Riding in Vans with Boys

“There is no need to go on multiplying examples of an impulse that can produce no adequate examples- of a capacity that can’t be objectified without falsification. I’ve written in its defense, and in defense of our denunciation of it, because that is the dialectic of a vocation no less essential for being impossible. All I ask the haters- and I, too, am one- is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.” Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry

There was a night in the middle of what I consider winter but everyone else probably gleefully describes as spring, when I was in Montreal and thankfully in a very comfortable room, when I felt fully warm and not just warm but excited, really, still so innocently excited about my life, the people in it, and punk. The night before I had seen Omegas, Torment, Mueco, Pox, and Sex Face at Katacombes and it had been a fucking insane, fantastic show. All the bands were great, none of my friends blacked out, and despite the language barrier I made some new friends (somehow still possible at thirty, a miracle unto itself). My boyfriend Kirk and I were sitting at our friend Mood’s house with my best friend Nikki, who had flown up from Miami to spend the weekend there. All of us have different backgrounds: Mood from a Muslim family in Canada, Kirk black and Jewish from LA, Nikki (Catholic-ish) and Columbian, and me (white atheist born in South Africa to communist parents). Despite being from different parts of the world and raised by very different people, here we were, sitting in a room drinking wine because we were friends, and we had become friends because of our interest in punk, or at least our interest in not being a part of the “rest of the world” and its interests. This sounds pedantic right? But it’s not, because I think as we get older and cynical, or as we get into punk and learn how to be critical, we forget the things that brought us here. We sat together in Mood’s room and drank wine and talked about healthy relationships, both sexual and emotional, and eventually left to the bar. Nothing too exciting, nothing wild, nothing scandalous...just three grown ups talking in a warm room.

I was incredibly thankful for that night, mostly just because it felt good to still have that thrill of intimacy with my friends. I think most of my close platonic relationships have been formed through playing music (when I say “punk” let’s extend that definition to mean DIY everything, playing music, setting up shows, touring, etc). To say nothing of the nuanced, incredibly complicated relationships I still maintain with people I’ve been intimate with (there’s some other posts about that) I think the things that I am most thankful about punk are my friends all over the country that I’ve made, some of them turning into life-long lasting friendships. There’s friends of mine who I see every year but we’ve never even lived on the same coast. That’s important to me. A lot of those relationships are with amazing, strong women, but a lot are also with men. Again, this sounds annoyingly chorus-to-choir right? But I read something on the internet the other day (I know…) that said that men didn’t belong in punk, and it made me consider my experiences with men. I thought about that night in Montreal, and about touring in bands with men, and about growing up before I got into punk. It’s a lot to consider.

First, I suppose I should say that as a woman I think we all understand the violence of adolescent. Growing up my dad and I were very close, but he moved far away when I was 13 and then we didn’t see much of each other. All my relationships with men from then on were sexual after that, and were neither fun nor probably healthy. Men scared me, they leered at me, and boys in school were worse. I was an awkward kid, I liked Lord of the Rings and had braces, but I also had boobs. None of those years were particularly fun for me (I’ve written about that before…) but I remember vividly when I started being happy, and finally having friends. It’s when I got into punk and had friends looking out for me (we looked out for each other) and people to hang out with (and avoid the Nazi skin heads together with!) and watch movies in bed and drink beer on the beach with...we weren’t dating, we didn’t date, we were just...friends. I ended up playing music and touring in bands with some of the people I met at 15. We made it through those terrible years together and began other terrible years but at least every year we could still talk together. When I went through a terrible break up almost a decade later at 25 I remember walking down the street in a town hours away from where we grew up and laying on my friends floor, my old bandmate, and both of us listening to the Radioactivity record and crying together. Platonic, lifelong friendships aren’t always sugar and spice, but having friends who you can count on to cry on their floor at 4am is meaningful to me. I doubt any of our parents still have friends like that, if they managed to keep their friends at all.

Without punk, I doubt I would have as many relationships with men as I do. I would even argue that there aren’t many aspects of modern American life where men and women interact outside of dating or work (unless you play sports or have like, normal hobbies, which we fucking don’t ok?). Playing in bands with men helped me have positive relationships with men. We would cook dinner at each other’s houses before practice, we would support each other during good shows and bad, and we would laugh (but not too much) at the things we might end up doing after the shows. I have had plenty of terrible experiences with men in the punk scene, because there’s always going to be men that aren’t willing to learn from their behavior or learn about anything other than what they want. But after I was assaulted it wasn’t just my female friends that had my back, but a lot of my close male friends and former bandmates.

These weren't jocks, they were also awkward teenagers that didn’t want to be apart of mainstream America, so instead they got into music. I think it should go without saying that punk provides not just an alternative lifestyle choice for women (I highly doubt I would be getting an MFA in poetry at 30 if I never got into punk...but I sometimes wonder if I would have been a doctor by now) it also provides a space for boys to experiment with gender and sexuality. This, to me, is what makes punk a safe space. But I can’t speak for other people’s experiences, and I don’t want to. I just want to publicly thank all my close friends who have been such a positive force in my life. I can’t imagine where I would be if none of my male friends hadn’t asked me to be in bands with them, or if when I asked them to start one they had blown me off. I also can’t imagine that my boyfriend would be such an emotionally smart, considerate, wonderful partner to me had he never played in bands and had platonic relationships with other women. I still don’t fucking like my dad, but I have plenty of amazing male friends who I see being good partners and good dads and it makes me happy. It’s possible for all of us to be healthy and emotionally and socially responsible, if not always happy.

Some of my best memories continue to be driving somewhere in a van, usually with strangers, on our way to a show or a party. Men are scary...other people are scary...but I have been so lucky to have the privilege of trust with most of the people I meet through punk. I can’t imagine under any circumstance that I would get into a van with six people I don’t know, but with punks, there is an element of trust that the average person would never have. This makes it especially saddening when that trust is violated, as it too often is. And yes, it’s fucking annoying when you’re on tour as a woman and some good looking punk dude asks if you’re the merch girl. There is violence and shitty people and shitty attitudes (especially on the internet, hi). However, like the quote above, it’s possible to criticize something, or stand up for it, or push against its boundaries while still loving it. So let all our criticism be exact, and well worded, and fair, in order to make it better.

An American Lyric

“You take in things you don’t want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.” -Claudia Rankine, Citizen

I heard a lot of people talking about Citizen when it came out, and understood it to be somewhat genre-bending while at the same time a powerful discourse about race in America. I bought it, because I like books, and because I especially like poetry books that push the boundaries of the genre, and also especially because I consider myself an ally of the Black Community, as in, 100% definitely not racist. And yet.

It took me a few months to pick up the book and read it. It’s worth mentioning that my partner, whose mother is black, read the book in one sitting at the bar while I was working and he loved it. He said, “the way it was written gave me a renewed sense of validation for my feelings, like of course I feel like this but it’s refreshing to see it in this language. The only surprising thing was that fucking tennis photo.*” Why did it take me so long to read it? Obviously, because I was afraid of feeling bad, or guilty, or complicit. Reading the book doesn’t change the fact that I’m already complicit in racism, because I both benefit from white privilege and also occupy space as a white person. These are things that I can’t change. I can however, check myself and not worry about how I’m feeling in order to listen to other voices- no matter how uncomfortable it might make me. I finally read the book, and I’m glad I could recognize both why I put it off and why it was important for me to read it.

The book is subtitled An American Lyric which seems appropriate, at a time when it seems like every other day a black person is killed by police in America (let’s be honest, this is nothing new, but the populist power of things like twitter and the direct political action of groups like Black Lives Matter has brought acute attention to these tragedies). As Claudia Rankine says in the book, “because white men can’t police their imagination black men are dying.” Split into 7 parts, the book takes on different forms. Some of the writing reads like poetry, and sounds like lamentations,

“To live through the days sometimes you moan like deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about.”

These are ephemeral poems, oscillating between emotion and observation. Some are placed in daily reality, but some of these, like the “sigh” lines above could be from any part of her life. These are emotional and felt, in stark contrast to the way she objectively writes about the aggressions of her day to day life in the other sections,

“When the stranger asks, Why do you care? you just stand there staring at him. He has just referred to the boisterous teenagers in Starbucks at niggers. Hey, I am standing right here, you responded, not necessarily expecting him to turn to you.

He is holding the lidded paper cup in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. They are just being kids. Come on, no need to get all KKK on them, you say.

Now there you go, he responds.

The people around you have turned away from their screens. The teenagers are on pause. There I go? you ask, feeling irritation begin to rain down. Yes, and something about hearing yourself repeating this stanger’s accusation in a voice usually reserved for your partner makes you smile.”

There are examples like that of “everyday racism” (which I put in quotes because it’s so foreign from my life, what looks like “everyday racism” to me is just “everyday” for someone in a non-white body) in the book as well as the absolutely lunatic-crazy narrative of Serena Williams, an incredible tennis player- literally probably the best in the world- who has had to put up with an incredible amount of verbal and physical violence in her career, and then told not to overreact or respond to it. That chapter in the book doesn’t read very poetic, not like the scripts she wrote for the Situation Videos (a collaboration with John Lucas) that Rankine puts together about Katrina, Stop-and-Frisk, Trayvon Martin and others, which read, without the video accompaniment, like poems. The Serena chapter instead serves to illustrates the swallowing of anger, the diminishing of a person in the face of this kind of aggression. The game always continues.

There’s another type of encounter in the book, the microaggression of either casual racism or just the invisibility of the body, not that they’re mutually exclusive.

“In line at a drugstore it’s finally your turn, and then it’s not as he walks in front of you and puts his things on the counter. The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised.

Oh my God, I didn’t see you.

You must be in a hurry, you offer.

No, no, no, I really didn’t see you.”

There is a theme of invisibility. Of diminishing. Rankine’s body in these stories, as both author and character, is someone who is adjusting to make the people around her feel comfortable. She addresses this with a quote from Judith Butler, someone who has written a lot about the body vis a vis the world,

“Not long ago you are in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler’s remarks, you begin to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and as insane as it is, saying please.”

This book is both poetry and sociology. It’s incredibly well-written, and thoughtful, and also unexpected (there’s a soccer sequence that mixes photos of a fight with Franz Fanon quotes, it’s fantastic). At the end I think it also reminded me to be alert, open, and to have that desire to engage that Rankine has. Required reading for sure.

*the photo depicts Dane Caroline Wozniacki, a tennis player, with towels stuffed down her skirt and shirt to depict Serena Williams, on December 12th, 2012 two weeks after Selena was named WTA player of the year.

An Unconventional Life

“This is even a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so.”*

*David Markson, This is Not a Novel

I’ve been a bartender for 5+ years, so I’m pretty used to this conversation, the one where people ask what you’re doing, or want to do, or if you’re going to school...some nice thing that starts the conversation that abruptly eclipses into something unfathomably rude like, “oh you play music but like, what do you really do?” or “you’re going to school for POETRY? Wow, your parents must be proud,” or just simply, “huh” or “why?” These are actual things people say to me while I’m serving them drinks. I can’t leave. I can crack jokes, “oh well I’m strictly studying poetry to make money” or lighten the mood, but I can’t be a jerk, or “overreact” because I need their money, it’s literally my job, it’s why I’m there. If I’m really lucky, I still have the energy to go home and write about it. This week I almost didn’t. After an especially awful conversation with someone, and not that it’s my place to judge but someone who despite his nice watch and black amex didn’t seem all that happy either, where I worked my butt off till 4am all weekend, to pay rent, and then woke up monday to go to my internship (which I love, they make me coffee and let me sit down at their kitchen table, oh the simple pleasure to be in someone else’s life even for a morning) and I came home and got into bed and didn’t get out of it for two days. I missed my favorite class at school. I didn’t write. I didn’t eat. I just stayed under the covers and lamented, for the first time in awhile, my unconventional life.

Maybe ten years ago I thought I would lead a conventional life. Maybe be married. Hopefully have my dream job, of a journalist, before the print bubble burst from the rise of internet publications...all that stuff seemed pretty real, for awhile. But then I played in bands for years and touring made more sense than graduate school. Working in bars and restaurants is an easy way to have time to leave town. I was happy with the music I made. I even got to travel more- my unconventional life was pretty privileged, and I’m not sure if I would trade it out (except for maybe that elusive, perfect dream job). Now though, at 30, that life doesn’t feel as privileged. I’m accepting the real fact that I won’t ever own a house, or probably ever have children. I’m going to be in debt from my MFA for a long time, and even aside from that, it’s hard to have quiet nights at home when you’re working in bars (there’s tequila in there you know) until 3am or later most nights. I have good weeks- with the “joy of writing” (credit: Donna Brook) and the affirmation I get from my friends who are also like me- banded together at shows or dancing or any other place regular people wouldn’t be at 2am on a Wednesday. Then there’s weeks where I feel permanently incapable. Where it’s tangible: real failure. Since I worked all weekend I didn’t have time to start an assignment for class, a class I really like, until Tuesday where I finally began to read David Markson’s This is Not a Novel under the covers of my bed.

It’s not, not even “not strickly” not a novel. It is very much not a novel. It’s a list of facts produced by the writer, who describes himself as the Author every now and then, but mostly it’s facts about writers. You don’t have to know the people in question, and it all start to blend together anyway, but when you do recognize a name or a reference it makes you feel triumphant. A ha! A familiar face. An anchor in the storm. The passages are like this:

“A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

Aristotle himself added, re tragedy.

Wittgenstein had nephews fighting on both sides in World War II.

Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.

He dug a grave of the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels- 
three Russian ells- and buried him.

Ruben Dario died of cirrhosis of the liver.

Diderot died of coronary thrombosis while sitting at dinner.

I used to say them, Go boldly in among the English, and then I used to go boldly 
in myself. Said Joan.

He could not get rid of the idea that he was damned, and he would have 
drowned himself if he has not been prevented by force. Says the chronicle from 
the monastery where Hugo Van der Goes was a lay brother.

He was know to drink, which made things worse. Says the same.”

It’s a whole “novel” like this. Facts and quotes and the interspersed speculation of the Author- who insists he’s not a character. It’s an unconventional novel, from someone who wrote many novels, including a crime novel, and several books of poetry. It’s a testament to creativity and what’s possible, in the face of critics and criticism who follow conventional paths.

It’s also a testament to an unconventional life. These facts about writers, mostly all how they died, mostly of syphilis and diseases of the heart and liver, somehow cheered me up. Anecdotes of bar fights, being kicked out of schools, lover's quarrels, infidelity, etc were able to get me out of bed. Most of these people weren’t just interesting characters, they were bad people! Nazi sympathizers, womanisers, and usurers. That’s a good way to feel better about yourself, even if you don’t trust your own writing. There’s also the heroes (Sarte and Borges still hold up very well in these facts, much to my relief). But! Still! Morality aside, this text- novel, poetry, messy dictionary of lives- cheered me up by reminding me that while often not in good company, at least I’m not deserted on an island (as I think John Donne would agree). So yes, even a litany of deaths can cheer you up sometimes, and it takes all kinds of things to get people out of bed and to work every day, but at least in my case, I can sleep in a little bit later than most.

Interiors

"#179 When I imagine a celibate man-especially one who doesn't even jerk off- I wonder how he related to his dick: what else he does with it, how he handles it, how he regards it. At first glance, this same question for a woman might appear "tucked away" (pussy-as-absence, pussy-as-lack: out of sight, out of mind). But I am inclined to think that anyone who thinks or talks this way has simply never felt the pulsing of a pussy in serious need of fucking- a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ejaculations of the heart."

Be careful carrying these books around with you. They’re small, and perfect for casually reading, a few minutes at a time, when you find yourself commuting on the subway or waiting for someone to bring you food in a small cafe. Perfectly sized for your handbag, or to carry to work, and spaced out evenly so that you can pick them up, put them down, and even read out of sequence throughout the course of your day. The caveat though: you might end up crying in public. It’s an odd sight, at 3am, on the L train heading home after work to see someone crying holding a book of poetry. It even makes the drunk young people uneasy. Especially alarming to the people sitting next to you in a cafe, watching big, heavy, mom-sized tears rolling down your face. 
Bluets by Maggie Nelson is a perfect read for anyone who’s ever had their heart broken. Or has had to break someone else’s heart, or has been in love with the world too sharply, or fallen out of love with it, or even been in love with a word, as something as simple as a color. Her meditation on Blue is a compelling exercise with theme: each bluet is numbered, and while one might mention flowers, the next will pull the thread, maybe it will be about the painter who talked about the flowers. So there is extreme precision of flow, of each short prose block (or poem) leading into the next. As a whole, it should still be considered a book of poetry, but alone, each bluet could be a poem or a short essay. There are things I always think of as being blue, but Nelson also brings up all these other blues, like the underside of her friends foot after an accident. 

"#198. In a 1994 interview, about twenty years after he wrote, “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen admitted that he could no longer remember the specifics of the love triangle that the song describes. “I always felt that there was an invisible male seducing the woman I was with, now whether that one was incarnate or merely imaginary I don’t remember.” I find this forgetting quite heartening, and quite tragic, in turns"
 
So many people are represented in the book, from Cohen to Thoreau, and not just Americans but also French painters and Greek philosophers. An incredible amount of research must have gone into Bluets, and yet the book reads as simply, and is as digestible, as a perfect, light blue macaroon. 
Perhaps a more traditional book of poetry, but still following a much longer narrative than it might appear for such a small book, is Kimiko Hahn’s The Narrow Road to the Interior. In Bluets there’s a loose narrative of a heartbreak, of a severed relationship, but the narrative in Hahn’s book is her as a mother, and even her as an adult woman balancing divorce and lovers, how that still reflected on her motherhood. Most of the poems are incredibly simple, “I’ve decided to climb the rocks beyond the stand of pine to find the insect that clicks like an old-fashioned toy.” Highly steeped in nature, most of the things written in this book are thoughts she’s had while outside or while apart from her daughters. This is a form of Japanese poetry called Tanka, single lines and the use of seasons and nature. Most of the writing seems to be reflections of Basho, Kawabata Yusunari, and Shikibu. Writers I’m not familiar with, but understand to be tied in very closely with the author's identity as a writer. It’s a beautiful collection of poems and often left me in tears late at night, too late to call my mom. 

"This afternoon H heard something in my voice and asked me, What’s wrong? Anything wrong? And I said, I miss my mother. But I think I’ve always missed my mother. Sometimes I just lie down on the floor and cry, Mommy Mommy."

As a woman with a close relationship with my mother, and as someone who doesn’t know if they will be able to have children (timing, not biology) the book resonated with me. It’s an amazing portrait of a complete woman, with her desires, her annoyances, shortcomings and loves. And just as all these things are complicated, different, incongruent, so is the style of the book. Poetry, journal entries, private and public thoughts, and prose, all complete the final picture. 

Moving Across the World on Horses

“Moving across the world on horses / body split at the edge of their necks / neck sweat eating at my jeans / moving across the world on horses.”*



Out in the country. The real country. The middle of Florida, in the Ocala National Forest, where the only restaurant is a Kangaroo gas station. You could stay barefoot for a whole week and no one would notice. Humidity like a blanket. White sand and forest and Coca-Cola lakes.The guy that owned the ranch was a horse thief. Really. He sold people horses and then took them back in the middle of the night and then painted them different colors. They would come back to the ranch and he would say oh no, you’re mistaken. I think he was one of my dad’s only friends, and we kept our horses there. I spent weekends there for maybe two years. I was twelve, at one point, for sure. We would ride our horses all day under the giant oak trees and through blonde fields and sometimes across lakes, and come out dripping and relieved from the summer heat. Horse dust in my mouth. The smell of horses in everything. Even now if I smell horses, driving through the country with the windows down I have this homesick feeling for them. Then I was just a kid, I thought it was totally normal and granted that I would spend my days and nights outside forever. When my dad would go to sleep I would walk around the little ranch. The black lake looked blacker, and even I knew better than to swim in it at night. Horses aren’t afraid of snakes, they have a natural immunity. That’s true. But they are afraid of hogs and pigs. Avoiding the lake, I would walk (barefoot) up the sandy road to the pasture and stay still, wait for the horses to come to me. We smelled each other. When I walked back to the little cabin I would hear them, very quietly though, walking along the pasture, following me. That was our friendship. Recognition and presence. I would go back and sit on the porch and listen to all the bugs. A whole world of creatures making one noise in the night. In the morning we would go ride out again, my dad usually leading the way trying to find some trail he made up in his head. In the afternoons it might rain and I would walk to where the horses were just to see the steam coming up off them, to put my head against their neck and rub their wet fur, both of us probably thinking: I am here. 

*The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ongaatje