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]

________________________________________________________________________________

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.

68---> kelly grace & smith

Name: Kelly Grace Thomas

Hometown: Long Beach Island, NJ

Current City: Los Angeles, CA

Occupation: Manager of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit- Words Ignite, as well as poet, editor, and author

What does poetry mean to you? 

Poetry, for me, is distilled into two entities, emotion or experience. We turn to poetry to wrangle or wrestle with emotions. We also turn to poetry to understand experience. To examine and create conversation with what life has give us. Ocean Vuong said, “Poets survive by looking.” Poetry is the lense in which the world, ourselves, light and darkness blur or come into focus. Either way it is a poet’s words and attention that give it shape.

Favorite Poet:

Patricia Smith. Hands down. I learned so much about language and surprise by studying Patricia. She is a master at making it fresh. Every time I lean into one of her ripe metaphors, her similes with teeth, I think, language has never bit me like that before. Words have never shocked me in such a way. She is also a master of form, dancing with ghazals and sestinas. And inside these structures she turns language and turns us, until the reader is inside out. I also love that Patricia writes with an urgency, an earthquaking expression, as if to say look, pay attention. Now.

I really love all her work but particularly the book Blood Dazzler. I grew up spending a lot of time on my father’s boat in Florida. It seems we were always outrunning a hurricane. There was always a storm breathing down my neck. I began to think of them as characters. I have always been fascinated how Patricia wrote a book about Hurricane Katrina, from multiple points of view, including the voice of the hurricane.

Why do you like this collection?

I am a sucker for metaphor. I love the way Patricia brings in the voice of Hurricane Katrina through metaphor. “I become /a mouth, thrashing hair, an overdone eye. /How dare the water belittle my thirst.”  She creates a voice that is in charge and taking no shit. The storm is there, hungry for power, demanding worship. I just love how we can see the transition from the need for attention to destruction. This poem also contains one of my favorite lines of all time, “Every woman begins as weather.” The idea of every woman beginning  as storm or sunshine, waiting to gather, fascinates me. It is a fresh and honest connection to emotion and mothering.  It also ties us to the beauty and danger of mother earth.

 "5 P. M TUESDAY AUGUST 23, 2005"

by Patricia Smith

“Data from an Air Force reserve unit reconnaissance aircraft...along with observations from the Bahamas and nearby ships….indicate the broad low pressure area over the Southern Bahamas has become organized enough to be classified as tropical depression twelve.”

-NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER

A muted thread of gray light, hovering ocean,

Becomes throat, pulls in wriggle, anemone, kelp

widens with the want of it. I become

a mouth, thrashing hair, an ovedone eye. How dare

the water belittle my thirst, treat me as just

another

small

disturbance,

try to feed me

From of the bottom of its hand?

I will require praise,

Unbirdled winds to define my body.

a crime between my teeth

because

every women begins as weather,

sips slow thunder, knows her hips. Every woman

habors a chaos, can

wait for it straddling a fever.

For now,

I console myself with small furies

those dips in my dawning system. I pull in

a bored breath. The brine shivers.

________________________________________________________________________________

Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Next nominee. BOAT/BURNED, her first full-length collection, is forthcoming from YesYes Books. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: DIAGRAM, Tinderbox, Nashville Review, Sixth Finch, Muzzle, PANK and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Manager of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. She is also the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot). Kelly was a 2016 Fellow for the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop. She is the founder of FeministWrites, a creative collective that connects and champions feminist voices. She is currently a reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She lives in Los Angeles.