Artist-In-Residence

To give oneself over to the protection of strangers must be a radically transformative, a liberating act. It would require, among other things, a concerted openness not to the possibility, but to the certainty of betrayal, as the very condition of solidarity.

This is the price of passage to the city of refuge.

In this journal, which I will also call City of Refuge, I will be exploring the evidence of such fugitive passages in the cultural traces of black and Filipino transpacific migrations over the course of the 20^th century, which the scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, contemplating the Philippine-American War, once proclaimed the century of the color line. I hope, at least in part, to recover and reactivate their betrayed visions of a liberated future—what I will call lost Afro-Asian worlds. At the same time, I will ask, for myself and for you, how a reader must make herself over to receive these visions as the work of a living imagination—which is just another way of saying that every reader is always also learning how to read.

By reading, I mean something like what Colson Whitehead imagines, when he describes the awakening powers of Lila Mae, the protagonist of his novel The Intuitionist, by saying “she has learned how to read, like a slave does, one forbidden word at a time,” and I mean something like what the radical theorists Fred Moten and Stefano Harney call “study,” a speculative practice and mode of being with others that opens and opens a broke and broken world. In the actual narratives of escapees from slavery, literacy is typically achieved under the certainty of repercussive violence, by impossible stratagem or divine agency. And then there is that other concept of reading, grounded in black spiritual traditions, that has most recently resurfaced in global pop consciousness via black drag culture, and I mean that too.

You can brush against the grain, like Walter Benjamin, or read upside down, like Stuart Hall, but reading is always something that must be done with others. This can be hard to understand if you idealize reading as a solitary practice, forgetting the very thing a child, or anyone who learns to read, first learns: that reading is what rescues solitude from isolation. And so I’ll be relying on you—if you are out there, if you are reading this—to help me find my way. For I will most certainly get lost all on my own.

Because this is a working blog, I’ll be fighting my own professional-academic habit of trying to anticipate every criticism—to be unafraid of errors, unashamed of gaps in knowledge, free with questions, and not too proud to make a plea for help. At times this writing will take the form of literary criticism, historical research, or pure speculation, but above all I hope it will become a kind of formal experiment in the social practice of reading.

Let me know what you think. All are invited. I’ll be here—set me straight, spin me around, or just let me know what’s on your mind.

Let me know where it takes you, if it takes you. Let me know if the words start skittering on the screen, and on the page; and let me know when they stop.

Let me know if you find something, in something I’ve written or something you’ve read, on the library’s “Special Collections” floor or the bottom of the fifth page of a Google search; in a box in the garage or under the bar or in the basement. My aunt Rea went looking and found this:

This journal is also called City of Refuge in honor of CA+T, the organization and the community of people who make it run, to whose generosity in hosting this project I am very much indebted. For those of us who have stood squinting at the institutions of culture, trying to catch a glimpse of another world beyond the edges of this one, CA+T is very much a place of refuge. But most proximately, I have titled this journal in reference to “The City of Refuge,” a 1925 short story about the betrayal of a migrant on the run from North Carolina to Harlem, King Solomon Gillis, by the brilliant physician and writer Rudolph Fisher.

So that seems an appropriate place to start. In the next installment, I’ll begin reading Fisher’s story, as a roundabout way of asking the question, what’s the difference between security and refuge? If you’re curious, the text is available here, but no advance familiarity is necessary. Come and read with me.

Photo Credits: Vincent T. Tajiri Estate

Welcome, welcome! For more in this series, check back Wednesdays. Find me anytime, here or here.

Grey moves back into the interior, the gym, the abandoned vestibule, and the garage. In fact, all of these videos, at least the initial idea in making them, began on a borrowed desk, in a former military base in California, where in the morning I would wake up, dance in a too small room, capturing this on my laptop. I thought, then, of filling a room with projections of images, me dancing, me, in a black box, each wall, blasted.

Grey is sad. It is leaving. It runs from one world into the imagination of another, filming being in it. Often, I am not grounded, but I am disciplined. In fact, I wanted, at some point, to soak my masks in water, then to freeze them, then to crush each with a hammer, the camera fixed to capture the act. I still can.

How many layers are possible in pushing the idea of the poem outwards from the conceptual act, to embed, and to break the space between what’s made and what’s revealed? Have I been desperate to show off? Perhaps. I do think there is a difference, however, in showing off what one has made in an act of desperation to be read, to be paid, to be considered, and showing off to change what it might mean to be read in ways that are meant to challenge, not to please, and to get paid what one deserves, particularly in the remuneration of time and space.

“Are you getting paid?”—“More than the sex, the talk of money made me uncomfortable.”—Two questions by poets I admire that make me think about what Grey is for, the resin of melancholy, my too exhausted face, fingers catching the wind off the ocean, variations of the self I’d like to follow.

When I first started writing poems, I worked with the great poet and teacher, June Jordan, who shared a check sheet list with her beginning poets. One of the questions she asked us to think about as we addressed one another’s poems was who is this poem for? I often return to this question, or maybe I have never left it.

I do know that, in some ways, these videos are for me—me who sometimes feels so quietly enraged at the need in making poetry to be liked, no matter how much I like “likes.” To be read as legible while resisting expectations. Professor Jordan, in her poem “Things I do in the Dark,” writes:

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
            whoever I may become

So I return to the costume, the future-fractured masks, in a box, in my house on the other side of the country. I return to the imagined catwalk on the pier, the parking lot, the beach. Back to the reality of the self as a poet on the move—One fear I upend is some me, inert, so I am constructing, at least for now, where I am moving, and into where.

The narrative used to flow; now, it flashes. The movies no longer steeped in language,

they are still. The movie moves around the poem, and so do I. I play, too.

Grey unveils the relationship between the work and the self.

Grey contends with the noose, redrawing it, cutting into it.

Grey embraces the sea, the fact of the razor.

Grey understands the sea as a sound, glistening, but muted

like the grey wall, and the grey floor.

---

Grey

A History—
of such Fat.

Well, because
it’s exact.

In here: Racks,
Weights.

Decouple, so that
Sea forms force:

“It’s very square.”
Since—

It warns you,
I’m backing up.

I order you,
Primordial.

The sight,
Unmoving I,

an Unnatural
article. Tells:

The hurdle
is never—

A Shape—
Large Body Benz.

Well, it manifests:
Trope—Query.

Where: Underarm,
alarms

a past, so
Knees form force:

“You were the one.”
Way—

It soothes you,
I’m holding up.

A Table—
Come to it.

Here: Light,
Drone.

Unfurl, so that
Snow: force-form.

“It’s exhausting.”
Since—

And, I think:
—Large,

Easy, Free—
Weight.

RED is nostalgic. It brings me back into my father’s black suit, tailor made in Singapore when he was then younger than I am now, when he was stationed in Japan as a sailor in the US Navy, traveling between there and the Philippines. I used to wear his old suits regularly, when I was in my 20s and into my 30s, but now that I am 15-20 years older than he was when he was at his most fit – I am certainly not at my most fit – the suit I used to rock on the regular is now a bit compromising. Ok, that’s an understatement: it’s tight, but thank art-goodness that my father and mother gave me one of my dad’s kimonos that kept me reasonably fashion fluid and warm. And also thank art-goodness that with some grace, the suit opens up some, as I dance.

A few years ago, Black Took Collective gave a performance at CalArts, and the Poet/Artist Wanda Coleman, was one of the members in the audience that came to see us. This meant a lot to us, certainly to me, who is a long time admirer of her work. I’m so glad that I had the chance to meet her in person before, so sadly, she passed on last year. A tremendous loss. I will never forget that she told us that we were Poets (Black Took’s members are me, Dawn Lundy Martin and Duriel E. Harris) that took great Risks! After she urged us to study the many performance artists that came before us, to know their work intimately, Coleman made a pointed and unique query. She asked about temperature; that is, how did we feel on stage—were we hot, cold? How did our bodies feel up there?

During the shooting of RED, I was freezing most of the time. The Port Jefferson Pier was my stage! I shot in brief intervals on two days in the New York Winter cold. My toes were numb at the end of filming, and the tripod was often impossible to manipulate, my fingers were so numb. Besides, I’d just flown in from Santa Cruz days before, where I just shot WHITE, so the differences in environment and atmosphere were quite stark, and equally revealing.

In shooting RED, I was most interested in capturing my performances in the distinct quality of light, the pink and grey-blue of the sky, the greens and greys of the choppy Long Island sound, the bare brown trees around me. Actually, I am here now in NY, for a few days, before I return West and I feel the pressure of returning to teach at University of California, Santa Cruz, and my past fulltime life here in NY, much of it as a graduate student at New York University, City University of New York, then a baby professor in Western Massachusetts at Mt. Holyoke.

What I love is that feeling, maybe nostalgia for that past or the always kind of sadness around how my partner of 22 years and I work on opposite sides of the country, is tied, for me, to the bareness of the trees, the stoic bark, and attentive branches in the crisp clear winter. This sky here does not soothe like the sky in Santa Cruz— it does not satiate, relax, is not wet with the salty sea; instead, it reveals itself in the cold, dry air edging me into a particular kind of thinking, and making.

Perhaps the poem, “Red,” written in tiny tercets of sharp description and sound emerge from this? Still, I am trying to be more conscious of writing about family and now engaging with my mother, her influences on my sense of style, scale, intimacy with fabric, design, and costume. How is this tied to questions of location, history? Hers, mine? I do not even know where my mother was born in the Philippines, the circumstances around which she left. I do know some of her story from my father. She is, however, quite guarded about revealing too much herself, but the process of making these films is helping me to figure out a way to ask her, directly, and to perhaps move in a radical direction towards what this line of inquiry means, promises. Maybe it will not be as difficult as I think?

In the poem, “Red,” I felt at first, too concerned with what distracted from these questions. “Red,” in one sense, negotiates being a writer, looking for a job, working in a world of other writers, being critical about poetic modes, desires, figuring out a way to work out what’s one’s craft in the face of it all, what it means for me to be working in various mediums, with voice, image, picture, dance. In another, it promises something that is much more central and important.

I realized that as I revised the poem – in the space of the video – it became less about critique, and more about process: What gets mined? And who? And for whom? The poem and the piece revolved and revolves, at least in the ways that I am now reading it, as a means to figure out what I want to say about my relationship with my family, my past, and to my mother, in particular. The poem is embedded, camouflaged and amplified in the body of the visual field—elastic, changing, morphing. And to keep in form with this, below is “Red,” the poem, entire. Hopefully, the process of rendering such poems in these morphing visual fields—the work and play of it all—will move me in directions I’ve yet to fully imagine.

Red

The interviewer didn’t
mark me. Red,
I dropped to the side

of the tub. I wore
black socks. G’d up,
I pissed my blue suit

at the interview,
before & dried—
It was, I think, Cebu.

Still, I went in & got
the call back.
Another all expense

paid tour. But
to Model stomp to
be whom I want.

Brilliant, but
they didn’t take
so fraught.

Who, the history
of consequence—
How to assimilate?

My father’s kimono,
Singapore tailored—
so, too, his suit.

My mother made
our Judo gis—tapioca
tint & brown flecks,

fragile fabric, destroyed
in practice. The boat
is red in the Sound.

The long bus blinks
across the short meter.
The boat, the distance,

the camera’s tripod
failed—
so, too, the camera.

One pulls a phone
out. Another snatch-
es a poem out of con

-text. Another picks
words off a conveyor belt.

That Sashimi
on boats, floating
—is not.

Lazy is lazy,
after all. What
is your language?

Lazy is lazy.
After you. What
if this language

weren’t for any
tongue, no palate.
Desperation

calls to some.
This Yatch, is
not, now, messy.

My pluck & duck
gets it in—
MTS, M4V, MOV

iMovie: Wonder
share, a wonder
—Isn’t it?

A workaround,
a fix—
I speak my own language.

“WHITE” comes from a few narrative sources, one of which is recent thinking about questions of address and form in the making of art and poetry. These are a few questions I’ve been considering lately: What is possible in delivering one’s poetry? This is to say, after the work is written, how might one deliver the “finished” work beyond holding up a book or a piece of paper, and reading a text out loud? Relatedly, is the poem, or even the book, actually the source text for its performance? And how can addressing these questions help to reveal the activities around what is being made and how the art-object as poem, audio-piece, movie, film complicates the subject matter of the work?

I recently delivered a poetry reading at Brown University, before which my host, the brilliant fiction writer and Professor Renee Gladman, asked me to read from my first book, Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man. I decided, somewhere along the line of this request, that I would read only a few sentences from the book and to “read” against and through these sentences, musical tracks (a series of freestyle lectures, raps, songs) that I designed around the formation of the volume—they were mostly centered around concerns I had when I first constructed it, and how or if these concerns (particularly about race, sexuality and representation) traveled with me through new experiences, art-sound-image-making, and larger practices as an artist.

As part of the reading, I played these recorded tracks “live,” layering and mixing them, all the while giving an improvised lecture around the book as a different means to reach out to the audience. At this “reading,” I also took off my shoes and socks before the presentation, danced some barefoot, reframing the book, the very idea of reading it, within the realm of conceptual performance.

My relationship to the “reading” as conceptual performance is not an ambivalent one, but, rather, it marks a way for me to maintain the freedom and spirit of creative energy as a constant source. The late, great poet Stanley Kunitz writes that “If the terrain were familiar, the poem would be dead on birth,” in his incredible book of essays, The Wild Braid. In some ways, for me, the need to constantly shift the performance of poetry stems directly from a similar impulse to create and work with living material, fresh thinking, nimble ideation. This is tied to unearthing the unexpected thought in the work, to creating open spaces for finding out what is engaging, and what engages with the very questions that prompt the project in the first place.

One of the things I attempted to work on in the making of “WHITE” was to pay particular attention to the tercet form of my poem: “White Notes: A Warning Song,” embedded in the video and included at the end of this document. Working in the three line stanzas through each of the scenes was a constraint that helped me to find and create narrative drama, length, timing and (to a certain extent) a kind of story that moves throughout the stanzas and the film. The poem, constructed in Word, evolved, grew, was cut, modified, rendered both on its own, and simultaneously in synch and in counterpoint with the movie’s construction. The shape and form of the poem’s lines and stanzas were also partly determined by the content of the film’s clips: the color of the plants, the way the cliffs are captured in the scene, the sound of the shore, the texture of the light, the sun, Mary J. Blige’s song I danced to in the background, and my own body moving within the space of the scene.

“White Notes: A Warning Song,” itself, explores a number of questions I am engaging around whiteness, the idea of its standards, its power players, plays, the fear that comes along with confronting its tricky manifestations, the ramifications of critique, the joy of this engagement, the act of troublemaking, disruption, “reading” [as in I READ YOU.], and what this all means in navigating the fields of such an identity politic in the writing public, particularly as someone attentive to whiteness as an aesthetic category, a zone of inquiry, a realm through which to protract, pull, shape, re-shape the poem, song, film, the work of art.

But what are the stakes of “blackness,” “brownness,” “pinkness,” “blueness,” in what I see in its concomitant relation to “whiteness,” and for me a poetic-filmic landscape where the racialized and sexualized body is fluid but often misheard, culturally mismarked, and impossibly managed. What to do in the face of fear, insecurity, the need to retaliate, to go in, how to exercise power, strength, or even ambivalence?

And if a poet can dance in the face of it all (Hip-Hop, House, Banjee-Boy, Ballet, Whatever), film it, record it, eavesdrop while doing it, de-face; or if one sings along to these acts, and captures the process in layers, more recordings, mixes, what are the stakes as one returns to ultimately present the work in multiple modes of address? What is the work? What the Work? What, Work? Work.—What? Work.

As I make what I am starting to think of as film, I realize this involves a different, but related set of concerns around making “poetry.” Location, weather, costumes, lighting, the landscape, all make a difference in terms of what is ultimately not just shown but rendered in the resulting film, AND in the real time of making the video in the world. For instance, shooting film in gorgeous temperate Santa Cruz in winter is very different than shooting on freezing cold Long Island in the same week, the light, the wind, the onlookers, who pauses, who stays, who ignores, the shifting of boots on the dried mud path, or numbing toes on asphalt.

In the poem, all these things matter to me, of course, but figuring this out in the field, shooting, reveals different amplifications: as in, when and how you might go outside, looking like what—Is it safe? —This is especially of concern if I am dressed up as TEAR-E-AVATAR in my heels, mask, or wigs, with all my video equipment, precarious on sand and/or on most piers. Slits between boards.

What does making poetry promise? I have always built this question into my working practice as a poet and have talked about this before: that the work I do is inspired by performance art, staged/un-staged performances, and the idea of being in the world as a third person subject, evaluated from the first, contending with the second and reporting this through writing, dance, film—I know, tricky—but I think that these shifting modes of subject position provide me with a certain relationship to the objective self in a formalized way that begins to be sophisticated enough to address the challenges of writing from the perspective of a marked, racialized and sexualized being (I mean we all are), but I am interested in articulating how, why, what matters, for whom and for what.

So how might working in various mediums enact what the poem realizes— I am thinking here of Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “peri-performative”— and the ways that numerous sites of language and meaning move around the very utterance, which may help what could be figured around the poem, how it is organized, revealed, and realized. What was said, fulfilled, unfulfilled, enacted, undone, engaged, disengaged as the primary text, in both its making, and the text in and as performance.

What are ways that one can move beyond the constraint of the three-stanza poem as it presses into the world beyond the page, beyond paper, beyond screen? Where is the work in this? What are the terms of address and, to add to this, the terms of expectation? The following photo is some evidence, a still image of this struggle/playground while I am constructing “White,” drafting notes around the poem as a source-text for the film. The tercet re-formed in the slowed-down sound of editing, by hand, other poems—my recording the music and conversations at Starbucks on 347A, related in ways I’ve yet to explore in my next video—the confusion just now of the cars outside in South Bend that sound like the sea, the brief baseline between clips of me in white moving to “No More Drama.”

WHITE NOTES: A WARNING SONG

In the sand, no footing, as on concrete,
but the hard dirt locks in the boot grip.
The line leads the shoulder, shoots

up the mountain that winds to the sea,
spits up the morning mist, and cracks
the red tree. Said on a city street,

passed to another, as in rumor, a rejection
by a colony: What did you say? Who cares?
—“Why you wearing that mask?”

The question is ridiculous, a failed gesture.
Concepts break at the shore: I guess, I care.
On the other side of the mountain, I rendered

trees, bodies, lynched. I saturated the ink
in watercolors. To compose in the space
in which I live: look at your mouth.

The threat is under it: how dare I say
what points to the loss? To not spit up
the smell of the sea as if we collaborate.

Great whites smell the death of their own,
many miles away, and plunge as far down
—even change routes, to escape attack.

But in the mask, sand sticks to sweat,
and the hard linen drifts in the shot.
A little cheap, but still the knees bind

and fat is cut from paper, so that noise
is texture, too. I don’t lose the fight.
Drawn to shadow boxing. Get—

out-ob-here. No patience to name
what’s over your head, or behind you.
I eat plainly, run, stretch, plank in pink

Run, holding a bone, in a yellow slip.
Spring to the shot, however quick:
it fades to what matters, the question

or curiosity. I don’t care, but I set it up,
as if I were there. As if I want to follow
the call beyond ticking. I eat the sky.

Where’s my RAW shirt (Sushi) for the shoot?
Or blue-black, black and blue, the steak: Red
toes freeze at the pier, on the cold coast.

For the backhand, the arms open. The line
across the shoulders symmetrical, the follow
through—a horizon deleted for debris.

To construct an identity, me, a balance
point, this body—stuck to pine and long
redwoods: a knock on a door, a warning shot.

The threat is a constant agent—in the other
dimension, trust. The cam twists off: I collapse
the tripod. I tell how much the light is changing.

What I am saying is that I am sick of all these lame azz attempts at categorization, and I think somehow this is tied to the failure to risk.¹ This morning, when I was at the hotel pool, I grabbed a pink kick-board, and between sets, left it on the deck at the end of my lane. Out of the blue, this white asked me, not “are you using this?” But “Is this yours?” To which I responded, “Yes, and there are others over there in that bin, but we can share this one,” though I did not want to share, and it was not mine, and she failed to say "thank you," until I left the pool, went to the bin myself, and got a green kick board which I announced, loudly, to which she did finally say “thanks,” though I did not answer; instead I said: “You’re so lazy!” I know, Yatch.

“We are listening,” is what another white said to me the other night when I asked a group at a table to explain what they think about Whiteness! It was a poetry reading. I recorded some of what we said, and I announced that I was doing so, though I have not listened to all of it, yet. One word I do recall being uttered is “amalgam,” and also the phrase: “I don’t know what you mean” – to which I went in on, free-styling, as usual, and for that, I was called "aggressive."

I love being at the center of these battles at times, a default zone, one of my own dial and design. The space between rage and joy. Poetry can act as the force that allows you to rotate near lots of affective centers, but so too, can swimming, kick turns, low pools, where the skull scrapes the low bottom.

I slipped back into the pool and began to butterfly, with care, but hard enough to make waves wide enough to jack that white. How should I explain my slowly selfish actions, my widening activities as an artist, critic, swimmer?

I trail Adrian Piper, who in an essay, “In Support of Meta Art,” moves around the word “Opacity." She meditates on the notion of opacity as a quality that differentiates Art from Meta-Art, her coinage. She argues that

The activity of making art is similar in character to the work itself. It is opaque in the sense that we can’t seem to rationalize the impulse to epitomize our experience. We can justify it in terms of the effects of the work, but I doubt if we would claim as an explanation of motive the wish to deify, beautify, propagandize, and so on, as one might explain one’s motive for being a social worker by one’s concern for society.

So what exists on the other side of this? Where’s the risk in work that begs the not epitomizing, refuses the long lyric line that leads to the indefatigable “I,” who is too lazy or too loaded in the suit to get its own kickboard, or can’t imagine that this is the prop one needs in the first place as forethought, not after-burn. Piper’s notion of Meta-Art is useful as a way of thinking about what’s possible beyond the activity of art in one’s practice that moves beyond deification, beautification, propaganda, etc. Piper goes on to argue that:

Doing Meta Art presupposes immediate privileged access to the impulse, the activity, and the emergence of the art. It is all a piece with these, but in addition requires an epistemic self-consciousness about them, namely, viewing ourselves as the aesthetic objects we are, then elucidating as fully as possible the thoughts, procedures and presuppositions that so define us.

When I shot “Blue” on a pier near the Puget sound, a white construction worker met me, first, in a kind of black drag, in brown heels, Gold Buckles, and what is now, for the moment, a Lebron Mask, Pity, though mine is sparkled. “How long will you be here?” “I will be blasting cement around you,” “I am concerned about your safety.” The same day, as I was TEAR-E-AVATAR in a CLOWN MASK, filming with Black Took Collective, a white security guard told me that I was in the way and that our work was “stupid.” And though I moved, I did tell him that it was not stupid, that it in fact was brilliant, and even though I got the workers to go away long enough to shoot, in both cases, the shots I got are still somewhat troubled. In one, the camera cases are showing. The others, I have not yet looked at closely, but I can always fit any frame, precisely, around whatever it is I wish to reveal, then, and now.

Endnote:
¹  "Blue" was delivered, along with a screening of my short film "Pink," for a panel, "What are we Projecting: American Poetry and Poetics in the Era of the Project," that included fellow artists Bhanu Kapil, Catherine Wagner, and Rodrigo Toscano, moderated by Sasha Steenson at the Associated Writing Programs Conference, Seattle, WA, 2014.

I am having fun, playing the Sea-Air as TEAR-E-AVATAR, a hot pink entity largely modeled after my crazy azz cousin, Terrie, and my mother’s insistence on “going in” whenever needing to costume. Drag, perhaps. But not really! It’s just a nice day on the harbor, on the beach which I have the good fortune to have so near my apartment in California. Why not? The writer and critic Indrani Chatterjee, after seeing my videos “BLACK” and “BROWN,” asked me where my mother was in the work, when my father is so clear? I think my mother is in my swimming and in my dancing, and I know she is in my dressing the part of my imagination, not as escape, but as encounter with what’s possible in the mix up of playing with who one is, inside, and its manifestations of race into the joy of say, neon. I am not a doll. I will not often paint my face, no blush on my cheeks; but instead, I will attract with a mask. After filming, I edited for so many hours that I burst a blood vessel in my right eye. It now features a large red dot: Subconjunctival Hemorrhage. I’m usually more low-tech, or “loose-tech,” than hi, but I am learning, now, how to use the proper instruments (HD camera, tripod, shotgun mic, etc.) for my growing video work and play. In one way, the act of working with cameras widens my sense of what is visually compelling in the act of making poetry, the mic exploding the sound in my ear, of sea, of sky, or the ocean, and I find myself wanting to stop, to paint everything. These are good signs. White words gently touch the brown sand and visit my sparkly black mask. There were at least two old white men that cruised me on the shoot. One said he loved my outfit, and the other turned around and stopped on wobbly legs: “Well, Good Morning!” Maybe other filmmakers and performers understand this, too, that the camera acts as a shield from query and attack, as it also begs invitation. I am a performer. I make video. In four inch heels. And I am, at all points, ready to run, or fight, dance, crouched low on the breakers, knew in that day, when to harden up in flashy NIKES, to protect my material, and how to move with the force of desire to satisfy in my porous pink shell. I pop to release race into the beautiful blue day. I am happy a whale was close to us that morning, somewhere near the shore in the bay. An old white lady told me she spotted it: “I don’t want to stop you, I know you’re doing something important!”

I am drafting on a moving, human tablet. This tablet is not flesh, nor is it an actual body. It is digital, at times, but it is, of course, not always. It has, though, been shot in the face while playing Hide & Seek. He may or may not live. It was also stomped on the skull for, allegedly, Photo-Bombing. She died. Yes, I am bombarded. And yes, too, Facebook is my primary, almost sole news source. I am constantly broken by events, ever reminded of important desperations, the need to belong, but all I care about, I realize, or at least, care about the most, is art and life, and their layerings through race, sex, and representation. Form? I know, this is a death-blocky issue, but all I have time to do these days is to make film and to edit, go to meetings, do work stuff, sleep, do yoga, and stay fulfilled. I work hard and sleep hard. I play all the time. Even when I do teach. I am reminded of what's possible of my body. I am working with the idea that I am going to ignore those who feel the need to emote in the smoke, or to invite us into the field of the never ending list. Rank. Poetry? Content? I spend most of my time documenting. I have spent a lot of time thinking and reading about production and playing, learning about the need to layer the experience of art making and sharing, or art giving, and shaping, singing, sliding, between the forms within the forms—a slippery set of expectations reliant on clear analysis and intention—so the question is when and how to unfurl, and what parts to reveal, how much to give, what to show to maintain the energy of the line no matter what? But really, the question is, "no matter HOW?" So what’s form anyway? I think I've pondered this since I discovered mirrors. I am untrained. I am highly trained. How can I not be? My films are “Brown” and “Black.” I do know that I love myself, or at least what I can recognize of myself so all I can do is try, right? To speak in ways that are unfamiliar and not, found, and sharp, embedded, broken, and then there is the streaming, flowing, ever-present narrative that is fun to leap into, and outside. To be beside myself: all to see, all the possibilities in thinking, in making, all to hear, to feel, to record, and to make. And to sweat. I am rarely bored. In the last note, I wrote about how working in iMovie (editing lines of poetry, sound and scene, in between the various visual fields) is form, or is a way of pushing form away, back, back in, at least insofar as it changes poetic perception, method, mode and intention. Accident. Skillz. Form: Video. Yes, I am making Videos. Not Film, for now.

One of the things  I was rendering in an 1800 square foot studio was how to think about what it meant to be cast into/as the role of the object by pushing an actual object, but was this object myself when I escaped its weight?  Let it go.  It sometimes fell.  Sometimes, I ignored it. I was fearful it would crack open my head. In dancing with it, I forced myself to move at, into the object of my disdain, and/or/and/with the feeling of being pushed away by my own force.  But to slide with the object, to avoid being splintered by the object, to force myself to not be wounded by the object, to spar with the object, to run with another object in mind, to swim in the ocean with the object in mind, I had  to forget about the object. I am ready to talk, but I am unable to carefully think outside of the landscape, the sea, my sprinting on the flat shore.  Does this make sense? I wanted to get to know the layers of how I am entertaining the object through another modality of feeling and touch, and I realize that working in video and editing in an application’s time and space does alter the music of language.   The space of the body moving with the object encounters race, the radicalized body, the suspect body, the fat body, the loved body, and, of course, desire.   I don't care if this makes sense, at least the kind I am used to.  I was so happily mad.  Who can afford it, anyway?  To be so digital.  I can, and am taking advantage.  My Ad. This piece is and isn’t necessarily about rendering this feeling, but by parsing out various modes of feeling through editing, not the line in that white space but this one, when the torso comes out of one surface, cut, to the next, all in motion, spun, mine, not yours—there is something else that I am feeling and working toward—I am letting go of having to clarify to the reader what the scene/seen or, for that matter, the sea implicitly enacts, or the mist, the threat of shark or comment, something related to the making of the poem,  in this way, but I want to keep making more of what is pushing me, a force Let's say it's this, before I return to what I have to do before I phone someone else up about coming.

I want to feel what it feels like to not explain myself right now. This is not easy, but I want to unleash in video, like a mime: without speaking. Explanation in direct language - for some poets - is difficult. For me it is not. Nor are actions. It's raining. The wind opens my door, so that the drops pick in my room. A bird barks in the offing, and the cold surrounds one ankle before the other. I brim with what to say, exact descriptions, markers. But my feet push the wood. Spin. Cut, Reset. For now, forgotten words drift - I am using my eyes, not my mouth.

I was horsing around with a bunch of young white boy poets. Maybe I was one of them. They liked junk food, and we were messing around, trying to beat a vending machine out of what it held, or all of us were getting what we paid for by kicking it. From the beating, it tumbled out bag after bag of snacks, including fresh popped popcorn that shot from the fallen glass, and Cheetos spilled all over the place, too, but it was the popcorn that thickened the landscape, layers of it all upon the front yard, a scalloped lawn, each of its long landings doused.

This would happen just before the snow fell.

Down in the basement, there were two camel crickets, one a black “teen” that bounced around, and escaped, and the other, an older insect that leapt in several directions, trying to get away, but it didn’t think to hide under the worn Williams-Sonoma bag I hold my wet yoga gear in before I dump it in the wash.

The older one got smashed on the dotted tile.¹

I begin with these two narratives, one dream-fictive, the other a chance encounter in the old house where I sometimes live. Both narratives represent an accumulation, or a marked abundance in the loss of subject and subjectivity, maybe my own, and the realization that what I am attempting to record about race and its manifestations, its epiphanies, as well as its discontents, floods out of the most innocuous places: dreams, journal entries, notes, revisions, basement run-ins—in each iteration, and my attempts at its capture, I am engaged in performing against solidity, expectation, against a black-static self.

A lot of the time, my expectations, in the midst of these performances, are given over to a pressing sense of whiteness as an overwhelming subject that moves around the body of what I want to say, a feeling, a source that encounters me at the same registers which I attempt to make sense of, or to at least hold in view, recognize, and to play around in. At this point, there is nothing perfect I can say beyond the realm of intuition, corralling around the sensations of what seeps in, and how this leads to a meditative stance around race and my relationship to thinking, being in the middle of it, blackness, as a site of intervention that includes dichotomies, splits, and then right when I go upstairs, some black and white little animal I barely see, a cat I don’t know, enters the house when I am upstairs printing out my flight itinerary.

When they say “nice dimples,” perhaps they’re really speaking about my teeth, which, after about a week of slipping the plastic over their surface, and after the stinging gums, the eyes reddening, I am, after all, recognizable. As who knows what: a friendly flyer, moving in the plane down the aisle, safely away from the cockpit, ever becoming someone or something, known.

I am suspiciously, yet fully, alive, unthreatened and singular but amidst all the others being marked in the flow of a number of related constructs: visitor, traveler, assailant, voice, spy, dancer, walking into and past that reactive moment as I attempt to wrestle with whom I am playing with, in the space between self-fashioning and experiment.

How to focus on the matters of making up this self, from the hyperbolic to the broken apart, and what are the possibilities found between breaking and singing, risking the too high music, or kick, the off pitch, the teeth bared to speak into erasure, to play with stereotype, capture, captivity, slippage, obliteration?

During a performance, when I am dancing, I let my spine drop down on the stage, or I push it down, so I can lift my entire body into moving in and out of time and space with whatever comes to meet it. I do not rise. I elevate in language that comes through the body. Where and how am I flexible around those that stand in the way, those that shock and rip us apart, and those that can be found, and sometimes used? How am I recognized in collaboration with the person I am believed to be and the person that plays between objectification and self-construction?

Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks explores a condition that helps me to frame the space in which this oscillates. He writes: “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.”²

Who are the players in this relationship, and what are the ways that this relationship, as a condition, marks the self, surrounded by this certain uncertainty? Does this stance call for offense in the face of offense? And what might be possible in the space of the shifting and permeable modes of defense? In other words, how do I/we write poetry in response to the need to experiment, to engage with the space outside of the poem, the space outside of the self in the midst of our offensive and defensive strategies in complicating one’s artistic performed practice and identity? Is the need to experiment between poetry and its multiply imagined forms dependent on embracing the status quo, the avant-garde, research, intuition, institution, absorbing all, inverting all, perverting all, via realms of pleasure, play, satisfaction, release?

But there are dead ends that count. There are trespassings, invitations, and ways into negotiating multiple relationships that might resemble something more or less civilized, like having a community, a post, a research fund, travel allowance, books, a nice home, a hot car, but the long leash that keeps you as not always aware of the figurations of the features of your psychic condition binds one to working with, or wanting to, or having to destroy the foundations upon which these connections are maintained.

As one might surmise, I often think about the split between the self and the speaker, in the space of the poem, as in the arena between the speaker and the persona and the self, or for that matter, the fractured body as metaphor, the thinking self constructed as the poem, the self moving, and the perceived self maneuvering against the wishes of the perceiver in the field of communication.

Some of the questions I am interested in encountering are as follows: What are the relationships between the poem/sound/dance/video and their various performances, and how will playing in and pushing the boundaries of each meet and complicate questions of race, sexuality, and representation? In particular, what does it mean to be working in received and self-articulated formations of race: African-American, Black, Asian, Filipino, Queer, Mixed, Re-mixed, Sublime, Surface, Jet, Swallow, Baby, Nap, Scream – And in terms of various imports, written, drawn, painted, performed, what will turn out to be the primary documents of this experience: the book, dance, sound-scape, film, or all of the above?

As of late, I frequently make sound recordings, fresh, improvised spoken documents, in and as various soundscapes. Speaking, moving and being with my voice in and with the world, constitutes an artistic practice I consider to be the poem, and poetry. The self, forming, that creates this is only loosely the “I,” or the “me” speaking, and this self speaking is not caught up in the din of silence, or usual routes of the poem’s expectations.

I describe these recordings as, “original poetry captured on my iPhone, documented while jogging on the beach, walking streets, hiking forests, driving, dancing, practicing yoga, sitting in cafés, or restaurants,” and bars, where I often go “off the dome,” and “go in” as it were, on my surroundings as an artist.³

Adrian Piper helps me to further synthesize this where she points out that: “…the artist per se, as a social and aesthetic being with a vocational role defined in relation to the rest of society, is determined not by the agency of anyone else but by the broader and more subtle spectrum of undeterminable forces.”⁴ Funny enough, I often find myself making my recordings at sites of opulence, consuming the perfect Pinot Grigio, grilled Monterey Bay calamari. In Sausalito, sitting out, staring out at the water: Who sees what? Who enjoys what? Who goes in, and where?

I do. Once, while making one of these recordings in a tiny Italian restaurant in Capitola, I was busted by a woman who saw me talking about her and her husband, on the attack, how she was in the way, the bane of my desire to wreck their home and make that Old White Daddy mine. To absorb him. To which she may have heard and asked, “are you videoing me?” I did not answer. Sometimes the inquisitor is invisible, or the speaker is absent, and the exchange of silence, or that sort of silence can get one through untouched, safe, unmarked, in any case otherwise, even more fully aware and alive, still at play.

Simultaneously, I am at work, finishing a new collection, Lucy 72 , a series of prose poems, first rendered at an artist colony where I spent much of the month drafting seventy-two poems written in long, loosely structured couplets that helped to address my thinking through the initial work.⁵ These poems, now honed down, but still in couplets, reveal a fluid narrative perspective that explores race, sexuality and representation both within the field of my imagination and, simultaneously, in my observations and analyses of my experiences in the artists’ colony in which these poems were written – as well as in others – where this exploration becomes further complicated and enriched.

When I attend most artist residencies, I am usually the “only one” by many criteria, often the only attending African American, certainly the only African-Filipino American. Add to this Queer, and add to that, I am often one of a few, or the only full time academic cultural critics. And then add that I work as a multi-media artist in painting, video, sound, dance and performance art. By all measures, I am usually an anomaly in these mostly, or all white, straight, and traditionally single medium centered artist colonies.

It is a challenging experience to thrive in these environments, as the “only one,” subtly or not so subtly attacked with various degrees of intention and frequency. At a recent residency, during dinner, it was suggested that I be “strangled” for describing the super thin, wealthy, post-plastic surgery white women in a nearby neighborhood as somehow longing to vanish. Later, I was called an “asshole” for naming an art colonist’s entitlement and white privilege in bypassing the colony’s bureaucracy in claiming the largest, nicest room of our communal house that was not intended specifically for her, simply because she felt it was. Another night, after sharing my experiences and ideas with some visiting artists about creating art work in public environments, restaurants, bars, airport lounges, etc., I was told that if I tried to do this in the major city where they lived, I would be “shut down,” and that I “talk a big game.” Clearly, I couldn’t be telling the truth, and besides, Who do I think I am?

Lucy, via her poetic personae, speaks outside of her perceived race, or is complicit in her race as a white woman, a white woman who is also a fat brown young man, or not black, or shapes, sometimes becoming a flash of light, meditating on people, rocks, playing in rivers, skies, staring into beige walls, fans, or low grass.

Part imaginative landscape and real field report, the poems in Lucy 72 expand around the core of what it might mean to be “the only one,” to not be shut down, but to open up into reflection, to evade strangling, and to breathe. I attempt to capture the person, beyond name-calling, who speaks through race, sexuality and representation, circulating in and out of the spaces where Lucy lives, and where we do too.

25. LUCY AND THE SUN

Of course, I don’t fear it. I look up into its face and see myself.
The bright not melting or burning, but leading me into the shiny stone,

flat and red, striped with white streaks that flow on its top.
It doesn’t overheat, more than it keeps me safe from my body, not bone,

but warm. A black wouldn’t see me without a rack. Billiard balls nest
in a triangle, so am I soft in my heart? I wait where I was born,

I break, softly, as if lying on a plate. Shell, I’m not sure
I will ever be hard. Whites, I am raw. Even where my body cramps,

I wonder what it means to be half and half? I can feel the black coming.
I enter a code, pull myself through a tiny room, dart away, my sight.

27. LUCY AND MOVEMENT

My body is full, while a black is a fragment.
I will not dream beyond texture, nor long for a sea;

instead, the field of grass thick as a substance
pulls itself out of the fire, holding the body alight

like a locket that forced itself open – the self,
shocked against the exit of the self?

In the opening, piles of leaves are not there
to shake and gather against my brain.

In the night they have left, and I’m all numb.
I, looking at a leaf, lying on a black surface,

I, pushing my speech forward as one act –
the first slip of my own body into the night.

My motivation, the next, the whole of my back
arching forward, to reveal this:

There is my body, and there is his.
Two iron poles shoot dark and hard, some crust

formed between us, where the sea air gives way
to the red mountain trail, to the rip

of the brown tide. Feeling, and looking
out over the coast, knowing, why is he so black?

40. LUCY CONSUMES WITH INTENT

The tree beyond the screen is not flat, and through the green,
I make my sight blur in the metal grid.

It keeps out the gnats. A branch cradles up above the fat trunk
and the moss spots are thick in the sill of memory.

Blur, I’m not brown, nor do I glow, but a part of my want
is attached to my breath, which I hold close to the grass line

as if my arms reach out above the yellowing leaf. To suck light,
I hide beneath the grey bird that will drown if it nicks the sea.

A spider web weaves beneath the two cracks that arc,
like I don’t have a belly? I’d rather not eat than be black.

The flamingos grow pink with algae. A black runs in a forest.
He’s a male, 5’7”, 176 lbs., and muscled.

To DAS EFX, he dances in the street. Or a black in my brain –
he does a typical jig, or imagines himself red as a college mascot,

dead self-tossed in the dryer. If I walk, am I lost in the auburn updo,
or if my hair’s caught where I sink, will each bite bulge my lips?

Endnotes: