constellations #93: after you hear certain voices

Hi again.

In late 2013 I was living just outside Boston, bored and lonely, fresh out of college, working a bad office job and a dreaming of one day going to grad school. My whole life seemed to exist in the past or the future; in the present, I did not, really, have much going on. One day I heard about this monthly poetry reading series at an independent bookstore just down the road from me, run by a local poet who had a small press in the city. The series was called BASH. I didn’t have too much of a relationship with poetry at the time, but I saw an event listing for it on Facebook and I thought it might make me feel inspired, or cultured, or something, so I asked my partner to attend it with me. Then I asked two of our friends to come with us, including my friend Madeline, who lived down the street and whom I had gotten to know somewhat recently.¹ After that first time, we all went to the next month’s reading. Then the next, and the next; at some point, the year turned over and, each month, we kept going.

Most of the readings were attended by what seemed to be a small but devoted group of regulars (among which we did not count ourselves — we were new!) all seated on folding chairs in the used-books section of the basement of the bookstore. We never recognized the names of the poets — none of us knew much about contemporary poetry — but we always liked what we heard. Usually the host read something, too, and we liked his work. Afterwards he’d remind the audience that he and the other poets would all be drinking at a bar around the corner and everyone was welcome to join. My friends and I joked about going to these afterparties but never went, too intimidated by some supposed insularity of the scene, or something. (I realize now how absolutely normal and unremarkable it would have been if we had joined them at the bar. Alas.)

Anyway, on the night of the April reading, we showed up and the bookstore was packed. We didn’t understand why, but when we got there almost every single seat was filled, and everyone was murmuring to each other about the night’s featured poet, and when the host got up to talk he had stars in his eyes. I can’t believe we have such a legendary poet with us tonight, he said, something like that, and me and my friends looked at each other, curious and confused. Eventually that legendary poet got up and read with a gravelly voice and a thick Boston accent, so funny and sharp, stopping to digress or explain things in the middle of the poems — it was incredible, really, unlike anything I’d encountered before.

“After you hear certain voices, the direction of your life is changed, and there's no going back,” the writer Maggie Nelson once said. She was describing the voice of the poet and writer Eileen Myles, Nelson’s early-career mentor in New York — and, yes, the very same poet my friends and I saw that night in the basement of the bookstore.

That was ten years ago this month. Ten years! A lifetime. Here’s what else I remember: The other two poets who read were excellent — Mark Leidner, who read a poem called “Ways to Dance” that made the whole audience laugh so hard (I couldn’t believe you were allowed to laugh so hard at a poem); and Dorothea Lasky, whom Madeline is fairly certain read this glorious poem called “Do You Want To Dip The Rat,” which we’ve both read and re-read and re-read many times since.

The two of us commemorated the anniversary of the reading a couple weeks ago, on the day it happened, April 11. I read Madeline the Maggie Nelson quote (not for the first time) and said, It really did change our lives, right?, and they agreed. That the direction of our lives was changed felt so true to me, genuinely, but I struggled to name what, exactly, the influence of the night had been. (I swear I felt the evening’s life-changing energy in its exact moment, though I wonder if there is any way to truly recall experiences like that without the rose-tint of memory. What did I really know, then, in that moment? That we all enjoyed the reading, that we went home thrilled, that it made me feel aglow and alive and inspired? That it showed me something was possible with language that I didn’t know was possible?) The more I talked to Madeline about the question of what changed, the more we circled around the way the reading became the bedrock of our now decade-long friendship. It was why I bought a copy of Myles’s Cool For You on a road trip a couple months later and immediately lent it to Madeline, which led to us, the next year, texting incessantly about Myles’s role on Transparent, and then, more broadly, talking endlessly to each other about writing and feminism and queerness and art, and all manner of obsessions we’d each harbored quietly but not yet had the right outlets for. Until suddenly, in each other, we did.

It reminds me of something that Myles wrote in the essay “How I Wrote Certain of My Poems,” from their book Not Me: “I am obsessed with culture. It’s my mental community, what configuration of art and art makers I belong with,” they say. “Alone, I’m the culture of one. I’ve got my paintings, heroes, cult movies — any person who lives alone knows the situation of feeling like some kind of private museum. But, I also want to address my culture (some new, larger one out there which I suspect exists) which I begin by making work which violates the hermetic nature of my own museum — as a friendly gesture towards the people who might recognize me.”² I think that obsession with culture, and that sense of isolation — and most of all, the friendly gesture that breaks through it: that was precisely what we both saw that night, in Myles and in each other. We recognized it, and we became part of that new, larger culture. It changed the direction of our lives. There was no going back. Thank goodness for that.

***

When I decided to write about the anniversary for this month’s newsletter, I realized I wanted to share some of Madeline’s poems, too, since the impact of that night is deeply embedded in their writing. I chose a couple of my favorites and asked them for an introduction to the work; here’s what they said:

Years following that BASH reading, I started incorporating poetry and writing into my visual art practice. A lot of the poetry would be built from appropriated text — general digital text archives, like tweets, my text messages, or screenshots of text on my phone and computer. I created tools to help me “cheat,” like archives of text to pull from, and tried to test myself in poetry workshops (one with Larissa Pham where she encouraged me to try to bring visual elements into the writing process, which produced the zine I made of my poem “seizing air,” below³; another with Eileen Myles — it was a real full circle moment). At Eileen's workshop weekend in the woods in Western Massachusetts, I remember being so scared that I wouldn't be able to write anything, and I brought an arsenal of text, pages and pages of screenshots to cut up and collage together, just in case organically writing in the sessions wouldn’t come to me. One of the other participants, a fellow photographer, brought cyanotypes for the group to make during a long lunch break. It was during one of these breaks that I made “untitled (the picture refers to you),” the initiation of my light & magnets series that I continued to work on for the next several years. To say that the weekend was generative is an understatement — it tipped me forward into a creative momentum that I am lucky enough to have experienced a few times in my life, though I know how rare it can be.

“seizing air,” zine collage of text and photographs, 2018

seizing air (2018)

(After Eileen Myles’s “Western Poem”)

twisting wind
	my solitude
taut morning light
	my witness
rust duff i walk with ease,
gnarled roots surface like veins on hand backs
chirping chorus circling above,
	my friends
celery moss-spotted landscape
       climbing the rotten and fallen
	my fruition 
a quiet tree 
burns
 slowly
	my stillness
	my still
	ness

sapphire rimmed moon round
	my patience
treading barefoot
sandy sooted roadside
        mailbox			 
        pilgrimage		 
        predestiny		
green street light
           my exit
yellow lines
	my companions

blue black 
midnight light
		swelter
blue black 
warming night
		silence
by being somewhere 
i made a choice to be 

some one 
  i brought myself 
there and stay 
             still 

wavering 
wink, my weakness
steel reflection in night’s window
my grasp
     cardinal blooms of pineapple sage
	my manifest
downhill ride to the russian sea
    submerged resalted sunned
	my comm
	union
asphalt faded, asphalt 
faded
dust covered rubble in the window
	my history
overheated 
afternoon
		the view 
		of writhing 
		daylight

		the view of
		writhing
		daylight
     a shimmering 
shuffle
my continuance

a shimmering shuffle

***

untitled (the picture refers to you) (2019)

In reality, the picture refers to YOU
An image of ourselves     us
All things are possible, 
The grace of biographies:
How they were to witness
I tend to keep going

“untitled (the picture refers to you),” cyanotype, 2019, created with cut-out text

Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: Pink Balloons by Ekko Astral; Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee; Bite Down by Rosali; “Gates of Heaven” / “Snake Eyes (again)” by Horse Jumper of Love; Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna; two new movies: Stress Positions and The People’s Joker; my first trip the The Met Cloisters, where I gazed lovingly upon the unicorn tapestries (thank you to Hazel for accompanying me); this beautiful profile of the labor organizer Jane McAlevey from last year; dinner & drinks at Pickerel in Providence — outrageously good; a wonderful set by Strange Mangers in a historic movie theater in Arlington, Mass., which you can watch online; the first edition of my friend Thamy’s new newsletter (!)

***

This time last year I was: writing about ambition, loss, and Mitski; and before that, turning 30 and thinking about my voice

***

Thanks for reading. Today is my birthday, and what a gift it is to get to share some time and (digital) space with all of you. Thanks for being here, sincerely. See you next 24th.

xo,
M

1. The other attendee was our very dear friend Sean, who also wrote for this newsletter a few years ago (and whom I could not bear to leave out of the narrative entirely).

2. This same quotation was recently excerpted in Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter <3

3. You can read the whole “seizing air” zine here