In Aporia: The Annual Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading

In Aporia: The Annual Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading

September 19, 2012 at 7pm
Lang Café, Eugene Lang College
65 W 11th street, NYC

The annual Akilah Oliver Memorial Reading at The New School honors the memory of Akilah Oliver, a radical poet, professor, feminist, and activist. The second of this annual reading series, this event will feature the work of Nick Von Kleist, Krystal Languell, Wendy S. Walters, and Eileen Myles.

Nick Von Kleist is a current senior at Eugene Lang College of the New School, where he studies Literature, Chinese and Fine Arts. Nick has been published on the online zine ShortfastandDeadly in London, where he also did many readings at the Woodburner. In New York, Nick has read at Bowwow at the Bowery Poetry Center.

Krystal Languell is a graduate of the MFA program at New Mexico State University, where she won the Mercedes Jacobs Thesis Award. Her first book, Call the Catastrophists, was published by BlazeVox in 2011. Her poems have appeared in Barn Owl Review, DIAGRAM, esque and elsewhere, and her reviews and interviews have been published online at NewPages and Coldfront. Founder of the feminist literary journal Bone Bouquet, she is part of the Belladonna Collaborative in Brooklyn and teaches writing at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and Pratt Institute.

Wendy S. Walters is the author of Troy, Michigan (forthcoming from Futurepoem Books in 2013), Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005), both published by Palm Press (Long Beach, CA). She is a 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. Walters’ poetry has been recognized with residency fellowships from Bread Loaf, MacDowell, Cave Canem and Yaddo, and her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Los Angeles Review, Callaloo, HOW2, Natural Bridge, Seneca Review and the Yalobusha Review, among several others. She has been a nominee for the Essay Prize and her prose has been published or is forthcoming in Bookforum, The Iowa Review, Coldfront, Seneca Review, Seattle Review, and Harper’s Magazine. She is also a co-founder of the First Person Plural Reading Series in Harlem with Amy Benson and Stacy Parker Le Melle.

Eileen Myles is from Boston and moved to New York in 1974 to be a poet. Eileen has published 18 collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction most recently Snowflake/different streets (poetry), and Inferno (a poet’s novel). Also The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009) for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital art writers grant. She is a 2012 Guggenheim fellow. She lives in New York.

Eileen Myles on Charles Dickens

I always date people who turn me on to great books. Often not right away. Sometimes right away. An ex said Bleak House was of great interest to Marxists. And now my beloved Leopoldine had Bleak House by Charles Dickens on her shelf. We were auditioning candidates for the reading aloud before bed spot. I read the first chapter of Bleak House and I was so elated by the flow which was utterly English, a thing I mostly have no use for and yet in Bleak House I was in the poetry of it. I would claim that the best English poetry is in English prose though I will also say that I was doing a studio visit in Rotterdam last week and a young artist asked if he could read me some Jeremy Prynne who Lisa Robertson had introduced him to and I was also taken by the compressed and odd music of Prynne’s work. But Dickens. He’s funny. He nails people in these flash character portraits but you know I think it was generally the landscape that mostly took me:

The sun was low – near setting – and its light came redly in above, without descending to the ground.

And soon after that the human landscape: Mr. Jarndyce, it is very kind of you to come to see me. I am not long to be seen, I think.

Dickens wrote in time where people talked like that - Death was perhaps a matter of going off stage – for good. Or else least people aspired to talking like that. Since it’s all that there was language was in everyone’s ears. I think of the 19th c. as having talk, and landscape, and a wealth disparity as grand as ours. So to be in Dickens observant colloquial world of this book (and it took me months to read) was to be both more and less at home in ours. In 1853 when Bleak House appeared the world still spoke richly of its problems and since even my own grandmother was born in 1880 and she is long gone we can’t ask anyone if a world about talking hurt less. But they died younger. So.

(Learn more about Eileen Myles herself here.)

Laura Mullen on Daphne Marlatt

“Who’s There?” The book begins—as Hamlet begins—with a question, and the insistence on an unfolding that must follow upon a sudden awareness of presence. Who = character, There = setting and both together: plot. His story: “history, the story of dominance. mastery. the bold line of it.” A deep engagement with the archive, Daphne Marlatt’s Ana Historic is also an exquisitely and subtly crafted novel (this “book of interruptions” feels loose and fresh as a draft), its poetic prose both transparent and prismatic, providing a wise guide to the problems and opportunities exposed by second wave feminism while opening—gently, lovingly, lucidly—an inquiry into history as a discourse, and lineage as an issue. The territory the book explores includes the rough beginnings of a logging town or outpost in the Pacific Northwest and—as palimpsest—the civilized present incarnation of that geography; the narrator is a history student turned faculty wife who turns again, away, straying first with her mind and then with her heart and soul, becoming one of those who can never go home again, given what she comes to know. In questioning charged absences in the historical chronicles she finds traces of women whose almost erased lives fire her imagination, and she unfolds herself—going from research assistant to novelist and from a stale and stalled marriage into a relationship which is tender, warm, intimate, and vulnerable. She unfolds herself: it turns out that that opening “Who’s There?” was not necessarily a question for another after all. Or not only. Ask it of yourself: read this—more than once. “the real history of women…is unwritten because it runs through our bodies: we give birth to each other…it’s women imagining all that women could be that brings us into the world.”

Hear Laura read from this here.

(Learn more about Laura Mullen herself here.)

Daphne Gottlieb on Katherine Dunn

In 1989, I had a cat named Pooka and I didn't eat meat. I was baby steps queer. I shaved my head and dyed my hair pink and shaved my head and pierced my nose. I marched on Washington DC. There was no internet. Being a fierce outcast took work. All my clothes were black. 

In 1989, books were stars -- you wanted to know what the newest, the hottest, the edgiest were. Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behavior was like that. The RE/Search books were like that. 

I was 20. At 20 and before that, books change your life better and more profoundly than they can later. Siddhartha. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The Little Prince. Still Life with Woodpecker. Cat's Cradle. 

And Geek Love. The story of a "freak show" family-- what begins as a story about outcasts and quickly becomes a story about cults and betrayal, only to ultimately become a meditation on family, love, home and sacrifice. 

I was a freak show. I wanted to find my cult. I knew all about betrayal. The rest I continue to learn about. 

I have read that book at least four times now. I come back to it and come back to it, a favorite resort, a dry place in a storm, a party, a prayer meeting. It has never disappointed me. And I always find something new. I hope you do, too

(You can learn more about Daphne Gottlieb herself here.)

Brooke Champagne on Vivian Gornick

On Being (S)Mothered: Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments

If I used the word perambulatory to describe this book, I’d stop to imagine my mother’s response: why do I always have to look up half the words you write, which invariably leaves me to interpret her comment as either compliment or pejorative (there you go again! she’d surely say). My mother is my favorite passive-aggressive editor.

But Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments is a perambulatory book, one in which a mother and daughter stroll down their New York streets across the decades only to misunderstand each other more deeply—more fiercely—as they slowly gray. Both women rhetorically strike back and forth with aplomb; their words stomp down the pages. Gornick struggles with her involuntary reactions to her mother’s ideas, the rush of blood to the head, the irritation morphing into rage. Oftentimes on walks that start off simple—let’s go for a walk and talk—she endeavors not to “make a holocaust of the afternoon.”

These are struggles of anyone with a mother, even one like mine, who perhaps I’ve been unfair to. Rather than an editor, she can be quite a sycophant. Ah, you wrote a piece about Gornick, she’ll say, how wonderful. Now who is he? Infuriating.

Hear Brooke read from this here.

(Learn more about Brooke Champagne herself here.)

Khadijah Qeen on Helene Cixous

Explicating Process: Helene Cixous' Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing

I hesitate to write about Cixous' work. She says it all so well herself. In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (Columbia University Press, 1993), she begins with the letters I and H, H particularly for its ladder-like appearance, and when that letter (in French) is "out of breath" (4), she turns to English to give it sound (life). With that introduction, proclaiming "this H, this ladder is writing" (4), she proceeds to send us to the School of the Dead. 

It is important that these are not schools in the traditional sense, but levels of consciousness that intersect and repeat. Whether you take notes, read straight through, skip around, reread or re-reread, reading Cixous often mirrors the act of memory, much like reading Morrison (as outlined in her essay "The Site of Memory," from Inventing the Truth, edited by William Zinsser).

Then we progress to the School of Dreams, still accompanied by the dead writers discussed in the previous School – Kafka, Lispector, Poe, Tsvetaeva. We learn that "One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One's own night. Walking through the self toward the dark" (65). Forget what you know. Look for what you don't understand, don't see – write through it.

The point of such a process, according to Cixous, is to unravel the self's mysteries, to know more than before about yourself and the world. Armed with that knowledge, "let the dream ladder grow. It grows down – toward the depths" (108) to the School of Roots. Reminiscent of Jenny Boully's recent work, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them (Tarpaulin Sky, 2011) with its "Home Under Ground" throughout, we enter "a world under the world" (126), a place of metamorphosis, restoration, recovery of self and language anew (129). Then we come to a finishing place. We write something else. Do it again.

(Learn more about Khadijah Queen herself here.)

Arielle Greenberg Bywater on Maira Kalman

Hey, Willy, See the Pyramids by Maira Kalman

I was working as a nanny in college in the early 90s, and my three-year-old charge Gracie had this book, which is how I discovered it; and how I discovered that surrealist and absurdist humor is alive and well and continues to thrive in children’s lit, as does Chagall- and Florine Stettheimer-inspired art; and how I discovered how much I eventually wanted to have children of my own, partly to have the excuse to read more children’s books; and how I discovered Maira Kalman, the contemporary author I most want to have over for dinner, because she is funny and Jewish and cares about food politics and democracy and vintage hats just like me; and how I discovered how much joy I get from things like the “tiny story” in Hey, Willy, which goes, in its entirety, “Four very tiny people / walked right by me / on the way to school. / No one knew / where they were going, / but they were / walking very fast / and carrying / little instruments”; and how much I myself wanted to write spare, funny, weird little things, which is not what I was writing then, but is sometimes what I try to write now.


Hear Arielle read this aloud here.
(Learn more about Arielle Greenberg Bywater herself here.)