falling in real time

couldn't undirty my scanner enough, but here you have

2011-12-16T20:48:00.001-08:00

Lauren Levin's new chapbook, Song

"if you could have/your lungs/you should"

* * *

my somatics counselor asked me to sit quietly with her in the small, yellow room above Civic Center. of all places for somatic work (the puddles of pee, the needles, the weeping, the Dollar Tree bright red now with Christmas wares and the neabry buy XXX theater). she asked me to consider all the things thta might be killing me. because she knows i tend to hyper-perceive the futurity in which i (we all are) surely dying. she suggested that we just gaze at each quietly, comfortably, and think about how we were dying. with intention, while breathing together.

"that is easy", i thought, "because being with someone always saves me from the jaggedy clutching, always coats it over".

wrong. being with her is something else. she pressences in a no blushit sort of way. and wears hot lavender boots.

so it was terribly hard to sit with her without begining to shake and cry. which, i realized, was the point. and what did she do? she started humming, holding a note, a few notes really. in the space between us. and then, i REALLY started crying, because it felt like such an uninhibited, exquisitely small, intimate thing to do. and i want to keep getting closer and closer to that kind of practice. i do have lungs, so do you.

(why does every air molecule have a cactus with a razor blade in its bouffant for my eyeball?) or, sans jet ski

2011-12-04T16:28:00.003-08:00

with D, practicing towing in. Her, vocally (mia Daneesa!), for our readings on the 12th (see previous post) and the 15th

***

Thursday, December 15, 7:30pm
Somatic Engagement:
the Politics and Publics of Embodiment

A collection of essays on the poetics and politics of embodiment, touching on topics that range from disability to immigration to homelessness. With contributors Juliana Spahr, Jena Osman, Amber DiPietra, Denise Leto, Christian Nagler, Georgina Kleege, Katherine Sherwood, Eleni Stecopoulos, and editor Petra Kuppers.

www.thegreenarcade.com

***

[D. in Sicily.]

ambient notes:

also, last night, doing energy work on sarah rosenthal in the side room at the Unitarian Center. (so many good memories of teaching poetry classes with Glori Simmons--for wise-cracking 5- and 6- year olds from the TL at this very church.) S. and i did our palmetry session while anne waldman practiced scales in the next room. i was temporarily locked in bathroom stall with a spider and bonded about it with some woman wearing red and talking about the oak she used to live under. she would've gone in for me, i felt, if it had not hidden in the latch.. then, me, sarah, shawn amos, denise and rosie occupied a row and watched anne waldman and laughed because we were so happy. and wondered why no one else laughed--maybe they thought they needed to be solemn because of the Unitarian setting and all?. a. waldman twirled her scarf, sung "G-spot topology, Barbara Bush transvestite racist", but I am misquoting her. i just know i want to balls it up and start singing in to my poetry. think she is glorious because she knows manatees too. (Val Witte sent me a micro-manatee poem today, but with harbor seals. the way my cat makes the seal on the carpet to be beguiling and keeps Val up all night with forced feline spooning (her calico heft = insomniac Valerie).

also, in the intro, steve dickison offered this news of how the poetry center's archives, dating back to the 50's, will now all be digitized and on the internet, and he added this lovely thing about how, in this time of higher education privatization, he loves that these recordings "are being thrown open to the world".

[IRCSF's rally at the Federal Bldg on Friday. Michelle Puckett in her union best.]

DiPietra, Leto, Ravine reading at Canessa, Dec. 12, 7:30 pm

2011-11-27T17:04:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Monica Peck for organizing this upcoming reading. She also recently engaged with Waveform on the Kelsey St. blog.

What happened when I got Waveform in the mail, is that I crushed out on the book and couldn’t stop reading it or /into/ it, rather. I keep spiraling around in it, but can’t seem to ever finish it; it’s a short book. At first, I blamed procrastination, lack of attention, or stress, but then I began to accept that this book actually was magically pulling me into the Fibonacci sequence of itself somehow and still I continue to eddy inside it.

“This is all happening at the same time” (Waveform).

Non-normative bodies in public spaces are political occupations that go to the grocery store, take the bus, look through glass at bank tellers … What happens when the private space (bed) is forced into the public (tent), as with demonstrations that pitch tents?

She goes on to write about Occupy and Cecilia Vicuna. Read more on the KSP blog.

P.O.D. 11.19.11 mission at 16th SF, 9:45 a.m. Community Organizer Training Day

2011-11-19T21:11:00.001-08:00

2011-11-17T18:06:00.000-08:00

Occupy Oakland, 11.10.11.

Who knows the name of the person who was shot that night? I searched for it, but could not find it.

enthusiastic map-defying movemernt

2011-11-06T20:51:00.001-08:00

spent Sunday tracking crows from my window, talking to Shawn Amos about fluidity and catching up on somatic blog reading---mainly, Jonathan Skinner and Thom Donovan's pieces on Jacket2.

"Sublime views of the limitless are motivating. But occlusion and opacity, the very density of the body, which we cannot “peer” into, thus having a perspective, enable real seeing and hearing. Call this the “inertial heft” of embodiment. How can the inertial heft, the fact of our own perspective, be useful in its very limitations?"

"Somatics do not replace representational politics, the crucial regulatory interventions, say, of the ADA [Americans with Disability Act], or the ESA [Endangered Species Act], but offer a site for communication, between different kinds of systems rather than solely within the legal structure. Where the law offers protection, somatics offer transformation. A somatic practice provokes the environment by, in a sense, letting go of the body’s hold on it. Somatic perception is fundamentally participatory, slips through the subject-object interpellations of spectacle and discipline, demanding contact, vulnerability, opening up to irrational forms of resonance."

I think of the body as the ultimate constraint-based, real time based method. My work as "disability advocate" which is basically research and peer counseling, instead of social work. Doing with. As a kind of sack race toward a goal. (How to counsel myself, now that I am cut off from Medicaid, an aide code mistake, $1600 share-of-cost for the month. I'll fix it with enough informed fit-throwing, for me it is not an immediate disaster as it would be for some of my clients. Though it will turn into one if I don't finesse and research the fit-having just right. And by fit, I mean being very civil and informed and monitoring what is happening now, my pulse racing a bit, the dread of Monday calls to make--that latter as me just running the panic. Run it. Like a tap, till it reaches the right, restorative tempature.)

but the best thing about Skinner's post, was his drawing my attention to this

"I stopped just on the other side of the Yuba River, to check out something called the Independence Trail. It turns out that the trail — occupying the site of old, abandoned hydraulic miner’s ditch — was built in answer to a request to, 'Please find me a level wilderness trail where I can reach out and touch the wildflowers from my wheel chair.' It is a mostly level trail, shaded by oak and pine, that contours the slope of the undeniably wild Yuba River valley, with views to the river below. At the time, I did not know that this trail, the 'First Wheelchair Accessible Wilderness Trail in America,' had been created by one John Olmsted."

I won't steal the photo of these raised wooden paths of this Trail that he has posted on his Jacket2 piece, but they make me want o get to Mendocino immediatemente. Surely better than the little adventure I had on Thursday--getting lost leaving Fort Mason after doing a wheel chair user sensitivity training for Golden Gate Park ranger/staff folk. I was skidding along on the old mobility scooter, down a rain-slick hill and then did one one of my iffy depth perception maneuvers--caught air time as I scootered over a set of short stairs where the sidewalk merged into the steps of an austere building entrance. There was no difference in pavement color to indicate the level change and because I didn't know I was flying, I flew and was fine. Landed. The rangers would have been proud or aghast. I was far from them by then. Anyway, you can see the photos of the paths from Skinner and read more of his post here. Fascinated by the coincidence that this Trail was created by one Mr. Olmsted, so similar to the Olmstead name. That decision, which is the basis for the alternatives-to-nursing-homes work I do now. Reminds me that I want to somehow convene regular meetings of my nursing home clients, who are working on discharge, at Yerba Buena Park. Next year--when it is the autumn's summer weather. It would be a feat to get everyone there with power chairs, oxygen, negative pressure valves, conservatorship law, et al. (Would it be sufficient peer counseling/advocacy work to communicate to my clients that San Francisco is beloved and malleable to me because I have been able to traverse it?)
.

And then I caught up on Thom Donovan's piece, also on Jacket2, and was vastly held by the following

"But the lyric is also what actively produces disaster — disaster as that starless condition without plans, destiny, fate. It is in such a wreck, a counter-wreck if you will, that the poem can open towards conditions of possibility for bodies, a general intellect or affective ground for a future multitude or commons. Archaeologies of morning and mourning (moaning?)."

and have found it fitting to match some other of his words with collages from Day of the Dead. (See yesterday's blog post.)

Got gorgeous Schizophrene in the mail from BK, wiht Rohini Kapil's luminous pink tropcial modern on it (whom I have never met, but would very very much like to). "This is autobiography (life writing), in enthusiastic map-defying movemernt," Thom Donovan writes in one of the blurbs for the book. It is thrilling to see the words "life writing" figure in this way, on this kind of book. Re-infused, what I wanted for Write To Connect.

Speaking of Mendocino and such, I have hardly had time to account for the HSU trip. The Lost Coast Cafe and Mario's soup, for Rosemary Clooney and Lady Gaga coexistent on the car ride, for two Italian lesbians that fed me nonstop, for professor Janet's Blue Heron House and her challah and how she heated my bed with that whirring fan, and the professor Christina who speaks just like my aunt Celeste and helped me buy proton pump inhibitors at a small grocer's store in Trinidad, just off the ocean, when my stomach got dangerous. The DAMN event and the amazing, young, disabled, trans Critical Race Gender and Sexuality Studies students I met at Humboldt State. I will endeavor to share some of their writing now on the W2C blog.

But it occurs to me, lastly, here tonight, that a blog post is like an a altar for placing names into a continuing.

dia de los muertos 2011

2011-11-05T15:41:00.003-07:00

"Since in any place inhere the things that have been there, and that (sometimes literally) remain there through its “half-lives” (that remain undead, in other words). And since any body is not just a body, which is to say, never only a finite membrane or container but a complex extension, a bundle of what it has encountered, consumed, sensed, felt, and touched — the body is many different places at once (in neoliberal terms, it has “gone global”). Place is, then, extended by many different bodies at once (the logic of virus, outbreak, contamination, plague). Somatics is a site — the aesthetic site — where we undergo these places.[12] The existences of these places within the body become framed, but also possibly moved (expressed, transformed, en route). “Remediation” (the shibboleth for any number of public and corporate earthworks projects post-disaster) then not only occurs within a particular geography or topology but in or at the body as a site coextensive with such places."

--Thom Donovan, Jacket2

cracking open

2011-11-01T23:09:00.002-07:00

friends promise the world is "cracking open, taking root" and we will be ok. (i have not occupied anything, though i salute all the occupiers, while i try to find rest w/o wobble. presence.)

one friend flipped over the handle bars of her bike when a black cat ran in to her path. she neglected to mention (till days later, when i was napping with her on her couch and doing energy work on her skull) that she, at the time of the accident, had, in fact, landed on her head and that she had been wearing her flame tights and her underwear on the outside; her usual Cap'n Safety get-up for Halloween. she proceeded on to work that day, her coworkers made her wear a sling, and another friend, who is a cranio-sacred therpaist, has ruled out concusssion. i have ruled in the fact that this black cat incident will be a grand luck reversal happening and her fall/autumn will shape up nicely because of it. kind of like getting my cream cardigan sleeve caught on the door of the somatic psychotherpay lobby door last week. i panicked and kept accelerating my scooter, thus ripping my arm backward and nearly dragging myself off the scooter. (the way i do emotional alchemy.) a Civic Center denizen, who had probably just shot up, had the wherewithal to disengage me and then patted me sweetly on the shoulder and walked on while i sat there and wept, sort of happily.

it is night and a huge gust just yanked my window open and when i looked out into the courtyard, there were no tweakers, but dry leaves and one of my sweet grass roses from Charleston.

hallows weather. tomorrow is my favorite holiday, dia de los muertos.

finishing Patti Smith's book, which sustained me for the pre-winter:

I was privy to the process as they worked on songs for her new album. Janis was the queen of the radiating wheel. sitting in her easy chair with a bottle of Southern Comfort, even in the afternoon. [...] I sat on the floor as Kris Kristofferson sang her 'Me and Bobby McGee'. Janis joining in the chorus. I was there for these moments, but so young and preoccupied with me own thoughts that i hardly recognized them as moments."

So comforting to think even luminary people miss moments, huge ones, too.

The romance for my year, almost Victorian in its early urchin story of shadow boxes and candelabras. And this quote about she and Robert in front of Birdland, where musicians "opened the field of jazz like human can openers". I want to be a human can opener or just stay closed, with nourishing contents for one.

also, somnolent new somatics for Write to Connect this autumn, winter. a focus on offering palmetry

Waveform thoughts from Leora Amir

2011-11-01T15:29:00.004-07:00

i love informal poems or short stories or even reviews that come in the real time form of email, or in this case--Facebook. here is what Leora sent me re: Waveform.

Dear Amber,

Just wanted to pass you a note to tell you how much I am enjoying Waveform! I am trying to get school stuff squared away this month and this came in the mail nestled next to beauty is a verb and it is funny how it's small but big--I read some pages one night and then this morning went back and re-read and all these other layers--I love the voices and the back and forth and the not-knowing of the voices and of me in parts and the knowing--the part about and I never really thought about collaboration in this way...not sure if I am making sense but am loving and savoring it...and how it is on the page and the image of the words crashing into the page that I am probably misquoting or whatever but I just feel like I am with these voices and shifting as they shift and turn...I like the talking about things that don't get talked about--suspension, blockedness--cross purposes (or purposes) of form/genre (avant garde) meeting identity/disability/political etc. Collaboration and artistic and interdependent-reflecting.

I have been thinking about and writing (not very well) about--lifting and dance and in life...how it is so much a part and natural to dance and so looked down upon and dreaded in a ableist societal dependence/disability context people). but good afternoon to you and just wanted to say thank you and I look forward to reading the rest and maybe re-reading more too! warmly, Leora PS Feel free to forward this to Denise. I'm off to get something done or try to.

And also, this generous story, embedded in a review of Waveform by Kristen Stone at Limn Literary Review

How something or someone falls to the earth, falling through time. The effort it takes to rise, the relationship between effort and flow. Carrying the body to the ocean so that it can be buoyed in the salt water: salt the opposite of gravity: my grandmother trying to teach us to float in the ocean. If you hold your breath, you’ll float better. you have more air inside. Her soft breasts, scarred and tattooed from radiation, threatened to slide out of her one-piece like their own ocean animals. Us, little, furiously treading water, vertical while our horizontal grandmother rose and fell with the waves, her ten toenails painted coral, sticking up out of the gray water. We are quick and stiff: holding my breath makes my whole body tense; the fear of sinking and the effort to stay up, kicking my skinny legs: we pant like puppies. Once you give up the fear of sinking you can breathe slowly and you will float, dropping below the surface slightly with each exhale, rising again as you breathe in. Later, grown, I practice yoga, I swim in a pool, I dance and strut as a member of my local drag troupe: remembering these lessons in resistance and surrender, a more complicated relationship between effort and release. Surrender and the breath: the body doing its strange work: moving uncertainly through space.

Read the entire review at Limn here: http://limnreviews.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/waveform/#more-40

Many thanks to Kristen and Lee!

DAMN Week on Disability at HSU

2011-10-04T00:10:00.000-07:00

DAMN is a week of community coalition dedicated to issues of disability art, culture, and justice. Learn, listen, share, and build community from a variety of perspectives and discussion. Cookies will be provided by the College of Professional Studies, you supply the point of view!

Monday, Oct. 17 in Gist Hall 218 at 6:30pm

Film Screening and Discussion: “(Sex)-Abled: Disability Uncensored” — sex, lies, and wheel spokes

Tuesday, Oct. 18 in Gist Hall 218 at 6:30pm

Film Screening and Discussion: “When Billy Broke His Head” — a road trip through the disability rights movement

Wednesday, Oct. 19 in Gist Hall 218 at 6:30pm

Film Screening and Discussion: “Drive-In Movie” — made by and starring local disabled artists

Thursday, Oct. 20 on the 1st Floor of the JGC at 7pm

Film Screening and Discussion presented by NAKED for Mental Health: “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” — finding empowerment through art and the people around you

Friday, Oct. 21 in the Great Hall at 7pm

Disability Art and Music Night (DAMN)! featuring Denise Leto and Amber DiPietra the authors of WAVEFORM, HCAR choir performance, campus and community open mic, and visual art exhibit

Want to share your art, or have questions about the event series? Email Elizabeth at erh60@humboldt.edu.

DAMN events are committed to event accessibility across multiple dimensions. If you have access questions or concerns, please contact Nancy.Resnick@humboldt.edu about arranging accommodations as soon as possible.

http://crgs.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/damn-disability-art-music-nights-week-on-disability/

some readings/events i will be doing this autumn and onward and also, hopes for a soft fall

2011-09-25T21:54:00.008-07:00

listening to R.E.M. Tongue, because the days after you turn 33, you want to go back to 1994.

or, you write like Lorrie Moore. the you, the you, the you. why so steadying?

or not. last night, at the :working class reading series after-party, wishing i had multiple bodies/personas purely for the simple, capricious reason that then i could have one lower back tattooed with tenderoni in olde english and the other with "dulce de leche" in regular cursive. thank you jennifer capo crucet (Leaving Hialeah).

have been brutal with myself all summer. veering now, to a halt, a different softer start. friends and family. very patient. gifts of cream-colored handmade scarf (that smells of good goats) and brown gloves from my mom, so silkenly furred they made me weep. also, a gnome dressed as an owl and P and Y revived my mason jar terrarium from last year. and beef enchiladas, to remind me that i do still like to eat. thanks Ms. Witte.

this from margit gallanter's newsletter today:

*FALLING

Despite the mysterious heat of the days, we have made it to Fall! Indeed, around us there are indications of collapse ...of structural phenomenon such as healthcare, of environmental protections, of a list too long to mention. Yet, in the face of our challenges, we have resources from the cycle of elements; we can learn how to Fall – body-mind-earth. First of all, remember that we are in a season, and it cycles. From the perspective of Chinese energetics, it is through the Metal/Wind element, associated with the fall, that we connect to some of the most basic functions of living - breath and elimination. Through Metal harmony, we establish our sense of purpose, our boundaries, and our courage. So, it helps to breathe ... deep breathing, like what can come from movement meditation practices and the somatic arts, from being outside, and from tapping into what you are here to do, giving yourself the breath of space and time to absorb what you do do.

i will be starting work full time at my agency soon, as nursing home transition coordinator. worried it will make me caved in, get hollow and pitted. no rest from my own emotional struggles there, as the distraction of other labors might provide.

one of my clients, an old timey movie star type who lives at the jewish home, but hopes to return to her puppy in the Outer Richmod soon (she dresses him in hounds tooth coats and caps from her long dead milliner father)--she told me "Oh. 33 is a magical age. That is when I made my first million. It is a glorious time to make messes. People ask me, 'Why do you walk so funny?' and I say, 'It is because I have been married too many times!'"

another client at laguna honda has to decide what to do about his sever bedsores. he can wait or choose surgery. for now., the doctor says some change is around the bend, as "the wound back is healing"

love for other people as sometimes, an unsustainable envelope. to lick and press time and other recipients between you and them..

will be shifting Write To Connect, or putting it on a kind of hiatus to focus more on offering energy work sessions (which sometimes function as mini, one-on-one somatic writing sessions). be in touch if you are interested.

i have some readings and events coming up in conjunction with the publication of my Waveform collaboration with Denise Leto (Kenning Editions), and the publication of the Beauty is a Verb anthology that I am lucky to be included in.

--Beauty Is a Verb reading at Pegasus Books in Berkeley, Sept 27. Read Jen Bartlett's preface to BAV and pick up a copy at Pegasus this Tuesday! Many thanks to Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, Michale Northern and the folks at Cinco Puntos Press.

--with Denise Leto at Moe's on October 18th, 7:30.

--October 21, Denise and I are road-tripping it to Humboldt State to be part of DAMN--Disability Art and Music Night, which is a kick-off for a week-long series of event at HSU around disability culture.

--December 12, Canessa Park with Denise Leto and Jai Arun Ravine

--Somatic Engagement, another anthology I am so grateful to be a part of, has just come out! Thanks to Petra Kuppers and Chain Links. I will be part of a reading for Somatic on Feb 28, 2012 at Pegasus books in dwtn Berkeley.

:working class reading series September 24, 2011 audio recording

2011-09-25T17:23:00.004-07:00

thanks to all who helped us rock the :wcrs--with hot dogs, poems and abor--into the fall equinox. listen to last night's event here.

we had an preacher who teaches little kids on lock down in E. Oakland, a daughter of Sicilian immigrants who is listing day jobs, una manzanita que ya owns her own mobile home in the most shi shi part of Boulder, and my favorite latina name--eugenia--who sang us songs about ninos preicosas. thank you again to Ta Amri, Sylvia Eugenia kakassy, Denise Leto and Rebecca Caridad. many thanks also to Kyle and Chris for documenting.

stay tuned for video from last night. it will be archived as part of the 100 Thousand Poets for Change event (we were linked to hundreds of poetry-for-change happenings across the world yesterday!), thanks to Big bridge for moving that larger social action forward. i will also be posting photos soon.

:working [class] reading series #5 - Part of 100 Thousand Poets for Change!

2011-09-15T13:44:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Michelle for getting this last 2011 : working class reading series off the ground. Peeps, please come. It is also (the day after) my birthday. Also, Sylvia's! Labor with us to make a sparkly autumnal post- dance party that reflects your inner/outer work.

Oh, and take a listen to the :working class reading series from last month, August 2011--featuring Lexi brayton, Sam Wall and Andrea Byer.

working [class] reading series #5 - Part of 100thousand Poets for Change!

Time	Saturday, September 24 · 7:30pm - 10:30pm

Location	michelle puckett's place 702 W. MacArthur Blvd Oakland, CA

Created By	Michelle Puckett

More Info	friends, this is our final reading of the series for the season, to be re-visited in may, 2012! it's also part of the AMAZING, world-wide event known as 100thousand poets for chage (www.100tpc.org). come be with us as we gather as workers and writers, in solidarity with writers across the world! SO EXCITING! and last, but not least, we'll have cake and an afterparty to help celebrate 2 birthdays: my beloved co-curator of this series, amber dipietra, and one of our readers that night, the lovely sylvia eugenia! in short: don't miss it! featured reader/workers: sylvia eugenia (birthday girl!) tai amri (just moved back to the bay from philly!) rebecca caridad (all the way from boulder, CO!) and denise leto (who we LOVE!) as always, we will provide free hotdogs (and veggie dogs) if you bring the sides, and don't forget to BYOB. doors at 7:30, reading starts at 8:30. bios (being added as they become available): SylviaEugenia kakassy; Feral Femme, Continuously living through and for her writing of now 29 years of life, she is sorting through the good and bad pain embedded in the knotted muscles of her body's memory. From the below Ventura Blvd in the San Fernanado Valley she is an expert in making something out of nothing for dinner and every other occasion, still believeing in help of San Pasqual to find whatever she has lost along with the properties of " Sana sana culito de rana..."to work through everyday pain . She is currently creating on a new collection of poems entitled "leftovers" as well as romancing she into falling in love with ella. Denise Leto is a poet, writer, activist and Senior Editor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has appeared in Puerto del Sol; Aufgabe; Xantippe; Wolf Magazine; MELUS: The Journal of Multi-Ethnic Literature in the US and is forthcoming in Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and Chain Link Books. She was guest editor for Sinister Wisdom, Artist in Residence at Djerassi, and a Fellow for the University of Michigan’s Symposium, “Movement, Somatics and Writing.” A collaborative chapbook with Amber DiPietra, Waveform, is just out from Kenning Editions. She is currently working on a docu-book, Day Jobs: What Poets, Writers, and Artists Do for a Living and, in her spare time, the foreclosure of big banks.

ambient notes #37: Non Major, Sacred, Susie Bright

2011-09-14T19:46:00.007-07:00

Abby Crain posted the video of The Non Major Show at The Subterranean ArtHouse from last Saturday night. (All, a benefit for the Foxing It show--go see it at the Subterranean, 9/30-10/1.)

Being around performance artists heals me and makes me more alive in a thousand ways. I want to get closer to that. Also, I want to non major everything in my life in a major way. I love this idea of non major. It is the idea for my year.

http://www.vimeo.com/28971099

She set me up to do palmetry quietly in the corner, during intermission.Stroked strangers’ wrists. Met a girl just post- bicicleta, who is making decisions. tried to seal direction in. Then stole Buuck’s whiskey. Perfect, low key. High key. A male escort form Mendocino and a guy with an accordion stole my heart. “Come along again with me and breathe this way."

Now, thinking of Mina Loy and The Sacred Prostitute, I lift this, non majorally, from the Harriet blog http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/09/mina-loy-triple-canopy-and-the-sacred-prostitute/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+HarrietTheBlog+%28Harriet%3A+The+Blog%29

Woman for me is the maze of abortive experience deflecting me from the consummate nucleus—the unique affinity of whose existence no disappointments will ever be able to dissuade me. I went out to meet life open-handed with such good-will, without prejudice, without criticism—I scoured the streets—plunged into society—“touched pitch”—dissolved myself in amorous mysticism—yet, I have never been able to solve the problem of love.

AND, I just saw that Susie Bright is doing a show at the Victoria Theater this Saturday. I SO want to go, Susie has been a kind of hero of my summer. Labor, Temansters and sex…http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/187368

Among the cognoscenti, blue movies became historic. I was lucky to wander in, like Alice with a bottle of something blue and a label that said, “Eat Me.” I’m very glad I did. Unlike Alice, I never went back to being small.

I am screeching to a halt, still screeching, but getting something back underneath me. apparently, what I do best is “hide in my open-ness”.

Flordacana summer 2011

2011-09-09T22:00:00.004-07:00

a walk with a brown heron, he was my height, along the littoral. ragged lace dogs the sand. coquinas bore in sideways, sucking pastels. heron kept looking at me out of his narrow side eye, using the other side eye to monitor the churning 2 foot breakers for fish. his giant talons. a peeping, speckled string of sandpipers skirts the dirty foam, which picks up in the winds and blows down the beach. mom attempts to read vanity fair in the outter bands. heroin chic model flaps wildly. a gull watches. we go to the Sea Hag that night. old Christmas tree in the corner, a winters' scene of Budweiser Clydesdales framed on the wall, two murals, using Marvel comics colors. one woman reclining on a beach amid martini olives the size of coconuts. another in a bikini rding a giant grouper like a bucking Bronco. mom wears her soft, rayon nightgown dress to dinner. joe, still sulky, earlier, standing alone in the water, there fight visible from a distance. two gymnasts in a grey tide.

flordacana summer 2011

2011-09-09T21:31:00.002-07:00

Skipper's Smokehouse--dad on drums. Ruben Rey and the Undercover band. petrified gator foot on a stick as a back scratcher. dad tells Ciro to keep that thing away from him. it is bad juju, with all the time he spends on the little john boat in lakes looking for bass with scarred palates. at the bottom of those lakes, the skeletons of so many poodles. some of them named Phyliss. dad falls asleep in his blue plumpy chair and wakes with a start, saying, "You should've jumpd on that worm."

a prevalence of 1970's sheets remain in the Chateau condos. i have some i stole before i left for college in 97. pale yellow with faded bluebirds and vines. i will use them till they fall apart.

Nick and Lolita with chicken wing.

flordacana summer 2011

2011-09-09T21:00:00.001-07:00

isabel comes out to sunset beach as she does every year. we lie in my grandmother's starched sheets and hold hands and talk about death, as if tracking tides. then, in the morning, we lay on our stomachs where the waves come in and dig up little tiny shellfish.

New country on every radio in Tampa nearly kilted me, but

2011-09-09T00:06:00.000-07:00

but my beautiful brother Jon Ciro singing Rascal Flats saved it for me. You hvae to turn the volume way up to hear it. Let's hope he doesn't morph into South Tampa Jersey Shore transplant crowd as he gets older. I doubt it...

ambient notes #45a Non Major note that i now offer energy work sessions

2011-09-08T20:51:00.001-07:00

which is hard for me to say. i need you to just know it, outside of the phrasal. because it is the way i crack open to people on the train, "hide your open-ness, open your hiddenness". thanks to Bhanu Kapil and the practicum she gave me on my sofa for 5 days, a ritual with orange Milanos and Cafe Bustelo. when i was not weeping or going with her and Anna to the cheeseburger shop. i now offer you palmetry. a kind of poesis localized to the palm. call it energy work if that makes sense to you. Sliding scale or trade. we can talk about it more. it has to stay non major. email me for details.

(the you. a whole prepositional sea this summer, trying to swim back)

and i am offering free sessions at The Subterranean Arthouse this Saturday with these amazing performers. When I watch them it is like receiving a kind of bodywork.

Saturday, September 10 · 8:00pm - 11:00pm

Location	The Subterranean Arthouse 2179 Bancroft Way Berkeley CA 94704 (between Shattuck and Fulton) Berkeley, CA

Created By	Art Workouts - Bay Area, CA, Abby Crain, Margit Galanter

More Info	the NON-MAJOR SHOW is a benefit for Letting the Fox Go ( Art Workouts final performance installation) featuring un-performances by Ted Nesseth of the Heavenly States, Big Fat Circle, Keith Hennessy, paige starling sorvillo, Harold Burns, Sara Pritchard, Garrett Neudeck, and Asia Wong, palmetry readings by Amber di Pietra, original never before seen artwork by Monique Jenkinson, wine, a chance to win money, and more.. Luminaries from the Bay Area performance, writing, and music scenes have been asked to perform/ present something in an unfamiliar medium. Expect brave failures, rash undertakings, and brazen courageousness that may quite possibly amount to nothing. $8-$15 no one turned away... http://artworkouts.wordpress.com/ Abby Crain and Margit Galanter sometimes work through the alias ART WORKOUTS. Art Workouts is an ongoing dialogue/experiment between Margit, Abby, and whatever and whoever crosses our path. We engage with the world around us for artistic revelation and inspiration, culling what seems relevant, problematic, brilliant. We write reviews and manifestos. We interview ourselves and other interesting people. We get together and make art. We are primarily movers so the work deals a lot with the body, performance, and that mysterious assemblage, presence. We periodically arrange workshops so that we can meet and explore with groups of people. This is when the work starts to really hum. For more info:http://artworkouts.wordpress.com/, and for Margit’s art projects:http://margitg.wordpress.com/ http://artworkouts.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/non-major-show-a-benefit-for-letting-the-fox-go/

Waveform

2011-08-24T12:32:00.001-07:00

Kenning Editions is pleased to announce the publication of WAVEFORM by Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto.

WAVEFORM documents an aqueous, stop-start conversation between two women poets with disabilities. The idea of suspension--being held back, held over, or held by larger bodies, especially water--serves as pivot point for a manuscript that begins with the problem of rising from bed in the morning, of gravity and the ankle, of making muscles that control speech contract and release. Quotidian rituals like listing provide structure while large marine creatures open this epistolary work to a kind of chronic floating.

Denise Leto is a poet, writer, and Senior Editor at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is forthcoming in Beauty is a Verb, Cinco Puntos Press, Fall 2011 and Puerto del Sol, Fall 2011 and has appeared in Wild Horses of Fire: Other Letters, The Wolf Magazine: Arts Council of England, Aufgabe, 26, and Xantippe. She was a Fellow for the University of Michigan’s Research/Practice Symposium on Movement, Somatics & Writing and is a past Honorary Fellow and Artist in Residence at Djerassi Resident Artist Program. She recently presented her work at the multi-media art event, “Breaking Ranks: Human/Nature,” at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Amber DiPietra works as an advocate and peer counselor in the Bay Area disability community. She has recently started Write To Connect—life writing workshops for radical and everyday embodiments. Her interests include tracking the orthopedic body in real time, personal fossil records, ¡accion mutante! politics, and warm waters. Poems and prose pieces by Amber have appeared in Make, A Chicago Literary Magazine, Mirage Period[ica], Tarpaulin Sky, Mrs. Maybe, Monday Night and TRY!. Amber also co-curates the :working class reading series with Michelle Puckett in Oakland, CA. Visit Amber’s blog at www.adipietra.blogspot.com

Paperback. Poetry/Creative Nonfiction/Disability Studies/Poetics. 36 pp. ISBN: 978-0-9767364-9-3. $10.00. Publication date: September 15, 2011.

Waveform is available by credit card or subscription/mailorder at http://www.kenningeditions as well as through Small Press Distribution:http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9780976736493/waveform.aspx

Beauty is a Verb reading at Pegasus downtown Sept 27 2011

2011-08-23T22:17:00.001-07:00

News from Marlon Rigel, events coordinator, Pegasus Downtown:

To celebrate the release of Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability,

we will be joined by editors Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett
who will be performing poetry from the anthology
alongside a host of guest contributors.

Readers:
Jennifer Bartlett
Sheila Black
Norma Cole
Amber DiPietra
Cecil Giscombe
Laurie Clements Lambeth
Rusty Morrison
Susan Schweik

Date: Tuesday, September 27th, 7:30pm
Location: Pegasus Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley

Contact: (510) 649-1320 or events@pegasusbookstore.com
Admission: Free

Wheelchair Accessible

Beauty is a Verb
The New Disability Poets
Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, Michael Northen

Beauty is a Verb is the first of its kind: a high-quality anthology of poetry by American poets with physical disabilities. Poems and essays alike consider how poetry, coupled with the experience of disability, speaks to the poetics of each poet included. The collection explores first the foremothers and forefathers whose poems had a complex (and sometimes absent) relationship with disability, such as Vassar Miller, Larry Eigner, and Josephine Miles. It continues with poets who have generated the Crip Poetics Movement, such as Petra Kuppers, Kenny Fries, and Jim Ferris. Finally, the collection explores the work of poets who don't necessarily subscribe to the identity of 'crip-poetics' and have never before been published in this exact context. These poets include Bernadette Mayer, Rusty Morrison, Cynthia Hogue, and C. S. Giscombe. The book crosses poetry movements-from narrative to language poetry-and speaks to and about a number of disabilities including cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, Multiple Scoliosis, and aphasia due to stroke, among others.

Sheila Black is the author of over 40 books for children and young adults as well as the author of two poetry collections and two chapbooks. She was born with X-Linked Hypophosphotema (XLH), a rare genetic bone condition, often called Vitamin D Resistent Rickets. Two of her three children also have XLH.

Jennifer Bartlett was a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow. Her publications include Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2005), (a) lullaby without any music (Chax 2011), and Anti-Autobiography (Saint Elizabeth Street/Youth-in-Asia Press 2010).

Michael Northen edits Wordgathering, A Journal of Disability and Poetry and coordinates the annual Inglis House Poetry Contest for disability-related poetry. For over 40 years, he has taught adults with physical disabilities, women on public assistance, prisoners, and rural and inner city children.
--
Marlon Rigel
Events Coordinator
Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 649-1320
events@pegasusbookstore.com
http://pegasusbookstore.com

last Friday's :working class reading series (8/5/11)

2011-08-13T17:38:00.002-07:00

had me kind of weepy (plus 3 beers w/o time for dinner) after an emo-charged week with clients at work and the crazy laying-on-the-floor thing I did at SFMOMA the day before.

my beloved lexi brayton read for the first time in a very long while and it was thrilling. an interactive tiered symptom assessment which involved all of us reading along and scoring ourselves on the sheets she handed out. we were either weary and rusty and needing milk at the corner store, fresh out of lovers for eternity, or just missing getting to be the blue whale, right there, on time, below the the bluff, who'd come out to meet us. the tsa interactive also ivnovled us staring into our neighbors eyes and shouting out our biggest shame in unison at the top of our lungs. whereupon she literally jumped up and done with glee because i guess she didn't think we'd all do it.

sam wall read to us about recently sitting with her aunt in hospice, about the body that goes back to its neonatal-self, curling in and in, bald now, but with labial boom. (this is where my weeping started.). and she read about flipping houses and her on home, being foreclosed upon.

i interviewed andrea byers, my body worker and nanny extraordinaire. when andrea touches you, you;d like to just be a baby again, so she can carry your ass around all day. she talked about growing up a preacher's daughter (hence becoming default babysitter for a village). about going to Ethiopia with the family she nannies for to help them adopt a new child and getting to do cranio-sacral work on all the infants--because so many of them manifest severe physical abnormalities from not enough hands to go around, to hold them. we didn't get to the story i wanted her to tell--about how she moved to oakland in 2000 with a now ex-boyfriend, who at the time had garnered a studio near the first fridays site, before art murmur even started happening. how strange it was and how she felt conflicted about invading a neighborhood and a culture that was not hers.

here's a video of lex doing the tsa and some pics. full audio coming soon.

SFMOMA Jellyfish House: architecture, long term care, paperwork, planning, the inventoried body.

2011-08-10T22:27:00.000-07:00

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2011/08/pop-up-poets-amber-dipietra-on-iwamotoscott-architecture/

in which i laid on the floor of the SFMOMA and did filtration, the excess of bodies drying in warehouses, wanting to disintegrate so i could be diffuse and understand how to fill the air around my clients and engage them. medicaid funneling. and lovely friends made it too easy, almost like cheating, there was not pure inertia or the stunnedness of the othered prone body, but there were actually people. interacting with my limbs. a successful failure. what to do with hat?

Thank you to friends and SFMOMA and Small Press Traffic. You can listen to it, including the silence of the interactive installation (my body which was stand in for the bodies in institutions) above.

Includes text (restorative writing done with) residents at Laguna Honda Hospital--one of the largest institutions (with residents ranging in age from 20 - 90) in the country.

it occurs to me it should be flordacana instead of floridicana

2011-08-07T13:44:00.005-07:00

having a 12-year-old son who is a youtube fanatic seems to have brought out my dad's latent acting abilities. i mean. this isn't all acting. my family seems to have chameleon accents depending on who they are with/what they are doing/mood. i.e. dad: driving or making sauce/deniro-as-al-capone, hanging with the guys/old-cuban-bone-thrower, fishing/hybrid redneck.

it is never this exciting when i go with them to the fishin hole at al lopez park, but i just like looking at the fungal water, thinking of thrown-back bass with scarred throats and wild pythons somewhere under there between the the water lilies. and poodle skulls sunk to the bottom, because gators notoriusly drag them down, taste better than any other kind of canine, Welo Angel used to tell me.

also, i wonder what kind of special sanction Ciro had to get to be allowed to say sonofabitch.

Me at SFMOMA tonight doing jellyfish, institutionalization, bureaucracy and bio filtration, pee

2011-08-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

Amber DiPietra on IwamotoScott Architecture's Jellyfish House

Thursday August 4 2011
Meet in the Haas Atrium before moving into the galleries.
6:30pm. Readings, 20 minutes. Part of Pop-Up Poets. Free with museum admission.

--- Much to MOMA's terror, and my own, my reading has turned into a performance.
Please don't lean on the vitrine!

7.25.11 P.O.D. Coordinates: Pigeon Manifesto and Dislocation Express

2011-07-25T22:43:00.002-07:00

When people say they hate pigeons, I want to ask them if they hate themselves, too
Michelle Tea. Pigeon Manifesto

This little matchbook sized chap is as close as I have gotten to a P.O.D. in Berkeley. (Thanks for the lend David Buuck, it will wing its way back to you soon.) Maybe Berkles is "too cruisey, slows them down". I don't know. But I almost wept when leaving SF today after work; a pigeon waited on the curb with me just before the light changed and we, wonky and mechanized, went in to the crush.

Even last weekend, a casserole, maybe a Hare Krishna leftover thing, was left out in the plaza below the Berkles apartment for like, the entire day, and there was no iridescent eating frenzy. Sad, bereft, birdless casserole. A tenuous, not entirely authentic desire to woo them to my roof deck, for then how will I walk barefoot after cheap wine at 4pm on the hot asphalt?

Pigeons are avian hobos. Hobos being these guys--Axis Dance teamed up with Dandelion Dancetheater to go a little steam punk.

(click to enlarge)

Hooverville, flying guitars and an overlay of internet dating narrative. Lines on the latter inducing an uncanny verisimilitude as (if) I had written them just yesterday in my journal.

That and my own internal undersong of Blue, blue windows behind the stars, Helpless. To close the day quietly with the cat.

2011-07-16T13:22:00.001-07:00

what we did on 4th of july and no, the cat power song is not called 4th of july.

for a minute, i had two wine glasses fresh from out of the closet. by afternoon, it was back to one.

tulip tree

pre-unicorn, mid palmetry practicum

"you never need anyone else in the green bed nook except me" and "i can has salmon" and "in the morning, i will make bhanu wade through a river of pee after you have left for work"

ambient notes 1

2011-07-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

punjabis in pajamas, it's like the writer's residency has come to me. but better because it is straight color and light. and angelcots. we spiral into the palm.

all diagonal to the fact that i have been entertaining again, on many levels. forever amber arrived today with a greeny -ery cover.

unicorns bring me cuban coffee in bed--there is another pietraluz, another bhanu? impossible.

then, brian evenson floats by the window, attached to the string of a yellow balloon.

P.O.D. July 5, 2011 Sarah Rosenthal and Amy Fung Yi Lee chapbook

2011-07-05T21:15:00.001-07:00

The Animal

from dusi/e chaps

2011-07-02T21:53:00.002-07:00

"clean up on aisle me"

Kyle's cube. May 2011

2011-06-25T17:08:00.002-07:00

Yerba Buena, sharp and clear yesterday, throwing off colors from its faceted corners. Pictured above--Axis doing their tech rehearsal for this year's performance of site-specific find way to fall (i couldn't do it this year, what with the consumption i had and the move to Berkles, but hope for next--oh, and congrats to Son and Rodney for their approaching Hollywood debut!) Co-peer counselor/disability advocate Derek Zarda brought ILRCSF youth group out to picnic and watch the rehearsal. Upper right hand corner, ILRCSF board member Sam and Phred, my hilarious intern. Phred gets lots of things done in the office when she is around on Fridays. When Phred is around on Fridays, I stop getting lots of things done and just start laughing.

dereality, new studio, the cat licked my arm before i clicked Publish and so it was fine to flop

2011-06-12T22:59:00.003-07:00

layers of things stripped bare will start the faux memoir in July esp. now that Anna has given me the word depersonalization to name the thing that frightens me most besides the death of everyone and myself and is most a part of being me/fiction will also write about jellyfish houses and say the ram have laid quietly on the couch in the new studio with the cat nursing on the blanket that covers me who knew sinus infections could remove you from the world so thoroughly having not been able to smell or taste in 3 weeks increasing the dereality return to work to calls from youngish men's families, catastrophic strokes--I fail as a peer counselor for people with cognitive impairment, how to step into it and offer/collaborate with honesty, in this reality mirrored closet doors in new grass green bed nook sun through east-facing window trailing eucalypti dust from the hills bursts across living room and shines off glass into bed a silver-white sky-sea impersonal condos on beaches suffused plain beige walls also hold the energy of skins have not seen any Berkles pigeons yet which makes me sad so I'll post some Mission pidgesters having a quiche on 16th Street and this dish on my roof deck like something very Floridicana now that all the work is done to get me moved and the puking from antibiotics in the IKEA parking lot (grandmother holding plastic bag to my face like she did when she picked me up from college reunion in February) I just want mom and grandmother to come back, to go to the municipal rose garden, to eat pastries and look out windows.

also, what happened in the upside-down was the second installment of the :working class reading series, this one a celebration fo the life of akilah oliver with lou flroez, jai arun ravine and selah saterstrom.

6.7.2011 Old neighborhood P.O.D.

2011-06-07T22:45:00.000-07:00

wcrs photos

2011-05-18T20:18:00.000-07:00

there is barely time to catch up with myself. different shifts of friends coming in to help with boxes (Lexi: smoking a cigarette while trundling along on the back of my scooter "I am a 4 with a a 5 wing"; Anna, also on the back of my scooter along cold grimy Market Street rainy midnight Saturday "ModgePodge! I can make doll heads. And hands! And bake them." This week, having no attention for whatever the spine specialist, if he is a hard-ass ortho-jock, might give me as a catastrophic edict about what fused vertebrae will soon do to my spinal cord. (As it were, with Dia de Juicio, when will I have time to even arrive on my new roof deck in Berkles?) Also Feinstein's office to stop the war, intro to nursing home ombudsman system, and interviewing a mom and son all in Spanish--en verdad, espnagles because there is no way I can steer anything of substance smoothly through the tenses. And the son, mostly nonverbal, Downs Syndrome. Just being with. A sponge and a filtering organ for his story. No matter what the divide. BK is sending me citrine light, so that should help.

Which is all to say, suffice it for now, some grainy photos of last week's first :working class reading series. Thanks to everyone who came.

:working [class] reading series May 6 8pm

2011-04-27T19:50:00.000-07:00

Readers, speakers, thinkers and workers for the first :working [class] reading series will include

--Amee Puckett Boswell in conversation re; working, illness, property, management, momness and more.

--Mg Roberts as featured poet

--Organizers of the Poetic Labor Project filling us in on their symposium and blog.

and all of you, thinking/dreaming aloud with us!

What it is;

:working [class] reading series

bring a covered dish or beverage. bring some pomes or almost poems. bring your curiosity about poetry, your thoughts on work or class or access. also, think christmas lights, driveway, old couches, kids and dogs, barbeque, after party.

:every first friday beginning may 6, 2011
:8pm at michelle puckett’s house
:702 w. macarthur blvd
:oakland, ca

with this series we aim to soften things up. we are thinking of people who interest us and then asking them what poems or thoughts they might have about work, bodies at work, working class perspectives on the world, stories of capitalism, commonality, and the millions of offshoots poetry allows us to consider given these things. we want to mix scenes and get comfie. we want hot dogs.

what we are looking for:

any work, on any topic, by people who identify as raised-poor or working class.
work from people from other classes, granted it considers deeply the plight and dignity of working people and casts them centrally in the writing.
also, we want to facilitate a short dialogue with a worker – most often one who does not identify as a “writer” – each month. we will look at poetics and the work of words through a loose lens of labor and the body that performs it.
it is important to say that this series consciously considers physical bodies. the venue, a garage, will have space heaters and blankets and fans if oakland nights get hot. it is also completely wheelchair accessible, though we really regret to say that bathrooms are upstairs. assistance will be provided to anyone who needs it and there is a bathroom at the gas station across the street and at macarthur BART.

we think just by talking about couches and kids and bathrooms, we are making for a new tone as far as reading series go and who is encouraged to attend them. hot dogs are to be provided but please BYOB. we hope you’ll join us.

:michelle puckett & amber dipietra

Pigeon-of-the Day: Belinda the Bag Lady Pigeon

2011-04-23T18:32:00.001-07:00

The back of this small hand-painted canvas says "My cart! My cart!" Interestingly, cart is a word my abuelo Angel uses to refer to my mobility scooter. This painting came to my in the mail (along with a tiny cha-cha-cha wooden zumbido frog that my dad found for me at a yard sale). It is a Spencer Meyers original. Check out his Etsy shop for more bird-headed women, etc. He is an artist, actor and my stepmom's coworker at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa. Dear Spencer, thank you. Belinda and I will be trundling on to my new roof deck in Berkeley soon. (Friends, as I prepare to move across the bay, I am getting rid of stuff--if you need very tiny women's clothing, please let me know...no wait, no, I will contact Jenn to see if My New Red Shoes--an agency which provides clothing for homeless kids--can use them.)

Maggie DiPietra, thank you for curating this P.O.D. art just for me. I love you!

Coming soon: P.O.D. in transit, videos incl.

(Thinking of Bhanu saying a blog post is a sparkly fold out mat a poet can do a little circus on for a minute...)

Poetic Labor Project news...

2011-04-20T18:35:00.000-07:00

This project has definitely helped me shape the working [class] reading series with Michelle Puckett. Thanks guys!

Poetic Labor Project

We're so pleased to announce that responses from Amber DiPietra, Steve Benson, and an anomyous contributor are now up on the Poetic Labor Project's blog: http://labday2010.blogspot.com/.

To download a pdf of all three, please go here:
http://andrewkenower.typepad.com/labor/poetic-labor-project-april-2011.pdf

We're grateful for these responses, which continue the conversation around poetics and labor that was the subject of the gatherings in the East Bay last Labor Day. As part of our commitment to continuing that conversation, please stay tuned for monthly updates with new content.

We want to open the space to as many people as would like to join - your comments and provocations are welcome. If you've got a more extended set of thoughts about any of the new writings, or the original presentations archived from the event, please feel free to submit those to: labday2010@gmail.com. A special thanks to Andrew Kenower for designing the PDF and to Dan Thomas-Glass for original artwork. Thanks for your interest and solidarity!

http://labday2010.blogspot.com/

Lauren Levin

Steve Farmer

Alli Warren

Brandon Brown

last Words and Deeds class for this series, tromped around softly in a huge blue bag

2011-04-12T02:16:00.001-07:00

all i had to do was be inside it. shuffle around the studio floor. when normally what i do is gravitate toward miniatures, as a way of crunching up, a tiny triangle of life outside gravity. (for a body that feels best in the moments before it gets out of bed, when it is still half asleep even, awake enough to be open to life, but unconscious enough to be exempt from muscle and bone) inanimate, figurina sleep.

(am not unaware of my grandfather's voice in my head, invoking a WC Fields tone to say "If you don't drink, well...when you get up in the morning, that's the best you gonna feel all day." Somatic classes are the only thing between me and the full espousal of this statement.)

a dark blue rice sack. like a bed-in-a-bag. this is what i have failed to explain to my counselor--Words and Deeds has made it more possible for me to approach new ways of being alone with my embodiment--as in, in my head with. while sustaining a connection to a web of dancing/performing/investigating others. a way to sleep while really awake.all i had to do was explore being recumbent and vertical, baggily. and approach Abby who was making her red wire-and-mesh laundry basket palpitate, a sacred redundant dumb responsive organ.

all these props, lit up from the inside with Violet Juno's animistic instructions. everyday objects beg her to take them home. to her students--the kid kids i guess--she says things like "Your understanding of art is deepened by your engagement with recycling".

Harold and i were somewhere on the kid kids side of the spectrum as far as students go tonight. vast rigorous silliness. we were supposed to be watching each other give stream-of-consciousness monologues, the listener also noting the speakers gestures and turning that into a score. but everything was hilarious. and there was that curious inversion that i noticed through the whole Words and Deeds series--in which some of the movers (the dancer folk) seemed to become entranced by language while the word people (the writers, etc) fell out of language and were happy to stay there. so Harold spoke and i did not track his gestures exactly, not in language. i felt them in my body as the rise and fall of tone, the swish of intention/worry/exclamation. but when i tried to reflect them back to him, my body could not do the things his body did. so i found i could map them as a poem. ( i was returned to words differently. "recovery from language", per Violet's website). poem made up of his real words, but really,a topography of cadence.

he went kind of like this:

[starts off silently though his mouth is moving and he is talking]

eyebrows up and up and down up and down down

once i saw this performance lecture and big words big words and i don't know why ___________people have to use big words and i
was taking notes but really i was like wah wah wah drawing and i am thinking
of your reading series and what would i read do i read, i would need to write, but do i write? i would like to write but i am a DANCER
and oh but i did a performance too and we put on glitter, hella glitter hella hella hella glitter
i love violet juno

To this tonal poem score recorded from Harold, I silently added--writing it on the giant piece of red construction paper where we were writhing:

hearty heartsville

Blogging is like performance art open studios, for poets.

:working [class] reading series

2011-04-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

bring a covered dish or beverage. bring some pomes or almost poems. bring your curiosity about poetry, your thoughts on work or class or access. also, think christmas lights, driveway, old couches, kids and dogs, barbeque, after party.

:8pm at michelle puckett’s house

:702 w. macarthur blvd

:oakland, ca

with this series we aim to soften things up. we are thinking of people who interest us and then asking them what poems or thoughts they might have about work, bodies at work, working class perspectives on the world, stories of capitalism, commonality, and the millions of offshoots poetry allows us to consider given these things. we want to mix scenes and get comfie. we want hot dogs.

what we are looking for:

any work, on any topic, by people who identify as raised-poor or working class.
work from people from other classes, granted it considers deeply the plight and dignity of working people and casts them centrally in the writing.
also, we want to facilitate a short dialogue with a worker – most often one who does not identify as a “writer” – each month. we will look at poetics and the work of words through a loose lens of labor and the body that performs it.

it is important to say that this series consciously considers physical bodies. the venue, a garage, will have space heaters and blankets and fans if oakland nights get hot. it is also completely wheelchair accessible, though we really regret to say that bathrooms are upstairs. assistance will be provided to anyone who needs it and there is a bathroom at the gas station across the street and at macarthur BART.

we think just by talking about couches and kids and bathrooms we are making for a new tone as far as reading series go. we hope you’ll join us. hot dogs will be provided but BYOB.

:michelle puckett & amber dipietra

working.class.reading@gmail.com

P.O.D. Edge waters and Nita Little.

2011-04-05T02:21:00.001-07:00

got to move/write with the glorious Nita Little (thanks to more Words and Deeds) who I now have a tremendous friend crush on. An old timey bombshell meets contact improv physics engineer. She is--evocative. And Margit told me what evocative meant--which I guess I have always known, but was stuck on a more plodding syntax for. Evocative is that which evokes--nothing, as in No Thing, but a wideness, an expanse....And For, that preposition is holding me back. the moving tonight helped me know it and I noticed it is now imposable for me to distinguish between major and minor stories.

she, Nita, started us off by doing the kind of sacrum-to-the-floor exercise that happens in many modalities. but it is April, the light is long, greyish pinkish green across the glossy dim floor of Kunststoff. and we were starfish at the tide line, limbs splayed out, limbs curled in, a crazy anemone sit up. over and again.

i was sad today, badly sad, sad sad sad, as in crying all along Market on the way to class. which is OK, I've needed that edge back, to trace metal rain and change forms. dry a long time. and so was kind of droopy all during class, but laid myself down along a diagonal post that girds the perimeter of the studio floor. cold metal painted the color of san francisco, and my bed room wall. that iron orange that hurts. and worked with my attention face down on the diagonal, a grace, the chance of other surfaces, for a body that doesn't easily change levels (physical). and heard other bodies, scuffing and whispering and occasionally whorling or side shuffling up to me and putting a toe in--to my rib or calf--which was everything. thought about Anna with her knitting and my union steward at work, who today sat with me for 20 minutes and gave me relationship advice.

Here's Nita: "My purpose then, when I am giving my weight to another, is to align my anchor with his just as if I were an intimate part of his body. My body joins in alignment with the structural organization of my partner, and since his organization begins from his anchor, I must also find that same anchor. When I do, we both find the freedom to move. When I don’t, I am blindly trusting the fates, or relying on my partner to make movement work. I ask him to handle the load of my weight as well as the force of my action. That makes me heavy and an effort. There is an implicit limitation to our physical freedom when I am not also managing my own weight relationship to the earth because the structure is inefficient. Through a partner and on my own, I want to be in continual touch with the earth, casting my relationship to her center from mine. That way, we form a whole." I need to go here and read more http://nitalittle.com/ of her writing toward "attentional geometry".

then, when i got home, this! a piece of the collaboration that Denise and I did--so many thanks to Thom (whose partner has an owl necklace in New York that I will one day get to covet when I visit)
http://www.wildhorsesoffire.org/.

http://www.rivalehrer.com/paintings/paintingsframesest.html

test

2011-04-03T20:54:00.001-07:00

I did not will my small body into a sharp javelin and bore through his skull thus pinning him to the back of the hard plastic bus seat. as I wished to do. so that he would stop. saying those things to my friend

2011-04-03T01:46:00.001-07:00

--suggesting what she might do with her limbs and tongue. but I believed I could have done this if I needed to.

why I even entertained the idea that my friend and I should get off the bus (when that man could have followed us) or why I even thought for a minute that we should stay on the bus and ignore his words for 15 more blocks, I don’t know. while the tall, imposing frat guys in the ironed jeans and button up shirts that were sitting right between us and this man, well—they got quiet. quit saying HBS—Harvard Business School apparently—every fucking other sentence and were trying to not to look at us, trying not to show their politically incorrect pissed faces, delaying them as we were, with having called the whole bus to a halt by summoning the po-po. I don’t know. I wanted to go empty and vacant, that was my first response and I wanted to avoid pissing off a larger number of people, which seems like a dumb weak impulse.

I took out my cell phone, pointed it at him at the man still saying “cunt” and I told him he could get off now or I was calling the police. then i yelled to the driver to stop the bus because I had 911 on the phone. and while we waited on the police, some colossal tool wearing a very twee coat and skinny jeans and an ipod got up and started shaming my friend for having stopped the bus just because she was offended. and I did not lunge across the aisle and gnaw his face off like a rabid little zombie Chihuahua dressed in my best Day of the Dead frock. but my friend got real loud, about how hard his life most certainly was in his Urban Outfitters get-up and when was last the time he got attacked on the street? and such. and he shut up, then turned to the bus driver and like a crazed little bat, raised his sinewy wings and started photographing the driver—one of my favorites on the 49 line, an older Asian man. bat boy was shrieking “I am taking your picture to report you for stopping this bus just because those women are hysterical!’

the man finally split before the police arrived. frat boys decided to speak up, oh so helpfully, at this point, by bellowing, “all right, he’s gone, let’s get this bus moving.”.. we got to our stop, my friend and I thanked the driver and stepped off the bus, just in time to see two Russian trannies, striding by calmly on this hot night, drinking tall boys. we laughed and sort of clung to each other and kind of cried and made a lot of whoopy feathery noises.

thinking about what a tremendously good kickboxer my friend would make, certainly a better strategy as my teeth and sharpened head would not last long. all of this after a night watching kindly yogi bicyclists and metal workers play Twister in a giant warehouse off of 20^th.

Beauty Is A Verb, also--

2011-03-30T23:16:00.001-07:00

this thrilling cover for the anthology! i almost can't believe it and want to catch up with the editors to ask them for the story behind this image/idea. because this is so in line with my Accion Mutante plan to go totally aquatic one day.

Beauty Is A Verb

2011-03-28T22:52:00.000-07:00

in the interest of conserving energy and spreading the word quickly, i am just going to quote David Wolach, and by that i mean--right click and subsume his entire blog post to say

"

Beauty Is A Verb

Many thanks to Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northern for bringing several of us together, who are interested in discourses around "disability," and then spending much of this year editing our collected contributions of poetry and essay to the forthcoming anthology, Beauty Is A Verb: An Anthology of Poetry, Poetics, and Disability. Of course I've yet to see most of the specific contributions herein, but knowing many of the current contributors' work more generally, I think it safe to say that this anthology will, as Jennifer notes below, be wide-ranging within the largely contested bounds of disability studies as examined poetically. Many thanks too to those who contributed to Nonsite Collective's curricula on somatic practices, the commons, and disability/post-abelism. The curricula span the years 2008-present and each suite, as intersecting with the others, has influenced my thinking/writing thru "disability" -- perhaps more than any other one transitory locus of activity. (See the curriculum pages for past talks/discussions/performances etc.)

More on the book as it takes shape. For now, below is Bartlett's note:

Great news! The anthology I have spent the last year co-editing with Sheila Black and Michael Northen, Beauty is a Verb, is coming out in September from Cinco Puntos. It's a collection of poetry and poetics by/on poets with disabilities including Norma Cole, Brian Teare, Dannielle Pufunda, Michael Davidson, Jim Ferris, Larry Eigner, Josephine Miles, Cynthia Hogue, Denise Leto, Hal Sirowitz, and so on.

Please help us spread the word. We believe this is the first such collection, and it crosses the genres of Language poetry, narrative poetry, New York School, Disability Poetics, and so on. If you know anyone who might be interested in reviewing the anthology or having a reading or university visit - please by all means, let us know.

I am very excited to be included in this anthology!

P.o.D.s with Pringles and hip implants

2011-03-28T22:15:00.002-07:00

hollow inner aluminums and such.

I looked in the mirror when I got up and said aloud: "you are a motor vehicle today." Then began looking at the face, so-called.

--David Wolach quoting Camille Roy

Capitol Corridor P.O.D. 3.24-25.11

2011-03-26T15:46:00.003-07:00

more Words and Deeds, onecontinuousword forthcoming

2011-03-21T22:57:00.001-07:00

we sounded our vowels through the 5 Chinese elements, uuu for perinuem and such. there are sacks that hold the organ groups and the tongue and heart, they are connected.

we paired up and Abby and I took turns turns witnessing, each other, writing on stage, talking while writing, dribbling, then putting the pages out there, letting the body be the page. Don't think of it as doing a dance, Margit said. Think of it as doing your thing. which made it a lot easier for me. had Abby convinced for a minute that I knew shorthand, which is maybe as close as I get to achieving some soaring dance move. I let my narrative go, kind of, put it out there, how I wanted to, needed some new lateral flow (after what the orthopedic told me last week re; my shoulders and ankles--"Your foundation has crumbled.") and then starting swimming toward the studio heat lamp (the Kunst-Off Arts studio has exquisite heat lamps, your hair could catch fire if you got to close, I think). Abby struggled, cocooned herself in her dance, arms making counter-valences, fingers pressed into each other until she went leap-running over blankets and bare wood floor, round and round the studio. enacting her sense of getting stuck in words, as total movement vocabulary.

Denise and I did a bang up job of not collapsing into paroxysms of laughter during the class (even when I sneezed ad we kept reversing the meridians during our pairing) this is a tremendous feat on our part, though i think we might have challenged ourselves to work that into our soundings. she also promised me that if i build the onecontinuousword blog for her, she will begin to blog. so i will.

We all go out into the night, our tongue-bodies entering BART, Margit concluded the class. Then, Oh no, never mind about that last part!

Grubstake

2011-03-20T00:01:00.001-07:00

support for families resource fair in a huge gym at a Mission high school. dozens of booths for children with disabilities and their parents. "are you guys interns? you are so young looking" a saucy volunteer from the silicon valley independent living center asked derek and i.. no, staff, we say but i have stickers and derek is a good ingenue. he makes a lot of good contacts for his group over the course of the afternoon.

later, work on the Proyecto Vision article, the rain bringing out all the old smells in our little apartment, olor de velvety wallpaper behind lead paint, wood which was once soaked and now molded. Meme works on a burlesque in the window--a writhing feline torso, yowling when old women address her adoringly from the street, through the bars. She will call it Meem Peeps.

anna is over for an extended, hopefully restorative, sleepover. too much Chinese birthing center dissertation and stomach plagues. it grows dark, the slurry sound of city traffic in rain. yelp tells us that Toast on Polk means gentrification. but i want to eat hot bread in a place that looks like an ikea of breakfasting. so i say we should go.

a. is wrapped in the afghan, cradling the giant plush manatee. i do preliminary research and discover that Toast turns into a smoked salmon fusion crispy flatbread kind of place after 5. "they are dead to me" a. says.

so, Grubstake, i hold on to K's arm and do a plié of sorts on a grate, just a little. still happy that it is the first time in 2 weeks i can bear weight on my ankle. K. threatens to do his routine, run skipping down the street holding a newspaper over his head. wind fwumps through our umbrellas and spins us around. there are gullies along every curb cut, sulphur light refracts and rushes along with oily water. "do normal people do this? go out in torrential rain for an old greasy diner?" i ask.

we get to the place where Grub has been pitched into the ground, home fries and "Portuguese Corner" meals staked out against the gale. an old railway car wedged between buildings near Polk at Pine. the bar part of the diner in the train car; affixed to that--a rectangular wood paneled room with a a tiny plank porch like an old shotgun house.

here, the real toast! also, a trellis ceiling strung with illuminated plastic grapes and Portuguese flags.

the world could wash away, is washing away and into irradiated spinach across the sea. we talk about nothing together. we make little boats. a skylight above the ceiling arbor, black and sparking wetly with the storm. through which can be seen the dingy side of a building across Polk St. men's white underwear hanging from a high window.

a sunday

2011-03-14T02:44:00.001-07:00

A. staring at a diamond-shaped pattern that is becoming a leafy red lace thing in her hands, while simultaneously showing P. how to pearl stitch, talking about peer counseling as it functions in domestic violence trainings and filling me in on our Sister Spit outing for this Friday.

P. learning to stitch in reverse while simultaneously making dahl, asking me about the avant garde (with a healthy dose of micro-lending, volunteer food banking skepticism) and outfitting me with an owl shirt from the Salvation Army.

Y being quiet, staring at his laptop and reading the news from Japan, telling us how he's feeling about doing research on Japanese single mothers whose daughters commit suicide for being bullied about the divorce, receiving their stories when he has come to live here--they are providing him with the stories he needs to complete his thesis for his nonprofit business degree, but what is he doing for them in exchange? Beginning to give the attention that is needed, learning new methods from the SF Food Bank, I tell him.

To have someone witness you in your work and say it is enough, for the moment, even when the need is endless. Michelle helps me with this. An office manager at ILRCSF and a poet friend, in the same space. This coincidence an incredible luxury.

I am reading A Megaphone, while simultaneously using some part of my brain to work out the problem of how I'll write this next Proyecto Vision article--how really, maybe I am not comfortable writing a disability article that doesn't have some triumphalist slant (and my discomfort discomforts me), and quoting passages from Christina Peet to the knitters.

And to Y. who has taken a break from scrolling through the devastation to his home country. Is lying on his belly on the floor, staring into the fish tank, at the shy and "dorky" mini-puffers.

AYG, Polk Street, Kate Robinson, involutions

2011-03-12T23:31:00.001-08:00

went and selected a white and indigo pansy in honor of Ana Yoshida Garcia's birthday--the uber mother as in, the unknowingess of her I have before me all the time, folded away in the body I sleep next to, the body he came from.

the pansy felt like sticky baby earlobes and I can't imagine it will last long next to the dusty succulents on our windowsill. but we also placed this photo of her on our altar. it occurs to me--thanks to michelle puckett--altar as my layered catholic buddhist poet family storied shadow box, a place to place small things and make large changes. to alter the shape of reality and how that shape abides and allows new/re-integrates old (bodies) spaces.

a walk up polk street, women in green short-shorts and bobbling felt antenna. apparently st. patricks day parade spill over from market street. a thousand bougie dogs chatting over organic roasts. robot chicken in the picture window where The Polk-a-Dpt used to be. 30 dollars on a tiny pie and cowgirl creamery nettle cheese. still have not given up on my original relationship to polk street. the sexual charge of the glowing computer stations in Quetzal.

those days. which strangely, amazingly, came up in conversation with Kate Robinson. i met her there to get acquainted, as part of us having been paired up for the Mills College Professional Development Program for Poets. premise being, i am the real-life example post-MFA, but really... lovely involutions of the pairing. as i am still developing a poetic profession. which is everything, making the map from the inside, instead of a separate aerial view. (thanks kate, for this schematic.) and we agreed we would probably be happy if we never published anything and she said, "when I finish something, I just want to tear it up and start again, because it is the process I am interested in" i admire that so hugely. other things discussed: amputee fetishism, fibonacci numbers, no more boring poetry, how can social realism prose hold a form, with holes.

relfexology, chocolate smears, mandibles

2011-03-08T00:26:00.001-08:00

special reflexology at Japan Town mall on grey humid but chilly Saturday, very cheap and the massage lady very kind, even if the man proprietor did talk to Isabel about me as if I were her daughter. I speculated that maybe disabled women don't go out on their own sans family members in Japan, so he made an assumption. or it could have simply been that both Isa and I went into the same pink, single stall bathroom and never stopped talking while we both took turns peeing.

then we had ice cream for lunch, chocolate wrapped in a waffle crepe, the way Isa and I eat chocolate. Pointing out parts of it to each other hours later--"Lick that spot on your arm, unless you've suddenly acquired a mole."

later, meeting Anna in her every day hair flower (versus the bedazzled black hair flower clips for burlesque days) at Sunflower. experiencing the good garlic pain of Vietnamese noodles. which may mean that, in our early 30's our digestive systems are profoundly aging.

finally had a chance to rid myself of guilt for having twice had Mission Pies without Kyle. This time, he was with us in the Outer Mission when we passed it by, and he ate raspberry pear.

met Michelle and Amee at a jazz club near 24th. an elderly Chinese lady in a beddazzled blazer was swaying drunkenly up and down the length of the bar. she saw my scooter and pointed, I want that! I want it!

i, yet again, told A and M the story of Isa and Bananna scraping a molten chocolate chip cookie off the wall of the Alhambra and shoveling it into their mouths. This is as exotic as my when-I-was-20-and-a-Eurotrash-hippie-in-Spain stories gets. Mychelle said, Why? because she assumed, what with my eagerness tot ell the story and all, that there was a bigger point. Isa answered, earnestly, plaintively, "There were no other cookies around...!"

Sunday, I remember drinking wine and feeling egregious for exceeding the word limit on this blog post I am supposed to be doing for the Labor Day posts. also, a brief post-gamelan concert interlude with Lex, in which we laid in bed and tried not to be fatalistic about social entrepreneurs who are aggressively courting. What matters is what Lola, the Ethiopian hound, thinks.

Monday, today, my manager gave me "permission not to obsess about X until July" and this felt like a revelation. She chose just the right words for me. Permission to think that i am doing what i can for clients right now, even if it is a bit of a mess.

And then, Words and Deeds class 3. Tonight was led by Sarah Shelton Mann. The left ankle bone spur is O.O.C. as in a coral reef of a callous has formed on my ankle bone and every nerve strums over it when I try to stand up straight. Brianna asked Sarah if I could still participate. i always wonder how to negotiate that. by being the only person with a very visible disability in a room of dancers, i am already making a statement, i am beyond asking permission--and yet, i feel the need to let others know, to ask something else, to make an ok space that helps me let myself.

hobbled up to Sarah as she was vigorously warming up and Brianna was asking the question about me, "Her ankle--" and then, from Sarah, "I see." without B. finishing. This made me a little defensive, immediately. Like she proclaimed she saw my weakness, my wound. But not at all.She just meant what she meant. I see. another kind of permission. She basically said, of course, you can participate. But beyond that, what you need to do is have fun.

Sarah is an tough, hard as a diamond presence. Someone you trust after a few moments, very much. "Your mandible is your identity.", "Find a spot in the room and bring it toward you with your awareness. You don't need to move.", "Go to the back of your skull and see the space.", "Close your eyes and say aloud I am happy. I know it is silly, Just do it."

Harold and I engaged in a kind of chanting chest slapping exercise together and after he told me I needed to hit people more often. in another life, i always thought i was a cuban boxer, though this is perhaps not what he meant, i love harold. and the two women in our improv subset--an aerialist whose father has just been hit by a car, a woman who wants recall her Soviet childhood standing in line for the wrong shoes by staging a performance art piece in a SF Financial District shoe store. the careful gutting and layering of fish innards. also, salt flats with norah, who had missed last week's river mountain people.

i am thinking blogs allow us to be childlike (syntacticaly) and real, a permissive space to use our ordinary language towards the sharing/encouraging of extraordinary patterns and rhythms.

Fruitvale P.O.D. and Monday

2011-03-01T00:39:00.001-08:00

one day, i will just live in Oakland and not need to be so far from my brown pink plaid bed on weekends to see friends. but, sat with baby osprey Lucille who was wearing a pink bear outfit and plays a deliberate delicate finger game, gave wild Nascha an early choco-bunny wrapped in gold leaf, tucked inside a green felt elephant purse Nascha barefoot on cold concrete in the Oakland dusk (i think for a five year old to actually say, as a calm side note, "my feet are cold" must mean they are beyond cold), shrieking about how she could have half after dinner. mismatched baby shoes sprout all over Mg's yard. heard about lesbian porno makers who successfully foster-adopted children with disabilities on fairly low incomes and i feel a crazy sense of definiteness, like yes! this, for me, please...gratitude to Mg for this.

other people i know moving in huge fast loops of narrative--this is called sadness. i do it too, i see it immediately. but when i am outside of it, i can't be in it. this is called flatness. am i going wrong with this tendency towards flatness lately? i think it is to give an open surface, as empathy, but maybe it is numbing..what to do with that? how much to help and how much to insist quietly, gently, that one takes steps forward, even if governmental forms are the most messy and deranged system of systems. she did systems analysis for the military in the 70s, a young mexican woman out of el paso. first engineer in her family. and now, "i bind my fingers so they don't curl, no matter how much it hurts. i don;t want to be deformed. i have a phobia of those Social Security forms."

i hang up the phone. stiffly, let my fingers curl a long time ago. leave work. go to the 2nd Words and Deeds class at Kunst-off. Hand placements on Harold's chest remind me how much I wan to be able to offer bodywork. Tracing the borders of Asia, the open-faced lovely singer from last week. The idea is to tuck one back into themselves and also, release out into other hands.

Neil says we must do a big score as a tiny dance. and Petra says we must make phrase. we lay on our blankets. i'd give anything to be able to sit comfortably indian style with the other movers on the floor. but no amount of binding...ok, i wouldn't;t, since i'd rather use what little currency in other ways.. i lean against petra's wheelchair instead. then glad for the flop time. mini-opera oyster, sipping air from a tube at the shoreline. rocking and scooching and sibilant in-breath which smells of hot chocolate. petra's cheeks are pink. neil and i are dressed in things of other roseate shades. it is freezing in the studio, there are glowing oscillating heater fan things and the red bricks. it is winter, it is estuary. never imagined how close everyone held to a river until it was told in the circle.

popping and locking in the urban fluid

2011-02-21T23:45:00.000-08:00

the grace of dancers
primary delights,
open face coming from
a crouch, (was she singing, "I
saw you"?) and I was
seen. be a row of
train seats
red folding
propulsions in adrenal
streams
boa in a basket
go with me

always offer a window sill sliding along landscapes and running varnished music to sunstruck rivers, in the church on regular days, attending small silvers...

"would you like
a lateral stretch", "why am
I afraid to invert myself?"

its all question and
gesture, what is given
a chance to move without much
thought over other
surfaces, grace
of dancers to suggest
options in--even slow
and cautious
opening--space

quick write after the first in the new Words and Deeds series, tonight's class taught by Jessica Tully and David Buuck. in a big new art studio above grimy civic center (which i have a fondness for anyway, it being the center of my initial work life, LightHouse, library, etc)

a bit from Jessica Tully: (who maps me back to my bathtub where i take the cross country BART back to manatee self. and makes me think about how severe long term arthritis can be staged as new kind of popping and locking, given the rights props....wow...yes, that is what she made me think about...the stiff slow body in the urban fluid.)

http://blog.sfmoma.org/2010/09/ost-jessica-tully/

Dr. Crissy Huffard, PhD, didn’t laugh when I told her about my line of inquiry. She is the marine scientist who discovered that octopuses could walk as bipeds on the ocean floor when they want to. We met at her part-time bungalow somewhere deep in the Santa Cruz mountains. She spends most of the year in Indonesia and was preparing for a trip there the very next day. I explained that I was working on conceptual forms that could be used to investigate the octopus’s elegant, otherworldly characteristics and wondered if she thought there could be a potentially feminist and community-centered application for this inquiry.

And David initiating many ebullient ridiculous hellos, in which I remembered how so many things are easier with dancers, their body tells them before their mind. (i was initially afraid upon entering the room, realizing that, for the first time, i was going to be part of a movement class not framed by disability dance...and could that be safe for me?) yes, my feet could creep even while others darted and i was protected by a kind of uncategorical attention (not adhering to visible pain or societal administration to/neglect of decrepitude). the moving and the still gets regarded in the dance space and brought out, carefully and without language.

in related news, was pining to go to the somatics workshop held in ann arbor this weekend, to be there with Denise and Thom and Bhanu and Eleni and Neil and Petra. but i could not face another plane after Fla. college reunion. but here is a bit from BK's blog about the weekend, the conclusion she came to after the weekend:

I should open a vocational training center for poets. Melissa could teach hypnosis and palmistry; I could teach facials, wraps and maalish: Indian head massage with mustard seed oil -- the points of the nadi opening like flowers on the skull (plus the pouring of the oil over the forehead); Sarah could teach art therapy and cranio-sacral skills; Petra could teach Esalen massage; Gina could teach yoga therapy; C.A. Conrad could teach the tarot -- and so on. I actually thought that Thom Donovan would make an incredible transpersonal psychotherapist, with a focus on music and writing. Why don't poets have trades? I think it's important. At the very least, it's a way to connect with the barter economy: the acupuncture, massage, homeopathy, yoga, home repairs and biodynamic produce (to name a few of the things I have bartered for) that support the body that writes. I think of hospice work, of volunteering with children in homeless shelters, or the organizations that support families, or work with refugees: how can we bring a somatics to these other communities, that so many of us think about in our work? How can we be practical? How, too, could we earn a living in an alternative way?

http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.com/2011/02/detroit.html

BK, I will offer experiments from the Write To Connect lab, plus peer counseling for folks with chronic illness disability--envisioning/enlivened listing practices!

Floridicana Tamiami 2011 (Nw College 50th anniversary/reunion and some Tampa)

2011-02-19T17:53:00.003-08:00

P.O.D. Saturday Caltrain, Candice and George

2011-02-07T22:22:00.003-08:00

january

2011-01-24T23:58:00.002-08:00

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

COMMON/USE

2011-01-06T22:41:00.001-08:00

the nonsite's COMMON/USE project at SFCamerawork--right next to Independent Living Resource center. so to contiue with the themes of Venn diagram worlds. "my" worlds.

in other news, 2nd series of Write To Connect starts this Saturday at the LightHouse for the Blind.

2011 begins...

2011-01-02T19:18:00.000-08:00

(TenderNob koi by artist Novy. (As two species of carp overtake The Great Lakes.) Gift from NOLA, tiger shell, Ear of Oya, goddess of illness, wind and transition. Daria and Robbert's amulet dance. Whisper in to be delivered. A red and yellow piggy bank painted by Zoe. Brings already prosperity, an accidental gift from the System, only two days in! Also, peridot to bind and mend. Digestion and renewed affection.

More holiday collages....

2010-12-31T19:11:00.000-08:00

Holiday collages 2

2010-12-24T01:03:00.000-08:00

Holiday collage thus far

2010-12-18T15:21:00.002-08:00

P.O.D. coordinates: from LightHouse holiday (sad goodbye redux) to ILRC holiday party. also, in Friday' rainy transit, ran my scooter into a pole trying to avoid astonished wet shoppers poised to race across every intersection the moment the light changed. "I love the way they sparkle the streets."

2010-12-18T14:36:00.000-08:00

Give yourself the gift of restorative writing

2010-12-16T01:39:00.000-08:00

Write To Connect—life writing workshops

in the disability community

Write To Connect means restorative writing, an experience of the body being met in words and artful experiment, an experience of opening and moving in new ways through writing.

Use Write To Connect

-- as a way to reach new spaces

-- as a friend builder

-- to focus your communication skills

-- as a path towards more meaningful work

-- to let go of old ideas

-- to find new forms for your voice or vision

This class is designed for writers and non-writers of all (dis)abilities. Emphasis is on exploring new processes, instead of putting out written products.

The dates for the next series are January 8, 15, 22 and 29. These Saturday workshops will happen at the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in San Francisco from 12 – 2pm. $5 - $15 suggested donation per class. No one turned away for lack of funds.

Contact Amber with questions. amberdipietra@yahoo.com, 415 867 1124. RSVP by January 2^!

Write To Connect: life writing for radical and everyday embodiments www.writetoconnect.blogspot.com.

Support WTC participants by donating on the WTC website via PayPal.

P.O.D. 12.13.10 coordinates: new downtown life, old dark matter, filing entropy, Jeffrey's remains! skeletal nativity, parse the lights and motion to make a glassy stream, which to make him give up? Did wearing my glasses make her projectile vomit?

2010-12-13T23:35:00.005-08:00

first Write To Connect at ILRCSF and Floridicana does the Charleston

2010-12-01T23:20:00.000-08:00

a wrap-up of the first-ever Write To Connect series I taught at the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco (a new series of W2C starts in January at the LightHouse for the Blind.)

and Thanksgiving in Charleston, moonshine, Bloody Mary's, Poe's Tavern, never made it to Fort Somethin Somethin from the drunksick, Norman Rockwell mid-motion pics in front of TV, lightsavers, but the babies are still funner than the Wii to swing around with, kids on the upstairs porch filling the sauce pot and drenching grown-ups coming back late from the bar. Some shots from Sullivan's Island:

P.O.D.not so much as terrified sparrow (o los manos de Melquiades) 11.12.2010

2010-11-12T21:40:00.004-08:00

Taking photos while waiting at the top of the escalator, Market @ New Montgomery. For Write To Connectors to emerge. Was this bird stricken? Tiny eye, swiveling wildly in its head. My larger eye not six inches away. Iridescent inky blue-green, these common lights. Would it die? Soon-to-be new job in old-old-job neighborhood. Red Cross to Laguna Honda. Now, the hard work, people who have never lived outside of the hospital before. Turned away to watch the metallic steps, leveling again and again with the dirty red tiles. When I looked back, the bird was gone.

terrified sparrow postscript 11.15.10: NPR short fiction contest. The prompt--Everyone said the house was haunted. Michael Cunningham is the judge. Sound bad? No! Winner is a resurrection birdhouse. Translucent hoot owl and strobing peacock!

P.O.D. busy, location unknown

2010-11-06T23:36:00.000-07:00

2010-11-04T02:53:00.000-07:00

orange and black for three solid days, remembering Dooger's Little League games and how I planted M&M trees by crushing them in to the dirt behind the dugout with my tennis shoes. A split persimmon flooded with red wax, an orange scarf gets me a long trail of honks like geese going wild, revving it up the hills. And altars with pale lilac parasols. There are no winter folds to tuck all these crowds into, this marigold rush. It's still summer in November, the nights are tricked into staying short, but singed on the edges, with sage and cotton candy.

P.O.D. Write To Connect 10.29.10

2010-11-04T02:35:00.001-07:00

P.O.D. Ananda Fuare 10.27.10

2010-10-27T01:40:00.001-07:00

LightHouse and light sculpture class at CCA

2010-10-24T04:07:00.001-07:00

GK Callahan, the social practice artist who has been making elaborate beaded creations and fanciful wind chimes out of old silverware with the blind seniors at work (the LightHouse for the Blind) for the last couple years, recently got a grant to use that trashy, overgrown lot next to the SF Arts Commission, across from City Hall and just next door to the LightHouse. He and the LightHouse community going to grow organic vegetables, plant a sensory garden (think wildly textured plants and varied smells, make a giant mosaic along the wall of the alley that leads to the space, and host an installation from Kota Ezawa's sculpture undergrads at the California College of the Arts. The students are going to make a light sculpture, that takes into account the visually impaired visitor to the garden and most likely, relies on their communal efforts to create the piece.

On Monday night, I got to accompany GK and Theresa Navarro to CCA. Theresa works with Project Insight--a division of SF Parks and Rec, designed so that blind kids can get outdoors and be involved in the usual Park and Rec type offerings for kids. (To her immense surprise, there was a huge poster on display in the CCA nave, showing the Project Insights greenhouse in Golden Gate Park, with the bench that CCA furniture students had designed for the site.) Charles Blackwell came along with some of his paintings in tow. Charles is a blind jazz musician, poet and playwright, originally from Alabama. Charles work is kind of like light sculpture in entropy (jazz musicians sloughing color in crazed movements, sharp loose strokes for kinetic form which is, I think, what is easiest for Charles to actually see).

Kota had invited GK and co. to come hear the proposals that his students had prepared for their potential installations in the LightHouse garden. I am grateful to GK and Theresa--who is helping GK do the tremendous amount of bureaucratic stuff he needs to do to get this project off the ground--for inviting me along. They remembered that I got my MFA at CCA and felt like I should be part of the discussion/review of the proposals.

The students were amazing. I was intensely jealous of both them and Kota--wishing I could do CCA over again, be a social practice artist, work more closely with the Art and Public Life program. (This is a principle reason why i have started Write To Connect--a growing impulse to make my writing more like social practice art.)

I had expected to feel a little bit othered in the class on Monday night, a little of that sense of, "Let's be nice to blind people and make cool art about blind people, because that would be a nice thing to do", but there was none of that. Each student's proposal had so much integrity, as in, there was such a desire to understand the community they were working with. And I definitely felt that they were feeling the With. One kid handed out an 11x17 mock-up of his design and said sheepishly, "I know it needed to be large print, but this was the best I could do with this layout." I almost cried. It was just a black and white outline, some sketches of stylized gates with rope and blocks of text arranged around that, but it was such clean crisp text and the print, while not quite being large enough, was substantially larger than any class handouts I ever received at CCA. At the time I was there, it had not occurred to me that I needed more definition like this--and here, it was handed to me.

One particularly impressive thing was the choice GK made in bringing with him the paperwork from the City's contract. He plopped it on the table and basically said, "here is social practice art". The contract has crazy clauses--wherein GK must return the land to the City in its original condition after the project is complete. So, tear up the garden and the sculptures and re-introduce the hypodermic needles and plastic bags? The students pored over the thick document with real interest, starting their own side conversations by pointing out certain bits of building code to each other, as if they were studying pigments. When I went to CCA, I would've been terrified by such legalese, by such a documents relationship to an art project I had to pull off. I thought it was brilliant of GK to bring that layer of the process into the classroom. It made it less odious, more interesting. The document was dog-eared and marked up--already re-made by GK's relationship to it. He is very dyslexic.

And we were sort of tough with the students. I said, "It's nice if you want to get folks to help you make clay letters--but what does that mean to someone who has never seen letters?" and, "I love the idea of the fountain, but the Helen Keller water legend resonates with that in a kind of corny way." No one was offended by this, the students were so engaged and so honest about how they had constructed their ideas and how they could dismantle them and recombine them. It was terribly beautiful. Charles was thrilled by scale models that he could totally follow with his fingers--and a giant sail that one of the kids in the class had scored from--some nautical dump? I don't know--but it's swarthy texture, illuminated by an LED sheet, an almost iridescent weave.

The final choice for the sculpture installation is up to GK, Kota and the class--but I know whatever they decide will be wonderful.

notes on photostream, 2

2010-10-10T23:42:00.001-07:00

caught myself madly snapping photos out of a taxi window the other day, as I sped down Market Street. same old dirty trajectory down lower Market, the small routes I always shuttle between, to and from places I go for work and service. but understood something so clearly (as in, this brief season of precise and detailed light) for a second, my finger on the shutter. that the only reason i write is because it somehow connects me to freedom of movment and all the times i cease to write, are, because, i have not yet learned how to make it compare, viscerally, to that dream of movement.

and taking photos is not, for me, about capturing motion, but getting real close to it. so, almost, begin in it the way i wish to be. in that haptic instant. quietly, by myself, and with a stranger (taxi driver). (far better than fleet week grinding down the horizon--a sound which just reminds me of doom.)

the actual sentences and pictures yielded by this ephemeral practice are somewhat incidental, but, if in temp giusto, full of moving.

Reading with Monday Night

2010-10-10T22:48:00.001-07:00

Announcing a joint celebration for the 9th Issue of Monday Night and the 5th Issue of Swill Magazine!

Join the editors and our beautiful and/or talented contributors for an evening of prose, poetry, and impropriety:

Tuesday 10/19, 7:00pm
Cafe Van Kleef
1621 Telegraph Ave (downtown Oakland)

Readings from: Marissa Bell Toffoli, Sean Craven, Amber DiPietra, Allison Landa, Warren Lutz, Rob Pierce, Della Watson

Monday Night ~ a journal of new literature
Editors: Heather Miller, Nana Twumasi, Jessica Wickens

Swill Magazine ~ Fiction for the Ill Literate
Editors: Sean Craven, Rob Pierce

Danny "Strike the Riser" DiPietra.

2010-10-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

See him live in Floridicana with Ruben Rey and the Undercover Band, babies.

From the redwood forest to the Gulf stream waters

2010-10-03T00:47:00.003-07:00

The time it takes for video to upload doesn't weigh out with the time it takes to write in my journal. Which is now. So suffice these pictures. Except to say that I got David Rawlings doing "a port monteau sandwich" of This Land is Your Land inside It's Too Easy. And Gillian Welch's head matching the Japanese maple on the side of the stage. We were so close. Turns out Hardly Strictly has an amazing disabled seating area. And it was filled with bluegrass fans/wheelchairs riders, senior hippies post Joan Baez set and all folks in between. Many of the people from the disability access day at the de Young ramped it on over there. Panning to Anna who was knitting something fuchsia. No 3 legged dogs this year, or pet chickens but a cat who rode on an old vet's wheelchair and consulted with him on whether it was best to stay for Steve Earl being as how the fog was going across the grass like dirty cotton balls and there'd been no sun since morning. A good way to get over my sadness that the old weather is back, small ribbon of Indian summer, the only summer there is in SF, vanished. This seasonal return, of being at Hardly Strictly with a kind crowd. And the fog, pulling the eucalyptus smell from the trees (strung with bikes) and the red sand and banjos.

Sock monkeys, Litquake and I am a Cuban Sandwich

2010-10-01T23:26:00.001-07:00

Jan Van Swearigan Oct 9 at Serendipity 803 Valencia SF. Paintings and sock monkeys. 6 - 9pm

Right around the corner, on Oct 9 at 6pm, my friend Michelle Puckett with Bang Out as part of Litquake. Reading her work. Double Dutch bar. http://litquake.org/events/lit-crawl-phase-1

And back in Floridicana, my uncle Richard in I Am A Cuban Sandwich, Theater Ybor, Oct 8, 9, 10 Tampa FL http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-am-a-Cuban-Sandwich/295728103521?v=app_2344061033&ref=ts

Floridicana summer 2010

2010-09-29T01:22:00.002-07:00

I’ve needed to do the process work, the routine and partial, saturated and sparse strokes that is my documenting of most things I document, but now, this summer in Floridicana. But the weight of coming back, in relation to the particular flotation privileges I achieve in relation to gravity when I am there, leaves me with it pressed under.

I thought I could do what Melanie does so beautifully—going back to her careful notes she has taken with the craftsmanship of a novelist, while on trips to Paris or that crazy glacial place near Argentina whose name I am forgetting now. But that is all too rather painstaking. As in, little stakes (what is stuck in time, in space) (not Melanie’s process or product—which is long and detailed, filled with the pleasure of reading a real novel in blog posts). But the process I would have to go through to make anything like that is pins to puncture and hold what wants to keeps floating. Embryo-waters.

Fluorescent pink contrails and army green gulf with white sheets of heat lightning. I want it back. And the feeling of space between my vertebrae. Which I get there, more than anywhere. Where I can’t really move any great distance, on my own. So many of these sentences start with but.

Hence, a greater conviction for the faux fossil memoir. Me and it, Floridicana, as a continuum on mineral deposits. Crushed shells in the thin layer of washing and receding water. Not carrying a purse on a bus, the heaviness of steps, but being driven in a car, Escalades and too many plastic water bottles. Five desserts for four Spanish ladies. The Italian club happy hour in Ybor City. Saw a slice of I Am a Cuban Sandwich. Uncle Richard in a red guayabera and a giant loaf, alone on stage, telling a story, the lights the same color as the orange sky outside, soaking up the dust from crumbling red brick.

(aunt Vilma, hi—is it late in Davis Island and uncle Manuel is sleeping? I love that you love the internet.)

Mom says, “I hope I am not old when you move back”. And I say, I will move back immediately or in ten years. If I could have access to the water—because if I go back 3,000 miles, I must be able to take myself, every day, easily, into the water. And they would make it happen, is the thing, if I were ready to settle all bets here and go back for good. Which is an unwieldy abundance. What it comes down too is not hard choices, but the choice time and distance makes us make.

And I did not look out the window when we went up—to see if I could see the giant black mass on the gulf. I don’t think I need to see it, but I wanted to because Laura Mullen had looked. I can’t. Mainly because planes make me sick. But really, what if, when I went back, forever, I create an initiative that involved disability access to the beach and that somehow linked to prehistoric manatee rites for/rights for mutations coming from the sea— This sentence is in the past tense because I know it will happen in some form and that makes me thankful, possibility seems revealed by the writing process, especially outside or instead of rigorous expectations for one’s process.

This is not the process work I wanted to do when I came back to SF, but now I am back and swept up, in hard fast gravity—stuff to do and days without warm water (but at least this dusty gold Indian summer, we get a little bit of this summer thing, though it makes me want to wheel my bath tub outside, because water with heat is not for keeping cool, but for really making the body swim).

Washed up, all the way across the continent. I give myself permission to keep saying the same things. Gabo did it. Kind of. (There were his ants, all around the pool in the screened porch. carrying old babies away and back again.) Build a flat from some eucalyptus or a red Dixie cup and float me home.

Some post- and pre-scripts:

9/15/10: Welo Chino tells a story about a Teamsters/Hollywood job and Joe Pesci on set at the Ca'd'Zan, freaking out because a palmetto bug touched him. Al that pinkymabrle. How do you get by a playing a mobster all your life? Easily, I think.

9/17/10: Reading Valery on sea shells at 2pm, knee-deep in pool, wearing my brother's gym shorts and a bathing suit top, on the back porch, using my swim goggles for a head band, avoiding the dead roach that the skimmer's current keeps pushing toward me, aunt Kim's cheecheewawa approahcing the side of the pool and sticking her tongue up my nose.

Valery basically says shells are motion and incremental change and return, sped up and held still, in a natural form, so as to be observable.

9/28/10: "cross-genre is a sensation model" (thanks Bhanu). Also,

Bloggerspot seems has done some crunching to these photos. Appropriate to my soamtics post Florida's unfurling. If you click on them, they regain their liquidity. In other news, new Payless topsiders from Mom. Think not yacht club deck shoes, but yacht rock kicks a la fried fish and karaoke on the causeway.

Birthday P.O.D. 9.23.10

2010-09-25T22:02:00.000-07:00

at Aquatic Park and then the silly sultry red Frenchie waiters at that little restaurant. He, the pigeon, did not send me a birthday text, but did carry a computer chip across a continent faster than you can say hour glass. P, V, A and K and lots of little crostinis with pear jam and manchego.

Floridicana summer 2010--soon!

2010-08-28T15:11:00.005-07:00

in anticipation of going to Fla next week. a photo from 2007. After Phil and Claudia's wedding in Miami, at this gorgeous little lounge, I came home and painted my living room these colors. Kind of.

Meanwhile, the abuelos are coming! My grandmother has decided she should come for a few days and then ride the plane with me back Fla. Bringing Welo Angel, the Hispanic Archie Bunker. "We're going to Tiburon to look at consignment shops and old Caddies again," she says. She insists on pronouncing Tiburon the real way, the sharp teethy way that sounds like what it is.

O&M somatic practice notes for David Wolach

2010-08-22T17:34:00.005-07:00

I was going to post this on Nonsite, but there is some code crazyness when I go there--and if I don't do this now, Monday will happen.

At a recent Nonsite event, David Wolach asked us to develop a somatic practice that re-humanizes the work place and the home place. For me, choosing is hard because everything is somatic practice, I am always practicing with my body because actually doing is interrupted, difficult, complex—be it walking or providing info and referral as a disability service or obsessing about the type of worker I should be (“Why did I get an MFA? Why am I not a physical therapist or a VI teacher or a real social worker?” “or why not in academia really then, instead of just with academic friends….?’ “How to be all when I am often neither?”etc etc etc. ). Working, not writing-working, but working-working as a social service provider (which also does involve some form of writing-working) is also somatic practice.

Since I recently lost all vision in my left eye, and since I cannot turn my head (my field thus being a lot more limited despite the fact that my right eye retains high partial vision) the Dept of Rehabilitation is paying for me to get O&M at my place of work—which happens to be the place that provides such services (I usually work on the other end of it, brining folks in for the services, instead of myself). O&M stands for Orientation and Mobility—the process by which a blind or low vision person learns to navigate with a white cane. The DOR is the governmental entity that funds training or other services for people with disabilities, injuries or illness. If job attainment or retention is contingent upon receiving such training or services, then one can be declared “severely disabled’ and receive funds for the training or service. There are many exceptions to this, much goes unfunded and one must have a certain way of presenting one’s case to the DOR to receive services. Since I work on the inside, I got my O&M authorization fairly easily, though typically, it can take several months.

My coworker, an O&M specialist, my age or a few years younger, has been assigned my case. We go out into traffic and practice intersection analysis. She seems a little appalled that I have no concept of left and right if it is not in relation to my legs. That car may be turning right, but he is turning toward my left, stiffer leg so the notion that he is a right-hand turner seems unreal to me. When she was still in grad school, she came to visit our agency and I showed her around, talked to her about how the organization works, etc. It's a bit awkward. I have strategies she did not learn about in school because O&M is geared towards one kind of disability generally. And she is not disabled and I feel obliged to forget my strategies in order to learn something from her--because also she has to check off boxes to say that I have learned and that I am safe. My strategies are opposite to what she has been taught is safe (i.e. I need to launch myself off the curb at the same time as I make the wide arc with the cane--because my leg bones require that kind of forward momentum. She maintains I need to be still while the cane does its pronouncement and then go quickly).

There are multiple systems at work here, not to mention thin layers of workers’ hierarchies. Vagaries in O&M (“once you have decided to step into the street, you can’t turn back, so there is no use in listening for the car nearest you—you have to listen to the lane ahead”) and in poetry. Bu there is a sense of a vital circuit between the DOR, O&M training, my job and myself as a worker and now a client of my place of work.

These notes form my journal are probably illegible. Does somatic practice writing have to be legible? Can it possibly be legible? Or is it like composting toward another layer of writing? (The LightHouse has gotten a grant to sue this long abandoned lot across from City Hall as a community garden—for the blindness community and other Civic Center communities.) The last line in the journal entry has to do with me suddenly hitting upon a possible resource lead for a man with ankylosis spondilits who came in seeking O&M from the LightHouse. He will never qualify for it, because he is not even low vision. His fixed spine makes it so that he cannot look up when he walks and people mow him over at the opera, which he enjoys going to regularly. It is frightening and demoralizing to him. but it has nothing to do with work retention, since he is retired and it is the opera. Therefore the DOR would not pay. It occurs to me that an East Bay agency offers generalized “travel training”. I feel relieved at having some suggestion to offer him, especially since like him, I fall more to the side of mobility than orientation.

Follow-up notes; I call the East Bay agency and the lady says they only offer this service to people who live in the East Bay. The AS guy would not qualify. I know she is telling me the wrong information, that she is, herself confused, so now I have to circle back to figure out who else at the agency I might need to talk to get a different answer. She is kind of an acquaintance, so the politics of it are difficult, Also, I am resourcing her for my resource work—we are now twice removed from seeing any income come into our agencies for the time spent on the AS man. But I am funded (being paid as a “resource counselor”) to do this kind of work, so in a sense, I can take all the time I want on it, except that since I saw that man, dozens of other people have come through the doors, and there is not time to come up with helpful leads for all of them.

Bodies in systems needs organic outlets, one stages need that is more prescribed than actual. The real need can’t quite get funded. You can come close to it—poetics, or just conversations (I really liked the guy with AS—it makes me want to meet him on a weekly basis and walk around with him. can I get paid for that? Unfortunately, we all need to get paid….) These are economics. The real social work falls somewhere else, it is like improv or communal somatic performance. One thing I love about my job is that the position exists half outside the system—someone can call me and just have a conversation.

Follow-up notes: On my next to last O&M session, my co-worker and I go to the cable car turn-around at Powell, to practice walking in crowds with the white cane. This is what I most wanted to practice. But when we get there, it seems that there can be no practicing. People are not machines, like cars (or mechanistic of the traffic system). Or they are and the white cane signals them to move, to drag their children out of my path as if I were a kind of motorized zombie (oddly, when speeding to Forever 21 on the mobility scooter, people stop dead in my path to examine bracelets at a street cart. They do not seem oblivious to my trajectory, but confident that I will find a way to skirt them or that I will yield until they choose to move out of my way.) For my part, for my own safety, again, the choice to exaggerate tendencies for optimal function--I have to choose not to veer but proceed toward them, so I am not constantly darting larger faster passersby. It is embarrassing only because I assume they know I see that but choose to not yield. Though actually, they probably assume I cannot see at all, because they do not ever make eye contact. Nothing about not being to see on the left side is that scary when merging into a crowd rushing toward the Gap. It is still the same old signals in my body, which mistake chronic ache for external danger--and it is not unfounded as slower stiffer walking can make for collision. Trust that they see you, I think of Rodney Bell telling me during the site-based performance with Axis (the phrase in which we were all moving, wildly quickly toward each other, criss-crossing). This is kind of the the antithesis of O&M theory and practice, and yet, also very applicable, as with listening to the lane ahead and going with the nearest parallel.

If you are reading this with a screen reader or screen mag software and want access to the text in the images, pleas email me. amberdipietra [at] yahoo [dot] com. Id be happy to transcribe. I just ran out of juice for the moment.

I created a flyer/vision statement for the first installment of Write To Connect!

2010-08-20T17:24:00.001-07:00

Write To Connect

Life Writing Workshops in the Disability Community

What is life writing?

Life writing usually refers to memoirs and autobiography. I use the term to mean any kind of writing that connects you back to your most dynamic self. It is writing that can take the form of novels, poems, emails, notes on Facebook, op eds for news outlets, posts on your blog, personal statements for job applications, and more! Life writing is both practical and artistic.

As a woman with a disability, my life writing practice has helped me connect with services that enable me to live independently in the community. It has helped me communicate openly and thoroughly with my doctors. Every day, my friendships and professional relationships are fortified through my life writing practice. Life writing brought me and my partner together. Most of all, life writing allows me to explore my disability through the lens of everyday experiences and to feel connected to the pulse of life even when barriers are present.

The Disability Community

Right now, so much emphasis is being placed on funding and programs to create more opportunities for social integration and employment “for” people with disabilities. But quality of life and livelihood is arrived at “by” individuals with disabilities, individuals with unique and vibrant voices.

Join a Write To Connect workshop and explore your writing voice while linking up with new friends and contacts. Build community and discover your vital self one word at a time. Writing can be pen-in-hand, audio diaries, email letters to friends. Writing can be the blink of an eye, a sip and a puff, a cartoon, a speech. Your voice is your own! Share it and connect!

How do WTC workshops work?

Poetry is my background. Each class will start with creative exercises, but each workshop series can go in different directions depending on who is attending. We will create the experience together. Participants can come in with specific goals (I want to write a short story, I want to hone my ideas around disability rights, I want to start a blog, I want to draft different cover letters for my dream job, etc) and I will shape the class around those goals or interests.

To find out more about WTC, go to www.writetoconnect.blogspot.com. There you can view my résumé and check out the blog.

Workshops may take place at an organization in the disability community, at a public place like the library or from your home (via internet or phone). Cost to you as a participant depends on the duration and location of the workshop series. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please contact me for details about the next series.

I would be happy to chat with you via phone or email about your interests in writing and your accessibility needs.

Email amberdipietra@yahoo.com Call 415 867 1124.

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and will be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urge that motivates you.

Keep the channel open.

--Martha Graham, in a letter to Agnes DeMille in "Dance to the Piper"