"Alyson Singes".
Hi all, I'm Alyson.
Some people call me Al.
I am many things to many.
A few thyinge to some, and nothing
but an irritant to socialites and othire glossing
troglodytes.
Just don't call me Alice.
I dig conversation, but the only rabbit I ever liked
is rabbit in prunes of Agen, sauted in duck fat,
or a conys in Hoggepotte.
It's been a long time, quod she, some and 600.
Everything was different, yet pretty much the same.
God above ruled all, and the Franks the rest.
Womenfolk were owned, ne trafficked, nor ghosted, and so
were most workfolk enserfed.
Sunsets were redder then-- legs, a little shorter.
In my time, I made my bed a stretch a streowen.
For many leien in hoo we did!
It's like ha said, my mie Emma--
Goldman, great lasse, freedom fighter.
Ha loose, free from ties--
if I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
You know tis on the home front, it begins.
Womenfolks development.
Hire freedom, hire independence, must come from and through hire
self, quod she.
And ha poked how she preached, she reproached,
and she fought and paid a high price
for a whole lot of decent raving.
I kenow this wheel, who've got a big front, I can't deny.
I've got appetit.
It's for fighting and humming, for heming good fight ability.
Easier said thanne doon, but ne will
have lovemakes plow my garden without checking out
the instruments and the state of their flowering.
And that is basically how she-- for there
could be no doubt of her sex, though the fashion of the time
did something to disguise it, chopped the esitant haitch off
my head with a vigorous smile and entered
the scene of my need.
Lo, she seyde, dont bleed me, give me light.
Everywhere I go, I hear about what
was a range of movements and battles for social revolution,
love and respeck and swich human diuersitie-- all manner
of this, that, and the annar dm.
What was serious glosage and causes
in groups and cells of selves, deep corage for deep psycho
rev groping together.
Pushing the homefront out in all fields and croppings,
laboring your entries into history,
I am majorly impressed.
Yea should be dancing--
Course for certayn, nis all what gold glitters.
Ye tell me nah that ye free.
Crusading got jammed in larder, sugary spices still rise
from the ire of your fruits, hidden held up tightly
from grouperie, don't proteck cont protest, much open
to abusage.
Didn't break nuff skin sgot a bad vibe, all gone volauvent,
barely scratchte the crust of that pasty geologically
speaking.
Nested generacion wilt open same olde bloody can,
what's for certeyn.
Ye tell me still, no woman, no lie's, still a no go zone,
violent fliquée.
Full of flipping eruptions and reruns, voices,
voices whimpering, language, language, language.
Names hurled down, doors pushed down, bodies burned.
Burns bashed to pull, pounded, pissed on, drag, drop, remove.
Noffing under low ceilings but the peeling of pain,
and I'm barely glosing.
Experience shows any one hark ye, listen up,
never be any free all pawned in 2D wooed in mirage.
Gender is no army for nought.
A structure for industry innit.
Indeedy don't know any oon, born oh, but oh, become so--
'member ne give a fig takes the queen that which
bulges same trousing.
Folk be arranged one type per pair,
so never be stood for long one on one.
Disallowed one for one.
Nor on any accounting there be o wit o.
And what if I present as a pair of divine cows diverse in form,
free to chew, 'n nit be jailed nor killed for it.
What if I pressent three graces, the good, the bold,
and the shaved.
Like that pic-- by what great queer Della Grace 'n
nat be jailed nor killed for it.
Or like what artist Rodney McMillan, who sow
seams to see what seems to keep things the way
they moostn't be like, things black like shiny,
landscape of black textile erectiles for instance,
sown up in white thread-- what do ye see?
Red.
Certes everything feels different.
Lo, the rains are devastating.
Networks vaster than all of England's castels
assembled but perhappes tis more like same bus, more workers,
more voters, or even more workers--
less votes.
Doubt enters oon, doubt works on ones, doubt has that one,
doubt questions hire, doubt increases doubt, dissipates
anger, overwhelm, doubt overtakes, over does it,
doubt eats, out at the throat.
Eats out the foughts, doubt eats out the love,
enters the liver, the kidneys, doubt builds up more bile.
Blocks the arteries, cramps up the limbs, the style--
doubt balloons oon, doubt makes them heavy with doubt,
and they grow absent, hair by hair.
Searching my bodice, I objected it to various kinds,
wrapping my body around my neck.
Nat ulikt a goose, a swan, or a cran--
strakt to crane,
certes my neck thus stretched, nat
ulikt the common hern or heron, or powerful cormeraunt.
Low flying ocean catcher what strange flemengo
is the sacred ibis, round and round, the ancient
and the recent egrets.
My throat was wrapde to limit around itself.
Bad air come out this side of knot, that side the nus,
a bestiary unhinges a rep of forgetting.
I knew bare bones about kenowing and kenulling,
negating annulling, move into muscle focus.
Ye know, ignorance nis bliss.
This shackle been warping my fitness.
Nah the animal is in me thinking, growing, learning,
pumping my bum cheeks to breast buns-- mental concentrate
much improved.
Soon could chillax my efforts.
Soften up with ointments.
Get waxed all over.
Mead and prepare for all those that
would be precious without doubt make me trouly.
Get your freak on, I said.
Some founde me 2 sexy.
Same 2 saucy, just like a maiden,
touched for the very firest time.
Some me founde real hot.
Ik feel love, I said throughout summer.
Then I spin round a recors, I'm alone.
It's like ha said, slim lady, from now on I
commit my body and my language.
Byways, please nat let what weedy poet, Caroline Bergman
or outher represent me.
Ha means well, but won't go the whole hog-- too bloody
well educated, makes her circumflexed.
All these books, and still hey don't-- and still,
hey doesn't finish her sentence/s.
She just doesn't have a big front, far too creeped out.
Books used to be me forbidden.
And writing them unfinkable.
Some things best women not understand, affirmed Juvenal,
or was that Furnivall.
Language cropped back to minimum for
fear I might speak like Eve did who spoke, Saint Bernard sayn,
but once and threw the world into disorder.
Books, or bokes, or bookes, as we call them then,
were used to keep chicks and outher menial
birds on the farm down.
Like Joan ne sheep, and they who burn small fry.
And odires are stoned, while armies of clerics cuss them
with their höly bök.
Certes y wet wool I used to be, physically
beaten with large voluminous, leather bound to the bed.
While my many manly folks would read and balk by the fire
at the succubines that fill their pages and agree, Pardee,
the sexual life of bitches sure is a dark continent
for psychologie.
This stuff's been filling their pages ever
since quote Simone de Beaver at great length.
Pardee, today's mother- hating scribes
squeeze old sham out of the same greased up postules,
just different spelt. By God, if women hadde written stories
as clerkes han withinnne hire oratories,
they wolde han written of men moore wikkednesse than al
the mark of Adam may redresse.
So what's the use of more books, if they don't fight back?
Give me piss factory, give me the slim lady--
real Slim Lady Jordan.
I'm unspeakable Acker!
Just call me Castor!
What scribe Lispector, and many otheres
miss Demeanors, who namoore axe how to spell YNOGH, than how
to spell AMOR.
Can you see?
Can you see, they just open their pages wide,
and, Audree Lordee, they give a good affront.
Who kenow how to use books making
me sing, and they dress so fine, and they look so good.
I do the best I can, protested I sheepishly.
It's not all of a piece.
I'm not who you think I am, nor am I who you think I should be.
Nor in truth, am I who I'd hoped I'd be.
My fear is great.
For years I confess, I was broke n petrified.
I used to cry.
I believed all I was told, that my vows are
too curly for grand plots.
That my consonants are too elongated for the shortness
of my ideas, that I have no structure.
My continuity's continuously lost
to the phasm of another greay area.
That I pout too much pressure on the palatial area.
Swells the speech era and makes the personal ways of my era
untenable, specifically un-shareable
in any available form odor.
Certainly quite useless for any sort of current activision
or cultural service.
Thyngges change, no can tell a book by its cover.
Just use me, said I. I can type.
I'm online.
I'm on it.
Right on, reports what artist Nancy Spero.
I've copied out reports, hung them
on the gallery walls for all to see the terror and the torture.
Sometimes copying, typing out, stamping, quoting, taking on,
carrying one's body the burden of otheres pain--
otheres codex skin as one's work.
Keeping each truth alive, reincorporated,
testified, and loved in an age that chastises, isolates,
ridicules what it debases.
Yeah, well, we kenow querelles with copyists,
grumbles a voice at the back-- authentically clad,
chosen for his language.
They can hardly stick to the trewe of the line,
have to stick a hole in with their own.
Nancy is a good pilot, quinces me, retorts Aly.
Just like the rider who rides, ha moves me deeplie.
Listen, I had a body, yet I was with the dead.
I have no roots, no legib language.
On pouvait me faire mal à la lettre, to the letter.
You won't kill.
You'll be killed.
You won't write.
You won't touch.
These are the laws of the foreigner, quod Cixous.
Then I sneezed, she writes, and something happened.
I sneeze, and something began.
I sneezed, I crossed my death with this life, wrote hey.
OK, yes, where was-- oh, ja, let me begin the beguine continues
Al--
your kiss-ability, love your ass, shaking that fear force,
body talks gendre be damned, damned.
Tongue and politics be dumbed down to the fight.
Ye wet wool scratches badly.
Too right, we've kept separate fronts for too long.
Separate ponds, separate beds, separate ways,
and battles of kinds.
Together, not by kin, not by kind--
all kings a drag anyhow.
Operatively, takes time, takes aspiration.
Sending love out nis simpel matter.
Naming kept me stumm until I stepped off.
One by one I peel the layers and give thanks.
Ne fetish love, ne totemic love--
I speak from the yoni in my Johnny.
See, I'm gap-toothed-- I was, and that bicam me weel.
The winds whistle through my lips
when I speak and tell the things even I have forgotten.
Just let me tell you this, a trewe story.
Last night, I was at an opening, and
this tall blonde, weel- heeled groomed white curator
cum scholar cum ha was too white, and unsexed,
heavily gendered though young, she was young, some and twenty.
Now, I'm a local lasse, a good kisser, nat French--
but I can appreciate the clipped sounds of euro-English.
So anyway, she was sitting in front
of us disheveled audience, well, I was dressed in my finery.
All of us tranced out from the massive weather
of our own springing, bucketing it outside,
and the large screen that was pulsating behind her when
she started pleading.
Tell me, pled she, who's the new Eva for the new era?
Tell me, she cride and pleyned.
Ha was insistent now, who will give pup?
Who will be the new mama dies for us?
Please, may I be me, sir, ma'am?
May I be real, sir, ma'am?
May I pull knowledge from my purse?
May I speak out?
Will you record it, transcribe it?
May I make less evolution?
May I make more blooming revolution?
Ma Em mie wicked enemy of the kind kenew a thing
or two about this kind of fing.
Simone could speck too of the salt of privilege.
Don't axe, said she, represent.
Go disco, she said.
Arise from superstition.
Dance, dance, dance to the dis-arrangement.
Come comrades, la transnationale.
Eg jeg ik en jeu in play, jump ship mid-sentence and back.
Take any fpigment with you.
Food shifts it from a fruit.
Horror hides the horror.
It's like it says at the reception,
push good door after 10 PM to open.
Don't axe, slam bam, represent.
I know this, continues Alyson, and bestest as I can,
I transcribe.
My sizeable, chuckles she he he.
Dims have me taught a thing or two about glottic profusion.
Now I'm not golden nor articulate.
I can't structure a full convolution.
Can't respond to those who gravely salivate over
asks saufely tucked away.
Don't let a single fold out their pleats.
Don't bleed out of their dipping figs and coilles,
what want collective action come ready- done.
What personal corset not corage and cataloged
wait for an istic turn before stirrups art to be sold,
nat soul food.
Action to schlock, nat transform.
Keeping the market canned, reminding
oo it's a good deal for some.
But neither art nor poetry change one bleeding f act.
Nouther in the nude, nouther disemboweled,
nouther in the street--
like hey, say, pump up the V. Nat believe the tag.
Mind's opulent, hystoricise way beyond a temp.
Oh, sis.
Sis, sis.
Sis, sis, bro.
Sis, bro, bro.
Bro, sis, bro-- too much jouissance, nat enough
pleasure, too many deals, nat enough daring, too much linguo,
nat enough tongue.
At this, the small press publisher,
a speaker in their own right, geeky, resentful geezer
at the best of times, has had it with this and interrupts.
Hey, Missy, turn it down a notch will you?
I've had it with this.
People like you have been mouthing off for centuries,
get to the point.
Your kind is crude.
Lips smacked, babbling away, rubbing words between you,
loosening divine with [Salima's saliva,
and God knows, anya else's breath.
It's just how it's always been.
Women poets just don't cut it for public sphere.
Undeterred, Alyson continues, and I transcribe.
Abyde, quod she, all good kings in drag.
The ear of my tellings nat bygone, just bigonne.
Woo.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.