what does it mean that every word (as in mini-spectrum of concept/sense trigger) toward which I have a poetic impulse (as in, there is making embedded in, a dense nested thing or a thing with lift -switch capability) is exactly what I hoped it would be/”really” mean when I look it up in Wikipedia—and that upon encountering the Wiki-isness of it, I get so much fulfillment, experience such a communion from its Wiki-isness that the poem wants to be only that, me copying and pasting a big fat chunk of the –pedia into a Word document and just toting that around like an Oliver Sacks periodic table/turned shadowbox? I mean, not what does that mean, but is it a problem? In writing, I fear hang-ups before I even allow them to become such—which is probably largely why my writing only comes out in infrequent crazed bursts—when it can’t be suppressed and pre-edited any longer.
Looking up “document” because struggling to come up with a title for the writing workshops I will begin to offer in the community—what I am privately, with a covetous sense of direction and ease like never before—whispering in my mind as “my freelance career”, much in the way one refers to their “process"—hilarious, silly, trumped up, vital, minute. Like when you get the breath right for one second.
These workshops as some bridge for me, between what is possible in the poetry community and the disability community. As a continuation of the careful, too careful to be called ecstatic quite--but of actualization, working in collaboration with Denise Leto on our poem for P. Durgin's Post-Ableist Chain anthology. Our system of suspending in waters and gears and tones, as a supported practice that carried over from the plane of the page to act as a a shared water for floating the day, the getting out of the bed, speaking, blinking. And working with Axis Dance to make, what was for me, performance poetry, to move in the spaces between words (now to figure out which words to document/make that language exist on paper on paper....)(Denise, don;t forget, you will report back to me from the MLA panel on Disability and Poetics and instead of feeling like a loser for not being there, I will channel you as OneContinuousWord.com)(in Axis class last night, scrambling to end up on the tape when the music ended, like a goose in the game, the beauty of the straggler built in to the score).
all of that and also Document. As official, claims made and considered, negotiable status, medical, governmental, blue with white stencils. How the person with a disability gets processed or not processed (issues of continuity of care, of receiving adequate services, of getting the best literacy skills because of the need to hold a book differently or take in the print in another form) and how to even that out, how to steady, enliven and empower through developing a life on the page beside and beyond one’s documents. How to create a vital, living document. For persons with disabilities or chronic health issues. Which is not therapy nor healing exactly, but a practice and a radical reconnection to oneself, one’s own impulse and momentum. But more on that later, will create a second blog for that (today, spoke with Georgina Kleege who wrote an open letter to the myth of Helen Keller as a kind of real faux memoir/social commentary. She teaches autobiography and disability studies at UCB. Thanks
I need a title for these workshops. LifeWrites possibly—but I don’t want to sound like a culty gym or a vitamin salesman. Docuability is just crap, though it gets a little closer to what I mean. Send me an email if you have any ideas. Look in your inboxes, flyers and mission statements coming soon.
