from “Teeter”
Kimberly Alidio | Teeter | Nightboat Books | August 2023 | 128 Pages
Autohistoriography of Arrival at a River
Is autonomy, is dissociating. Sometimes I wish I had my Tascam when cigarette smoke in erica’s car smelled reassuring. Or just say language recognizes, reproduces, voices, becomes, uncovers, is revelatory, is unveiling. Or just say technology—alien, sacred, romantic, materialist, governmental, genealogical, biopolitical—spins a practitioner along energetically embedded knowledge. A craft becomes a system in historical time, an invention inventing traditions. A practice recognizes reality, reproduces, voices, becomes action, uncovers, is revelatory, is an unveiling. “Perhaps there is a life here / Of not being afraid of your own heart beating / Do not be afraid of your own heart beating,” Bernadette Mayer writes. About phenomenological process of naming & orientation that gives meanings to space/time, producing place, origin, home (oikos). I’ve been thinking about postcolonial queer avant-garde realisms via Caribbean anti-colonial surrealism & third-world feminism (Anzaldua’s “el mundo zurdo”). During a Q&A, S said that poems do the work of world-building. For the first time I understand world-building outside the realm of speculative fiction or explicit futurism.
& the world of each is not lesser or even discrete from the world formed by two or more noises or morphemes. & each is not supposed to be regarded as singular & apart but each can be. That the residue of one noise or one morpheme is present in another noise or another. Each allows me to dwell upon starts & ends in multiple, fractal relationships because each has a start & end that are slurred, blurred, resonant. I know that noise & morpheme are phenomena that invite more consciousness about time. Between experience & idea. There is continuity between past, present, emergent future (hints of what might become). I’m proud of this persona, identifiable by consciousness & perception, by the poetics of these. A persona different from the poetic speaker because the persona is also the writer writing-as-a-reader-reads (Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino). All the parts are continuous, not through narrative, but through a poetic consciousness that creates a persona. What do contrasting tones create as a continuous surface? What is made when a confessional anecdote about an experience in an archive’s anteroom is collaged with a docupoetry prompt? A braided creative nonfiction-style personal essay is softly satirical & keenly experimental. One sonnet is braided like that.
A hidden essay critiques the historical profession, New American poetry, autobiography & naming (“old stories”), literature, books, etc., as well as collage & parataxis & avant-garde poetics. Later, I broke the paragraphs open & hid it in a poetry manuscript so no one would read it & decided my mission in life is to protect my writing from widespread identity reading. At the time, I felt nothing. I wrote an essay because the training was to teach it & a peer reviewing colleague said I need to keep working on it & send it to the New Yorker. I took out all the names. Work that disappears the self is followed by a drama of big entitlement. An art history of organizers & nurses & artists & clerics & cooks pushing the apocalypse, working binary extremes. Sideline aside, talk just to say, speak just to hey, sound just to chorus. Take long sustain sounds, remove the attack & decay to assemble tones. Lower & raise pitch, make the levels consistent, string together a long-ass DRONE. Examples: vocalizations by mom & dad, cicadas, horns, bells, etc.
Staying on the brink of narrative, stating its poetics as a research method at the start, accounting for the length & breadth of diaspora as temporality a speaker is dropped into. As do the others, it tells you what it does, makes its own frame. There will not be a gathering. “The-e & not the -i,” the book transcribes from a lecture in a style of dispersal, both the oceanic & interior. M. NourbeSe Philip’s syntactical destruction to free linguistic symbols from hold & ship, but a play of elements before they cohere. Embodied in dialectical mode of experimental narrative historiography & ante-narrative sound, morpheme & arc of perception.
When & how is material subjected to technique & trans/formed? Citation is reference to an object before it’s processed & this reference to listening leads to processing. “The composer as a whole prior stage of listening that the audience is not privy to before receiving the work,” writes Alan Licht. If process is tied to product—basically a narrative of production—how to make this part of the work in a non-narrative way? Is sound art a poem? It resists modes of organizing sound: time/narrative; Nicole Brossard’s sentence; rhetoric/communication; the player-listener relation. It lets sound go unorganized. It resists pattern-making, intention, worlding, connection to the linguistic & the player-to-audience relation. Sound art is environmental, spatial, architectural, sculptural rather than durational & performative. Gallery exhibition & land art rather than concert hall & club venue. What happens when the site of “site-specific” is not present or here? “[T]o amplify perversion, distortion & alienation, that having ‘fluency’ in English means swallowing & regurgitating the poetics of racial capitalism & military violence,” Michael Dowdy says. Cha hits the pause button to catch the formants. To learn English is to speak one’s own silencing, to have that other speak through you as a possession, thinged at & upon. Let’s name this effect later. Slowing it down to lowered frequency. Learning English is remembered by processing a vocalization with a delay filter.
From Teeter by Kimberly Alidio.
Copyright © 2023 Kimberly Alidio.
Reprinted with permission of Nightboat Books.