WEBVTT

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I'm going to read a poem.

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It's a long poem about an
artist named Ana Mendieta, who's

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a huge influence on my
work, even though she's

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in a completely different field.

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I don't know if some
of you know who she is.

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But she did kind of Earth
art and performance art,

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and she was Cuban.

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She was exiled in
the United States

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from Cuba in some kind
of special program,

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and she was murdered
by her husband.

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But she is to me one of the most
significant feminist artists

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of the 20th century, so
that's why I wrote this poem.

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It's called "A Devil Inside
Me" after Ana Mendieta.

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"One.

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Seven powers, ye
who are so sticky

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with our divine effusions, I
kneel in thee with great piety

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and exploit your intercession
through the Great Spirit.

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See my petition and grant
me agency and vision.

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Please remove any
obstacle which causes me

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to stray from the beauty way.

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Olofi, I trust in the words
'The personal is political.'

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Let it be so.

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Two.

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Art had a problem.

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Her body was explicit
abattoir with its ribbons

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of sulfur smoke and raw animus.

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Her body was a meteor, but
it wasn't being written.

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Press a hand into Earth's flesh.

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Duplexity comes
up like inception.

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The body print is an illegible
surge, a bleeding trace of self

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en route.

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The figure like a bottle
of wine, stiff as a board,

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grave as lead.

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What moves underneath?

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The moss silhouette,
mute but vatic.

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Three.

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Inside the thicket, the tree.

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Inside the tree, heart.

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Inside heart, the water where
body garlands to the surface

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like fur.

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The body a territory.

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From inside the territory,
call for reversal.

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The call for reversal
is native first.

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Four.

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Water encloses
the body's vestige

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in a conspiracy of sticks,
or the body schemes

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with verger and mud
ambrosia in a tree trunk,

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that baptismal consecration.

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Art history banished
the body and its sopping

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glut and customary expulsion.

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The body pushes back.

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She is found
embedded, heart exuded

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in the wind, the study in stone
outcroppings, in land, marvel.

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Torrent of impulse,
torrent of unlikeliness,

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implacable corpse in
the aesthetic mortuary,

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and for this she brought
the process of gunpowder.

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For this work, audience and
documentation from every vista,

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each atom as witness and cohort.

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Five.

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Because she's
marginalized in situ,

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she stitches hairs to her face.

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Her squinting mug is
coarse mistress parody.

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Bloodied mortification
and witness

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makes her work Marianism.

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Raised in paper houses and
their attendant infiltration,

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immersed in these
new reclamations,

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she strips the land of
its nationalist fripperies

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for scrap metal.

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Six.

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The body is a battleground.

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Drone attacks on it.

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If it's broken, they buy it.

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If it's splayed on the table
for dissection, they bought it.

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Blood is the enterprise.

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The rocket in their
pocket is a passport.

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The wind tucks the ash into its
pulsing, to seize that force

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and dam up the rivers with
it, and furrow the Earth

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with an atoning blood cure, and
rise up into a storm to divide

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the sky, real prayer
woven in the threads.

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Seven.

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It's natal, no hesitation.

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She was brought up alien,
arbiter of corpus release

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and brute transients.

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The crevasse effect craters
into mistranslated exoticism.

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Maps aren't the
discourse for it.

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The seam of long haired rosary
wipes out that old sovereignty.

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Automaton just never
felt right, neither did

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provincial white goddess.

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The traces of fervor
in the very ventricles

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of the conjoined earths.

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The terrain is dark
asylum, positive darkness,

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naturally mutilation.

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Eight.

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Why this kingdom?

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You find the stone on a mountain
fit with others like it.

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Not trees, houses,
villages, or wells.

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This empire is disappeared.

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Only seldom voices, stones
with ours tethered to them.

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The goddess is
dead from treason,

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so her people fade white
as water in the cold,

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then disappear into
the stone horizon,

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become the wall space."

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