Stingy Kids

Poetry @ YouTube

YouTube user joshuamarie77 is the poet Joshua Marie Wilkinson, whose poemfilm journal, Rabbit Light Movies, was mentioned in a much earlier post. Snippets of these episodes are available for viewing on YouTube but haven't been updated for several months.  That's probably because he has switched over to Vimeo.  I love the scruffiness of YouTube but, I admit, the Vimeo videos look more professional.  What a difference context makes.  Compare and contrast with this video of Joyelle McSweeney reading "Piaf":

Joyelle McSweeney from joshuamarie on Vimeo.

Amy King has a more active YouTube channel, amyhappens.  She curated and moderated a panel on Race and Poetry for the 2008 Boog City Festival.  I missed the festival entirely so I'm grateful that she has posted videos of this event.  I'm slowly making my way through her videos of the panel. 

Mad Men and Death Poems

WARNING:  This post contains a major Mad Men spoiler, so if you if you have not seen Episode 2 of Season 2, visit this site after you have.

The most recent episode of Mad Men, a show about advertising executives set in 1960s NYC, opens with the news that American Airlines Flight 1 crashed on its way to Los Angeles.  After cracking some tasteless jokes, the character Pete Campbell learns that his father was on that flight.  His family's loss turns into a professional advantage for Campbell when the new Director of Account Services Herman "Duck" Phillips brings him in to land a deal with American Airlines, now desperate to salvage its public image.  Don Draper, a partner at the advertising firm, resists this move, knowing that it means that they will have to break a contract with Mohawk Airlines, a small but loyal client.  He meets Mohawk's president in a Japanese-style bar and gives the news.  After the meeting, Draper sits alone for some minutes with his drink.  Kyu Sakamoto's "Ue o muite arukō" (Looking up while walking) plays in the background.  The choice of this song is hardly a coincidence: in 1985 Sakamoto died in the crash of Japan Airlines Flight 123, one of the worst single aircraft disasters in history.  Of 524 passengers and crew members, only four survived to give a partial account of what the passengers went through before and after the crash.  It was the eve of Obon, a three-day festival during which many Japanese return to their hometowns to commemorate their dead.

Admittedly, I was quite pleased with myself for identifying both the song and its relevance to this scene.  It's a minor vindication of a life long affection for oldies music.  Although some posters on the AMC boards disagree, the use of this song in this scene is not anachronistic.  The song was recorded in 1961 and released by Toshiba-EMI.  A disc jockey in DC had gotten a hold of the Toshiba LP and played the song on the air.  It proved to be a hit and was released as "Sukiyaki" in 1963 by Capitol in the US, even though "sukiyaki" refers to a Japanese dish and has nothing to do with the song.  But those responsible for releasing Sakamoto's album in the US/UK decided that the title "sukiyaki" sounded "more" Japanese and would be easier for English speakers to pronounce.  Here's a video of the song featuring Sakamoto:

Some years ago I picked up a copy of Japanese Death Poems edited by the Israeli writer Yoel Hoffman, who lived in Japan for many years.  The book offers a historical introduction to the Japanese tradition of writing jisei ("death poem").  Although, Hoffman concerns himself with death poems composed by monks and poets, anyone can choose to write jisei.  He writes:

Where did the ancient Japanese, a largely maritime people, send their dead?  The "birds of death" sailed sometimes from the eastern shore, sometimes from the western one, out toward the horizon where sea and sky meet.  Did the prehistoric Japanese, who were sun-worshipers, believe that the huge fiery ball which rose from the sea every morning or sank beneath it at night (depending on the position of the region, either on the Pacific Ocean or on the Sea of Japan) was the destination of their dead?  Traces of a belief that the land of the dead lies over the sea can still be found in the ceremonies of the Bon [Obon] festival, during which...the dead who have come to visit their relatives return in small paper boats that the living set sail upon bodies of water.

Japan Airlines Flight 123 began to experience problems with its vertical stabilizer and hydraulic systems 12 minutes after take off.  The pilots were unable to stabilize the aircraft and problems with the controls meant that for most of the short flight, they had no idea where they were.  The plane weaved and circled over Osutaka Ridge for about half an hour before crashing.  In that time, many passengers, including Kyu Sakamoto, wrote farewell letters and poems to their family and friends.  Many of these documents were recovered at the crash site and some are featured in an exhibit at the Safety Promotion Center in Tokyo's Haneda Airport.

Pistorius

Earlier this year, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ruled that use of "technical aids" was forbidden in competition.  The broad interpretation of what constitutes a "technical aid" ultimately disqualified Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee who runs on carbon fiber prostheses.  That's right--Pistorius, a 21-year old South African sprinter who was born without fibulae, is so fast on his "Cheetah" blades that he has blown away his competition at the Paralympic level, acquiring the sobriquet "Blade Runner" in the process.  For the past year, he had been competing against able-bodied runners, until the January IAAF ruling made him ineligible for these races.  In considering Pistorius' case, the IAAF determined that his running blades gave him an advantage over able-bodied runners.  Pistorius and his supporters (including Ossur, the company that makes his blades) contested this decision, arguing that more extensive research and tests were required.

Yesterday, taking new research into consideration, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which is based in Switzerland, reversed the IAAF's ruling.  Pistorius is now eligible to qualify for the Beijing Olympics.  In order to do so, he needs to shave at least 3/4 of a second from his current 400m time.  If he makes it, expect a great deal more discussion and debate on this subject.  It's amazing to me that the relative "advantages" or "disadvantages" of prostheses were never a question or a problem when Paralympic runners came nowhere near the running times of able-bodied runners.  Advances in the technology of protheses have helped narrow the gap but it isn't clear if modern protheses represent an improvement on the human body or simply level the playing field between the able and disabled.

Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins participated in a fascinating on line discussion on yesterday's ruling. Many of the questions that she was asked concerned the issue of advantage and "the line between natural and artificial."  Is the use of prostheses an "enhancement" equivalent to steroid use?  Or is it more like wearing specially designed running shoes?  Do Olympic athletes from wealthy countries ever wonder about "leveling the playing field" when they compete against athletes with considerably fewer resources? Is that gold medal any less golden because you had a better swimsuit? Or a personal nutritionist?    Jenkins remarks:

There are profound inequities in what athletes from various parts of the world have access to. The first time you go to the Games and see what some athletes have and what others don't, the illusion of a level playing field is lost forever.

Her comment made me wonder if there are debates at the Paralympic level regarding protheses.  The blades that Pistorius uses are very expensive, costing anywhere between $15000-18000, the "BMW"  of protheses. Arguably, having the best protheses gives a runner an advantage over other disabled runners--is that fair? Or is that like having the best Nike running shoes? (And is that fair?) But what really intrigued me was that the current technology of running prostheses is having trouble keeping up with Pistorius' abilities.  In other words, as Pistorius becomes a better, stronger and faster runner, his protheses may need to adapt accordingly.  I can see how this line of thinking reveals a potentially slippery slope--at which point do the protheses, which are designed "to restore maximum biological function," actually make him a super-human?  This question came up in Jenkins's discussion:

Vienna, Va.: I think this case is extremely interesting. I know that DARPA (defense research agency) is working to develop an exo-suit for soldiers to enhance physical capabilities. Maybe in the future, there will be two types of competition--one for "natural" bodies and one for "enhanced" bodies (mechanical, chemical or any other).

Sally Jenkins: Wow.

Yes. WOW. There are so many ways to approach the story of Oscar Pistorius, but what most fascinates me is how it brings to the foreground the question of what makes us human and how a fear of disability illuminates this question.   

In 1998, Aimee Mullins, a bilateral amputee, appeared on the cover of the London magazine Dazed and Confused. On the cover, her long, athletic legs spliced the question "fashionable?" in two--"fashion" and "able?"  "Able," notably, remaining in question.  What the cover and its accompanying article illustrated provocatively was the "cyborgian quality" of the disabled body and the extent to which this quality is both appealing and disquieting (Mullins played the "cheetah woman" in Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3).  In her work as a model and actress, Mullins, a former competitive runner, challenges traditional ideas of disability--the idea that prosthetic legs should resemble human legs, the idea that disability should strive toward invisibility.  I recommend that you take a look at the images in "Walking as Art" (which includes the Dazed cover) and "A living sculpture." I was particularly struck by a picture of Mullins's prosthetic legs. She has several pairs of varying styles and uses.  This range marks one way that the disabled body challenges loss and absence by becoming a site of hybridity, change and transformation.

Watching a clip of Pistorius running the 400m with able-bodied athletes, I'm struck by how different his race strategy is.  Because of the blades, he actually has to kind of stand up straight at the start in order to continue moving forward.  As a result, his start is much slower than that of the other athletes. But halfway through the sprint, he starts to pick up tremendous speed and, while other runners are starting to show signs of slowing down, he sustains this speed across the finish.  It's amazing to watch--and not only because Pistorius is doing this on prosthetic legs.  In order to accomplish this feat, he has to utilize muscles and techniques that able-bodied runners don't rely on.  Why should these things necessarily place him in a separate category?  Embracing new kinds of competitors and strategies is how a sport--how anything, really--evolves. 

In his tribute to Pistorius, who was named one of TIME's 100 for 2008, Eric Weihenmayer wrote:

When I was learning how to climb mountains as a blind person, I had a lot of encouragement from experts. But after I summited Mount Everest, these people weren't ready to accept what I had done at face value. Some said I must have cheated; one even claimed I had an unfair advantage: "I'd climb Mount Everest too if I couldn't see how far I had to fall."

A disability is by definition a "deficiency," an "incapacity."  So it follows that an ability is the opposite, what makes us complete.  But does this definition still hold if it's our very abilities that hold us back?  For Pistorius, "able" is not in question. "I'm not disabled, I just don't have any legs," he says. 

image credit: ossur

Demolition

Last week, Geegaw and I attended Anne Carson's reading/performance of "Cassandra Float Can" and "Possessive Used As Drink (Me)" at the 92nd St Y.  Geegaw paid far better attention than I did, so I'll point you to her summary of both performances.

Cassandra Float Can

"a sensation of veils flying up...call this sensation Cassandra"

"not translatable but not meaningless"

This was a hypnotic and distracting performance.  While Anne Carson spoke in soothing tones, several individuals dressed in black walked along the stage and through the aisles carrying large prints of architectural images.  Some of these images were also projected on a large screen.  Carson spoke about the relation between Cassandra and translation.  According to Greek mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of the Trojan King Priam and was cursed with a gift of prophecy that no one would believe.  After the Trojan War, she was taken by Agamemnon and, in one of the most incredible scenes in literature (which I've only read in English), she stands at the threshold of his home, foresees what awaits her inside, and cries out to the spectators "Otototoi popoi da Opollon Opollon."  Carson's entire performance hinges on this one phrase.  The on line Ancient Greek lexicon that I consulted interprets "otototoi" as a cry of dismay, alarm, awe. Its translation varies.  But it's also worth speculating, as Carson and other scholars do, if it is even Greek in origin.  What language is Cassandra speaking at this moment?  Is she simply emitting sounds of dread or speaking in another tongue?  Either way, how does one translate this cry?  Is there even anything to translate? The skepticism of the chorus provokes a fascinating exchange on language and translation:

CASSANDRA: I tell you you'll see Agamemnon dead.
CHORUS MEMBER: Poor girl, calm yourself. Tone down those words.
CASSANDRA: No—no one can heal what my words prophesy.
CHORUS: Not if they're true. But may the gods forbid!
CASSANDRA: While you pray here, others move in to kill.
CHORUS LEADER: What man is going to commit such crimes?
CASSANDRA: What man? You've completely missed the point.
You've failed to understand my prophecies.
CHORUS LEADER: Yes I have—
I don't see who has means to do it.
CASSANDRA: Yet I can speak Greek well enough.
CHORUS LEADER: So does the oracle at Delphi,
but understanding what it says is hard.

(translation by Ian Johnston)

We learn later in the performance that many of these circulating images are part of what remains of Gordon Matta-Clark's "building cuts," large scale art works that often consisted of cutting holes and creating fissures in abandoned buildings or structures slated for demolition.  It seems that inevitable destruction is the connection between Matta-Clark's buildings and Cassandra's threshold.  Cassandra stands before Agamemnon's home and envisions its ruin.  It's completely unavoidable.  Her speeches to the chorus before she enters the house are stunning in their lyrical power but they are useless.  Cassandra could have stepped inside without a word but, instead, she gives prophecy another try, though she's fully aware that she won't be understood.  She's casting a light that no one will see until it's over.  Like the light in those remaining, surviving images of Matta-Clark's "cuts." 

Possessive Used As Drink (Me): a lecture in the form of 15 sonnets

"Poet Anne Carson proves that even the lowly subject of pronouns can be delicious." (via Play Gallery)

1. Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony: Part I; Part II; Part III
2. Sonnet Isolate
3. Recipe
4. Sonnet of Addressing Gertrude Stein
5. Sonnet of Addressing God
6. Merce Sonnet
7. Sonnet of Addressing Oscar Wilde
8. Deictic Quiz Sonnet: Parts I through VI
9. Drop't Sonnet
10. Sonnet of the Pronoun Event
11. Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences from the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Émile Benveniste's Problems in General Linguistics (Paris 1966)
12. Reticent Sonnet
13. Sonnet of "We Tried Doing It Without The Cue Sheet But Couldn't Remember What Color Referred To What Movement And What Had Been Done And What Was Left To Do"
14. Sonnet of the English-Made Cabinet with Drawers (in prose)
15. Crowning Sonnet (Fashioned from the Foregoing 14 by Chance Operations)

I've included links to video excerpts of this performance. 

Flying Words

In 2003, Slope, an on line poetry journal, published a special issue devoted to American Sign Language (ASL) poetry. The issue featured the winners of the 2003 Heart+Express National ASL Poetry Prize and presented their work in video format.  There is no other way to "read" this work.  Unlike Deaf poetry, which can be signed and/or written, ASL poetry is in, and only in, ASL.  At first, I assumed that the videos would feature subtitles, some printed "translation" of what the poets were signing.  This wasn't the case.  Instead, the videos are completely silent--that is, to someone who doesn't know ASL.  But it's clear from the careful hand, body and facial movements that a great deal is being expressed, and it is maddening not to be able to understand the poems. On the other hand, I think that the decision made by the Slope editors was brilliant.  ASL isn't simply a way of "miming" or literally translating English, rather, it is its own language and needs to be approached on its own terms:

ASL incorporates all the functions and structures of a fully developed language system, capable of expressing abstract ideas and poetry....Variations in handshapes, palm orientation, movement, and placement create rhyme, rhythm, tropes, symbols, stanzas and other recognizable characteristics of spoken and written poetry.  You need a video camera to publish a "book" of ASL poetry.

The judges of the contest, Peter Cook and Kenny Lerner, are also known as the Flying Words Project. For over twenty years, they have traveled around the United States and abroad sharing ASL poetry with deaf and hearing audiences.  Cook, who is deaf, signs on stage while Lerner, who is usually off stage, provides a voice for hearing audiences (you can view two of their performances on the Slope site and also in this YouTube video).  Cook is committed to sharing ASL poetry with hearing audiences but when asked if there is a sign for poetry, he draws an important distinction between "hearing" and "Deaf" poetry:

The sign for Hearing poetry is a generally traditional sign. The handshape is "P" (at dominant hand) and flat "B" (non-dominant hand). The P moves while the B stays. It is almost the same sign as for music. This sign is strongly associated with rhythms/rhyme. The other sign was created at the Deaf Way Festival at Gallaudet University in 1989 (I think)...I remember a meeting where we were discussing that we needed a sign that shows our poetry. Finally, we decided to use this sign: Handshape "S," start at the chest then move forward into handshape "5." This sign is similar to "Expression." It looks like this: HEART+EXPRESS.

Lerner's voice gives the hearing audience a sense of the poem, that is all. "My words are not designed to create the whole picture...If you close your eyes and just listen to my voice, you won't understand the poem," he says.

Amy Radil's excellent article "The cultural clamor of American Sign Language poetry" explains in greater detail the formal elements of ASL poetry:

Handshapes are at the core: They are basic forms like letters or numbers, which can be used in combination to construct many different signs. Repeated handshapes become the rhymes in ASL, while repeated signs or sequences generate the rhythm. In addition to handshape rhymes and repetition, poets can create tone through fluid or jerky movements. Two hands can perform different signs at the same time to juxtapose images. A poem can progress through different uses of space, with the performer turning to face different people or take on different personas. Signs for English letters may be incorporated into the poem, to intertwine the spelling of an English word among the signs. Eye contact, or a break in it, can signal shifts and interruptions.

Cook thinks of the process as creating a "language sculpture" that can be experienced as a pause or in motion. I think that attempting to translate these details of motion and gesture in writing would encourage written poetry to move in new and surprising directions.   This certainly was true of translation into ASL.

In 1939, Eric Malzkuhn ("Malz"), a graduate of Gallaudet University, translated Lewis Carroll's poem "The Jabberwocky" into ASL. His masterful translation is regarded by many scholars and poets as the beginning of ASL poetry:

[Malzkuhn's] ASL translation walked the same line between known signs and previously unimagined combinations. Not only was it a hit with audiences, it awakened Deaf people to a new dimension of their language. The performance helped ASL speakers in the audience see their language's potential to astound, to transform normal communication into something else entirely.

I wanted to see if I could locate a clip of Jabberwocky in ASL and found Carl Schroeder's version on YouTube.  From the comments left on his blog, I gathered that his version differs from Malzkuhn's but I recommend that you check it out.

Jabberwocky has been translated into many languages, and in most cases it requires that a translator really push the limits of the target language and, ultimately, embrace the creation of total nonsense.  This means, of course, that what results is not really a translation but a new poem entirely.  The same is true, I imagine, with the ASL translation(s) of Jabberwocky.  In Schroeder's version, his hands seem to fuse into each other in constant flows of movement.  In ASL, which Cynthia L. Peters calls a "visual-kinetic vernacular," Carroll's linguistic hybridity and play is animated, activated in ways that seem to me to be very true to the original.

Slam on the Web

...don't sweat it I ain't mistaken this stage for a pulpit/ this is just the altar where I offer my ink and my words for the return of your memory--"Remember," Mayda del Valle

In late 2002, I had the chance to see a performance of Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam On Broadway. The show fascinated me and provoked months of thinking about how one defines poetry, the relation between poetry and music, the nature of the poetic word, and, more than anything else, what we broadly term as "identity politics." Since then, I've been looking for ways to discuss the works I encountered on and since that day, but writing about slam poetry/spoken word without being able to convey the oral and visual aspects of its performance seemed pointless. Simply put, to "quote" a slam or spoken word performance requires sounds and images. This why it was tremendously odd for me to discover that a published collection of the Def Poetry Jam On Broadway poets did not include, at the very least, a CD. At the time, most of the poets that participated in the Def Poetry Jam On Broadway show had very rudimentary websites, if they had a website at all. Fortunately, this has changed in the past few years and part of the credit goes to sites like MySpace and YouTube that make it easier and affordable to share multi-media content.

Three Def Jam poets currently on MySpace are Mayda del Valle, Ishle Park and Georgia Me. Their respective pages take advantage of available content-sharing technologies to varying degrees. On her MySpace page, Mayda embedded a video of her performance of "In the Cocina" (see below), which she also performed on Broadway. She considers it the poem for which she is best known. It's a well-crafted poem and she performs it with wonderful energy but, personally, I dislike it immensely. I acknowledge that this is due to very personal reasons but ones that touch directly on the issues I have with the way "identity" is advanced in many slam/spoken performances. Someday I'll respond to Mayda's poem with my own version called "Mamá's in the kitchen huddled over CPA practice exams, a week's worth of frozen tuco in the fridge." On a more positive note, I think her poem "Tongue Tactics" is brilliant and after months of searching high and low for a recording, I found one. Ishle has no videos up on MySpace but her track "Work is Love" is gorgeous. She has a crisp voice that moves from word to word with a touch of restraint, gripping a word just slightly before she lets it go. Georgia Me's MySpace page includes both YouTube videos and audio tracks, including a more musical version of her best known poem "Niggods." Unlike Mayda and Ishle, there's not much action on her MySpace blog. Staceyann Chin sporadically uses her MySpace blog to post events and updates but for poems and audios of her performances you'll need to visit her official website. MySpace is a good start but it can't handle a lot of media. The vertical content layout quickly results in a cluttered, sluggish page. On the other hand, the active communities that emerge around a MySpace page encourage more, and more frequently updated, content. Staceyann's personal website, in contrast, is notably silent though it is better equipped to support and organize a lot of media content. But still, there are a few things she could do to make her MySpace page look less like an afterthought (for instance, why not post events using the MySpace calendar?). As people continue to embrace new media technologies on the web, I anticipate more dynamic poet websites. Sites better equipped to house the heterogeneous, multiple and fractured identities to which these poets give voice. And, on my end, these new technologies are making it possible to write about these works, so keep your eyes out for a more extensive critique of slam/performance poetry on SK.

Laura Sims @ The Unassociated Garden Party

Sims reads from "Bank Book," a series of poems from her first collection Practice, Restraint. jordandavis at YouTube posted several videos of poetry readings at this gathering, which took place in March 2006 in Austin, TX.