Andrea Rexilius - They are marginal. They move in rivulets. They exist not only in their details. They contain their own extraordinary destiny. They live beside a family of small farmers. They are discovered and decide to emigrate. Their name is William. They are born a little girl

Andrea Rexilius, Half of What They Carried Flew Away, Letter Machine Editions, 2012.

Some people fear movement away from what is comfortable, fear contradiction. Rexilius is not afraid. She embraces paradox by dispersing time. Time is always now despite perception; time is open—open as noun. She writes, “They come to the open between each breath.” In essence, she creates a system of being which chooses to stay in one place (form) while transitioning seamlessly in(to) another. There is no need for preparation. Time is both visible and a multiple of itself—both witness and the observed. To accept this discrepancy is to trust Rexilius when she directs us, the readers, to investigate how we normally look at the world. Looking, apparently, is not the same as seeing. In this era when separation and discontinuity (instability) reign supreme, the possibility of existing in wholeness while alone but not isolated (stability) allows catharsis.- Ginger Teppner.

In a 2011 interview on Book Slut, Andrea Rexilius mentions that the conceptual genesis of Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012) stemmed from, in part, essays she taught in a composition class “on ways in which marginalized voices speak up to interrupt, or just to enter, and comment on or critique or call out or make visible a perspective previously shut out or unheard within the cultural narrative.” Not surprisingly, then, the tropes of boundary, crossings, and transformation employed by Rexilius echo those found within Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a foundational text for marginalized voices in the twentieth century.

Joan Pinkvoss, in her introduction to the third edition of Anzaldua's book, describes Borderlands/La Frontera as an “inclusive, many-voiced” (i) text that highlights identities “caught between los intersticios, the spaces between the different worlds” (iii). Similarly, in Half of What They Carried Flew Away, we find:

Furrows are created by circumstance. A type of fluid to recognize transformation. The above does not impose. Inner changes played out in outer terrains. Nothing happens to the image. These borders they live on, interrelated. (35)

The confluence of “inner changes” and “outer terrains,” or the “border” on which they “interrelate,” comprise a zone of transformation wherein identity becomes “fluid.” Rexilius's collection concludes with:

I do not know what it is I am like.
…
I am above all flight from flight.
I undertake not to represent, interpret or symbolize, but to make maps and draw lines
…
I am neither a woman nor a man in the light. (89)

The speaker draws maps, escapes along lines of flight, is “neither a woman nor a man,” and admits that “I do not know what it is I am like.” To this extent, the non-gendered voice explores a mutable concept of self and participates in a “shaman aesthetic” wherein the storyteller transforms “into something or someone else” (Pinkvoss xviii); or, in Anzaldúa’s words, enters into “a place of contradictions” (19) located “at the juncture of cultures [and] languages” (20).

The most evident instance of a shaman aesthetic within Half Of What They Carried Flew Away occurs during one of the book's few image-laden passages:

They needed a language to communicate with themselves.
They put bones, pieces of bark, feathers into a tape recorder.
The meaning of the word forehead came out.
They come to the open between each breath.
They breathe out, grow gills and a river pours out.
Storms dissolve in their saliva.
They look up at the vast terrain, They've crossed over. (84)

The transformation of bone, bark, and feather into forehead; or the human body, replete with river water, growing gills: these physical alterations for the sake of “communication” signal an arrival at Anzaldúa’s “place of contradictions” where nature and culture, among others discourses, intersect.

Of course, there are differences between these texts. For example, Anzaldúa claims that the U.S.-Mexican border “es un herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third—a border culture” (25). Not only is this border inextricable from the body, but it is a body bleeding, scabbing, and bleeding once again. In contrast to Anzaldúa’s border as flesh, Rexilius writes:

A sea they say an origin.
I say sea, a place of incest. Holding something at bay.
Place where land and water meet. Bilingual place.
Place of water. Bodiless body. (21)

The confluence of elements, the border between land and water, is a “Bilingual place” just as Anzaldúa posits la frontera to be; but Rexilius's location is “Bodiless.” The speaker reinforces the absence of  a body later in the collection, when she writes: “I have been told, it is unfair to say the word 'body' again. That's fine. It's easy enough to ignore” (35). One writer believes the body to be the epicenter, literally, of the new mestiza consciousness that must be “enacted” and “forever invoked” (89) in the flesh, whereas the other writer chooses to “ignore” the body.

Why, then, does the speaker of Rexilius's book promote material absence at a border? The answer, perhaps, can be found through a question Half of What They Carried asks of its readers: “What is the emanation of the image?” (23), where the image is a body inscribed. For the speaker of these poems, what emanates from the image is “contamination[,] a condition” (25) which produces “a cruel second nature” that places “limits” on one's “distinctions” (26). Accordingly, when a writer “decrease[s]...the images” within her writing, which for the most part Rexilius accomplishes, an “expansion” (49) results through abstraction. Abstraction, conceptualized in this manner, engenders a more protean and, thus, more egalitarian text that creates a fluid subjectivity. Subjectivity, as such, moves with less difficulty across borders, clearing a space for marginalized voices and a critique of dominant narratives. - Joshua Ware

  

What they wanted most was to see things they had never seen before. When they were people they felt relief. They were on a new sexual continent willing to proclaim anything. They couldn’t sleep. It was impossible for them to choose whether or not to be savage. They felt something.

They indulge as a result of repeated colonization. They make armies. They decide they are as small as ants. It happens on the cellular level. It happens as a result of frustration. Like daffodils in the middle of the Pacific.

It was already happening, like the sun in this place, their lungs helped them to arrive.

American poet Andrea Rexilius follows up her first trade poetry collection, To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011) with a second, Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Tuscon AZ/Denver CO: Letter Machine Editions, 2012). Predominantly a text of perpetual lyric movement and continued arrival, Halfof What They Carried Flew Away explores a series of prose-poems that accumulate into a semi-narrative around echoes of immigration. What makes lyric prose so much more prevalent in American poetry than in Canadian writing? Somehow we still seem entirely too attached to metaphor-driven verse, yet this currently generation of American poets are apparently lining up to produce books of lyric prose-poetry, including Lily Brown, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Eric Baus, Kate Schapira, Noah Eli Gordon, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Richard Froude and so many, many more.

There are two worlds inside them: the world and the sky. One living organism, a marriage of space and inner catastrophe. They are referring to negation, to the deepest blue. But it’s hard to get the blue of this sky, they say. Is it the same blue as that blue over there? It is true, they think, to question the language the blue has given them. Their eyes can only reach so far, even hooked together. They cannot bring that blue next to this blue. What is this blue called, they wonder. What is that blue.

Broken down into five sections—“First Residence: Desire,” “Second Residence: Water,” “Third Residence: Emanation,” “Fourth Residence: Weather” and “Fifth Residence: Territory”—the collection also uses a thread of sub-titles, including “This is the interview of their first crossing,” “This is the answer of their first crossing,” “What is the emanation of the image?” and “This is the song of their second crossing.” The lyric collage of Rexilius’ Half of What They Carried Flew Away both creates and deflects a narrative, composing and sliding around speculation, describing a voyage that is often less described than entirely conceptual. “Human space is a cohabitation with fog.” she writes, somewhere in the second section. Further into the collection, she writes: “They are from the early 1870s. / They move from house to house like windows.” Even the ideas themselves remain slippery. This is a staggering collection, and one that requires deep, repeated readings. One must possibly drown within.

I do not know the limits of my own distinctions.

Transition is not easy to define.

We are teeming with bees, boll-weevils, locusts. Brimming

    with maidservants and mistresses.

 This is what we have learned from imagery.

A cruel second nature, but what happened to the first, what

    will the next reveal?

Lower animals tell us more about ourselves.

Lost in a laboratory maze, the woodcock reasons, feels,

    communicates across the centuries.

He lives in the cultural field. On the plains.

To what extent can he trust his eyes? Who is his animal double?

I am an amoeba by sympathy. We could answer to each other.

We could trade pictures we’ve drawn on stones.

We are plants and people. Our rituals dance.

We respect the sky with ease.

 -   rob mclennan

Is it a conceptual event? Is it a document of performance itself? How might the degree of transparency map this object? In Andrea Rexilius’s latest book these lines are not printed in italics, so I change a line by drawing attention to the line. I might be able to think of ways that language, by definition, is a capturing, a simultaneous failure to capture. What is the sculptural fragment that is revealed by this city? To make the poem a place is not exactly the same as to make a poem of place. To make the work a body is not exactly the same as to make a body of work. I am reading through the book again. Sometimes it feels like work, and sometimes it feels like fun. It is fun work. I should probably say something about genre. I should probably say something about narrative. I should probably say something about linebreaking. I should probably say something about essay. I should probably say less about how I am feeling. I am tilting against the windmills. I establish a continuity. I cannot pin down one side of the territory. I am an open mouth and a factory. I am yellow, or red. I was asked if I am myself. I am myself. I should probably say something about pronouns. Their name is William. They are born a little girl. To review the book is, what? To narrate the experience of reading the book? What if the book doesn’t defy narration as much as it ignores narration? Pronouns and time and place and image, and then there’s experience, and theirs becomes memory. There is never a story as soon as they say there’s a story. What if the book ignores narration as a way of questioning narration as a way of acknowledging narration? Half of what they carried flew away, and what I am left with is some space between the thing and the description of the thing. Right? I am sounding pretentious again. My understanding is not convoluted. I am talking about myself again. I do not know the limits of my own distinction. Human space is a cohabitation with fog. I am skipping over some really good stuff about Christopher Columbus. There is this one reference to incest. An actor friend asked me what this book was about. He was wearing old man makeup. I said her book was about words and different kinds of nature and history and time, and then I thought to myself that all good books are kind of about those things, and I said, “you just have to read it.” I read him the line about igniting the cloud. You and I are in a relationship. To organize the language, the poet divides the book into five residences: Desire, Water, Emanation, Weather and Territory. We are glistening with what it evokes. I forget which pronoun she uses for the glacier. There is that reference to God and the cutting of photographs. A long, white tongue to read the parchment. There is much I can’t say about trauma and loss. It is the result of deep amnesia. - Timothy C. Dyke


Jack Spicer believed the poems he wrote were sent through him by extraterrestrial beings. That is, he believed he was the vessel through which the news, heartbreak, strangeness, music, and the art of the “other” was carried.

I like this. I like to think about people’s creative mythologies. In an artist’s case, I don’t think the “myth” part of their existence is untrue. I believe Jack Spicer when he talks about aliens. And I believe we can see in some poets work a kind of otherworldly experience happening to them and then to us as readers. Of course, this is often translated in our academic and secular minds as purely “inventive” or “creative” imagination though there is something mysterious happening, something we can’t explain so we say: “How did he come up with that?” or “How does she write like that?”
Perhaps the “voices” from outer space that Spicer talked about are not so far from, well, outer space.
I had this kind of experience reading Andrea Rexilius’s book Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2012). This book is like a lost journal in that you are not sure if the people being written about are from the distant past or the distant future:
“It was already happening, like the sun in this place, their lungs/ helped them to arrive”
Rexilius’s book is broken up into five sections, five “residence”: Desire, Water, Emanation, Weather, and Territory. Each residence is filled with beautiful prose and lyric poetry. This is a book that will not make an appearance on Prairie Home Companion or perhaps even Poetry Daily, though it should. The more I re-read Andrea’s book, the more open and strange I feel (a great thing to get from experiencing art), which leads me to believe the book is about the inner territories of the self, that strange, outer space world of our inner lives:
“What is it to embrace water?
Are you fearful near the edge or the middle?
Could you symbolize your idea of the self?”
What is it we are crossing over to in our lives? What is it that pushes and pulls at us? I think this book is digging into the world of those questions with an extraterrestrial shovel. Everyone should buy two copies: one for yourself and one for Garrison Keillor.- Matthew Dickman

 

 

  

 

 

 

Andrea Rexilius, To Be Human Is to Be a Conversation, Rescue Press, 2011.

  
Andrea Rexilius’s first book, To Be Human Is to Be a Conversation, was published this past spring by Rescue Press. She has a second book forthcoming, Half of What They Carried Flew Away, from Letter Machine, this fall. To Be Human examines (in digression, diversion, evasion, lyric, and interview) Rexilius’s relationship with her stepsister, also named Andrea. It is an erosive consideration of the self and language and gesture and residue. It feels not unlike wandering through an abandoned building with abandoned documents and personal objects -- though it is actually quite severe in its intellectual seriousness, never in the simple realm of wander, always asking for a response of some sort: read.
Some pieces in the book give me the sensation I got when watching Terrence Malick’s 1973 Badlands: specifically, when Sissy Spacek’s character traces words with her tongue onto the roof of her mouth. To Be Human does deal directly with the echoing, lurking weight of the tongue, but it also offers “its edgeless swarming body” as a glimpse into human alienation and overwhelm. The reading of it is deceptively smooth -- it feels sometimes light and open -- and politely rupturing. When the book states that “You and I are in a relationship” and that “We are glistening with what it evokes,” second person comes undone and spills. The reader swallows and reads on.


My first question comes from p. 87 of To Be Human, in particular, the poem “History        of    Human        Dissection”:

Etymology traces slight changes in pronunciation of a word over time. These are not inundations. Their travel marks an erosion, as in saliva wearing the basin of the mouth away. A single river is never the same river, a word never the same, having traveled as water over the lungs. If I repeat selvedge, selvedge, selvedge you may begin to notice it consists of two words conjoined. Invention of the selvedge is concordant with recognition of the self. Distinction is the beginning of dissection.

This poem does many different things at once; many of them are associative and dependent on the reader. The things I see right away are: odd overlaps of speaking and reading, the possibility that metaphor is closest to what we say is “reality,” an assumption that a reader will create some of the space in which a poem resides, and a suggestion about human history: our (probably) mostly Victorian obsession with taxonomy is an obsession with distinction, which is, in turn, a way of dominating the world by opening it up and examining it. Do these responses seem in keeping with what you intend when you write/what you had wanted to posit with this poem? What is the relationship, for you, between speaking a thing and reading it? When you compose, do you "image-ine"? I mean: do you have a visual corollary in mind? Do you have auditory or olfactory things in mind? Textural? Is the process synesthetic?

In this particular poem I had in mind the erosion of language or fusion of language via etymology. The poem references Heraclitus's statement that one can never step into the same river twice because it is always moving. It struck me that this is also true in regard to language and then I began to see the mouth as a cavern or riverbed with speech running over it. This is one reference to the movement of language or etymology. A second reference is when I focus on the single word “selvedge.” In the O.E.D. the origin of this word is split. It comes from self+edge. An actual selvedge is the edge of a piece of cloth before it is turned under and hemmed. I like to think of this as a raw edge of the self. Then the act of hemming becomes an act of bodying. This leads to how awareness of our own boundaries or fusion of these boundaries into a hem / edge / fence, etc. creates a distinction between ourselves, other people, and the world -- and yes, that this distinction leads to dissection, the impulse to take things apart, to uncover what hems them to themselves. When I think about the composition of this poem I see a kaleidoscope unfolding one image after another, so in terms of metaphor, an actual metamorphosis takes place within the ideas and the images. I wouldn't say that I think metaphor is reality. I was thinking more about the divinatory nature of etymology, and of language as divinatory here. Metaphor might be one form of this alchemy, but it's an overworked and often simplistic form. Metaphor is supposed to behave as a bridge between one expressible experience and one less expressible one, so I'm interested when the bridge fails or when the lack of equivalence is noticed, less so when metaphor pretends to be exact, when it doesn't account for its own slippage.
You're right to say that I assume a reader will create some of the space in which a poem resides. I have this assumption because I want the experience of reading to be active, creative, generative for the reader. I don't think the act of creation should end with the writing, but this isn't to suggest that there are no expectations or roadmaps, or stable meanings in the poems. Those things are there as well; the reader is just being asked to step toward them.
One other thing I assume is that the work will be read both horizontally and vertically. Meaning is being made across the entire book as well as from page to page. This poem that you've chosen to look at is further discussed or mirrored or mentioned in a number of other areas in the book—on page 21 for instance, in the lines “The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation. / The very idea of body implies separation and observation.” I see this line as more specifically pointing to the paradox Martin Buber spoke of in I/Thou that for ourselves we are always “I,” but to others we are “you.” The word “I” is simultaneously collective and singular and it is the body, but maybe also consciousness, or maybe not consciousness and only the body, that creates this distance or contradiction or separation or simultaneity. It is this existential dilemma that most accurately describes the experience my stepsister and I shared, to feel very much yourself and yet very outside of yourself at the same time. It is, as Freud puts it, to experience the uncanny. I like the way his definition of the uncanny is linked to confrontation with one's double and to loss or displacement of the sense of home, to diaspora or exile from the familiar. The I/Thou paradox is similar, but is uncanny in an almost opposite way, in our inability to actually be separate from, and to observe ourselves. John Hooker invented a mirror in 1887 that allowed people to see themselves from the physical perspective in which others saw them. Normally our image is flipped in a mirror. The right side of my face becomes the left side. In this new mirror you see yourself as if you are someone else. This was upsetting in particular for people with asymmetrical faces. I looked into one of these mirrors once and didn't understand what was so special about it. I thought it seemed like looking into any other mirror. Maybe I have an exceptionally symmetrical face, or maybe my experience with my sister already undid that mirror experiment. Of course, my sister and I look nothing alike because we are not related, but that's exactly what made our situation so uncanny.
I don’t know if you read the blog Montevidayo, but in the Spring I was following one of their threads about “difficult art,” and I want to ask what you think about this idea, if it is even worth entertaining. I think that this conversation began with a post Johannes Göransson did about Billy Collins’s apparent distaste for work that obfuscates (the negative connotation is Collins’s). Then, James Pate wrote this series of claims:

One of the things I like about certain types of “difficult” experimental writing as opposed to a great deal of “accessible” writing is that I actually find experimental writing in a way easier to read specifically because it usually doesn’t ask me to perform an act of “close” reading to get to the kernel of truth in the text (in the usual sense of that word). Even in a great deal of language writing, which I’m sometimes very critical about, there is a surface effect, the play of the signifier, but no depth to figure out, no Meaning under the surface. That’s one of the elements of Language writing I actually do like and respond to…
“Easier to read” might not be the right term here: it’s a different way of experiencing a text…
For example: isn’t the supposedly difficult John Cage really about a kind of vigilant ease?
I would argue that a great deal of experimental writing moves closer to music than to argument… the “difficulty” is its refusal to draw even the thinnest of lines between style and content…

When you are reading and/or reading for writing, are you interested in “difficult” work? I mean: maybe some mainstream readers think of experimental work as difficult, obfuscating, willfully obscuring, lacking clarity, etc. Do you bother with these distinctions in the first place? Do you have a position? I tend to agree with Pate; I find it much, much easier to read a page of Susan Howe than an Auden poem... what do you think?

I guess in this particular text I was thinking about how to place a number of different types of writing next to one another: memoir, poetry, essay, history. I wanted to find a way to have the facts presented, but also allow room for the strictly factual to be transcended and made creative. I don't know whether or not that's difficult.

I'm working at Naropa's Summer Writing Program this summer and one of the things that was talked about on a panel about hybridity in the context of what is cyborgean or monstrous is that the new is often monstrous or ugly because it is new or because we don't know how to look at / respond to / interact with it yet. This also suggests that we will, that it isn't impossible or “difficult.” And personally I would rather gaze into the eyes of Frankenstein than Hayden Christensen any day.

To pick up the idea that a text should be read horizontally as well as vertically in light of the term “close reading,” I would say that where I find my students most upset about “difficult” poetry is in their failed attempt to decode something. This act of decoding, perhaps, is what “accessible” poetry most often asks of its readers, to find the symbolism and the metaphors and etc. However, for me meaning is made primarily in the horizontal space of the book. A landscape of text or experience is being curated on each page, but also within the entire text. I don't expect readers to decode anything. I want to invite them into the linguistic experience of the “poetry.” Or maybe what should be “decoded” is process rather than symbolism or detail. You could hypothetically question or “closely read” the process / larger decisions of the book. Why interviews? Why essays and histories when these are actually poems? Why interviews/ essays and then research / bibliography and then poems? Why photographs of an unrelated twin relationship? Why no photos of me and my sister? Why bodies on the front of the book and faces on the back? Why three sections and not two? When I read or write about books of poetry I begin by asking questions like these, questions that examine how the text was curated. If someone's doing something with form I ask questions about that as a process too: Mathias Svalina's creations myths or Rusty Morrison's elegies or Julie Carr's notes or Alice Notley's epics, or Bernadette Mayer's sonnets, are all saying something about those forms, for example.

Hayden Christensen? What a reference. I like your idea about the curated experience/landscape of the text, and I like how this issue of taste itself (and all the ideological and prismatic spaces it implies) is present in a text. What are the things “around you” (intellectually) when you compose? From what kind of mental museum do you mine? Actually, at what point do you mark the beginning of art-/meaning-making? A gaze at a branch, a nagging film, the taste of a really bad cherry: do you begin to compose here, or elsewhere? I’m thinking of some kind of Cornellian experience of juxtapositions -- and how that would link thought and writing-labor.

Oh, I know. I didn't even know who Hayden Christensen was, but I asked Eric [Baus], “who would be the opposite of Frankenstein, like if I fell in love with someone and it happened to be Frankenstein, who would be opposite of that?” He said Hayden Christensen and I looked at a photo of him and thought yeah, that's right. To clarify, the grotesque is important here. I wanted Frankenstein's “opposite” to contain something I would find grotesque and Christensen certainly achieves that.  

Lately I've been thinking more about writing and ritual space, what that looks like or includes or turn towards. I've also been thinking about duration in writing. The second book I finished that will be out with Letter Machine in the fall started with an idea of duration. I wanted to start in a space outside of writing a single poem, but didn't want to limit this idea to the serial poem or the long poem. Instead I told myself I would write a novel (secretly, or not so secretly, it is of course poetry). The “novel” carries all sorts of problems with it, like characters, plot, conflict, etc. I only thought about character because as a poet the complication of pronouns was already present in my mind. Some traces of plot or conflict probably still exist in the work, but it's amazingly easy to ignore them. I've been wondering how ideas of duration might work in a creative writing workshop. I took a course called Durations at SAIC, but it was performance based. We would create one minute performances and then shift those into 30 minute performances or into six hour performances, or we would just make individual performances in varying lengths. After writing Half of What They Carried Flew Away, I prefer to think of my mode of writing as durational. But what does that look like? Could we in a workshop learn something by creating one-minute or one-sentence texts and then expanding those into nineteen paragraphs or by writing for one minute, writing for six hours, etc.? Do written ideas respond to durations in that way that bodily ideas do? In the performance art class I thought about how repetition or variation or tempo worked to expand or contract our durations. What was sustainable? What became too simple or stunted? Alongside this there are numerous examples of durational performances in the art world. How could writers translate or learn something from Tehching Hsieh's durational experiments, for example, or is this just a parallel thing, or perhaps a bad example of the possibilities found in duration?  I'm interested in the way these durational gestures enter into writing. Performance or duration of performance is always a ritual space, that is to say it contains or holds a particular focus, so that is part of the space of composition for me as well.

Also, the title of that book came from a specific experience. I was at a park down the street from my house where I found some milkweed growing near a creek, so I climbed down and pulled apart the milkweed and gathered its cottony insides. I collected a huge pile of the fluff in my arms and began to walk home. When I walked into the house I announced to Eric that “half of what I carried flew away.” I wrote that down and thought about what kind of experience it curates. What does it mean for half of the milkweed you're carrying to fly away? What other textures, images, feelings, etc. does that resemble? Half of What They Carried Flew Away grew out of those thoughts and also out of the essays I was teaching for a composition class on ways in which marginalized voices speak up to interrupt, or just to enter, and comment on or critique or call out or make visible a perspective previously shut out or unheard within the cultural narrative.

The title To Be Human Is to Be a Conversation resonates here as well, although this is not so much what that book is about. When we're not able or allowed to enter into conversation with the society we live within we are seen as less than human or as not-human. When we're locked out of a conversation, for whatever reason, we are in danger of becoming extinct, of flying away altogether. I think about this a lot now that corporations have their own “individual” voices. It strikes me as a pretty terrible idea to allow Chase Bank and AT & T and Comcast and Walmart these huge voices that eat up so much of the landscape and conversation. I'm also talking about the root system of our culture. Blogs allow more voices to enter the amorphous “conversation,” sure, but I'm talking about narrative and who is still left out or unheard or made submissive within the primary narrative of our American culture. For example the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, like Sacagawea's, is about the size of a quarter and thus got mixed up with the quarter. This of course led to the practical decision to remove it from circulation, from the cultural narrative, once again. You can collect it, store it in a drawer, keep it in your house somewhere, domestic and hidden, but it is not part of our public culture. You have to seek it out, cultivate it as a “special interest.” It historicizes or honors nothing. Another example I've been thinking about again is the Bechdel test for women in movies. I “test” every movie I watch now, and it's become unbearable.

As far as my writing practice goes, I don't write every day. Sometimes I don't write for months. When I'm not writing I'm working in the garden or making paintings or sewing or reading and taking notes or knitting. I need to have a question that I'm really interested in exploring in order to get started, usually an abstract question, a question of duration or a question of gesture or a question of proximity, system, etc. It matters less to me where the question comes from, whether out of an observation or a response or a sensation. I don't know that I really even mark that, though retrospectively I may be able to. What typically happens is I feel a silence, or maybe given what I talked about above, attention is a better word. I don't write for months, but I feel something going on at the back of the silence/attention. I read and notice and probably begin to curate some ideas, build some questions, but I don't know them and then one day I just do, and that's when I begin writing again. So maybe that is to say that the idea or the question comes from a level of consciousness that is not immediately accessible via language. I wait for it to become accessible and in the meantime I try to nourish it.

Institute Benjamenta “Classroom Dance”

Landscapes and Creatures Seven Piece Nesting Doll Set / Original Artwork

PJ Harvey In the Dark Places

Pauline Oliveros Monkey (this whole album over and over)

Cecilia Vicuna

Ana Mendieta

Bill Viola, “I do not know what it is I am like”

Abigail Child “Is This What You Were Born For?” (I wanted this to be “Covert Action” but I couldn't find it online).

Nicole Brossard

When you’re wittingly or unwittingly constructing a writing question within a period of silence, you are, I presume, acquiring lists and bits of things (that’s how it works for me, I think)... and then, do you find that the bits are themselves an architecture for the question? How often do you find yourself in direct response (or even some sort of mood-mimicry)? How often do you feel that the art you collect and consume is invisible, but fortifying (a set of nutrients in a series of meals)? For example, I constantly want to steal from Fassbinder, but so far, I can only use his work as a kind of mood-start, if that seems reasonable. I don’t know how to use his actual cinematic tricks, but I like just thinking about how it might work -- same with some older Woody Allen and with any bad horror film starring Vincent Price and his moustache -- and with, right now, Henry James’s loveliness of objects and secrets and despair. And then I pick up materials from you and from Phil [Sorenson] and from other friends -- and from these weird internet-based laceworks of other art (clicking on things for access to more things).

I guess I am most interested in how artists use abstract materials, seeing as issues of ownership seem useless and tacky and capitalist, but also seeing as I try to promote (with students and in my habits) a system of trick-stealing, so that to write is simply to be constantly on the make...

I'm not sure how to answer this except to talk about what happened when I wrote these two books we've been discussing. The process was pretty different for them both. The first book about my sister took forever to complete. This is because I felt responsible for telling the story, maybe for witnessing or confessing something about it. For years I had a manuscript called A Hem that is now a condensed version in the last section of the book. I had no idea it was about my sister and I. But one day I heard the title differently and realized this writing had been hemming two A's together, two Andreas. The bulk of this manuscript was written by the body and by that I mean, I wrote these poems as responses to a series of performances I had made at SAIC that I thought were about hemming, and suturing, and sewing, and sewing patterns, and division and continental drift, etc. When I began trying to write more directly about my experience with my sister I realized I had been writing about it indirectly for years and so I decided to let those two manuscripts merge. I wove the essays on sisterhood into the histories of reading as stitching, etc.

The second book was written in a period of about two months, just after I completed the PhD program at the University of Denver. That sprang from four years of extensive thinking and fragmented writing. I wrote by weaving together notes I had taken, though the majority of it (the questions in particular) came off the top of my head, furiously. I had all of this surplus to get down on paper, but most of the time I didn't know what it was. I purposely avoided knowing what it was. I knew too much what the sister project was, so I wanted to be unhindered by an idea. The question, as I said above, was about duration. But it wasn't really a question. More of a prompt, I guess. I decided to write “a novel” (quotes included), so that I could write something extensively. I tried to avoid knowing what the “novel” was about, so that what it was “about” would appear, as opposed to “be shaped.” About half way through the manuscript I knew who “they” (the main characters) were. I took a break for a week or so and tried to forget about who I thought “they” were. I do think there is a bit more shaping involved in the second half of the book, but I tried to leave it out as much as possible and tried to let “they” become other things/characters that I wasn't aware of yet. When I finished writing it, I was able to articulate what thinking/gathering/witnessing/contemplating had made it possible, but this activity was a concluding, not an opening part of the work. I also knew where the title came from, but did not decide or think about how the title related to what the novel was until after the novel was.

 

from New Organism by Andrea Rexilius

PART ONE: SÉANCE/A CRITICAL THEORY OF GRIEF SENSATIONS
Secrecy can function as a group, to maintain the identity of that group. To maintain the group’s shame. I have not yet functioned as a secret, as a person shrouded by shame. I have not been a group or the maintenance of a group. I have not seen a ghost, but I have dreamt one. I have not haunted anyone, but I have left traces in the hopes of haunting them. I have not built tunnels to the other-side of anything. I have not collected or perused the undersides of tabletops, of slips, of bottoms of bottles, but oh, how I have wanted to come undone in this way. I have not come undone in many ways, having learned early on what the result is. I have at times lost touch with my body. I have felt more like an aura than an organism. I have feared being psychic. I have feared being seen by those who are psychic, of presenting an energy I could not control. I have short-circuited watches and laptops and radios involuntarily. I have not been present at a séance, but I have tried to conduct a séance.

A séance functions as a perception. A stone feels like a dream. Imagine a dream with the weight of a stone or try in your dream to become a stone. A stone breathes and a stone becomes and a stone is perception traveling. I sleep with a stone in my ear. I listen to what the stone says. This is a séance. A stone may hold some ghosts. I used to say a tree would be a good place for a ghost to live and that all allergies were the result of ghosts in the body. Put your body ghosts in trees and eat wheat again, eat nuts and milk and put your ghosts to rest. Take refuge in the newly revived heart, and stomach, and liver. There is no shame in loving a ghost, or in dreaming as a stone dreams, with shifty eyes, like vessels cut open by the scalpel, like a drowning man in flight beneath the water, like a body ghost loving a tree ghost loving a person.

Loving a person is like a séance, in that it involves a strangeness and a necessity. It requires you to seize up in fits of possession. To become water, to become air, to become fluid. To say, We are both horses again, aren’t we. We are both in a race around this goddamn giant circle. We are both heaving forward with all four hands on the floor. We are pressing down the floorboards with our tongues. Marking the points of erasure of a person. Licking up the stains the body leaves behind, swallowing their shadows in the morning. When I lean this close to the floorboards I hear the wood whispering. I hear myself whispering to the wood.

I hear myself whispering to the wood, at night, on hilltops. I hear myself whispering at night in my sleep. What are my eyelids saying. At night the room fluctuates. Becomes other rooms, other landscapes. I am dreaming in this room while the other room of my dream heaves forward. Embeds itself in the coat-rack and the door-frame, seeps in between pages of a book. Later I find traces of it. A residue on the countertop, a piece of bark in the sink drain. The impression of an ear on the wall. I have the distinct sense that the dream is listening. The dream is carving out new ideas beneath the skin. The pores soak in their salt, sweat out the dream, move the dream upward into the light. Let the dream sink like a stone cradled inside the ear. The stone will absorb the dream, not necessarily bring the dream. Some people live on borrowed dreams and their eyes are shakier for it. It is best to dissolve a dream like this, to walk away from it and not turn back to check its progress.

While this progresses I am bathed in sunlight drinking a glass of milk. I am lapping a glass of milk from a bowl in my undergarments like a cat. I look in the low places beneath the dresser, under the door. I put my paws beneath the door and meow. I press my body against the walls, against the books, against the chair legs. I press myself against the furniture and the clothes and the doorknobs. I press myself against the windows, and the screens, and the fabrics and ask plaintively why these things are here. What purpose does it serve to separate me from mountains and rivers, from ravines and roads and light of the sun and lampposts and stars. I look with my cat eyes at the scene outside the window. I watch dandelion fluff float by. I jump toward leaves I cannot reach. I howl at the other cats if they look at me. I howl and puff-up my tail in their direction. I spit and hiss at the door-frame. I try to escape but I no longer wish to escape.

I no longer wish to escape without a trace like rust under the red lights of the city. I no longer want to leave stones behind to find my way back to the house. I walk the cages of the street, rattling their abandonment. In the morning I stop at the post-office. I walk through a glass door and suffer a migraine. I eat small vials of salt, and sand, and crushed oregano. I paint my ribcage red and make a print that looks like lungs on the wall. I reminisce about the color orange. I drink orange juice and lay on the lawn, still wet with dew. I watch clouds roll by and become a cloud. I sail up into the air. I hyperventilate and come back down. I am a girl, and what does it feel like to be a girl. It feels like a hand over your mouth. A hand over your mouth and on your thighs. Some say it is the sound of a rabbit before it is caught. I say it is the sound of the sky before it comes crashing down.

Before it comes crashing down it is suspended. And then, as it moves, it evaporates. I conduct a study to find out which gender is more concerned with death. I find out it is men. I have never much regarded death, or cared one way or the other, as long as I do not die by the hands of men, in strange and brutal ways. Death has never been particularly interesting. I prefer the ocean depths or night sky to feel unwieldy. I have never wanted what was beyond death, except for the dust of it, to become a material. A fine grain of something. A thing the wind could truly lift. And to be disparate for once, and whole. To be in the sea and on the oak leaves. To be breath inside all the bodies and to be unseen and slipping through all of those hands, toward the light and away from the light, free of the face of the body.
I face my body the way a moth faces light. I graze the edges of the room, edges of the city, edges of the continent. I touch water with my ankles and my fingertips. Weather moves and you move with it. Your pores unlatching, your thighs unhinged in wild grasses and flowers above the beach. Rushing headlong into them, them bending back and resting you gently against the earth. I told a girl I would meet her here, like this. We would know the moment. The sky would be a brand new sky. It would be bruised and clouds would rush toward us like smoke. We would make a pilgrimage then. We would live in the nest of grasses at the ocean. We would live in Sonoma County. It wouldn’t matter when.

It wouldn’t matter when the ice melted or when the fog lifted. It wouldn’t matter how the water looked or where the horizon ended. We would not need a boat. I would become the boat or fin we need to travel. I would become the face of death. I would face death and tell him to fuck off. I would tear up love letters death writes to me that are just Depeche Mode lyrics anyway. I will not drink Zima with death. I will not raise the roof with death. I walk away into a field of my own choosing, and as the sun comes down, I place the stone back inside my ear earnestly.
I place the stone back instead my ear earnestly. I swallow the world and I listen to the world. I have met the world’s ghost. I am related to trees and I know the tree of knowledge. I am related to trees and I used to be a tree. Now I am uprooted. I am a new organism craving light. My mother is Francesca Woodman. She is standing in a room with a turtle. Our great problem is post-revolutionary. A space where one can be a sensation and outplay the law. My mother, Francesca Woodman, is at a loss for words. She is unsayable. Her body is a body of pictures. Are these pictures shocking? Only if you are underwater. And then they reflect grief sensations.