Resurrect Extinct Vibration is a (Soma)tic
poetry ritual I have been working with for the past year. Please let me explain. I create rituals that I do and while doing
them I take raw notes that are later sculpted into poems. These rituals demand physical interactions
with the world, keeping a strong focus on the present while writing. One might say the rituals create a space of
“extreme present” where nothing except the ritual and the writing within the
ritual can be concentrated on.
In the Resurrect ritual I use a mix of audio
field recordings of recently extinct animals.
When driving across the United States in my car I take time each day no
matter where I am to lie on the ground and saturate my body with these extinct
sounds, the speakers first at my feet then slowly moving up my body. I take notes for my poem immediately after
the ritual is completed.
The World Wildlife Fund’s biennial report
from 2014 revealed the stark results from analysis of accumulated research that
more than half of our planet’s wild animals have disappeared in the past four
decades. My goal with the Resurrect
ritual is to focus on Ecopoetics as more than our degraded soil, air, and
water, but to also consider and begin including the idea of vibrational
absence. When a species becomes extinct
they take their sounds with them: song,
cry, breath, footfall, heartbeat. And we
in turn replace their sounds with our human sounds, our metal, machines, bombs,
cars, etc. When I was born over half a
century ago my cells were formed on a more complex, organic vibration than the
cells of children being born today.
My goal is to delve even deeper in 2017 and
2018 into this ritual, writing poems as a study through my body, the results of
returning these missing sounds to my cells.
Part of the ritual involves sleeping in my car in Walmart parking
lots. I view Walmart as the epitome of
the effects of Manifest Destiny upon the land.
There are 9,000 Walmart stores in the lower 48 states with each one holding
between 250,000 and half a million items on site for sale. Outside in the parking lots each night, and
this is true no matter where I am in the United States, there are homeless
families living in cars.
Another component to the ritual happens at
sunrise, listening to the extinct animal sounds on headphones while walking in
a spiral formation inside the Walmart, working my way into the middle of the
store. At the center of the spiral I
find a spot to kneel and take more notes for my poem. In the end it is a poem pointing a finger
within the body living inside the structures of capital and religion and how
those forces worked together to shape ideas that in turn reshaped the planet. As a transgendered / gender-fluid person I
will write through the broad spectrum of my experienced genders as a vehicle for
the poetry to compound its message and song.
