#97: MARFA POETRY MACHINE in 36 Things

--for the night eagle

“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

While cooking breakfast play the song RISING by Yoko Ono.

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.

in issue 7 of……………...d i o d e MAGAZINE

YOU DON'T HAVE WHAT IT 

 TAKES TO BE MY NEMESIS 

New (Soma)tic Poetry Ritual & Resulting Poem 

CLICK HERE to read

 ((((MANY THANKS TO THE EDITORS))))

NAROPA Summer Writing Program, 2014

BLOODSTONE QUARRIES 

OF THE SPLEEN 

is my workshop this year 

click HERE for details

#96: TAROT AS VERB TAROTING MEAT

                  --for Selah Ann Saterstrom

“I saw you, sister, standing in this brilliance.”

                  --Paul Celan

Seeking potential conversations with the dead in grocery stores?  Lacking the respect of a churchyard, stacks of chopped bodies wrapped in plastic and styrofoam, stamped with dates and prices, the refrigerator is not the grave the human stomach is the grave.  Grocery store refrigerators are like any morgue awaiting someone to claim the body.  Take a deep breath, close your eyes and listen.  There is a particular and very noticeable chatter beneath the clear plastic shrouds, making the listener enter a quiet, cold meditation.  Stand before the hacked animal joints, stomach and shoulder fat, and cut the tarot deck nine times, then read the cards.

Memories stored in flesh all flesh all humans and other animals on the prairie, by the bay, in the city, or incarcerated in prisons or zoos (which are prisons built to amuse children and their nescient parents).  Memories of joy and suffering, anyone who has received extensive massage or acupuncture knows the body can release feelings long secluded in muscle and other tissue.  It’s a glorious thing such freedom.  Give this to grocery store animals with their fur ripped away, their tongues removed, their bones cracked and sawed from ligaments.  Pull the cards, pull them, see how they walked and felt the touch of sunlight.  Unfetter a bit of the pain.  One, two, three cards pulled for chops, roasts, and hamburger patties.  Take notes about love you have known for those who were shown none.  Notes from taroting at the display of conformist serial killing will become a poem, another communiqué, one for humans loosening their impediments of ignorance of suffering.

BLOODSTONE workshop in beautiful Tucson

all details for workshop AT THIS LINK 

at JOHN ASHBERY Home School

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PAGE

FULL MOON HAWK APPLICATION chapbook

Order from Assless Chaps Press 

at THIS LINK 

SAMPLE at THIS LINK

 Designed by Ben-Sandra Doller 

Letterpressed covers and sewn binding 

by Feliz Lucia Molina & Ben Segal

#95: KRISTIN’S VOTIVE CHAPEL

At the MacDowell Colony painter, artist Kristin Cammermeyer invited me to her Votive Chapel studio for a type of collaboration.  She invited me to respond to her installation painting by writing a poem for her studio opening.  I fell in love with her three dimensional installation painting immediately and took notes on the shapes and colors, took a few photographs, then left to get to work on it.

Outside my studio I found a group of collapsed trees holding each other in place, creating the diamond and V shapes found in Kristin’s Votive Chapel installation.  I placed a chair in front of the trees to mimic the shapes with my legs, then arms, standing, sitting, then on my back in the freshly fallen leaves.  Then the notes, taking notes between physical movements, moving legs in and out of V patters while writing, then holding one arm overhead, craning a V pattern moving into wider, then narrower patterns, writing all the while.  FUTURE BACK OF A HAT is the resulting poem from my notes.  It was a pleasure working with such a brilliant artist!

ONLINE Workshop for Small Press Traffic

4 SUNDAYS in FEBRUARY, 2014
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(Soma)tic poetry rituals create what we can refer to as an "extreme present" set to reveal the creative viability of everything around us.  With (Soma)tics we will learn how even in crisis we can thrive through the poems, as well as learn to collaborate in unexpected ways with other artistic disciplines.  Soon we'll all agree with Alice Notley saying, "poetry's so common hardly anyone can find it."

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You will be given a site code to sign in to the class upon registration. Register at: smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

#94: YOU DON’T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE MY NEMESIS

for Dorothea Lasky who also 
puts up with a lot of assholes 

To the friend you thought was a friend until they tried to sabotage a publishing opportunity. To the one who ripped your book in half on stage then wrote patronizing letters to the newspaper about how you should be writing and the poets you should be reading to become a real poet. HAHA!! To the creep who deleted your MP3 file because your reading was better than his. There are others, lying, conniving, envious sour pusses without the courage to be loyal to the love of friends and shared ideas. But finally to the worst of all, to the one you loved the most; your trusted collaborator, the one who wrecked true havoc, the gifted sociopath, the one you always dreaded, but they found you. That one, the best liar you ever met who took a machete to your life, their drama akin to opera. Even still they are given the parting words, “YOU DON’T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE MY NEMISIS!!”

Take notes about each of them for the poem, their names are unimportant as such cowards are rarely remembered. Create a line of tiny photographs of their faces on your computer, ALL IN A ROW, and then print it out; this will be the rolling paper for a cigarette. Cover their faces with equal amounts of the following dried ingredients: Fennel seeds, pine needles, rose petals, mugwort, basil, white sage, red sandalwood powder, perique tobacco, and marijuana. These ingredients qualm negative thoughts, shift gears for transformation, and also invoke prophetic dreams, clairvoyance, happiness, honesty, peace of mind, and marijuana because you put up with a lot of shit and deserve to enjoy yourself! Roll it up, keep track of which enemy you are smoking, but smoke them all, SMOKE THEM ALL, sucking their faces into your lungs while writing notes for the poem, notes about the ones who didn’t have what it takes to beat you down, the ones who never deserved your friendship in the first place. Exhaling their faces on a braid of smoke is more satisfying than the usual forms of forgiveness. Find your poem in the notes and utterly relish your day!

CATHETER ENJAMBMENT

(the resulting poem for the below (Soma)tic ritual is at THIS LINK, titled IT'S TOO LATE FOR CAREFUL)

--for Bradley Manning & Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

"And our lips are not our lips. But are the lips of heads of poets.

And should shout revolution."

--Jack Spicer

Anyone who makes us remember our naked animal beneath the clothes is dangerous, thank you Bradley, thank you Mattilda.  To remove the scandal of bare-assed nakedness would require the annihilation of every bureaucratic agency sending memos through our doors.  It is 2012 and some of us have positioned our boots in an attempt to hold back The Return To Modesty Campaign.  The American homosexual of 2012 unapologetically celebrates surrendering to the dominant culture for marital equilibrium and WAR! This swift, unmitigated return to wholesome values acts like bookends many willingly throw themselves between. The opportunity to challenge these stifling, life-threatening institutions passes out of the conversation entirely in 2012.

Notes for the poem began with a meditation on meeting Marsha P. Johnson in Thompson Square Park during the 1990 Gay Pride Festival.  She started the 1969 Stonewall Riot, her headfirst, unflinching fisticuffs with the police sited to this day by RuPaul and others!  She who started our revolution, a tall black drag queen, carried a sign in 1990:  STONEWALL WAS A RIOT NOT A TRADEMARK!  “You are the coolest person I have ever met,” I told her.  “YES I AM,” she said with a smile.  “What does the P stand for in your name?”  “It means PAY IT NO MIND baby, PAY IT NO MIND!”  Where are the statues, poems and operas in her honor?  She was homeless at the time she was murdered and thrown in the Hudson.  Our queen, our Mother of the Revolution!  She was the true deviant propulsion, pushing the culture forward ready or not!

Marsha didn’t live to see faggots putting rainbow stickers on machine guns to kill Arabs with impunity!  Faggots joining hands with a multi-billion dollar military industrial complex should alarm us, infuriate us, it should break our hearts.  Three children die of war-related injuries EVERY SINGLE DAY in Afghanistan.  And after ten years of U.S. American occupation, Afghanistan has been deemed THE MOST DANGEROUS nation on our planet for women.  How else can I repeat this so you hear it?  U.S. America makes the lives of Afghan women and children almost unendurable!  GAY AND LESBIAN U.S. AMERICANS HAVE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME!  Did you hear that?

The genocide of queer men in Iraq (called “puppies” instead of “faggots” in Baghdad) is undoubtedly a direct result of the U.S. American invasion and occupation of Iraq.  The most famous homosexual apologist for war Dan Choi helped make this genocide possible while serving as a U.S. American soldier in Iraq.  Destabilization of the secular Hussein government has brought destruction to Iraqi queers.  Our tortured, executed queer Iraqi brothers have become merely another item on our long list of collateral damage.

Many notes, many notes for the poem, my sadness, my outrage, my complete embarrassment for an assimilationist campaign gone mad!  Then I did research on how to catheterize myself to go out into the world with utter insertion.  I took notes, many notes for the poem.

I performed reiki on a long, thin piece of plastic tubing, reiki imbuing the tube with my intentions to be in conversation throughout the day about being queer.  Queer.  Today I will NOT ALLOW anyone to change the subject when I talk about what it means to be queer.  Today I will talk about the frustrations of watching war go unquestioned by the U.S. American homosexual.  Reiki.  I did reiki for half an hour on the plastic tube, then lubricated every inch of it to ever so gently insert it into the irritated, angry looking opening of my penis.  It was not for pleasure of pain it was for a chronic reminder of HOW the U.S. American culture inserts its will on my cock more and more each day.  You may now be married under our rules.  You may now engage in mortal combat in designated enemy countries by our rules.  I had many strained, bizarre conversations that day, constantly FEELING the plastic tube inside me while walking around Philadelphia, while walking around Occupy Philadelphia and talking about war, genocide and oil.  The following poem is the result of this writing ritual, which was more painful in spirit than it was for the plastic plugging my urethra.  After all, it’s much too late for careful.

#93: STRAWBERRY ASTRAL MASH

a collaborative (Soma)tic by CAConrad and Laura Schadler 

A MacDowell Colony Experiment

ONE: Put a strawberry and a couple ice cubes into a small wax or plastic baggie. Carry this into the woods, find a place to sit quietly with notebook and pen. With your eyes open for a few minutes hold the bag up in the air while staring at the world around you in the woods. Then lower the bag and close your eyes. Put your hand into the bag and slowly feel the last of the ice melt, then begin to tear and mash the strawberry between your fingers. Keep mashing it for at least twenty minutes, eyes closed the entire time, focusing on both the world around you you cannot see, and the feeling of the strawberry you can feel but do not see. Think about how the wild around you is like this strawberry coming apart in your hands right now. THEN QUICKLY empty the mashed strawberry into your mouth, but hold it there, and slowly, slowly chew while writing AS FAST AS YOU CAN whatever comes to mind!! 

DAY TWO: Find a comfortable place to lie down on the ground, flat on your back, arms slightly away

from your sides, legs slightly apart. Imagine you are surrounded by a warm, white light. Feel the sensations and atmosphere of yourself. Ground yourself deeply in your body and consider how this feels for a moment. Next, begin to slowly move away from these physical sensations. The goal here it to project yourself outside of yourself. Find yourself in a totally new and unfamiliar landscape, one you have never visited before. Consider the specific details of this new place and what it feels like to inhabit it. Are you the same person? Are you different? How so? What is your experience of this place? If you are not yourself or your body, who are you? Stay in this landscape for at least ten minutes. Move through it. If you float away or the landscape eludes you, allow yourself to move to somewhere new. Sit up and immediately write of this place and who you were there or of something else entirely. Repeat, if necessary.