84---> christine & reines

Name: Christine Herzer.

Poet. Visual Artist. Teacher. 

Lives and works in Paris.

What does poetry mean to you? 

Writing poetry is world-care.

Poetry = a commitment to living an 'examined life' (Louise Bourgeois)

Invitation to notice, to choose where our attention goes

'every rose pulses' (Carol Maso)

Ability to see/feel; 

Bewilderment as a way of entering the day as much as the work (Fanny Howe)

Relationship between space and silence, dying and speaking

I know who poetry can't accommodate: the tourist. I don't mean it is necessarily more highborn than shell art, though the effort, the ardor of it goes toward being borne up. But I believe it can't be identified with the compulsion to shop instead of the desire to touch, be touched.  (C.D. Wright)

Favorite Poet/Poet:

I don’t have a favorite poem or poet. I prefer ‘open texts’ [see Lyn Hejinian: Against Closure/Umberto Eco: The Poetics of the Open Work]. I value multiplicity, reading/viewing experiences that allow me to think/form my own thoughts/understanding; I value work which reveals its complexities & pleasures through re-reading where subsequent reading/viewing produces again an unforeseeable individual experience.

frank ocean, futura free

barry jenkins, moonlight

carol maso, ava

ariana reines, the palace of justice 

etc.

Paul Celan called poems porous formations,

I wrote PRISON last year at the desk of a job I had accepted to pay for my art.  Reines’s poem had been with me for years. I still remember what it felt like to read the poem for the first time, how drawn I was to the part that talks about loving someone so well that they would want to be free…I remember wondering if I would have been hired for the job and how turned on I felt by the intelligence of the poet and the enigmatic quality of the poem [that warden!].        I totally got the part about the lipstick… My drawing has its own context, it wasn’t intended as an homage to Reines or her poems; however, I did think about her poem while writing the drawing. Her poem ‘returned’ to me, in a context where poetry wasn’t valued, where a certain kind of freedom was at stake.

Writing/repeating PRISON, I felt the impulse to re-read "The Palace of Justice." I wanted to test its mystery, I wanted to test if I had figured it out after all, if some newly acquired life [prison]-experience had made me a better reader of the poem… a better lover. I felt the need to double check the title of the poem. I failed to remember the word ‘Justice’. The poem didn’t fail me. Its mystery remained intact, I came away feeling somewhat elated. Reines trusts her readers, her skill set is indeed special.

The prison is called The Women’s

Palace and it is a progressive prison

Whose warden

Truly loves her women

The palace being a prison for women

Who do not want to be free. I am hired

As the warden’s assistant, My skill

Set is special she says.

I want to believe her but I am not sure

She’s making fun of me. Still I’m hired.

I am charged to love the women in the palace

So well they’ll want to be free

I don’t know how to do it I say to the warden.

She smiles, a woman in her sixties in coral lipstick.

I don’t know how to do it I say again. I’m scared.

They probably don’t want to be free

Because they know more

About freedom than me

I say

To which she says nothing

For a while. You are stupider

Than you look she says

But I believe in you.

Get to work.

"The Palace of Justice" by Ariana Reines, Mercury [Fence Books]

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Christine Herzer makes work that offers the viewer a multitude of meanings, moods, and experiences with which to interact, draw nourishment, and form their own understanding. Using gestures of "overwriting," "covering up," "erasing," and accumulation, she explores questions of invisibility, alienation and agency. Christine is the 2018 Laureate "Ecritures" of a writing residency at La Cité des Arts, Paris, where she will be using her ongoing series of '‘Written Drawings" as a living archive from which to direct her investigations into such questions as: What is the role of repetition in the creative process? How to show caring/devotion for words, as well as their meanings (emotional centers) and [ab]uses? ORANGE, her new chapbook of poems, will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, NY) this summer.

82---> jeremy & robertson

I came to Lisa Robertson’s work not long ago and the sensation was one of uncanny discovery, that rare-but-sought-after feeling we have as readers when we say, “oh I have been looking for this, exactly this, for such a long time, without ever knowing it.” This first, powerful impression remains the best explanation I have for why I love Robertson’s poetry, and everything else I have tried to say to express it has just been embarrassing (“this poetry is so smart, I feel clumsy as a chaperone at a high school dance,” or “the classical is beautiful, but so is raunch—let’s go for a walk”).

My attempts were doomed from the beginning, of course, because anything shy of Lisa Robertson that tries to approximate Lisa Robertson is bound to come up short, because how could approximated Lisa Robertson be satisfying when we can just read Lisa Robertson? Which means excerpting her is almost as quixotic an enterprise, because one poem, or even a handful, could never do justice to the intelligence, the humor, the pure bounty of language, the depth of the art, the sense of receiving a gift that comes to you across the reading of a full volume. Here, thought and intimacy are allowed to share the same body! Here, desire is not only the vectors but the bodies that create them! Here, the present tense is an always-renewing abundance of possibility! Let’s go for a walk!

The futility of presenting an excerpt aside, this lovely moment from “Third Summer,” in 3 Summers (Coach House Books, 2016), is one I cherish:

Actual living trees are cinema

I rode through the practical and mysterious tunnel on a borrowed bicycle

many kinds of space are possible

if they are possible, they are also very probable

it was beneath the river and very cool and even

the sociality was held temporarily in abeyance

it is in itself possible

the form of a hare

is the place in the wheat where she pauses

or rests

(like a grid of empty shoes

at République)

as outside – a ways off – a stand of pine

croons winter

in this way I come to perceive my life

as parody

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Jeremy Allan Hawkins was born in New York City and raised in the Hudson Valley. He has been the recipient of a grant from the US Fulbright Program and teaching fellowships from the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project and the New York City Teaching Fellows. He is the author of A Clean Edge, selected by Richard Siken as the winner of the 2016 BOAAT Chapbook Prize. He lives in France.