so much as relieving. As I peeled my skin back, groaning, I felt something push at my rib cage from within. I thought, my god, I must have a tumor between my breasts, now a heart attack is one thing but cancer is just not allowed. And that’s when it happened; I don’t know how. My heart burst out of my chest. It popped through its arterial fence, it surged through my lungs and my rib cage, and ejected itself through various nervous tissues and muscle fibers with a final rip through the hole I had made in my skin. There it stopped, my heart, still attached to its arteries and veins, but exposed and sagging between my breasts like some kind of unwieldy necklace. Chestlace? If you will.

Because Paul has fucking weird dreams, naturally he assumed this was one and promptly went back to sleep. After a moment, so did I. When I woke up, the problem had unfortunately not remedied itself. My chest bore a small open wound, from whence my heart dangled, snug between my mammary glands. I was more fascinated than alarmed—fascinated because my heart, now visible to the world, looked remarkably like a tomato, a tomato whose rubbery skin steadily palpitated with soft th-thumps. When Paul woke up, he had an identically similar reaction. Your heart, he exclaimed animatedly, it looks remarkably like a tomato! Then he stopped staring and looked at me concerned. Darling, he said, we really should take you to the hospital, with that patronizing look like he knew what was best, and I certainly didn’t. By that point in our relationship, however, I knew better than to cry condescension. He would invariably pull out the card that said, I have a master’s degree in women’s studies and a four-year background in anti-rape activism. What do you have, Christine?

Fuck you, Paul, I said with a yawn, and got up gracefully. I’m fine. I stepped in front of the mirror to examine myself more closely. Not only did my heart look remarkably like a tomato, there was no arguing that it was, in fact, a tomato, and large, at that, even when contracted. Indeed, it took great effort to resist taking a bite out of my heart. I gasped and covered myself, thinking of Paul’s similar tomato-lust. I must keep my heart away from Paul, I thought, or he would surely eat it and kill me.

After I put on a loose sweatshirt, I began to feel somewhat lightheaded. Well, I thought, maybe I’ll go to the emergency room after all. I wrote a note and stuck it on the refrigerator, then left the apartment and stepped onto the street. By now I had a severe craving for a big, juicy tomato, so I thought, why not stop at the local farmer’s market on the way to the hospital. There wasn’t any rush.

It was crowded for a Tuesday morning, with everyone tossing around barked numbers and bulky bags of produce. I made my way past tables of green peppers, lettuce, jellies, and cucumbers before catching sight of the tomatoes at the end of the market. Cherry tomatoes, plum tomatoes, slicing tomatoes, ah. The shiny bright skin, the friendly round shape, the thirst-quenching blood.

Luscious, I thought. Pure lusciousness.

I needed a tomato, right then, right there.

My eyes locked in on an especially large specimen with a quirky asymmetrical stem. This, I thought, this is the one. I felt a twinge of guilt at my independent tomato-hunting. Although Paul and I tried always to prevent any development of co-dependence between us, so much so that we each made our own salads standing side by side at the counter, tomatoes had always been our thing. Now, not a full day since we had made our commitment, I was already acting selfishly. But what can you do about severe tomato cravings, I asked myself, except eat a tomato? Besides, you are selfish.

As I was beelining towards the tomatoes, lost in my thoughts, a woman with an elbow bumped into me. She elbowed me right between my breasts, right in the heart. I sucked in my breath and stopped still. The woman didn’t bother to apologize, just stalked off indifferently as my blood went rushing to my head. Had it burst? Had my heart burst? I needed to sit down and check without flashing my breasts at anyone. I needed to sit down and catch my breath. I needed to sit down and … I sat down. I looked down my shirt. My heart had ruptured; juice was running down my abdomen. I reached down and cradled my broken heart. Realizing I was in a busy public area, I looked up alarmed. No, I calmed myself, no one had noticed me with my hand down my shirt; I had my heart to myself, and rightly so.

Having skipped breakfast, my hunger pangs were intense, and heightened by the smell of ripe tomato. I would need to eat soon. And what more delicious than…? No. I knew better. And yet my stomach was turning itself inside out with hunger. So I grabbed my tomato heart lustily and tugged it experimentally towards my lips, finding that its arterial vine had some give. I sucked my heart’s juice. And…I couldn’t help myself. I bit.

Immediately I felt stronger in the stomach and brain but weaker in the rest of my body. My chest hurt badly; pain shot all through. I mustered up all my strength and walked the two blocks to the hospital. The nurse in the emergency room took one look at me, gave me a clipboard, and said, take a seat. Although the pain was excruciating, I told myself to be patient. Other people needed doctors, too. But I couldn’t even fill out the application form; my stomach was yawning noisily. What was I to do? So I lifted up my heart and took another bite. The nurse sighed. Well, now you’ll need a transplant. Doctor!

I recovered fully. Paul and I decided to take a break. I feel sure it is a permanent break but know the decision is his to make. He will not be at peace unless he gets the last word and can legitimately justify the break-up on grounds not related to my heart.

I no longer eat tomatoes. When I see them now, I feel a phantom lurch in my chest. My new affair is with grapes. Cold, hard grapes. I like the white kind, the seedless kind, the ones that look like eyeballs. I like to plop a cold, hard seedless grape in my mouth and suck and suck before biting and feeling all the juice squirt out inside of me. Sometimes, I like to peel the skin off before chomping on the fleshy interior. But it’s hard to find the time for that. We’re all so busy these days.

Megan Milks is in the Ph.D. Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.Her work is forthcoming or has been published in Thirty Under Thirty, an anthology of innovative writers under the age of thirty; Kathy Acker:Transatlanticism and the Transnational; Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire; Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of ContemporaryXXperimental Prose by Women Writers; DIAGRAM; Pocket Myths; and MildredPierce. Her short story “Kill Marguerite” is coming out as a chapbook through Another New Calligraphy in May.

]]> http://thewildmag.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/tomato-heart-by-megan-milks/feed/ 0 thewildmag http://thewildmag.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/an-interlude-on-poetics-as-dirt-by-caconrad-and-brenda-iijima/ http://thewildmag.wordpress.com/2009/04/20/an-interlude-on-poetics-as-dirt-by-caconrad-and-brenda-iijima/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:15:09 +0000 thewildmag http://thewildmag.wordpress.com/?p=65 ]]> CONRAD:

OKAY BRENDA! My friend! DIRT! The real thing MEETS poetry, the other real thing! We\’re both Capricorns so it feels right to be discussing DIRT with POETRY, Capricorn being the last island before the zodiac is engulfed by total air and water. Whenever I\’ve had boyfriends who are also Earth signs the union to dirt is a merry and serious occasion. One summer I asked my boyfriend Robin to locate with me five different varieties of dirt to explore and eat. Our enthusiastic search (land)ed some exquisite side effects. We were in southwestern New York State at a pagan festival, and our friend the Reverend Velveteen Sly from the Church of the Subgenius officiated our DIRT UNION. To be honest, it turned out to actually be that holy, this search-and-eat dirt expedition. The plots of dirt were chosen carefully for texture and color as we were trying to find the perfect combination corresponding to the four cardinal elements and the fifth, unseen element. (At the time we referred to this fifth element as Wyrd, after the blank rune, but this was before hearing Freya Asswyn lecture on Wyrd being an American neo-pagan invention, and without historic location in the Rhineland and other Nordic regions.) The dirt in the woods is what made Robin sick, I think, but he had also been drinking a lot the night before, this crap alcohol called Purple Jesus. The dirt from the woods was near a rotting tree, fresh with life, and without a doubt the most ALIVE of all the dirt selections, I mean you could FEEL your heart racing ten minutes after eating it, your blood rich with its complex nutrients. We ate each selection at each location, small mouthfuls, chewing a long time, especially the dry, red dirt, which was probably an old clay bed long since baked to dust in the sun. Smell, taste, texture, inculcated information in the most unexpected ways which revealed itself in my dreams that night. I was in a submarine, which was not marine at all, but in the ground, and the machine didn\’t make tunnels, it didn\’t burrow, it simply moved through the dirt and the dirt healed behind it much like water would do. And yes, the periscope, you have to have a periscope, and I could SEE the festival dancers, naked around the campfire with the drummers, dancing and drumming all night long, as they do every night of these festivals. It felt like an out of body experience, only, instead of floating out of the body into the air it was underground PUSHING PUSHING THROUGH DIRT THE FRONT WINDOW OF THE MACHINE REVEALING ROOTS OF EVERY KIND SOME LIKE RED CHICKEN CLAWS AND DIRT DIRT DIRT WORMS DIRT DIRT DIRT PEBBLES AND COCOONS! I will ALWAYS remember this dream, this INCREDIBLE dream! It was most likely just a dream though, not astral travel, but what a vivid, MAGNIFICENT dream it was! I woke violently and suddenly and wrote without thinking about it, this little poem, which is part of my forthcoming CHAX Press book, THE BOOK OF FRANK:

Frank remembers
shirts of buried generals
flying in formation
over schoolyards

blowing wasps from sleeves

Dirt informed this poem directly, the graves sending the shirts into the sky, threatening! I remember thinking while eating one of the five selections of dirt THIS IS OUTSIDE COMMERCE, FUCK THE BANKS, FUCK THE GROCERY BUSINESS, FUCK ALL BUSINESS, THIS ONE IS OUTSIDE THEIR REACH, WE TWO FAGS AND THE EARTH! The desire to be Outside the functions of our culture have always been strong in me, but never stronger as on that day, slowly eating our mouthfuls of dirt together. One of the selections actually tasted like flesh, but it wasn\’t a rotted animal, it was dust, but tasted like meat. Even though I was vegetarian, it made the continuum of dirt, plant, and animal blink epiphanies throughout the day. Outside of waking violently from my submarine dream, the experience of our DIRT UNION was total pleasure. Earth as pleasure, something to strive for in this time of Earth as utilitarian, mineral scavenging, damn building, bomb craters, graves graves graves graves graves fucking war-filled graves! One of the most beautiful moments Robin and I shared in the pleasure of dirt this day was when the Reverend Velveteen Sly officiated our DIRT UNION, and we dug a little hole in the field, made love at her command (the Reverend enjoys telling fags when to get going), and deposited our semen into the hole simultaneously, putting a little dirt over our deposit, then an acorn, then more dirt. Sex and dirt and poetry have an endless braid of possibilities! Horticulture and poetry and sex!

IIJIMA:

That meaty flavor you tasted was most likely iron. Many stones in New England contain copious amounts of iron—it bleeds out of the rocks. Dirt—ground down stones, the continuum of terrestrial matter in heady sedimentary patterns—where the nouns return to, only to reverb. Geophagy! There is substantial evidence that humans have been consuming dirt for medicinal reasons for over forty thousand years (reports Cindy Engel in Wild Health: Lessons in Natural Wellness from the Animal Kingdom)—animals go to great lengths to lick at dirt and clay which helps them deal with toxicity in their diets, etc. I’m attracted to dirt for its moist microbial richness—dirt of subterranean (or interior) eco systems where movement involves burrowing, tunneling, and digging. (Eating this top layer is a bit hazardous because that’s where most of the bacteria live—though my sister and I would feast on the occasional “dirt brownie”). As a child I used to dig holes in various places and lay my face into the concave excavation—in order to pick up vibrations of the earth and also to smell and feel the contours. And I found, if I inhaled short quick successive breaths I could gain access to the changeable dirt/earth scents quite like a fox, nose to mossy floor. Easy transition from solid to liquid interest me too. Pour a little water on dirt and you get mud. These shape shifting unstable properties point to a changeability not often conceded to in the lived out world of civilization. Dirt is disarticulation and re-absorption—the break down of civilization into dirt. Now, with our biomedical bodies loading up on synthetic chemicals we need dirt evermore to purify our own excretions. Dirt is the local blend—all this returning local color under our soles. Love your androgynous mother(ing) dirt! An acre of soil might contain 130 pounds each of algae and protozoa, 890 lbs. of insects, nearly 900 pounds of earthworms and about 2,000 pounds each of bacteria and fungi as well as a larger weight of plant roots than the above-the-ground plant parts. Worm gardens are the opposite of captivity. Mega processes going on including electron exchange and chemical transformation—the soil is charged I say. Dirt is erroneously thought to be dirty when in fact it is actively cleansing—and yes, there is the rotting stage, as you mention—and then there’s the fact of the autotrophs and their hunger for compounds. And the fact of the heterotrophs and their insatiable appetite for autotrophs…I am very greedy about earthworm shit. I feed and I feed them, feed and feed and feed them. They become thick, plump and agile and their castings keep the tilth subtle, thick, aggregate, dense. The sticky binding element of soil is a protein called glomalin and 30% of soil mass consists of this substance. Glomalin contains 1-9% iron, so you might have tasted it’s slightly bloody meat flavor. What glomalin does is store carbon—30-40% would be released into the atmosphere without this homeopathic glue.

I feel I have to evoke the material rich nano reality of dirt before I can wiggle amongst the symbols. There is so much fear of the pre-technical, and it is thought of as inferior, lower life—the untamed, undomesticated, not given to husbandry. As far as poetry is concerned, there must be room for the ugly, unsculpted, corrupted, unstable utterance—or something unformed and less than pristine. I look to dirt for a modality of the raw. An instance of what I mean is encapsulated in Snow Sensitive Skin, a moody, sensitive collaboration between Rob Halpern and Taylor Brady that they worked on during the conflict between Lebanon and Israel, the horrible aggression that was meted out, turning life to rubble…

—my carbon credits public smog
our outposts on the commons
being waste expands there
no limit to what’s left over-
time remains say life itself
where gulls wheel scout mark
mountains of what won’t decay
no future reference a bird-
filled sky affirms

—what guarantees the working day

Here’s Abraham Smith from his book Whim Man Mannon
—sultry soil—mortal tactile tract—troubling the farm:

secret soil coital
he dover here
sounds blonde as
whipped oil
please appeal to
wimpling skies
journeying trees
there is but one fence
bone true and
one blockhead dog
inside
to rend
the smarts
of trees
at journey’s end

And James Thomas Stevens’ tangible matter with matter:

The vegetable earth on its mineral spine

CONRAD:

Much of what you say makes your book AROUND SEA more complete! If that makes sense? Tell us how AROUND SEA is part of your total immersion into Earth.

IIJIMA:

There seemed to be so much taxonomy to cut through to visualize the flow of the ecosystem. Things are parsed out for value and quality and how this relates to human concern. I wanted to understand beyond thingness, to understand systems and how they surge within networks—in and out of formation/form—dissipating outlines.

CA, I love your poetry for its passionate creation and lyrical insistence of a commons of culture and an ecology of inclusively. “we are not between trees between hairs/split mine in two so you can get it going/keep it soaring” (broadside by CAConrad read at Peace on A, 3/1/08—from going to 108).

I concur with Slavoj Zizek that the paradigm of apartheid, instead of disappearing is reinvigorating. And, as he says, “Ecology becomes a problem of sustainable development” when there is this division between the included and excluded, so environmental issues are parsed by personal decisions that involve money and style, for instance, “How do I build a green patio, or is my bamboo flooring eco friendly ?”, or “See my new fuel efficient Prius”: myopic, self-serving consumerist attitudes that distract from the intensities of interrelating local and global issues that take a lot more gumption to address. He uses the term “polluting excluded” to comment on the atmosphere in the United States and Europe surrounding immigration, refugees—displaced persons—articulated in another way, people that are viewed as dirt, objects of disgust. Wild animals are viewed with the same derision. Coyotes, boars and numerous other animals continually poisoned because they are in the way of huge industrial ranching interests and corporate farms. The irony is of course, that dubious industrial practices poison with synthetics—sublimely and stealthily; very threateningly.

Dirt contains the shrapnel, skin, blood and guts—dirt contains the trace. Dirt is primordial but present and presently breathing. Dirt is the real (as in Real) if we need to separate out the symbolic and the imaginative into distinct categories, (corporal experience tells me they swirl together in such a jumble they are one and the same with differentiation within, like a spectrum)…Well, Zizek brings them together here: “The Real is thus effectively all three dimensions at the same time: the abyssal vortex that ruins every consistent structure, the mathematized consistent structure of reality, the fragile pure appearance.” (Organs Without Bodies p. 103.). I’m much less interested in Platonic forms then the surging, gesticulating, teetering materiality of the mineral and viscous that never quite stabilizes. Beverly Dahlen from, A Reading 8-10 (note her emphatic usage of vitality):

the vitality of dying forms. Having taken part in it, an image
of the historical, when the dying forms falls apart: the litter,
monumental, of dead forms.

Leslie Scalapino:

The land and 1.2 billion living are in
a—one’s—thorax—chemical wasteland in

paper mills, steel factories, coal the
waste acid pours as sky into the huge

river—and sky pairs in visible hell of
no seeing and living—workers

from The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence

and Tyrone Williams:

Both the appeal of a bell—
or disturbed soil—
strike twice: bend both
ears on graveyard shift:
tilt the table—
exhalt exhume—

“err on the side of life”, etc.
from On Spec

CONRAD:

Filth is another word for pollution, for garbage, for the bacteria-laden STINK we sweep out the door to become someone else\’s problem, some other environment\’s stinking problem. Garbage is on the streets all over Philadelphia and sometimes I see it and feel an affinity. It feels important to not only admit this affinity, but to examine how and why there would be. It\’s not surrendering to the total breakdown, but accepting and understanding that IT IS ME the breakdown, as much as it is all of us. The garbage on the street is who we are. I\’ve thought about inventing a long, hollow, clear plastic dress connected to a vacuum, and I would go around the city sucking up garbage, which would slowly fill my dress. And a sign mounted on my wig would read: EVERYTHING FROM EXPLODING STARS! Or maybe: PLEASE LITTER SO I CAN BE PRETTY! Or maybe: WALTZ ME WITH LOVE\’S RECYCLING IN YOUR EYES! Or maybe: CONURBATION OR BUST! Or maybe: BE A SANITATION BEAUTY QUEEN! Or maybe: OUR BAROQUE CESSPOOL AND IMPENDING OVERDRAFT OF RESOURCES APPROACHETH! Or maybe: DECAY IS AT HAND YOUNG AND OLD! Or maybe: SCRUPLES ARE FOR HEALTHY PLANETS! Or maybe: JESUS DIED FOR YOUR INORDINATE CONSUMPTION OF SHIT! Or maybe: PLEASE PETITION AL QUEDA TO HELP END POLLUTION! Or maybe: GARBAGE SOON FOR ALL PROXIMITY OF DEGENERATES LIKE US!

IIJIMA:

CA, could you talk at greater length about your engagement in reinvigorating the cultural commons?

CONRAD:

(Soma)tic Poetics, and thanks for asking this in this way. The Body, somatic, is FROM dirt, and is walking ON dirt. Spirit is Soma. This is a poetry conducted through the Soma and Somatic, literally, by manipulating our bodies and other anatomies of our physical world to connect our spiritual centers for a more holistic poetry. The brain has too much rule over our lives the more mechanized our world becomes, pushing us further and further into forgetting THE DIRT we come from, THE DIRT WE ARE. (Soma)tic Poetics relocates the intelligence of the physical and spiritual worlds and alerts and alters other aspects of our lives as a result, keeping us tuned into the frequencies of wood, toenail, blood, sleet, all the neighboring carbon, gentle AND NOT. Being in this world, this way, taking no THING for granted for our poetry to recognize, fully observe, and even alleviate the stress from Alice Notley\’s wise observation, \”Poetry\’s so common hardly anyone can find it.\” (from \”C-81,\” Mysteries of Small Houses). But it\’s also true to say that (Soma)tic Poetics is informed by the destruction of our planet, and the planet is our Body of bodies. Actually, I don\’t really believe it\’s being destroyed, but that it\’s being reinvented, but in such a way that we humans may not survive it\’s transformation. But for now it\’s our planet and our problem. And our poetry. Our American invasion and occupation of Iraq led me, ultimately, to this idea of the body being a marker for what we are doing, what we can do. I stopped cutting my hair on the 3rd anniversary of our invasion in order to have some THING IN my life as a daily reminder that we are at war. It\’s getting longer, and needing more and more care, my hair. But so is the war, getting longer, and needing more care. Suffering is not disconnected here, or anywhere, no matter how much we strive to forget. My war hair helped me formulate roads into SEEING poetry in a new way with the body. Jack Kimball is publishing my first collection of (Soma)tic poems called (Soma)tic Midge on his FAUX Press. There is a very brief introductory note I wrote for that book that I would like to share here:

I cannot stress enough how much this mechanistic world, as it becomes more and more efficient, resulting in ever increasing brutality, has required me to FIND MY BODY to FIND MY PLANET in order to find my poetry. If I am an extension of this world then I am an extension of garbage, shit, pesticides, bombed and smoldering cities, microchips, cyber, astral and biological pollution, BUT ALSO the beauty of a patch of unspoiled sand, all that croaks from the mud, talons on the cliff that take rock and silt so seriously flying over the spectacle for a closer examination is nothing short of necessary. The most idle looking pebble will suddenly match any hunger, any rage. Suddenly, and will be realized at no other speed than suddenly.

Recently I was at a poetry reading and one of the poets announced, \”IT\’S GREAT SPRING IS FINALLY HERE, I\’VE HAD ENOUGH OF WINTER!\” The audience ERUPTED with shouts and applause. It startled me. I sat there turning my head around to look at everyone for that brief revelry against winter. \”What is this?\” I asked myself. This winter has been one of the mildest winters I have ever experienced in Philadelphia, and I\’ve been here more than half my life. So, it couldn\’t possibly BE that everyone was tired of snow and ice, since we hardly had any. What is this? Weather is the enemy, JUST LISTEN TO the weather reports on the news stations of the radio and TV, their adjectives are gathered around this idea of Weather being our enemy. But how could it be? Maybe I\’m wrong, BUT I\’ve been thinking that everyone is SO STRESSED OUT with the war, with the politics, with all the darkness, with all the denial surrounding the darkness, and in the end it cannot be denied enough. There\’s never enough noise to shout down a war, especially a war WE ALL KNOW should not have happened. Over a MILLION lives, REAL HUMAN LIVES have been taken for this war which FILLS THE POCKETS OF THE WEALTHIEST CITIZENS OF OUR NATION WITH AMERICA\’S WEALTHIEST TOP FIVE PERCENT INCREASING THEIR WEALTH BY FORTY PERCENT IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS. The EXACT age of the war, let me point out. Remember these facts, and try to sleep. Remember these facts, and try to wait for spring each year. Winter is not the enemy, not when Philadelphia had such a mild winter even the tulips were confused. No-no, spring is more than welcome in these dark times. And I don\’t blame anyone for wanting it, HELL YES I WANT SPRING AS MUCH AS THE NEXT PERSON, but I also want to live with the truth at the same time, and I KNOW winter is not to blame for our silent pain of being citizens funding the misery and bloodshed the rich have been dreaming of since the last war. We pay the price for paying our taxes, and it\’s terrible to live with, truly terrible.

Brenda, a couple of years ago you were on stage at the St. Mark\’s Poetry Project for the big New Year\’s Day marathon reading, and there were literally hundreds of us sitting, watching. You did this marvelous THING where you said, \”Never forget the body,\” then gave us a brief, beautiful dance. After that you read your poems. There was something magical about it, and we all gasped! For me, I think, what you did was TAKE the power of the Body, and all that IS the Body (all the bodies of the Body, mind/flesh/spirit/other) and DIRECT them into the microphone. It was a moment to always remember. It was so ENLIGHTENING! It made the poems really SING out of you! And MOST IMPORTANT is that when you did this it seemed to take ALL OF US, all the many Bodies in the room, and get us into a common FLESH for a moment. Maybe I\’m taking this too far, this idea, but it FELT like this. I had a physical reaction to it, goose bumps, and we all gasped, I can still hear us and feel the cool air of the gasp entering my throat. It felt shared, and holy.

IIJIMA:

It just seemed that the set up—the audience OUT THERE sitting passively and the reader IN FRONT, on stage, usually very non-gestural—at the podium—the hierarchic structural furniture needed intervention—this configuration doesn’t get beyond the spectacle associated with religiosity, politics and education where convention dictates body positionings. I wanted to pay tribute to the fact that poetry is surely not only a cerebral process—that body brains are intersubjective. How to generate kenetic energy—note all the varying energies available…that’s the question and motivation. We watch wars on TV where bodies are explicitly involved—yet this lived reality is repressed. To witness whole persons, bodies in motion, palpable, tangible, organic—changeable. Plus, there is body curiosity—don’t you wish you could witness each person’s individual way of engaging their body in dance? Maybe what we should be doing is reading in the nude once a year, to access our vulnerabilities, to share these delicate human states. How easy to change the context merely by introducing the body!
revv. you’ll—ution, the manuscript I’m working on right now is guttural-visceral. Much of the language is vernacular, raw, vascular (if that can be applied to language) and grotesque (by this I mean there is a clash of supposedly incompatible elements). And somehow, it moves back in time to the present by considering homo sapian roots, cave people, burials, excavations, quaking underlayers, body sensing and incarceration, etc. by filtering through the concept of revolution with all its varied implications. Maybe it is a flailing, spasmodic, agitated dance.

Could you write more about the incredible activations in your (Soma)tic Poetics? Each poem contains energetic instructions…you are compelling us to experience!

CONRAD:

(Soma)tic Poetics is insistence for the instance you make. Experience OUT OF what\’s normal for us, that\’s key to what (Soma)tic Poetics expects to HAPPEN to us. It\’s about bringing the Body into the conversation, much like you were saying about your marvelous dance before reading, how it\’s not just the brain, poetry. In fact, often the best poems (or maybe I mean my FAVORITE poems) seem to involve all sensory.
Chris Martin was just here in Philadelphia to read with Kevin Varrone and Paul Siegell, it was great, the three of them were really fantastic together! When Chris was up there though he talked about DISEQUILIBRIUM, and how it\’s this shift that NEEDS TO happen inside us sometimes to create a new kind of processing in order for us to be able to take on new information. With DISEQUILIBRIUM we get a new set of equations to work things out with, and new kinds of places to hold information, and from this major perception shifts can occur. It\’s truly revolutionary to make new room inside for THE NEW ROOM INSIDE!

This is EXACTLY what (Soma)tic Poetics is about, especially the exercises, which I update monthly. (SomaticPoetryExercises.blogspot.com) These are a series of odd choices, odd meaning not normal. Since I have always felt odd, and feel comfortable (especially comfortable at this point in my odd life) feeling odd, it took me to realize that IT\’S THE CHOICES I MAKE that make me access poems. So if I can get other humans to get odd they can find a doorway when they\’re needing to. Getting us OFF TRACK, to STOP the normal way we wander into our days, THIS is how we create new ideas. You can ENTER new ideas for the brain by creating new ideas for the body. Does that make sense? I mean to say the Body is ONE BIG WEB of muscle, memory, sensation, bone, eyelash, etc., working together, so you can enter into thought with a physical sensation as well as doing a math problem. In fact the real discovery of course is that it\’s always happening anyway, but this is a way to be consciously doing it. It\’s like lucid dreaming while awake, such awareness.

In one exercise I ask you to stand naked in a bucket of water while looking through the peep hole of your front door. The water is room temperature. And you may not be used to being at your front door except to open it for someone else to walk through, or for you to walk in or out of, and that\’s it. But to STAND there, just STAND there, naked, in a bucket of water, spending time there, and really taking it all in and TAKING IT ALL IN while naked, it really will open new portals for you, I promise! I ask that you keep paper and pen RIGHT THERE so you can get writing.

For ten years I was macrobiotic (I\’m just vegetarian now). But macrobiotics is really being SPECIFIC about choices which get into THE BIG LIFE (which is what the word macrobiotic means). For me what it did most besides healing ailments I had, was to show me how the body is this MARVELOUS organism, that, if we get the brain to truly understand the Body, to allow the Body to feed on the best choices of grains and beans and vegetables, that the Body will work as best as it can. And the brain will also be properly fed and in turn work as best as it can. And you can SMELL deeper, BREATHE deeper, SEX IS MUCH MORE SUBSTANTIAL, and everything TASTES BRAND NEW!

Before macrobiotics I had a drug dealer boyfriend and THAT WAS A LOT OF FANTASTIC PARTIES is what that was, but after macrobiotics I could access the world on a very holy, deep water sensation, just like I could with drugs, only, without the side effects of feeling irritable and depressed. But, (Soma)tic Poetics is very much part of this because, like my choice to let my hair grow to FEEL AND SEE the every lengthening American war in Iraq, macrobiotics came first for me in making me a totally aware animal. Before macrobiotics so many parts of me were asleep. (Soma)tic Poetics would have never been possible without this ten year study of the organism I live in and am. The body is far more resilient, pliable, CAPABLE than I would have ever realized otherwise. I feel very fortunate for these discoveries.

I\’d like to request a preview of the manuscript you\’re working on, revv. you\’ll–ution. And maybe give us more details about this spasmodic dance?

IIJIMA:

At the threshold of meaning are unaccountable gestures that might open up in understandings as variegated assertions—where difference and temporality bloom. Spasmodic because bodily gesture and response can be a site of uncontrollability and this feels like an alternative conception of freedom in being. Volatilization not necessarily violent—these are spontaneous gesticulations that may have resided dominantly in the body, been previously foreclosed.

I guess society is close to producing a factory model of the body—this is getting to be true for “livestock”—but yet, their bodies resist.

The issue that got me involved with revv. you\’ll—ution is this incredible erasure or cloaking of recognition regarding the Haitian Revolution in terms of how this revolution in particular participated and shaped concepts of modernism—historians, academic and otherwise have spent good energy ignoring this successful struggle for racial equality—this sent spasms through my body system. This was a way my body communicated with (in) me. And too as is known, the body is a host for numerously various life forms, so they spasm occasionally too, territorializing, recalibrating, harmonizing.

(First published in the journal ON: Contemporary Practice 1, edited by Michael Cross, Thom Donovan and Kyle Schlesinger. www.oncontemporaries.wordpress.com)

CAConrad’s The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009) received the Gil Ott Book Award.  He is also the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX Press, 2008), and two forthcoming books, advanced ELVIS course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Press, 2009).  He invites you to visit him online at www.CAConrad.blogspot.com.

Brenda Iijima’s forthcoming books include revv. you’ll—ution (Displaced Press) and If Not Metamorphic (Ahsahta Press).  At present, she is writing an informal encyclopedia on animals used as surrogates by humans—the donkey and the mule are recent entries.  She runs Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs (http://yoyolabs.com) from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.