Fieldnotes: Issue 4

Juice is Renee Gladman's first full-length book. Gladman wields an idiosyncratic skill with description and characters that draw praise and attention from her contemporaries. Juice describes a world where seemingly minor obsessions and details (like the narrator's almost random preference for juice) can structure and develop an entire story, down to its tone and style. As her narrator puts it: "So far it has been sex and leaves that keep me alive."

This major new work is thought, spirit and sense (in every sense) ‘fleshed out’ in ‘all the corners’ by being unmade – as poetry, as music, as (black and white) images, and as attention to the interconnected circuitries the One has with the social, historical and environmental ‘to / link us outside’. These elements are no sooner embodied than they slip, shift, carousel and spin away. As Goodwin puts it: ‘no longer a bodily reference to an individual subject’s presence; not obliterated but made into an element, air or breath, as black poetry’s condition of im/possibility for, and refusal of subjecthood.’ Hence it is that this poetry achieves ‘flightacross precipitous intransigence’ (Will Alexander), perhaps flights of manifestations of spirit, ‘ghostly crowned / apogees’, like duppies, which is to say, sacred. Hence too the work’s urgent task to avoid ‘thingification’: the conscription and exploitation of thought &/or body for neo-colonialist, which is to say, neo-liberal ends. Goodwin eschews identity politics for a phenomenology that is more properly radical in both the etymological sense of the term – rooted and vital to life – as well as situated within a history of experimental black thought which, simultaneously, rejects normative traditions of meaning, signification and value. Both meanings are central to the anti-racist core of this important work – ‘when i don’t know you but you must know who i am’ – in a poetry that’s as breath-taking as it is breath-making. ‘Inexpressibly full with what words can do’.

— Emily Critchley, author of Home (London: Protoype, 2021), Arrangements (Shearsman Books, 2018) and Ten Thousand Things (UEA: Boiler House Press, 2017)

James Goodwin is a poet doing a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on the blacksociopoetics of marronage, breath, sacrality and emanation. His pamphlet, aspects caught in the headspace we’re in: composition for friends, was published by Face Press; and his debut book, Fleshed Out For All The Corners Of The Slip, is forthcoming with the87press. He serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

Conceptual writing is emerging as a vital 21st century literary movement and I’ll Drown My Book represents the contributions of women in this defining moment. Edited by Caroline Bergvall, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place, I’ll Drown My Book takes its name from a poem by Bernadette Mayer, appropriating Shakespeare. The book includes work by 64 women from 10 countries, with contributors’ responses to the question—What is conceptual writing?—appearing alongside their work. I’ll Drown My Book offers feminist perspectives within this literary phenomenon.

CONTRIBUTORS:

Kathy Acker, Oana Avasilichioaei & Erin Moure, Dodie Bellamy, Lee Ann Brown, Angela Carr, Monica de la Torre, Danielle Dutton, Renee Gladman, Jen Hofer, Bernadette Mayer, Sharon Mesmer, Laura Mullen, Harryette Mullen, Deborah Richards, Juliana Spahr, Cecilia Vicuña, Wendy Walker, Jen Bervin, Inger Christiansen, Marcella Durand, Katie Degentesh, Nada Gordon, Jennifer Karmin, Mette Moestrup, Yedda Morrison, Anne Portugal, Joan Retallack, Cia Rinne, Giovanni Singleton, Anne Tardos, Hannah Weiner, Christine Wertheim, Norma Cole, Debra Di Blasi, Stacy Doris & Lisa Robertson, Sarah Dowling, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Levitsky, Laura Moriarty, Redell Olsen, Chus Pato, Julie Patton, Kristin Prevallet, a.rawlings, Ryoko Seikiguchi, Susan M. Schultz, Rosmarie Waldrop, Renee Angle, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tina Darragh, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Maryrose Larkin, Tracie Morris, Sawako Nakayasu, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jena Osman, kathryn l. pringle, Frances Richard, Kim Rosenfeld, and Rachel Zolf.

A selection of interviews and rare photos from the legendary St. Mark's Poetry Project for its 50th anniversary season.

The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church was founded in 1966 for the overlapping circles of poets in the Lower East Side of New York. These interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter form a kind of conversation over time between some of the late 20th century's most influential poets and artists, who have come together in this legendary venue over the past 50 years.

Includes interviews with Charles North, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, David Rattray, Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Harryette Mullen, Barbara Henning, David Henderson, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Ed Sanders, Samuel Delany, Harry Matthews, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Renee Gladman, Lorenzo Thomas, Fred Moten, Stan Brakhage, Alex Katz, Lewis Warsh, Ron Padgett, Maggie Nelson, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, and more.

"I find it one of the liveliest points of communication in the American poetry world. There is an incredible excitement to come to the church and read one's poems to the many other poets who congregate there, drawn to the church by its own energy and thrust."—Donald Hall

From the introduction, by Anselm Berrigan: "For the poets closely involved with the Poetry Project since, and subsequent to, its inception, the interviews were an opportunity to speak directly to a community one could perceive as known, imaginary, expanding, unwieldy, intermittent, formative, desperately necessary, and sometimes peculiarly unsatisfying all at once. Community being the kind of term that often implies everything and nothing simultaneously, with the bottom falling out of the word depending on who happens to be wielding it. Poets can be particularly adept at using and exposing such terms."

‘One Shape of the Language: Cyrillic Archives’ is an artist’s book documenting Inna Kochkina’s research into the history, style, and politics of traditional Cyrillic.

This research was born from Kochkina’s self-reflective curiosity about the relationship between cultural heritage and typography and evolved into an examination of the socio-political role of traditional Cyrillic. An ancient script, Cyrillic has been used to express various forms of cultural and territorial domination and continues to serve as an imperialist tool, having long been deployed in support of Slavic nationalism both in Russia and in the former USSR territories. 

This publication is the result of Kochkina’s own research into and engagement with archives of typography, as well as conversations with anti-colonial activists, artists, and historians who interrogate traditional Cyrillic and its relationship to colonial power. 

Alongside conducting scholarly research, Kochkina also produced drawings in response to archives of traditional Cyrillic. Making these drawings constituted a form of “studying by making.” With these efforts she has sought to construct an anti-colonial feminist narrative, employing both typographic artifacts and ‘patriarchal’ letterforms.

To make her drawings, Kochkina took samples from these low quality typographic archives, enlarging and transforming them into unexpected graphic shapes that were then recorded in a series of experimental prints. The drawing, collating and contact printing process that she followed allowed her to document and reveal the qualities lent to historical artifacts by digital noise. Through this working method she sought to rethink both the subject of her work as well as traditional approaches to type design practice. This book presents the prints in a roughly chronological sequence, poetically portraying Kochkina’s complex relationship with her native script. Variously precise, messy, and destructive, these works ultimately convey a series of “imaginary” shapes through which to reinterpret traditional Cyrillic of the past and present.

Known and celebrated in Brazil and abroad for his novel Resistance, Julián Fuks returns to his auto-fictional alter ego Sebastián in a narrative alternating between the writer’s conversations with refugees occupying a building in downtown São Paulo, his father’s sickness, and his wife’s pregnancy. With impeccable prose, the author builds associations that go beyond the obvious, not only between glimpsing a life's beginning and end, but also between the building’s occupation and his wife's pregnancy — showcasing the various forms of occupation while exposing the frailty of life, the risk of solitude and the brutality of not belonging.

Cet été j’ai rappelé un ami, Grégoire Devidal, pour lui demander de ses nouvelles depuis que nous sommes chacun·e parti·e d’Amsterdam où nous y avons partagé quelques années. Il m’a parlé d’un projet de podcasts avec Agathe Boulanger et Gwendal Raymond.

Ayant partagé des moments de vie, de création, de tension, de doutes et beaucoup de moments de travail, il m’est apparu comme une nécessité de proposer ce nouveau numéro de HOOT à ces trois artistes. La parole et l’écriture sont au centre de leur pratique et de leurs recherches. Je leur ai alors confié mon questionnaire habituel pour m’effacer de la trame de ces conversations et laisser place à une nouvelle forme de dialogue : celui qu'iels se partagent sans que je ne les écoute, sans que je n'intervienne. Iels parlent entre-elleux, se questionnent et se meuvent comme autant d’échos infinis sur des parois fluides. Leurs échanges m’ont évoqué ceux des personnages des Vagues de Virginia Woolf dans la manière dont ils s'interpénètrent, dont l’identité des orateur·rice·s valse et les échanges se relaient plutôt que se répondent.