“Well it’s just that Elizabeth
Taylor’s head keeps getting in the way.
But I am there, mostly behind her left ear.”
--Ed Graczyk, Come
Back to the Five and Dime Jimmie Dean, Jimmie Dean
The Lannan Foundation presented me with a generous
fellowship to live and write in beautiful Marfa, Texas for two months. My mother thinks I’ve pulled off a bank heist
that anyone would be foolish enough to pay me to write my poems. I said, “I know Mom I know, it’s amazing with
all the love our country gives to war and genocide that there’s any left over
for a poet!” I did 36 things a day for
36 days, taking notes between each thing, the notes harvested later for the
poems. Here is a list of the things I
did to create the MARFA POETRY MACHINE:
1: SAGE POETS
Burn sage to honor a different living poet each morning,
saying the poet’s name out loud while wearing a ceramic hamsa my friend
Erica
Kaufman gave me.
2: CRYSTAL SOUSE
Place the day’s food on my crystal altar, the steady pulse
of crystal frequencies saturating plants, beans and grains.
3: REIKI SUNRISE
BEFORE SUNRISE
Watch sunrise on Edgar Cayce Institute
Meditation Room
webcam in Virginia Beach while giving Reiki to myself, preparing for the sun’s
arrival in Texas.
4: REIKI SUNRISE
Watch sunrise on porch while giving myself Reiki. Setting my day by the sun plugs me into the
natural clock.
5: YOKO MOLECULAR
INFUSION
6: CELL KNITTING
Chew each mouthful of breakfast 36 times, meditating on food
cells becoming my own cells of Yoko-Crystal infusion.
7:
ELVIS PENETRATING
CRYSTAL
Meditate on a postage stamp of Elvis Presley (a gift from
friend
Jenn McCreary) through a clear shaft of flawless citrine, the guardian
gemstone of manifestation.
8: ELVIS BLACKOUT
Wearing headphones sitting inside a closet with door closed
listening to the length of one Elvis song different each day then as it
finishes take notes by flashlight.
9: MARFA GRATITUDE
Standing in front of the house on Summer Street taking a
slow 360-degree view, grateful for the people who make Marfa what it is.
You can surround yourself with the best art
in the world, but what actually makes a town is its citizens, and
Marfa is home
to some of the most thoughtful people I have ever met.
10: LOG BENCH
VISUALIZATION
Sit on log bench in Summer Street Park. Gaze at the landscape without blinking. Close eyes and remember what was seen. Open eyes and look for what was missed. With each day the contents of the landscape
grows more complete inside. Later while
falling asleep I visualize the park, seeing the details clearer and clearer
through the weeks.
11: GIANT SEGMENTS
Watch five and a half minutes of the movie GIANT that was
filmed in Marfa, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean.
12: COLOR COORDINATES
Focus on a color outside the Pueblo Market on cars,
sidewalks, buildings, or the sky. Then walk the market aisles to find the color
on cans and other packaging. Read the
ingredients of canned peas as if it is the legend to a map.
13: PINE SENTINEL
All my life I’ve made friends with trees. I take my magnifying glass to the giant pine
growing behind an abandoned building near Pueblo Market. She is tall and old and Donald Judd must have
taken notice of her perfect symmetry of branches holding herself in spaces of
green, brown, and angelic exhale of crown.
14: APHRODITE’S
ELEMENT
Place a penny on railroad tracks next to the post
office.
Copper is the metal of Aphrodite
– the goddess of Love – and we must not forget her element in our lives.
15: SOTOL SNAKE
SAUNTER
Walk a snake pattern through the long rows of enormous sotol
plants at the corner of Oak & High outside The Chinati Foundation.
16: SHUT UP AND SLIDE
At the Travis E. Self Memorial Park climb the sliding
board. Take notes at the top. Send the notebook down the slide then follow
it no matter who watches.
17: RAILROAD PYRAMID
Climb hill near MARFA RAILROAD PEN. Face across tracks, find three stationary
objects then imagine a line connecting them.
Study contents of triangle especially look for the large dark chicken,
she lives there and she is a beautiful chicken.
18: CHICKEN SONGS
Sing to the large dark chicken even if she’s not
visible. But sing like a chicken, one
very large dark chicken serenade she might appreciate.
19: MARFA HIBACHI
Stand at intersection of Highland Avenue and San Antonio
Street imagining a restaurant with a giant canvas at the entrance with brushes
and paints for customers to add to. The
choice to not paint is a thousand dollars for a glass of water, a salad, or
cookie, the high price of denying collaboration.
20: JUDD’S FALLEN
GIANT
For years I’ve viewed Donald Judd’s work in museums as an
immersed study on chakras, spinal discs aligned and lit from within. In Marfa I drive down South 67 to see Judd’s
massive concrete blocks in the desert, like the remains of a fallen giant a
kilometer in length, spinal cord fossils with flesh of Texas wind and sand.
21: MARFA ALOHA
Give a stranger a poetry broadside.
22: DESERT WITCHES
Read five pages a day of Marc Simmons’s 180 page book,
WITCHCRAFT IN THE SOUTHWEST: Spanish
& Indian Supernaturalism on the Rio Grande.
(I found myself routing for the witches, no matter what prejudices the
author attempted to instill.)
23: WITCH DANCE WORKOUT
Each day I sit on floor to follow
Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance
like a Jane Fonda workout video for the spirit.
I believe Wigman may be the first contemporary dancer to consciously
turn dance into a trauma release ritual.
In an interview she said, “I was once completely confused and
unhappy.
I locked myself in the guest room
of my parent’s home and in great consternation I sobbed and cried because I did
not know anymore what to do with my life.
There on the spot I discovered suddenly that in all my unhappiness I was
moving and I was moving in such a way that I had never moved before.
And also suddenly this moving became an
expression, speaking out.”
--Mary
Wigman, dancer and choreographer.
24:
SWEET POTATO BABY
DOLL
The grocer said my sweet potato is organic, but I love all
sweet potatoes, organic or filled with toxic sprays and fucked up genes. I cradle my sweet potato, breast feed my
sweet potato, rock her back and forth, singing her name, Tara, Tara. My mother said this would have been my name
if I had been born a girl.
25: REGRET-REVERSAL
SPELL
Close eyes and think of an embarrassment from the past. Imagine the former self in the situation
shrugging and laughing.
26: WE ARE ALL COGS
OF A BEAUTIFUL MACHINE
Find one natural item a day, a twig, little stone, feather,
a bit of fluff on a breeze, and wind it, twist it into my longest strands of
hair.
27: COGS OF A MARFA
POETRY MACHINE
Arrange found natural items on back porch, a growing
machine.
28: PAGE 36
Read page 36 of a book by a different Lannan fellow each
day.
29: YOKO MOLECULAR
INFUSION PART TWO
While cooking supper play the 2007 song
YES, I’M A WITCH by
Yoko Ono.
“Each time we don’t say what
we want to say we’re dying.”
30: CELL KNITTING
PART TWO
Chew each mouthful of supper 36 times, meditating on food
cells becoming my own cells of Crystal-Yoko infusion.
31: REIKI SUNSET
Watch sunset over the desert at end of Third Street while
giving myself Reiki. (I’ll have two
sunrises a day but only one sunset to cheat the grave.)
32: LOST HORSE
Have one shot of Jack Daniels at The Lost Horse Saloon to
meet people and enjoy this space where one night a woman rode a beautiful white
horse INTO THE BAR.
Ask
Tim Johnson at
the Marfa Book Company, we were having a drink together.
The lost horse always finds its way.
33: MARFA LIGHTS
Look for
the Marfa Lights at the viewing station on Route
90.
Every night I saw them, sometimes as
balls of white light rising from the earth, other nights riding the air
sideways and changing colors.
Someone
told me they were reflected car lights.
I said, “Oh really, then what were they in 1888 and earlier, long before
the metal horse arrived in Marfa?”
34: FOR THE
ARCHITECTS WE LIVE WITH
Each night I play the CD
DUET
FOR PEN & PENCIL, ELECTRIC DIRT, composed by Christine Olejniczak.
Then I walk from room to room with a
flashlight to study the house designed by architect
Kristin Bonkemeyer.
I pause in each room to note THIS is where I
write in Kristin’s drawing, THIS is where I play music in Kristin’s drawing,
THIS is where I cook, eat and dream in Kristin’s drawing.
35: PECCARY VIGIL
Sit quietly on front porch hoping to spot the tribe of
javelinas
who like to eat the prickly pear cactus in the yard.
Several nights THERE THEY WERE, little
chattering tusks, hairy, stinky, and glorious to behold.
36: SAGE POETS PART
TWO
Burn sage to honor a deceased poet each evening.
For instance, R.I.P.
Amiri Baraka who died
the first week I was in Marfa.
