I want to talk with you about the archive of memory
stored in the muscle of all bodies,
even the body of the book.
Imagine a narrative as it reveals itself, the swell
and swarm of it on stone, the slow metamorphosis
pre and post page.
Imagine the many, many transfusions
between before and after.
Imagine an impossible book and body
as they realized themselves.
I've been investigating the book as an appendage of the body
and the body as an appendage to the book, the slow apparition
in between flanked with tissue nerves and light.
I've been exploring the book pre book,
meditating within the necessary gestation period of a narrative
pre and post ink through my own muscle memory,
but also the muscle memories of thread paper fiber
on fired and fired clay.
I come to the space of the page, three-page, and nest
with the feeling that I must bridge my body out
of its collapse.
Writing is the retrieval of material
to produce a desired shape.
A question that birds might consider,
what is the distance between material and building site?
What will be lost in transit?
How can a writer prevent unwanted distraction and decay
within a narrative and within herself?
Birds and insects build structures and tension.
Many solve the problem of ephemerality
with secretions from their own bodies, silk, wax, feathers,
and fecal cement.
Reproduction and writing cannot be understood without nest
consideration, its content, materiality,
and spatial relationships.
Nests and narratives are pre-natal,
a clutch for eggs and honey.
What is archived in order for something else
to be unarchived within the nest and body and palm.
The structural engagement of a book
can be a site of radical transformation.
Often it is the completed manuscript that is celebrated.
I am interested in what the body and narrative must
undergo in order for the book to come into existence.
So I slow the process in an attempt
to bring its becoming into focus.
I handle a wet slab of clay, fillet it into uneven strips
and begin a shape, a dwelling for the manuscript
I am composing.
I want to feel somewhere between my body and the page,
how and why these books are written
and how they might be inhabited.
These nests still in their wet stage
as they are built become places of engagement
while writing an experience in ephemerality, something
like hallucination or hypnosis.
But writing becomes something tangible as I handle the clay.
I understand language to be a thing of the body
of the physical world.
I manipulate the clay and I can feel languages syntax.
Its muscle body contract below me.
And since these nests are the book,
I don't yet know what their relationship will
be to the completed manuscript because for me these nests that
hang here in the Poetry Center and that hang in my living room
are inextricable from the book as it rests on the page
and as it builds itself within my thinking body.
So these nests, then, are maybe a kind of bridge or dwelling,
but sometimes that feels too pretty.
Maybe they are also like a butcher's block
or a midwife scalpel or the place in the corner
where a woman alone might crouch,
squat near the floor, her hands between her legs
as she gives birth, a place to climb within and rest or ride,
the place to gestate the book and proliferate its story as it
realizes itself through me.
I often wonder why I've made them public,
these nests, this writing process,
these spilt books next to the eventual book as it is written.
And then I remember the reactions of people
as they encounter these nests with their spilling mouths,
and it's helped me to understand the latest
relationship between myself, the page and its eventual reader.
These nests as I hang suspended with my shredded manuscripts
scrambled in their bellies and spewing from the mouths
become a different kind of book.
What is a book inhabited, tangible but unable
to be turned leaf by leaf, its spine and gutter
hammock in the palms.
I hang these chambers upon the wall,
and in doing so I'm saying to my reader,
please climb with me into under the sentence.
These nests are teaching me about my hesitancy
in reading, what I am willing and unwilling to risk.
So here I open my own belly.
You walk up to the split lips of the nest
and I feel as if you are somehow seeing
some secret inside of me.
I've been thinking a lot about shame, the shames I hold
and carve out of and into myself,
how these nesting places that I create for my manuscripts
in progress are vessels associated with learning
a kind of shamelessness.
I put them in the world, my nests, the manuscript not
yet completed.
These are open mouths and bellies.
These second mouths might be the sex between my legs, open
and having voice visible.
Writing for me is closely linked to ritual and desire,
the allowance of feeling of wanting, the giving in.
It is sometimes terrifying to write.
Sometimes it is painful.
Sometimes it is near orgasmic and then
the shame associated with all of that, the shame
of the body and its voice.
I want to learn a kind of shamelessness.
These nests let me look at these things
on the other side of myself.
I can put them on the wall, stuff them silly and stuff them
and then stuff them again.
They have become what has made writing possible pleasurable.
I think of the solitude one sits within as one
casts a manuscript.
I wonder about the writing space, this strange place
at the threshold of the page where
I forage sound into shape, where I am exactly here, everywhere,
and nowhere at once.
No one shares this space with me except my imagined reader
and even she is not here with me always.
The manuscript builds itself with or without you,
but also within you.
Sometimes it kills itself, cannibalizes, ghosts so much so
that maybe it never existed, how to convince yourself,
yes, I've been living in the belly of a hungry ghost,
this thing that must be invoked to the other side of the body.
So I wet my hands with mud and begin.
I carve a fragment in sound.
I bring this cannibalisation into focus.
The first night I began writing this for you
all I dreamed of the bay upon who shore I was raised.
The dream is larger than I can remember, but at its center
I swam as an utter night searching.
I was looking to encounter a rare pod of oceanic women
for in the dream I understood it was their season of crossing
this bay.
Days passed before the first woman surfaced.
I swam and dreaming women in nightgowns
with buoy, bellies to the sky, buoyant to slow
arching into under again.
I understood that these dreaming women
were writing as they passed eyes closed, their faces relaxed
and sleep, their mouths open, tongue searching
with the soft feet of a clam.
And as they turn deeper whirling over,
I could see their nightgown backs
where the pages and covers of books
were shingled along growing like a fibrous exoskeleton.
Thank you.