Thank you very much, Sam, and thank you to the Poetry Center.
A special thank you to the instructors of the Honors
College who hosted us this week; Aurelie and I
got to visit them.
I was very impressed by the questions
that their students asked.
I understand we will not be doing a Q and A tonight,
so I'm going to read very briefly from a statement
about this work that I hope will ground it and contextualize it.
"La Chola Martina was a derogatory alias
bestowed on Martina Espinoza.
A woman believed by white Angelenos
to be an acquaintance of the bandit, Juan Flores.
In 1857, Flores and his men killed Sheriff Barton
and most of his posse in the countryside
outside Los Angeles.
The accusation that Martina Espinoza tampered
with the Barton posse's guns fueled
a wave of retaliatory lynching and murder
targeting Hispanic men.
Artist and chronicler, Ken Gonzales-Day reports that
the shout pouch was, quote, 'A most beautiful necklace
of human ears strung on a rawhide string intended
to prove that the wearer had successfully killed Hispanic
men.'
Hispanic vigilante posses wore the necklaces
to reassure the Anglo community.
I can imagine a little devaluation, a little hunger,
rolling blackouts, the ease with which we
ourselves right here could get that ugly.
But really, I can't for very long,
see people as anything other than people, which is probably
a systemic virtue.
These poems, I guess, are trying to trace that system,
its buttressing and fissures.
There are also here loving quarrels
with writers and artists--
Rilke, Yoko Ono, Melville, Goya, --about how art does, and does
not make spaces for violence.
Ken Gonzales-Day writes that photographic archives
can hardly tell us the difference between a Californio
condemned to death by vigilante squad or kangaroo court,
and a Californian member of the landed gentry.
Conventions of 19th century portraiture
were such that everyone came to be dignified by the lens.
And all came to be subsumed under the label of Mexican
and its variants by photographic archivists who
valued neither the rectitude of a high collared shirt,
nor the specificity of a death.
So that seemed a metaphor enough.
I started putting things in that truck
that my daughter appears and fades away,
that she's coming into her phenotypes
and into her genitals, and into the pulsing
network these make when we turn them
into identities and stories.
My need to be her archive, to arrest her
as an artifact of her origin, yet to see her in process,
delaying form, disturbed and disturbing, and my need
to know how we can within and through archive, narrative,
photograph, and painting, see anything at all."
One more prefatory remark, this is a quotation
that I found in an essay by Nathaniel Mackey
on the poetry of Robert Duncan.
Charles Alexander encouraged me to read this essay.
I don't know if he's here tonight, but thank you,
Charles.
And I intend this as a self-critical gesture.
Rene Char apparently said, "Art knows nothing of history,
but helps itself to its terror."