WEBVTT

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I want to talk with you
about the archive of memory

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stored in the muscle
of all bodies,

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even the body of the book.

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Imagine a narrative as it
reveals itself, the swell

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and swarm of it on stone,
the slow metamorphosis

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pre and post page.

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Imagine the many,
many transfusions

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between before and after.

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Imagine an impossible
book and body

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as they realized themselves.

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I've been investigating the
book as an appendage of the body

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and the body as an appendage to
the book, the slow apparition

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in between flanked with
tissue nerves and light.

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I've been exploring
the book pre book,

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meditating within the necessary
gestation period of a narrative

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pre and post ink through
my own muscle memory,

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but also the muscle memories
of thread paper fiber

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on fired and fired clay.

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I come to the space of the
page, three-page, and nest

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with the feeling that I
must bridge my body out

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of its collapse.

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Writing is the
retrieval of material

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to produce a desired shape.

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A question that
birds might consider,

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what is the distance between
material and building site?

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What will be lost in transit?

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How can a writer prevent
unwanted distraction and decay

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within a narrative
and within herself?

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Birds and insects build
structures and tension.

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Many solve the problem
of ephemerality

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with secretions from their own
bodies, silk, wax, feathers,

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and fecal cement.

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Reproduction and writing cannot
be understood without nest

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consideration, its
content, materiality,

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and spatial relationships.

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Nests and narratives
are pre-natal,

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a clutch for eggs and honey.

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What is archived in
order for something else

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to be unarchived within
the nest and body and palm.

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The structural
engagement of a book

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can be a site of
radical transformation.

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Often it is the completed
manuscript that is celebrated.

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I am interested in what
the body and narrative must

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undergo in order for the
book to come into existence.

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So I slow the
process in an attempt

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to bring its
becoming into focus.

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I handle a wet slab of clay,
fillet it into uneven strips

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and begin a shape, a
dwelling for the manuscript

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I am composing.

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I want to feel somewhere
between my body and the page,

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how and why these
books are written

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and how they might be inhabited.

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These nests still
in their wet stage

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as they are built become
places of engagement

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while writing an experience
in ephemerality, something

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like hallucination or hypnosis.

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But writing becomes something
tangible as I handle the clay.

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I understand language to
be a thing of the body

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of the physical world.

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I manipulate the clay and I
can feel languages syntax.

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Its muscle body
contract below me.

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And since these
nests are the book,

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I don't yet know what
their relationship will

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be to the completed manuscript
because for me these nests that

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hang here in the Poetry Center
and that hang in my living room

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are inextricable from the
book as it rests on the page

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and as it builds itself
within my thinking body.

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So these nests, then, are maybe
a kind of bridge or dwelling,

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but sometimes that
feels too pretty.

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Maybe they are also
like a butcher's block

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or a midwife scalpel or
the place in the corner

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where a woman
alone might crouch,

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squat near the floor, her
hands between her legs

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as she gives birth, a place to
climb within and rest or ride,

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the place to gestate the book
and proliferate its story as it

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realizes itself through me.

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I often wonder why
I've made them public,

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these nests, this
writing process,

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these spilt books next to the
eventual book as it is written.

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And then I remember
the reactions of people

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as they encounter these nests
with their spilling mouths,

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and it's helped me to
understand the latest

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relationship between myself, the
page and its eventual reader.

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These nests as I hang suspended
with my shredded manuscripts

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scrambled in their bellies
and spewing from the mouths

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become a different kind of book.

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What is a book inhabited,
tangible but unable

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to be turned leaf by
leaf, its spine and gutter

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hammock in the palms.

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I hang these chambers
upon the wall,

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and in doing so I'm
saying to my reader,

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please climb with me
into under the sentence.

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These nests are teaching
me about my hesitancy

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in reading, what I am willing
and unwilling to risk.

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So here I open my own belly.

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You walk up to the
split lips of the nest

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and I feel as if you
are somehow seeing

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some secret inside of me.

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I've been thinking a lot
about shame, the shames I hold

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and carve out of
and into myself,

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how these nesting places that
I create for my manuscripts

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in progress are vessels
associated with learning

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a kind of shamelessness.

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I put them in the world, my
nests, the manuscript not

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yet completed.

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These are open
mouths and bellies.

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These second mouths might be
the sex between my legs, open

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and having voice visible.

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Writing for me is closely
linked to ritual and desire,

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the allowance of feeling
of wanting, the giving in.

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It is sometimes
terrifying to write.

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Sometimes it is painful.

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Sometimes it is near
orgasmic and then

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the shame associated with
all of that, the shame

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of the body and its voice.

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I want to learn a
kind of shamelessness.

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These nests let me
look at these things

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on the other side of myself.

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I can put them on the wall,
stuff them silly and stuff them

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and then stuff them again.

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They have become what has made
writing possible pleasurable.

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I think of the solitude
one sits within as one

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casts a manuscript.

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I wonder about the writing
space, this strange place

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at the threshold
of the page where

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I forage sound into shape, where
I am exactly here, everywhere,

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and nowhere at once.

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No one shares this space with
me except my imagined reader

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and even she is not
here with me always.

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The manuscript builds
itself with or without you,

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but also within you.

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Sometimes it kills itself,
cannibalizes, ghosts so much so

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that maybe it never existed,
how to convince yourself,

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yes, I've been living in
the belly of a hungry ghost,

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this thing that must be invoked
to the other side of the body.

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So I wet my hands
with mud and begin.

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I carve a fragment in sound.

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I bring this
cannibalisation into focus.

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The first night I began
writing this for you

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all I dreamed of the bay
upon who shore I was raised.

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The dream is larger than I can
remember, but at its center

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I swam as an utter
night searching.

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I was looking to encounter
a rare pod of oceanic women

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for in the dream I understood
it was their season of crossing

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this bay.

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Days passed before the
first woman surfaced.

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I swam and dreaming
women in nightgowns

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with buoy, bellies to
the sky, buoyant to slow

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arching into under again.

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I understood that
these dreaming women

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were writing as they passed
eyes closed, their faces relaxed

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and sleep, their mouths
open, tongue searching

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with the soft feet of a clam.

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And as they turn
deeper whirling over,

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I could see their
nightgown backs

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where the pages
and covers of books

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were shingled along growing
like a fibrous exoskeleton.

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Thank you.

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