january

watched Exit Through the Gift Shop and now I want to morph energies that go into being a disability advocate /poet into being a street artist. radical hyper-visible incognito. web cams and spray cans on my scooter. (in other news, a car swerved on to langton street while I was going to jury duty—God? Kafka? at work…—and hit the back of my scooter as I crossed at the intersection. I flew off. and had a lot of time to think. rapidly reframing it as an aerial dance and doing the magical thinking math. that this meant this one bad thing would save me from a dozen others for future months. maybe.)

visited laguna honda state hospital for the first time, as part of my new job as transition facilitator. it is no magic mountain, but it is refurbished. no more 10 beds to a room and people abandoned in beds in the halls. but it is still a place one wishes to transition from. my client has been there for 10 year since he fell off a building. he writes poetry that is transmitted to him from PBS and sunlight. he has never heard of jack spicer. I am trying to convince him that he could turn into a hot quad rugby guy.

Denise Leto and I got together to talk about Italian deli dykes, pushing the jump cut. and other stuff. actually, spasmodically laughing about her World Series antics while we tried to rein ourselves in and edit down the collaborative poem we have been knitting together over the course of 8 months. this is for Patrick Durgin’s post-ableist book. She also filled me in on what happened at the mla re: disability and poetics panels. (in seeking out tidbits online, I ran across an article—totally unrelated to the mla—about the “discursive abyss” between trauma studies and disability studies. the guy who wrote it claims disability studies people are rigid about not acknowledging trauma. and that the trauma people are overly mystical. I agree on both counts.) I both did and did not want to go to the mla. I have no desire to ever write something academic again, as I was telling Brandy, my ex- anthro-Ph.D- candidate friend turned community radio organizer. she concurred. but it is cool that the Beauty is a Verb anthology that I will be in is being presented at  the "Breaking Boundaries" conference at Sarah Lawrence College on March 4-6th. many thanks to sheila black, jennifer bartlettt and michael northern for putting that book together.

oh, and Denise has discovered a way to work with her dystonic voice and will be performing it, as multimedia, at this event

http://www.headlands.org/event_detail.asp?key=20&eventkey=928. sadly, I cannot go. I will be on the fruit streets drinking forties for my 10 year college reunion. but you should go.

this Saturday will be the last in the second series of Write To Connect. www.writetoconnect.blogspot.com. I am so grateful for the response I have had and what has been possible to explore. the participants carry me. went to the new, shiny ed roberts campus near ashby bart on Sunday, the first ever ed roberts day. hopefully, soon, I will be offering WTC from that venue. an enormous, wide ramp, spiraling into the upper levels of a sunny atrium. a light-suffused example of universal design (and the ashby bart elevator will open directly on to the campus—no need to even cross Adeline!)

and, speaking of access, I went to Brandon Brown’s new reading series last week with Michelle. It is only a few blocks away from my work at ILRCSF. mission at 7^th, right near the SSA office. certainly it’s being there—I think Brandon is calling the series The Commons?—transforms my dreary oppressed experience of the SSA and the federal bldg, where I have spent some time. AND, it is a reading series WITHOUT STAIRS!  (I pull the granny call caps out for this one.) just rolled up on the scootz. I very much appreciate this.

there are other, accessible, new reading series on the horizon. mine. with michelle puckett. in a garage and driveway near macarthur bart during the summer months. with barbecues and kids and dogs and Christmas lights. pertaining to working class aesthetics and other stuff. as per the Labor Day series (which I am excited to see renewed as blog and to be writing a blog post for some time soon…)

also, excited about the Words and Deeds series curated by margit and friends. http://artworkouts.wordpress.com/ language in the physical world, in the body. the perfect thing to replenish my poe-matic store for what I can offer in future Write To connect classes. Words and Deeds starts Feb 21. check it out.

finally, after talking to steffi tonight, I concluded that I may never write another single, “simple” poem again because the materials scatter. become dense, hunch up, waiting to be the leaping musculature of some other prose thing that sleeps and waits. or the thing the poem could be disperses, floats, wants to happen in the air, with people, in a class, dancing. so, I may as well let some of the poiesis run-off filter through here, real time stream style.

9.1.11

resume a

live/work

balance

give me a sheltered workspace

and call it

enough can i

distend quotes from

a post-

feminist

stay-at-home

& just want trauma

where its permitted to tunnel

in, be

mysterious and explode

instead

regular

leaky gut

measure the week from Wednesdays

collects on the filtering gill

pressure to determine

if the well is dead or

beings that

are

a thin membrane between

water and sun,

envy them their knees

tiny black froglets

in chlroine

he put the wrong part

in me so it will never bend

thought Shriners are ossuary Masons

but it was fixed

plexi-glass trophy case

in sports medicine showroom

on account of the acids

can’t build its shell

black mucus clots and hind springs

sharp-snouted day

frog knows its neck

to pulse only so long

and a spooky emptiness in the sample nets

http://afteriwasdead.blogspot.com/2011/01/osc-part-one-hope.html