OK.
So the next group I'm going to read
are from this book called Poses, and they are poems
written in a drawing group.
And here's a tentative cover.
Actually they're both possible covers, it's exciting.
So it's coming out in the fall.
So I just used to go to a drawing room,
and I wanted to use the conventions
of the withdrawing group to get in under too much deliberation,
or overwhelm, or dazzle, and just write.
And just use the time limits of the poses, and the immediacy.
Bringing the model helped me come back into the room.
So I went to this drawing group with Selina Trieff
and Bob Henry in New York mostly,
and then there were some other places too.
So they're short.
Some of them literally they were two minute poses,
or three minute, or five, seven, 10.
And so I'm just going to pause between them.
So what I did was just write continuously
and not on drawing paper with a pencil, which
is another way they're related to carbon-14.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
Actually when I first got here, I
was writing in my journal in bed.
And I was like, "I'd better write with a pencil
so I don't get ink on the sheets which I usually do."
And so the first thing I did when I was here,
was start to write with a pencil.
And it just has been this constant throughout
in all these different ways.
OK so I'm just going to read a group of these,
and I'll just pause between them,
but I won't stop until I leave the group.
The pose seeks to catch the model somewhere
between where she thought she was supposed to be,
and where she thinks she is supposed to be.
Here we are 12 of us in a semicircle
studying this person naked and kneeling on one knee,
looking off into a spot on the floor.
Fill in the rest, creamy Narcissus
See on the bank of a river watching
one point that is never still under his gaze,
he's the still one.
A river inside him fixed between these two coursing rivers,
his attention.
The only thing he can hope to hold still.
His fingernails and the ocean floor
together advance in their year long inch.
Even a mountain as certain grammars have noticed,
belongs to a category of action.
Now the model is on hot sand, the crocheted blanket
digs into his knees.
He's captured for these purposes, his weary course
across the desert.
No water in sight, nothing worth turning back for.
He leans into it, face turned in against the sharp wind
that breaks across his skull.
All the weight collecting in his hands, blood of the whole body
held in his hands.
I can't look at the model, Its cracking me up
that he's moving his lips as he keeps time silently.
[GIGGLES]
A clock in the proctored classroom.
We expect the model's clock to be internalized and perfectly
calibrated, moving from one two minute pose to the next.
Like freesia buds opening one by one
along the curve of the stock.
At least, I no longer feel like laughing.
He's breaking the frame, no illusion that we're
operating out of time.
If the drawing marked off seconds like that,
would anyone want to look at it?
10 minute pose.
Some things have been decided for me:
the placement of his palm against the belly
of his hamstring, the forward movement of his leg,
cant of his head, torsion of spine and rib cage,
how much time I've been given to study this arrangement.
Sometimes, it takes your own hand to move your leg forward.
The lead line wrapped around buttercups back legs,
coaxing her across the paddock.
How she hopped her hooves ahead with the pressure of the lead.
Where is the model trying to go, that he
needs a leather lead lined looped around his leg?
Or trying not to go, where is he trying to stay?
I told Richard, "You were my guide through the underworld."
He said, "Where are we now?"
That's Richard McCann, he was the most amazing teacher.
And precisely for saying things like that just when you think
you're of the woods.
[LAUGHTER]
Sorry.
It's not over.
The model's head tilts up in profile toward an exhaust fan,
and a fly circles above.
Actually not circles, please forgive my one plain sight
bias.
A fly darts the polyhedral geometry
dictated by the dueled surface of its eyes.
What I can see of her is far less
than the fly, who would view her through facets even
if it were standing still.
Which it is not, which she is not, which I am not.
The fly is long gone, and still I mention it here.
At 2:00.
If I could live my life like a two-minute pose,
look, see the gesture, embody the gesture,
water posits itself over the stone.
It shapes the stone and is shaped, time's up.
At 5:00.
And the monitor today has a digital timer, no ticking.
I didn't realize there was no ticking, until I heard
other sounds in its absence.
I would have noticed it sooner, if I were modeling.
Even if someone else operates the timer,
the model is in charge of time.
We in these five minute oceans can forget about it.
It's being stopped, held for us.
Like every new hack horse, Leon tacked up and held for me
as I pressed my foot into the stirrup
and swung onto its back.
Its haunches collecting underneath, tail switching,
tongue tossing the steel bit.
She's bending forward as if to pick something up,
but the gesture is held.
What you see is the intention but not the act,
not the thing lifted.
The moment before the action: foreplay, interruption,
afterglow, after life all ascribed primacy to one action
or state over another.
Reaching for something is as real as holding it.
Seated pose.
Stability of squared shoulders, hips, knees, and feet,
dreamed this diagram.
A line drawing as in a dictionary, of a woman seated
on a straight back chair.
A double dotted line indicating a band,
starts at her pubic mound.
And the word mound is somehow stressed and ends at her mouth.
Alongside it a dotted arrow points up
with an animated instruction, "One firm,
swift lap of the tongue is straight up the dotted line.
All one stroke," it emphasizes.
Under the drawing, this brass label prose.
We know it's a leg, do you really need two edges
when you're struggling against time?
[FLIPS PAGE]
What's preoccupying me today is the pressure
at the membrane, where I come in contact with the sensory world.
Formlessness presses form, wants to grind against it.
The materials are so unreliable though:
language, perception, attention.
"If any one of those are more exact,
it might not feel so exquisitely confounding."
I declared all this to S. He held up his palm
and said, "Here, push.
The relief resistance brings, the proof someone's there.
What I want is to fuck the poem.
[FLIPS PAGE]
And today, Ellie."
Ellie, p-town showgirl, 73 years young as her sign
reads on the stereo system she pulls through town
in a radio flyer wagon.
"I'll keep my own time," she tells the monitor.
Here, Ellie wears not her camisole and miniskirt, just
elegant drop pearl earrings.
Riding down commercial street, I hear her before I see her.
Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland in her generous baritone offered
as if to each person directly.
Patrons drop their dollars into her white bathroom trash
can with its sharpie marker, thank you.
Or they pick up a copy of her Xerox life story held down
by a rock for $3.
Here we are at the shoreline.
Breasts nudging at a presence, penis receding from one
tucked between her crossed thighs.
"There you are with yours, and here I am with mine.
So I guess we'll just be leaving it at this."
She sings as we draw.
Ellie for 60 some years held a long pose
as Elliot holding still.
I love you, I honestly love you.
Her timer rings and Sal marks the pose with chalk and masking
tape.
Ellie gathers her legs under her and rises out of the outline
her body leaves.
During the break, Ellie sands facing
the wall reading the banner wearing only her rabbit fur
jacket.
There's something about the nudity continuing
through the break, that exhausts people.
Like falling asleep with the light on.
When the model puts on her robe for the break,
it is not only for the model's sake.
The fur jacket ending just above the tan lines from her string
bikini, creates a zone of attention
that peripherally pulls people from their conversations
they're trying to have.
And causes them to look into their beverages as they talk,
rather than take the chance of looking in Ellie's direction.
She takes off her jacket and resumes the pose.
It is as if a hot fan has been turned off,
everyone resumes drawing and Ellie starts to sing.
Covering the paper in charcoal and drawing
by erasing, in conflict scour your sense
of your own accountability.
And if still there's something left in the other when
you're through , address that.
His fist pushes against his thigh,
he's working at something.
From the wood shop next door hammering,
and Selina's grandsons hamsters stir in their cage.
I want a white stripe down my chest, like Orble.
Which means, I want fur.
Which I do.
And to walk on four legs, especially when
going up the hill.
The models bearing in which no degree of expectation rests,
makes the weighting in my own body fluoresce.
The three second delay.
Last night I played pool at vixen
for a while with an Irish snookerer.
He wasn't playing his best, he said.
But he still had lots of fancy angles, or fancy English.
"In every ball score, you stay down on the shot
until you're done," he told me, "Miss, you're
holding the cue too high.
See if you can sight lower on the cue."
"Sure," I thought, "Sight lower on the cue," that
sounds really good.
And I stored his sincere suggestion just off
to the side of my body.
In the delta just inside the misregistered police outline,
where I stash everything I'll do when my actual life begins.
[CLEARS THROAT]
And one more read.
The model is lying on her back with her legs
slung over to the right, and her head turned to the left.
I can feel the release of it.
The opening of the chest, the twist of the spine,
stretch along the side, haptic knowledge.
How does the drawing record that knowledge?
What are the traces of subjective experience?
Yesterday when we did handstands against the wall in yoga
I'd love pitching forward onto my hands, the feel of my legs
balancing above my hips, the exchange of weight
inverting the usual traffic of blood and gravity.
All day I kept replaying that action in my mind,
all that was left was actually to do the handstand right there
on Fifth Avenue.
Now my hand is on Louie's head, dog of miraculous comebacks.
In my hand, all the dogs heads I've
held sweet tilt to his face.
Maybe Selina can tell the neighbors,
he would have fewer problems if he weren't so good at living.
Now he's pushing the full weight of his will
into me, right under my hand what keeps him alive.
Petting Louie has become my drawing.
So that book will be coming out with this press called
Kelly's Cove Press.
It's a small press in San Francisco,
and the publisher is a poet and writer named Bart Schneider.
And he used to work with the loft in Minnesota
and then he moved to San Francisco
and started his press.
And so it should be like October or something.