David Wolach & Elizabeth Williamson's Notes from EconVergence

Getting there

It is ironic, as David often says, that the folks who most need health care are the ones least able to stand around in the cold at a protest. Even the short trip to Portland took a lot of David, physically and emotionally, due to a painful and unremitting neuromuscular condition.

Gosh, when you put it that way, it sounds horrible!  Reflecting back on it, tho, some of the problems or social divisions Rob and others have identified, indeed in part what I think fuels Nonsite Collective and fueled much of EconVergence, seemed – and seem always – to course through this body: this body as metaphor of the neck-up conditionality of “thinking” thru issues of social and economic justice.  The head feels lonely in transit, in action.  Of divides or lines or separators between systems of identification—the conditions under which we form identifications, as if “this body” were not itself an enunciation that frames thru exclusion, sets a course.  

We were therefore forced to limit our participation in this wonderful conference to only a few sessions, but luckily one of them was the panel that culminated in the PACE action. I take note of this limitation in order to acknowledge how challenging and valuable it was to get everyone in the same room – and how challenging it can be to get everyone (especially folks dealing with barriers to mobility and economic access) in any room where things like poetry and activism are being discussed off the clock. 

Definitely. Shows how hungry many of us are for radical change.  There were a lot of people around.  Surprising to me from the start was the energetic, decidedly “unstuffy” or “action-oriented” vibe everywhere we went. 

That said, it was a sign of the conference organizers’ success that the church (which is quite well outfitted with classrooms, for a church) was packed to the gills with aging hippies and rosy-cheeked anarchists.

Let’s just say “people,” eh? Jeez. Tho, yr right in the sense that there seemed to be a bit of a split at some talks between a generation for which the discourse, as Allison Cobb noted, of feminizing the earth - “Mother Nature”   / who needs be “protected” from the Bad Men – is perfectly okay, and seemingly more radicalized (or less, should I say, "too old school" or "out of touch"?) panelists and attendees (many of them perhaps younger, many of them women) who took note of (and exception to) some of these framings. 

Navigating our way to the correct room was a challenge due to some logistical scrambling, and one of the most intriguing aspects of the panel itself was the fact that many conference participants wandered in, realized they were in the wrong place, and wandered out again. If only they had known that David Buuck would be eating toxic dirt! Rob, Kaia, and David Wolach discuss above the intricate problem of bringing activists and socially concerned poets together (in this case, I might add, it looked like we were dealing with at least two fairly different groups of activists).

Shit, I missed this parenthetical in my first read-thru.  Yeah, cf above. Tho, lefties (I count myself as one) are a fractured bunch—I’d stress the “at least…”

Given that the PACE action was about bringing poetry into the streets, confronting people who would not otherwise be reading poetry in the middle of the day and asking them to read poetry, it was intriguing to see how people navigated the choice to not participate in a panel on activism and poetics.

I think they were just looking for FAMILIAR faces, and when they didn’t see any, they left.  Is this saying the same thing?  I mean, is this part of the difficulty in laying bare to, or suspending, one’s affiliations, at least temporarily, in the service of a new self-organization?  The difficulty of re-calibrating social conventions via de-familiarization? 

Site specific

In the elevator, on the way to “the street,” I asked CAConrad if he’d ever done a reading at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia (http://www.easternstate.org/ ) -- I used to volunteer there when I was a graduate student at Penn and I know that artists routinely do very interesting site-based work there). He told me he thought that running the place as an educational site was important, but that he couldn’t stand being on the premises. “I don’t like what they did to people there,” he said. There, in a nutshell, is the difference between Conrad and 95% of the academics I know, including myself. We see the horrors of history under a microscope, and have no trouble conducting (brief) investigations into the sites of those horrors, as long as it helps us understand them better.

But you do more than conduct brief investigations, or anyway, you count these investigations as contiguous with other forms of knowledge, and routinely question yr methods of looking/sensing. Most of us do end up quickly habituated into the academic discourse, tho, & it takes others to shake us, to transfigure that landscape for us, I think.

Microscopy.  Because we’re trained to think that way, fear being the major reinforcement.  We can be untrained, but why – under these job conditions, in a climate of unrelenting fear – would we wake up one day and decide to do anything that would be considered a desecration of an institution that “houses” us? Hence my interest in organizing would-be allies (activists, radical academics) for making aesthetic practices a major living part of our organizing struggles—making room for socially concerned artists within any radical organizing sub-structure.  I often feel like I'm recapitulating, some inevitable redux.  This occurs the less I'm with PEOPLE. 

Conrad is willing to suffer for his art (see his somatic practices:http://somaticpoetryexercises.blogspot.com/) but not at the expense of effacing a history of previous suffering. In fact, my sense is that although he has a very strong sense of history, especially the history of poetry, he’s more interested in creating new experiences than recreating old ones. David Buuck has an equally intricate relationship to this set of problems: rather than attempting to bring to the surface all the lost history of a place like Treasure Island (http://davidbuuck.com/barge/bti/), he projects that space forward into the future—dealing tangentially, but no less powerfully, with its past. The act of eating toxic dirt from the site (as he does, periodically, when giving talks about BARGE), seems to me to be purposefully symbolic rather than straightforwardly somatic—he knows that he can never replicate the hazards experienced by the low-income residents who live on the island, but he wants to at least measure out the length of that gap.

Yes.  Speaking of tangential: I’m interested in (especially as a Nonsite discussion) yr distinction between the “straightforwardly somatic” and the symbolically somatic.  In neither Conrad nor Buuck’s work do I see anything that seeks to replicate, yr right.  But in both there is the (speaking of the penal) corporeal ritual as both metaphor and motor for metaphor, or perhaps, especially in thinking of Conrad’s sound (soma)tics, ritual as also beyond metaphor or wearing/embodying/becoming that motor which moves or expels or witnesses…(?)  In PACE this is writ-large, Conrad (in parallel ways, like Buuck in his work) BECOMING the poem that inverts its having been othered.  Conrad and Frank were leading us, in the beginning, on a quest to verb all over the place. Conrad's work is often described as an "inclusive queering."  Seems to me we were, at various levels, queering neighborhood blocks as we went along.

The talk was particularly awesome.  Frank's recounting of the history of PACE, along with talking us thru HB's Poetic Terrorism !!  was terrific.  I was especially intrigued by Buuck's use of different modalities to access Treasure Island - that the (de)tour was also available as do-it-yrself dial-in cell phone jaunt was something I did not know, and I wonder what feedback he might have gotten from those who ventured to the island with only the ghostly archive of the ghosts of the future in their ear.  Something about that image reminds me of the screen test.

So, with Conrad’s powerful words of refusal and Buuck’s strategic engagement in mind, we headed out into downtown Portland. My understanding, from Frank Sherlock’s presentation about the history of PACE, is that most of the actions he and Conrad undertake are not just site-specific but time-specific. Their holiday action, for instance, played with the convention of the greeting card in order to get passers by to engage with poems about/protesting the Iraq War. I found that specificity missing in this action, though the advantage was that it allowed the panel participants—many of whom had brought broadsides for this purpose, many of whom read from their well-worn notebooks and portable electronic devices—to engage with the action on their own terms with minimal preparation. Our first initial steps were cautious and halting; we followed Frank like small children on a field trip, chatting with each other when we were too shy to engage passers-by. I found Conrad’s mode of address particularly brilliant. Rather than asking, as pamphleteers often do, whether pedestrians would “like some” of what was in his hand he asked them if they “like poetry”—a more surprising question that invites an exchange of opinion rather than of paper. David, a former union organizer, was naturally more comfortable with this exercise than most of us were—he even approached motorists in their cars (I think there’s a proposal on the table in several of our major urban centers to ban panhandlers from doing just that, ostensibly to prevent “thuggery”). I had nothing to offer, but was honored to give out copies of Frank’s poem, which reproduces some of the documentation from his battles with the Philadelphia power company.

Great set of observations.  I, too, felt that this action was probably a shift from the smaller, temporally-located actions prior—tho, as you say, in a really fascinating, really good way.  Also, at the beginning, I noticed that most people wanted to stage readings—stand on a corner, on a bench, etc., as if from a podium, and that subsided over some time as people branched out.  I would guess that each action takes on such a different feeling…  Interesting that you contrast Conrad’s and Frank’s invitational and dialogic approach with mine.  As contrast, thuggery is spot-on.  When I was training organizers, and before that when I was a field organizer, it was common for authorities to seek out arcane laws like thuggery statutes to keep us from having conversations about forming unions--this is now part of the Fusion Center movement, to PREVENT movement/flow of information.  So, there is something both radical (as resistant to dominant/quieting forces) and functional in the organizing conversation, yet something also potentially coercive.  Not always so, really not usually—that would be a bad organizing conversation.  In fact, Conrad’s invitation – his asking if people if they had a minute to engage, to hear, to enjoy – is more of what an organizing conversation is supposed to begin as.  Early on I was taught that since I am in the mode of “having an unnatural conversation” in which I am trying to (if need be) convince someone of their own “worth” on the job, I am starting off with much more information, knowing that I am to initiate a particular discourse, and thus the power differential is huge.  The closer to coercive one gets—the less one listens, allowing the person to detour, to teach YOU, for the learning to be mutual—the less, in fact, “successful” the conversation will be.  After all, a solidarity, a bond, a deep connection over time, is what is hoped for. 

The culminating moment for all of us, I think, was initiated by Buuck, who bounded up into the exterior staircases of a parking garage (this kind of improvisation is Buuck’s strong suit; when confronted with a rather dank and musty space for his reading at Evergreen the following week, he directly engaged the site’s institutionality by turning a lectern on its side and pushing it across the floor). Several readers followed him up, until we had layers of poetry being projected from the garage. Of course picking up their words was like listening to radio from outer space; we only heard them, from the opposite corner of the intersection, because we were focusing on them. Most folks passed us by without any particular experience of “dissensus.”

That was awesome.  I was able to hear ok.  Anyway, I was more into the idea of us taking over a private space and turning it public, into a site of activation, to use Buuck’s terms, & was excited to see that tho David initiated the reading, those who followed were very self-assuredly going up there with a sort of “takeover” in mind, independent of Buuck’s reading.  Like, they decided at once, which occurred just after 4 of us stood, each on one corner of an intersection, and read one of Conrad’s poems in chorus.  I also noticed, maybe because I decided to stand in the middle of the walkway looking up as if Duncan’s aliens were just overhead, trying to draw a crowd by example, that people did begin to stop, look, and at least try to listen.  Several did.  Tho, the acoustics weren’t ALL THAT, so they didn’t stay for the whole time, for sure.

But this is the question, isn’t it? Are we reading poetry in the streets for us or for them? This particular PACE action, especially because it was framed as part of the conference, felt pedagogical to me. Our little flock of ducklings was trying out something that Conrad and Sherlock have done before. Next time we’ll do it on our own terms, and find new ways of engaging with our roving audience. But I also took it as an experiment; what does the poem feel like under these conditions, how does it change the work itself, if not the world around it? In this case, it is not a question of “performer” vs. “audience” but of testing out the waters of the language itself.

Hopefully, in most instances, the “us-them” distinction washes away when the conversation gets good; it seemed to do so as time went on, as people became more comfortable, tried out new ways to engage with passersby.  Also, the difference between the holiday reading and this one can’t be underestimated: that between a small cadre of poets reading, discussing, giving out poems—gifting—on a particular issue, one certainly contiguous with all the “issues” we discussed at the conference but more focused, and a large action of some 50 plus people walking down the street, reading/sharing from a soup of overlapping concerns.  I think you just get different outcomes, one being that perhaps there is more of a feeling of having an audience with this larger group.  My guess is that we did have an impact on a neighborhood.  That we carved out SO much space for aesthetic practice-as-social engagement made for an action that I think did and will reverberate with defamiliarization.  I still remember that guy with a python around his neck on 4^th street in NYC, and that was 14 years ago.  Yet I do LOVE that you bring up questions of how the poem FEELS, how it might feel DIFFERENT in your head, coming from your mouth, in your hands or someone else’s, when taken out of boundary-forming / identification-forming habitats, assemblages, institutional contexts.

I want to note, too, that the Friday reading also had this feel, or at least was not at all clubby & myopic as so many readings are.  I’m with Conrad & Frank—it was one of the highlights of the weekend for me.  It was one of the first times that I at least noticed non-poets, e.g., lefty political science professors, community activists, etc., mingling with and engaged by a group of poets who feel solidarity with one-another, but may not feel connected to other socially active individuals & groups.  Very cool space, I might add.  All around very inviting, a lovely night.