Painting a Bibliography: Excerpts from SPEECH

The following excerpts—rearranged especially for this condensed reading space—are from a project entitled SPEECH (Nightboat Books 2019): a book of poetry, prose, and images from an archive of paintings that were made by the author during the time of the book’s writing.

* Two cities of middles overlapped inside my notebook. This was confusing though I was not unhappy. Until heat rose up in me and I went from asking "where should I live?" to thinking "here I have something to learn" which was to believe in poetry's making despite the misrecognition "poet equals citizen," as if a poet could only be real through official belonging. In fact, it had always been the opposite.
So I went walking with the others who vector across parking lots, alleys, and through city blocks where there is no set path. From my window I watched their movements as if they were stitching new embellishments into the city's surfaces. Then I joined them making curves and diagonals. Without speaking, carrying my notebook with me in a canvas bag: city and me, sweating and absorptive. Over and over to step off the curb-tiny leaps-into the mix of watchful communication between me and the others who walk, between the backs of buildings in alleys, between me and drivers who yield and to whom I signal "thank-you" by placing a hand over my heart.   On my walks I occasionally bent down and picked one up, slipped the new relic into my bag. These objects sat near my writing desk and as SPEECH stopped and started I began to paint their likenesses always floating and flat: fugitive-like. They have no shadow, no weight, and no context. Placed on square substrates, usually in a set of four, they refer to the grid of weaving. And as weaving measures the passage of time while material accumulates, so do the paintings. Textilic, both. Hence, the idea to stamp each painting with a number in sequence.

*
Writing not using a pen.

Painting
Scripting. Placed on square substrates, usually in a set of four, they refer to the grid of weaving. And as weaving measures the passage of time while material accumulates, so do the paintings. Textilic, both. Hence, the idea to stamp each painting with a number in sequence.

*
Writing not using a pen.

Painting
Scripting. An archive of paintings and a book-length poem joined by a practice of walking and divided by form and materiality. I dreamt of a space that would house them both. One blueprint for such a space: inside the covers of a book. Here is a second blueprint for such a space: When exhibited, each painting's number corresponds to a couplet or line in SPEECH. This hinges the numbers to the book with the paintings in the middle: an odd bibliography. Viewers pick up a sheet of numbers and titles-a gallery-map-as-poem, a mobile didactic. They walk, look, read, recompose SPEECH, moving at their own pace and along unpredictable pathways. So, too, with a city and with a book whose page numbers nudge readers in a certain direction.
The book's architecture-the double-page spread that opens as the reader holds the front and back-implies a beginning, middle, and end. Yet this structure can be subverted by reader sovereignty at any time. This uncertainty adds extra vibration to an already-vibrating citational space where language is framed by page boundaries and by front and back covers. Similarly, each numbered painting does not index a complete thought though the object painted appears to be revered. * An archive of paintings and a book-length poem joined by a practice of walking and divided by form and materiality. I dreamt of a space that would house them both. One blueprint for such a space: inside the covers of a book. Here is a second blueprint for such a space: When exhibited, each painting's number corresponds to a couplet or line in SPEECH. This hinges the numbers to the book with the paintings in the middle: an odd bibliography. Viewers pick up a sheet of numbers and titles-a gallery-map-as-poem, a mobile didactic. They walk, look, read, re-compose SPEECH, moving at their own pace and along unpredictable pathways. So, too, with a city and with a book whose page numbers nudge readers in a certain direction.
The book's architecture-the double-page spread that opens as the reader holds the front and back-implies a beginning, middle, and end. Yet this structure can be subverted by reader sovereignty at any time. This uncertainty adds extra vibration to an already-vibrating citational space where language is framed by page boundaries and by front and back covers. Similarly, each numbered painting does not index a complete thought though the object painted appears to be revered. Yet the objects are not remarkable and as an archive there is really nothing to be learned or studied. And so while the statement "this is a feather" is true, the paintings leave the tether of "what kind?" and "why?" unfastened.
The subject who won't be indexed precisely and who makes place where self-indexing is relational, various, and repetitive, also makes paintings from this practice and from the objects of her context.
Why not add the disciplinary divide between text and image to her collection of borders crossed? * At the antiques souk he would not sell the book to me. Because of the wrong religion I was allowed to see the writing inside and not to touch. I asked why without access without touching. Closing its covers he answered, "We are a tolerant people." If you are a vector without access.
If painting and the desire for color crushes.
If the vector once the poem now painting as bibliography.
Painting a bibliography.
Burying narrative under color under love story under object. Just now finding its shades.
A lens for watching the skies change.
You go quietly into a garden.
A fence of beauty guards against speech, lets speech in. Both ways. About a place I do not know I will never hear the argument so surely again. This speech.
* Who is she, walking here? How is she a guest and who does she host? Does she walk comfortably with history and the world? What couldn't keep her at home? What is her language? Or I heard nothing at all, feeling disregard, nonchalance, the absence of curiosity directed toward me. My own voice rang out sharply then.
Susceptible, I took in the questions and silences. I composed an essay on "writing in an elsewhere" and made a project called "Last Book": stacks and stacks of the same stark white book without title, author, cover art, publisher's imprint. I said I was quitting poetry until I remembered my refugee father (who called himself a refugee when we made fun of his mismatched clothes-"Don't make fun of the poor refugee!"-and we would laugh) who unintentionally taught me what poetry is for. His seat in the living room where weekly he hosted guests after church and I watched, shocked by his confidence to do so. I began to imagine hosting others which is to speak. Which is not necessarily to belong but how to live with longing. * At the base of society she finds the base of her skull. Her superstructure waits for shifty instrument feedback until a father went refugee status for her to say, "There I can say anything I want. This has weight. Was home"-His slouching historical back his bones as feathers their secret fissures ask, "Did you know there is an organization determining how free is your country? Check your rating fluxing." "Whose country? Which you? Whose heat?" "Not the refugee with his pants unzipped his pants short. Messy tourist go loud and others stealth. Messy citizen goes loud or who makes themselves small in public space or wanders freely looking up." Say hello to the gap in her dictionary a gap in her blouse. To cover this up and stop speaking in such an accent she never learned his tongue. To cover this up his too many arms. All the hands to cover up his gaping accent. * With a listening ear I saw the former place more clearly in the new place; this clarity made a third space which was more like a method and less like a site. Not speaking for a place I wrote out of place and toward the cities and people ambivalent about my permanence and my art-those who have been, incidentally, the most generous of teachers. * Traces of the archive of objects work their way into the book object-as cover art and intermezzo. First it was the writer and now it is the reader who finds a thing to pick up and inspect: feather, brick, twig, words, book. They take the ordinary thing into their home where home is inside and outside, present and past, made and remade: parts of SPEECH.