Sun, Jan 31, 2021 at 12:29 PM
To: Renia White
Hi Renia,
Hope you’re well! Apologies for the late response! I've been writing/thinking with images lately, and thought perhaps that both of us sharing an image with each other and using that as a starting place could be cool, or if we want to start more traditionally, with a shared question would be cool too. I suppose one question that is always a good beginning, is what are you working on, or thinking about, or envisioning in this moment?
Calvin
Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 9:24 PM
To: Calvin Walds
Hi Calvin,
Hope you are safe and well. These days are a new brand of strange. My apologies about the delay.
I feel like it would be so hard to pick a single image! But I did think about it for a while, and I have to admit, my immediate inclination was to think “away from” recent images that’ve stayed with me because of the ache they inspire. So many of those images, right? I caught myself thinking I’ll insist upon an image that did some other kind of work, which (of course) did reveal that I have plenty of those too! I’m saved every day by so many things and reminded of what I am working toward, thinking toward, of what’s possible, etc. It really doesn’t take much--Rihanna in collaboration with Lorna Simpson, A Tschabalala Self painting, a photo of an old friend I haven’t really seen in years (in which they look brand new & the same).
And I’m thinking about what it means to insist upon what doesn’t ache, especially now.
Recently, one of my writing rituals was to journal daily about whatever present joy I had. I hoped it would do the work of allowing me to exhaust any quick despair by turning my head toward whatever gentleness I could muster. And so I tried my hand at it and was quickly reminded that, of course, I’d always have something to say and I’d find the joy if I looked for it, but what kind on what day? And what now that I could locate it? What else? But writing it down meant I could both see the joy and look beyond it--a different door that led to a familiar room.
And I mention that because that’s how I get to the page these days: little tasks and prompts of that sort. And the rest is in the (strange) living.
I want to hear what you're thinking about too! Working on? What’s keeping you these days?
Looking forward!
Renia
Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 7:29 PM
To: Renia White
Hi Renia,
Thank you for offering this language and frame for thinking about images: that which aches.
Yesterday, I went to the new show at New Museum, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, curated by the late Okwui Enwezor. Even with the title in mind, with an awareness of what I stepping into, I went out of a true excitement to see so many of my favorite Black artists together--from Diamond Stingley, to Basquiat, Nari Ward, Rashid Johnson, Carrie Mae Weems, the list just goes on, but ache did those images, sculptures, and sounds that were gliding throughout the museum. I honestly already find the work of artists like Walker hard to look at in a way, because of the histories, places, actions they evoke in a way that feels playful, but particularly yesterday I wasn’t ready for the range of ache, how Nari Ward covered a hearse in feathers and tar, bringing so much, across time and space and memory together in that covering of a black vehicle with a black material--tar.
In some ways, I’m thinking back to Elizabeth Alexander’s essay “Can you be BLACK and look at this” which she wrote after the circulation of the video of the LAPD assault on Rodney King, and in light of the history of images of Black harm being circulated for various reasons, from attempts to elicit empathy or outcry, to spectacle. I was appreciative, in a way, of how the exhibit refuses or circumnavigates the spectacle of Black harm by including abstract and conceptual work and focusing more on the aftermath, the residuals, the ache, the grief.
I’m also thinking about what it means for us to be looking at these images collectively, at least in the same room or platform. I found myself, as I often do when I go see Black exhibits or performances, wondering what other people in the room with me were thinking and feeling and understanding, and wondering about what it meant to take images in the space, how the mostly Black docents were tasked with guarding the pieces, telling folks to step back…
I suppose my work is moving around some of these questions and thoughts. I’ve been practicing writing poems in response to images, paintings by abstract Black painters, particularly Beauford Delaney.
I’m interested in the turn toward abstraction, away from the figurative, the representational, the discernable, toward an interest in or preoccupation with color and materiality. Maybe it’s avoidance or refusal, maybe it’s seeking something about what’s after the body….
I just read your poem lump (Witness, Spring 2019) and it’s striking, how it seems to be an act or performance (ritual?) of drawing, of making and unmaking a body, the body of a girl. You write:
in this part the girl is without head.
I draw her bone-jut and sweet-
an extravagant lump referencing what isn’t present.
I’m reminded of Francine Harris,’s poem Canvas, which also does the work of textual painting, and I’m curious if you might share how you were taking up the body, drawing, making, images in relation to the sometimes neglected instances of police and state violence against Black womxn and girls, especially in how the drawing becomes an act of protection, of care, gonna make me a girl you can’t knee press.
Calvin
Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 7:11 PM
To: Calvin Walds
Hello Calvin, I hope you are warm and well. I'm glad you're willing to use this language to think with me.
Thank you for sharing your experience at the New Museum. When you say you weren't ready for the "range of ache," I know I can't pinpoint exactly where that work met you, but I also know there's so much that's possible and I meet you there. I'm especially drawn in by your description of the Nari Ward piece.
What can prepare us for what aches but knowing it's coming or possible? And that took some ache that we all know wasn't the first ache...I hope to also view the show soon.
Thank you for your reflections--how you appreciate the inclusion of abstract & conceptual work as a way to get to those other materials that are left: the "residuals...the grief." I love that you're also working on these kinds of questions in response to abstract paintings. I'm especially interested in your wondering about what others might have been "feeling...understanding" alongside you and the carefulness of your eye turning toward the docents.
There's something about how the collective looking-on multiplies things. What are we looking at? What do you see that I don't, that I do? What do we do now? feels so much larger than What do I do?
Also, thank you for taking a look at lump with care. When you ask how I was "taking up the body, drawing, making, images in relation to...instances of police and state violence against Black womxn and girls..." I suppose I was thinking about what else there was to be done. I'd begun writing the poem a few years before its publication following the footage from the violent, pool party incident in McKinney, TX during the summer of 2015. That was also the summer of Sandra Bland's death.
And the poem and I knew there was nothing I could really do. I couldn't and didn't want to explain the materials those moments leave you with. I figured it was something that you have to do something with, maybe? And I kept arriving at the thought that, no matter what was left, if there was something to "do something" with, if I truly could, I would make a girl from whatever that was and you'd have to leave her alone because that's what she's made of. I'd insist upon making a girl even after they tried/try to unmake us.
And there was no way to do that, of course. Those materials aren't around and shouldn't have to be--so take this lump and I will too. Now, what's next? And that was just how I chose to encounter the shapeless sort of grief. I put the lump of it in my hands and approached it and its limitations.
--
I wanna turn to something kind of tender and bright for a bit, if that's OK.
I'm interested in your piece in our shared issue of No, Dear. In A solution for all problems, we're in an intimate scene and there's this way that Audre Lorde is within that frame altering and adding to this interaction we're looking in on: I am looking for a panacea so you hand me a shimmering copy of audre: here, touch me there.
& later: I remember audre's three day trysts in her apartment. Let's not go out.
Do you mind talking a bit about that turn toward Lorde and the inclusion of an excerpt from Zami? Thinking back to my mention of turning toward gentleness--we have Audre and we have Sandra here in the same poem. I'd love to know how you were navigating the world of those references and that of the poem.
Looking forward,
Renia
Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 10:31 PM
To: Renia White
Hi Renia,
I hope you're well too!
Thank you for asking about my poem. I kind of fell into reading Zami. One year, a few years ago, I left NYC and moved to East Africa to teach at a boarding school. The school was in an isolated location, a desert essentially, with a ton of sunlight, and in the afternoons we didn’t have electricity, so I would take the time to drift, reading and wandering around in the dried out river beds there. I’d brought copies of Zami and Sister Outsider with me because I had a feeling I was meant to read these classics, and that I would when I was ready, and once I started I couldn’t stop until I was finished. It felt like drinking water. I would look forward every day to getting back out there so I could sit and return to Audre’s travels and travails in upper and lower Manhattan, in Mexico City, in various apartments— it resonated with the peripatetic life I was living, and maybe assuaged a bit of my missing.
I was often (nearly always) alone in the desert— and perhaps because of this, the poems I wrote during that time began to include this imagined you that I was interacting with. So the you handing me the ’shimmering copy of audre’ was a kind of formless but familiar subject that I could respond to. In thinking back to my poetry generally, I’m rarely comfortable being alone in a poem, as in the lyrical I, and often have a you or an addressee there with the speaker, as in the poems I’m working on with (on) the painter Beauford Delaney. I think I’m wondering if it’s something about the Black poem, that it always brings other folks, voices, references, histories, inside—in a fugitive way, running away together.
And including Sandra Bland at the end came in later drafts. Even after the palimpsest. I felt uncomfortable with the initial ending of the poem, perhaps because I couldn’t just stay in the apartment--the smell of ‘sugar cane heat’ from the Kara Walker show at Domino Sugar Factory seeps in, and with it, the history she evokes, and then its afterlife in police violence, the speaker couldn’t abide by the you’s warning to not leave…which brings me to your moving poem in No, Dear that warrants so many re-reading in which you write that a fix for the drowning is called leaving I’m wondering if you might share how you’re taking up leaving, departure, and their limits and there’s much water, wrists in water and water entering and drowning, and there’s a you here, too doing different work, and there’s intimacy in the second section that kind of evades label, gives and pulls back, a he and me swimming around need and desire and failure to feel it for what it is.
Calvin
Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 11:04 PM
To: Renia White
And one more thought about the smell of sugar cane heat. Akiliah Oliver is another poet that is important to me and she's conversant with Lorde in many ways but I'm thinking of what she calls "the non-linear synapses between desire, memory, blackness" in the flesh memories and how she focuses on how and what memories are carried, inscribed within our bodies. I used to think about whether it was possible to have a sensorial memory or understanding of the Black past, not just an intellectual understanding of the field, the water, the ship, the land, and I used poetry to try to break what at first was a barrier for me in truly contending with this history, to access what it have smelled like and sounded like, and I think a lot Black art is trying to get into that. So with the Walker show, it was the olfactory, how I could smell the sugar that stayed with me.
Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 12:29 AM
To: Calvin Walds
Hi Calvin,
That sounds like such a wonderful experience--to know in some region of yourself that it was time for those texts, and then to have them with you in such a dynamic moment.
I'm also so intrigued by your reflection that you're "rarely comfortable being alone in a poem." The idea that it's about your comfort feels different from, say, not wanting to be alone in a poem. I don't think one would be better than the other, but I enjoy thinking of your "imagined you"--this "formless but familiar subject that [you] could respond to" as an echo of those that you bring with you out of comfort. I like the idea of Black folks doing things for their comfort :-)
I also love how you're not just making this other visible, but also giving them a part. On my end, rarely do I feel like my "I" breaks down far enough to feel like it hasn't brought others along. There's always a more. It brings to mind Lynne Thompson's Fretwork, which I read for the first time late last year. Specifically, the poem In a Reflecting Glass:
how it begins:
...I am almost sure of what I see.
and a little later:
It's something / over my shoulder that I'm seeing: black earth rising, breathing / like a sleeping child.
The I often feels like that for me -- I + something over the shoulder, something underneath the feet, etc.
I enjoy the connection between these ideas and how you've described your thinking around "...a sensorial memory or understanding of the black past" alongside the work of Akilah Oliver. The smell of “sugar cane heat” staying with you and the memory arriving where you were then feels illustrative of that thinking and also invites so much more thought about where the I is in that history.
On "leaving, departure, and their limits" as I encounter those ideas in, all over, but only here, I'd say the limits and also the implied expanse were both a part of what I was thinking through.
Leaving as a fix is cool until one can't do it for whatever reason, right? & perhaps someone can/does meet you where you are?
In the world of the poem, the lover comes a long way and they can bring a gift, sure, perhaps even something that you left behind, but otherwise they can only bring themselves. They can't bring the city you crave, can't bring that intangible aspect of self that you know you are going to grow into but haven't come upon yet. But they can bring along a sense of "not here, not quite" that changes here into someplace else. And that's a sort of tender and beautiful thing, if you are not always trying to make a thing meet a mighty need. There's a tenderness in them taking on that leaving for you in order to bring you a bit of it. Speaking of leaving, I do hope we might share more thoughts, but I know we have to begin moving toward a close here. In that vein, I do wonder if you'll reflect a bit on what you're envisioning these days, to borrow from one of your recommendations for where to begin.
For me, I'm predictably thinking toward seeing people I love when it feels safe. I've also been thinking about if I'm one of those people who feels I've had a hard time writing because of the lack of stimuli, visible change, etc. But the next thought is always, OK if you say that is true you will have thoughts once you go outside, right?
But I really I do; I'm hoping toward the future making and what makes it possible--may it be joy.
'til soon, Renia
Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 12:36 PM
To: Renia White
Renia,
Those thoughts and questions around leaving, thank you for sharing those. And this note on how the lover “can only bring themselves” I’m sitting with that and this wisdom you’re offering about expectation of things of not expecting them to meet “mighty needs”, to allow all things to be themselves, to offer what they offer, to be allowed to sit and not constantly asked to grow beyond capacity, or want, to be something that might not be the “intangible aspect” that they never claimed to be, a something still good.
…I was just having a conversation with students about one of the many things that made this year challenging, which is an understatement, is that I’ve been limited in my ability to put myself into unexpected situations, say an architecture lecture downtown or hearing bachata at a random bar in BK, that usually seemed to fuel the writing, and instead I have fallen, like most people, into routine. Last summer, I would bike one of three routes nearly every day or night, and there was something in the repetition that I started to fall into…I recently was reminded of an essay by the late James Snead, On Repetition in Black Culture, and I’m thinking about where Snead writes:
Repetitive words and rhythms have long been recognized as a focal constituent of African Music and its American descendants--slave-songs,blues, spirituals, and jazz and he continues,
The fact that repetition, in some sense, is the principle of organization shows the desire to rely upon “the thing that is there to pick up”. Progress in the sense of “avoidance of repetition” would at once sabotage such an effort. Without an organizing principle of repetition, true improvisation would be impossible, as an improvisator relies upon the ongoing recurrence of the beat.
Most of my favorite music is ultra repetitive, (e.g see gqom), and there something to be said about the repetitive nature of Black life in so many iterations, whether it is the repetition of containment, policing, of labor cycles, or just the overall banality of late capitalism despite all the crises, real and maintained…I’m, at a fundamental level, a little bored,
So, in looking forward...I’m thinking about the last note in the Snead quote, that in the repetition, into or within the what has become routine, is where improvisation occurs, like a fugue note that pops out of the cycle--I suppose I’m interested in enacting that.
I have a chapbook coming out! called Flee (Split/Lip, April 2021) that is hybrid prose and it actually has made me feel confident in the possibility of writing a poetic novel like thing--so I’m also looking toward that.
-& yes, may it be joy