ebfrye's blog

An interview with Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (Part II)

ebfrye — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:58:01 +0000

Screen shot, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Wild Animals I Have Known pamplisest via Landmarks

Last week I posted Part I of my interview with Susan Somers-Willett. Today I'm excited to bring you Part II in which we continue to talk digital poetics and new uses of ekphrasis. Susan holds forth on other projects, including her work with UT's Landmarks prorgram and the Blanton Museum's poetry project. We also discuss her upcoming work that responds simultaneously to the recent Abu Ghraib photographs and early 20th-century lynching photographs.

EF: Do you think this kind of hybrid medium (poetry, photography, web content) will proliferate as we move more into digital poetics and digital modes of access? What kind of multimedia poetics do you find to be engaging?

SSW: Yes, I do. I think Kwame Dawes’s work is really exciting. He’s working in a similar mode of going into various communities, and documenting people or events within those communities, though I don’t know how much audio work he’s working on right now. His pieces have him reading the poem, so adding the element of interview footage was unique to my project and Natasha Trethewey’s project and what Erika Meitner’s project will become.

I feel like we’re on the verge, as Kwame’s, Natasha’s, and Erika’s projects will inspire people to approach this in a different way. It’s not like this is completely new mode of expression. James Agee and Walker Evans’s collaboration Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is probably the most famous example, but clearly there’s not a digital element to that. I think as far as the combination of audio and video and textual production goes, the more publishing becomes easier and more accessible through technology and our use or misuse of it, we’re going to see more of it. It’s a very specific combination. Poetry, audio, photography. Text, sound, image. I probably just need to think a little outside the box on that. Such a trinity doesn’t necessarily have to have a documentary focus.

For instance, consider what they did with the Blanton poetry project. You have the piece of artwork, the poem, and the interview with the project. There’s also the Landmarks projects at UT.

Screen Shot, Susan B. A. Somers-Willett, collaboration with the Blanton poetry project

EF: Could you talk a bit more about your involvement with Landmarks?

SSW: Let me explain what I think I did, because I really don’t know what I did. I called what I did for Landmarks my “bonkers poem” because it was drawing on so many different elements at which I was surely unadept. They asked me to respond to the piece by David Ellis that he created at UT in a period over a month called Animal. What he does in terms of his process—David has a large oversized canvas, a high res. camera that’s over the piece of canvas or surface, and he paints on the floor and he paints an entire mural, and then he paints over it, and then over it, and over it again while the camera captures the entire process in time-lapse photography. In the resultant video, David’s painting starts to morph and change, and then you see elements of the old painting showing through either because the paint is translucent or he has left elements that would read as blank space but they’re not blank space. It’s just the old showing through in the new. And the final piece is a 9-minute video of him doing this process for a month. When I saw it for the first time, it blew my mind and then I thought, “How the hell will I write about this?” It’s so ephemeral and, well, bonkers. If I were to approach it in the traditional ekprhastic way, it would be like taking stills from a film and trying to describe those scenes, but that doesn’t capture the excitement or energy or beauty of what David is doing in his work. It would be textbook.

Screen shot, David Ellis, video still from Animal, via Landmarks

I decided to approach it from the angle of David’s process and apply that process to my own work as a writer. One thing that came to mind, one concept, was the palimpsest. I was thinking of erasure, writing under writing, a new poem that’s showing through old writing, the old painting showing through the new paint that’s on top of it . I looked for examples in literature that modeled that paradigm, and I thought of Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow where she’s taken a 19th- century novella and taken Wite-Out® and erased certain parts of it so that on each page of that book, there splays a little poem. It’s like haiku, but not syllabic. Her poems in that book are shaped by whatever words are on the page. I read that and it was so exciting, experimentally, but incredibly accessible. So with David’s piece and then with Mary Ruefle’s model in mind, I created the poem Wild Animals I Have Known. There are other pieces in the same vein such as Travis MacDonald’s "The O Mission Repo" that uses redaction as its method. Ruefle’s book and the tradition of erasure in visual art and in performance art in which artists will cut out something or burn something to create were my main inspirations.

I decided to find a source text that corresponded with David’s piece Animal, and I wanted the source to be local, because David’s text stemmed from images that he saw in Austin and included some ambient sounds associated with Austin. I did a search in the HRC [Harry Ransom Center] to see what they would have associated with animals, specifically crows or grackles. I was so haunted by the image of a grackle in David’s piece. I found a book that had to be public domain, and I came across this text Wild Animals I Have Known by Ernest Thompson Seton. In that collection of nature stories, there was a story called “Silverspot the Crow,” and I got my hands on a couple of original texts of that book and decided to use redaction in the spirit of David’s piece. But, I wanted to make it read as a whole. I didn’t want it to read in just parts like other poets had done, in a one-poem-per-page, haiku-like fashion. I wanted to create a poem that would, through the process of redaction, span the entire length of the piece and tell a narrative like David’s piece. So, it became a sectioned poem, but the stanzas are created page by page, so one stanza is one page.

Screen shot, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, Wild Animals I Have Known pamplisest via Landmarks

Screen shot, Susan B.A. Somers-Willett, stanza 3 of Wild Animals I Have Known, via Landmarks

I gotta tell you, I met David when we premiered his piece and my poem at Art Night Austin E.A.S.T. tour last fall in Austin, and he and I became such great friends. I was really honored that he was excited about the poem, and he said that I felt like I understood his artwork and “got it”, so that was a really nice. I think my strength as a collaborator is having conversations with other arts and artists, so that’s why I found employing his process so engaging and interesting. Even though we weren’t having a literal conversation at that time, our arts were in conversation and not just in terms of image or subject matter but in terms of process.

EF: Have any of these multimedia projects impacted your teaching?

SSW: I do present these works in my classes, and I do have my students in my workshops write ekphrastic poems. However, I don’t at the moment have the capabilities to mentor students through this process, but I would like to in a perfect world with a lot of funding and time. I use technology in the classroom as much as I can as someone who works in a workshop-based environment. We have to do a lot of one-on-one face time, too. I do use media to teach. I use a lot of audio pieces and video pieces to talk about poems and to teach aspects of poetry as well as let the students hear people perform their work and get it in the mouth and in the body and in the ear. I don’t know if that’s part of my participation in these projects. I think that interest existed before I got involved with them. Maybe these projects are an extension are part of my interest in exploring various media, which is always an aspect of my teaching.

EF: What are you working on at the moment?

SSW: An ekphrastic project that has evolved a lot over the last few years. It’s been percolating for a while. I thought I would be writing about early photography until I saw the Abu Ghraib photographs. Contemplating those, which was really hard, made me start thinking about how we represent and experience images of torture. Also, I was looking through the book Without Sanctuary, which is of images of lynching in America for another class I was going to teach on race and gender and the image. I had experienced those images before but not put it together that I was having the same emotional and physical responses to those images when I was looking at the Abu Ghraib photographs. I think with both of those kinds of photographs, one of the hardest things to deal with is how the images are hailing me as a viewer, not just the acts themselves, which are terrible and gut wrenching. They hail all of as viewers, maybe not in the same way, but for me it calls me out and, because of my race or my nationality, constructs an identity of complicity with torture that I want to but can never absolutely reject.

Screen shot, "Standard Operating Procedure," via salon

So, for example, when I look at the Abu Ghraib photos, I feel among many other emotions, I feel this call of “You did this. You as an American did this.” I feel that the American military under the auspices of protecting people, protecting Americans engaged in these acts, so that by seeing Americans do this, I share an identity as an American, that I am implied and complicit. It’s the same thing with the lynching photographs. One of the commonly fictionalized crimes among black men who were lynched is that they were rapists or somehow a threat to white women’s sexuality, so looking at those photographs I feel that I am somehow… middling by default of how I am socially hailed in the Althusserian sense. It’s not like I condone those acts, but that’s the weird difficult space that I want to explore in my poems. What I’m currently attempting to do is represent these images in formal pairs, have a poem about the Abu Ghraib photos and then a poem about the lynching images on facing pages. By formally pairing poems about these images, I hope they can work in a lot of different ways, work as positive negative, recto verso, and all imply the photographic process itself. Though I wouldn’t call myself a New Formalist, I think as poets, we’re all formalists, some writing in received forms and some not. Otherwise, we’re prose writers.

Screen shot, "The corpse of Clyde Johnson. August 3, 1935. Yreka, California." via Without Sanctuary

On the topic of form, I think there’s an interesting resurgence of received forms, especially in African American poetry. Patricia Smith recently gave a reading at my home institution, and I asked her “What’s up with all of these received forms?” Patricia’s “Motown Crown” is amazing because she’s talking about boogying to Motown in a crown of sonnets—funk meets formal. It’s really smart. Natasha Trethewey, who has also been doing sonnet crowns, said to me that one thing that’s interesting about African American poets using those forms is that they were never meant to use those forms in the first place. So there’s always a kind of transformation of the received form simply in its contemporary use.

EF: I’m so excited to read, hear, and watch your future projects. Thanks so much for the interview.

SSW: You’re welcome.

On representing "the city and its women": An interview with Susan B.A. Somers-Willett (Part I)

ebfrye — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:17:33 +0000

via "Women of Troy," In Verse on vimeo

A few months ago, I happily stumbled upon and blogged about poet, scholar, and UT alum Susan B.A. Somers-Willett’s docu-poetry project “Women of Troy.” Recently, Susan kindly took a break from her busy semester of writing and teaching to have coffee with me. We talked about multimedia poetics, issues of representation, the complications of collaboration, and the role of technology in the poetry classroom. Because the transcript of our interview is rather long, you can read Part I of our conversation below. I'll post the second installment next week. After that you'll also be able to find the interview in its entirety on our "Views" page.

First, a word about the "Women of Troy" project:

In 2009, Somers-Willett teamed up with photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally and radio producer Lu Olkowski to represent the experiences of women living below the poverty line in Troy, New York. The collaboration aired on Public Radio International/WNYC program Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen and BBC Radio, and a print version appeared with Kenneally's photographs in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Among multiple honors, “Women of Troy” received a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media in 2010.

More about Susan:

Susan is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry and a book of criticism. Her first book of poetry, Roam, won the Crab Orchard Review Award series in 2006 and was a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Memorial Award for poetry. Her second book, Quiver, published in 2009 with the University of Georgia Press as part of the VQR Series in Poetry, received the 2010 Writers' League of Texas Book Award. Her book of criticism, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America, was published by University of Michigan Press in 2009 and has been cited by The Globe and Mail and The New York Times. Her writing has been featured by The Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Our talk:

EF: Tell me a little bit about the process of putting together "Women of Troy." How did you come to the project?

SSW: I had a call from Ted Genoways, editor-in-chief of VQR. He had been talking with Lu Olkowski about doing some multimedia pieces in the vein of Kwame Dawes’s work with the Pulitzer Center. Ted was also connected with Brenda Ann Kenneally who hails from the Troy area and has been documenting women in that community for 6 -7 years now. He had known all of us in those various spheres and brought us together. Lu and Ted had been talking about putting together a series of documentary poetry projects with the multimedia elements of radio and photography. “Women of Troy” was the first of those projects.

My introduction to the project and Troy, New York was visual, through Brenda’s photographs, or some of them at least. What I saw in those photographs was stark and shocking and challenging for me as someone who identified as a white, middle class woman, and I knew that was exactly why I needed to do the project because it would and has caused me to think about class in much more conscious ways.

EF: Do you remember which photographs you saw first and which images you found to be most striking?

SSW: I saw a slideshow of Brenda’s work that someone had put together. I remember a photograph of a mother (whom I would later learn was Kayla), father, and baby. The father had a huge knife laying on his belly. I later found out it was a toy knife. I also saw an image of a woman lying on a bed holding a gun. I assumed it was real, but I don’t know. Those weapons really stuck with me the first time I saw Brenda’s work. I felt that there was a threat there.

I saw pictures of children living in only what I could describe as squalor, in these bare, crumbling backgrounds. Their environments seemed so chaotic, but later I found out they were moving all the time. That was my one trepidation when I was thinking about going into this environment, but it was never as dangerous as those photographs necessarily depict.

So, when I think about my first impressions of looking at those photographs, it’s actually kind of funny to me, knowing what I know now about Troy. In a lot of ways, these women are just like you or me, loving their families fiercely and trying to get by with what they have, and often I identified with them more than I felt an economic or social divide. At other times, the economic divide was very sharp, but the social divide still felt distant and I never felt threatened. I think my experience of that environment and the very specific vision that Brenda is promoting or trying to get across in her photographs is different. She sees herself as someone who got out of that community. She has a different perspective on how she wants those women to be represented. She wants them to get out and educate themselves and still be tough and mean and still have their street cred. but not be trapped in that cycle of poverty and gossip and all of the she said/she said that’s there. My main goal was to observe, and to do my best not to paternalize or exploit. It’s not that Brenda’s and my goals are mutually exclusive; I just think we had different processes and agendas.

Photograph, Brenda Ann Keneally, from Upstate Girls

What was your writing process like? How did it dovetail with Brenda Ann Kenneally’s process?

SSW: Brenda was shooting the entire time that we were there. I was there for a week in May and then I left for a month and wrote 24/7. Then went back in early June for another ten days and then wrote for another month. My time in Troy wasn’t like sitting down have and having coffee over an interview. It was real fieldwork. We were staying up until 3:00 in the morning at times. I was staying up with Billie Jean partying with her friends and then getting up to ride with D.J. to drop her kids off at school at 7:00 a.m. The schedule was grueling and I got really sick at the end.

When I was in Troy, I was with Brenda who was already accepted as a member of that community. She hails from that area. She talks like the gals in Troy and has their swagger. So who knows what I would have experienced if we hadn’t worked as a team, but I feel that Brenda gave us the credentials to be in that community and for those subjects to accept us. I feel that we would not have been as able to get as deep and entangled in their lives if it had not been for her inviting us in, and I am very grateful for that.

EF: For how many of the photographs were you present? How did that change your writing process?

SSW: I don’t know if I can give you a number because there were so many different productions. I think the majority of photographs were taken before.

One of the things that I learned in my time there watching Brenda photograph is that she directs her subjects not to smile. I remember being very vividly being in a house documenting a teenage girl and Brenda kept saying, “No smiles! No smiles!” It was like seeing the man behind the curtain, or the woman behind the curtain in this case, in the production of that image because it underscored the constructed-ness of documentary images, but I think she does it in a very powerful way that has no equal. She says what she wants to say with those images.

EF: Were you involved in the editing process? Did you know what photographs would be paired with your poems? In what order?

SSW: I was not involved in the editing at all, and it’s probably a good thing. That was Lu’s doing, and she hired filmmaker Jeremiah Zagar to edit it together. The input that I did have—I had written “Women of Troy,” and I had seen a show Brenda had done at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, a non-profit, in an old converted church in Troy. They fund and sponsor community projects, and their building is right across the street from the main house where all of the gossip and stuff goes on, where Kayla lives with her family, where everybody goes and talks, gathers. That stoop is always crowded. Roseanne, Billie Jean’s mother, lived in the unfinished basement of that house at the time. But, the Sanctuary supports Brenda’s work quite a bit. They had a show called Upstate Girls, which is Brenda’s continuing project, a show of all of her photographs, D.J.’s photographs, Dana’s photographs. They were able to open it up to the community, and the women could write on the wall around the photographs and have a conversation with those images.

I had seen that show and there were a few key specific photographs that I reference in the poems. The last image of “Women of Troy” is of this young girl holding a sparkler. I knew that would go well with the last stanza of the poem, “You are the city and its women/ wailing darkly and bright to bless/ your city as it burns, this city/made of your light.” So, although I gave one or two suggestions about what images might correspond to the poem, most of the images spring from their own contexts rather than being literal referents.

In another poem, “A Call to Arms,” the very last image in that poem stems from a photograph of Billie Jean. The last few lines are about a women going down the block to take the beating someone says she deserves and the photograph is Billie Jean receiving a pocketknife from a friend of hers as she is preparing to go down the block and take the beating. That was one of the few literal referents I included.

Screen shot, Brenda Ann Kenneally's website for “Upstate Girls”

EF: How were issues of representation involved for you as a poet and as a collaborator?

SSW: I don’t really know how these women would choose to represent themselves [visually]. The dialogic aspect of this project really attracted me because I knew that through the radio and the audio aspect that we would be able to hear their voices.

I discovered that there’s a thin line on appropriating voices, and the line always seems to be moving. I kept asking myself, “What’s the right way to represent the women? Should I be representing them at all?” At AWP, Erika Meitner was talking about trying to avoid “ruin porn” in writing about photographs of Detroit. The bottom line is you don’t want to fetishize the aspect of of a subject’s experience simply because it’s edgy or shocking for a particular readership, even though that response is probably inevitable for some folks.

Lu and I got to know these women as women and as friends, and we got to know their families. Nothing’s ever easy in the field of documentary studies, but that was an aspect that attracted me to the project. I knew that through the audio tracks that we would hear their voices, too. I knew that it wouldn’t just be me speaking or representing their voices, and I hoped that it would turn into a conversation.

Something that I found was really interesting was that some audiences had heard only the radio pieces, which had some interviews with the women introducing the poems that I had read and an interview the Brenda. The poems were intercut with interview and audio, so it was an interesting use of multimedia. Of the women that we had profiled, all identified as white, but there were a number of people who assumed that they were black because of their idioms and accents. One of my colleagues asked, “How does it feel as a white person documenting black women?”—a question that’s very valid, but that also revealed that my colleage had made some assumptions linking class, race, and language in very specific ways. We had a great discussion about it, actually.

The appropriation of voice is something that I am very conscious of in writing these pieces. I felt like I had to be very conscious of staying true to what Dana, Billie Jean, and D.J. would say and be sensitive about how they might want to be represented. The feedback that we’ve gotten from them is pretty much “Yeah, that’s about right.” I’m hoping that we did a good, sensitive job, but it’s something that we all worry about. When you’re doing something with people who are in a relatively less empowered position than you are, you have to think about those questions or you’re not doing your job.

I think that we were women profiling with women in a community where there is a profound absence of men (because the men were in prison or had just skidaddled) was important to the project. Now, that’s not to say that I think a male could not engage with this work but that it would be somewhat different.

EF: So does the poet have an obligation to the subject? How is this similar or different from the photographer’s?

SSW: Of course, but the kind of obligationdepends on the poet and the photographer. One of the things that we discovered through this project—this project was really hard to do because so many different moving parts—we discovered we had different creative projects and ways to get work done. Personally, I learned a lot about audio production. I learned a lot about Brenda’s visual and technical processes and different approaches that have to do with the kinds of artists that we are. I needed more reflection and time to observe in a silent manner. I knew that I needed more time than I had to hole up and write. Lu’s process is about seducing you to say the right thing to get the radio piece to work in a coherent way. It’s about being around people, and talking, talking, talking, pulling it out of the interviewee. Brenda--her process is different. She crosses more lines than most documenters would cross by giving somebody five dollars for gas or a ride here and there because she’s a member of that community, because she’s an insider and that determines how anyone would approach it. And I think that’s OK too. The question of insider/outsider may be the more important question about how to approach the documentary work than whether you are a poet or photographer.

EF: So how is it different for the insider versus the outsider?

SSW: I’m thinking of Brenda getting embroiled in all the drama, their fistfights and all of their mama drama. There’s a lot of baby mama drama, or, as Billie Jean would say, “baby mother and baby father drama.” She’s very proper about that, which ended up being part of my poem. Billie Jean called it that, so that’s why it’s in there.

I’m thinking about [the insider/outsider question] in contrast to Brenda’s photographs, which are very stark and tell a specific message. I wanted to complement that vision, but I wanted to represent moments where these women did feel empowered. My goal is not to contradict but to enrich and complicate the singular vision of the photograph. I think the piece of Billy Jean at the Flag Day parade, the “Just a Girl” poem, is a step in that direction. There was one night we piled into D.J.’s minivan and went to Schenectady, NY and they got all dressed up in their tight pants and g-strings. We had a good time. We had a girl’s night out. Brenda photographed that, and it made it into the poem, photos of that evening when we went out to the club. There’s a picture of D.J. dancing, and my back’s to the camera.

Screen shot, Brenda Ann Kenneally's website for “Upstate Girls”

EF: Do you consider these pieces to be ekphrastic? You’ve made ekphrasis part of your work elsewhere. How does this process compare with other ekphrastics you’ve done, ex. for the Landmarks program and the Blanton Museum's Poetry Project?

SSW: I’ve automatically assumed that they are but not in the traditional way, as in, “Here’s a piece of visual art. I’m going to represent it in my poem.” It’s a different kind of take because we were working collaboratively and we were creating our respective works of art at the same time. So, some of it is ekphrastic. Some of it, yes, in the more traditional sense. For instance, there were three or four images, that I had already seen. Some of them ended up in the poem or references to them. Lu tends to represent this approach as a new way of storytelling, but it’s a new take on ekphrasis, too. The visual art pre-exists the poems, but some of them are being created at the same time. Some of the photos are taken afterwards. I think the possibility to call it ekphrasis is definitely there but not wholly in the traditional sense. I am interested in pushing the envelope in what the process of ekphrasis means.

Plato talks about ekphrasis as involving one representation in art and then a second ideal representation of that representation in literature, and then a third ideal representation, ad infinitum--basically an infinite regress of mirrors. But here we’re asking, “What happens when those representations are parallel, when they are being created in parallel forms in parallel time? What prism of ekphrastic perspective can emerge through collaboration? And can it be more than merely mimetic?”

One of the ways that I want to complicate and trouble ekphrasis is to add reflection on process—on creation as well as representation. Thinking about that parallelism between poetry and photograph rather than having a linear distance between them helps to do that. “Women of Troy” is as much about photography and representation as it is about these particular women. The last few lines, “You are the city and its women/wailing darkly and bright to bless/your city as it burns, this city/made of your light” is of course Troy burning--but it is also the city being populated by Brenda’s photographs, the light and dark of her film and its reproduction.

The way that poem is organized—it’s a litany. It’s image after image. Not all of the lines correspond one to one to a photograph, but it’s like being in a gallery of photographs. I wanted the effect of walking through a gallery and to emphasize the way the city speaks to a viewer through this collection of images.

And that’s what I think poetry and photography share, the language of image, and that’s why there’s such a venerable tradition of the two working together. At the same time, there are a lot of unexplored avenues in working in those two artistic genres. With ekphrasis, I feel like I’ve stumbled upon the great metaphor that will inform most of my writing. I could write a lifetime of work about image and representation.

Screen shot, "Women of Troy" via vimeo

EF: Aside from ekphrasis, these pieces seem to touch the borders of other forms. I’m thinking elegy, ode. They also form a sort of archive.

SSW: We definitely took it as a documentary project and certainly what Brenda is doing is archiving these women’s lives. A big goal of her Upstate Girls project is to basically follow these women and their daughters through growing up as children and then becoming mothers themselves. She wants to see one generational turn, and she’s not that far away from it, actually.

EF: You’ve probably noticed that many of my questions deal with characterizing the form of this piece. I find that the complicated form pays tribute to the lives of these women, in a way. Did you find that, in order to pay full tribute to these women’s experiences, it was necessary to use multiple forms?

SSW: I don’t think it’s necessary. I think you can pay tribute in whatever genre, whatever artistic mode. However, I think the fact that we did undertake a multifaceted, complex mode that reached many artistic modes and genres, we made it a better documentary project because you could have a conversation of women on the radio that you couldn’t have anywhere else. You could have my poem and Billie Jean talking right back to each other. I could add a counter-anchor to Brenda’s photos to show empowerment as well as moments of strife and struggle.

I don’t think my poems would be as strong as they are if they were not running alongside the work of my collaborators, Lu and Brenda. Can you pay tribute in single genres? Of course, and they do. But, they speak so much more powerfully in concert.

EF: I know you’re also interested in orality, aurality, and the role of the performance. Do you view these videos or photograph/ video combos as a kind of performance?

SSW: Oh lordy! Well, let me tell you a story. I was living in Austin the summer I was writing these poems, and so Lu arranged for me to go to the KUT studio on the UT campus to record my poems. We spent a four-hour, marathon session recording four or five poems that she would then edit down. I have a background in doing performance poetry on slam stages, so I got ready for it. I rehearsed and practiced reading the poems aloud and got it so that they would sound good on the radio. Then I got into the studio, and Lu had hired an audio editor, Emily Botein, to help her with the project. She and Emily were on the phone, and I would say three lines, and then they would say, “Make this sound less like poetry. You’re reading this too much like a poet.” It was so frustrating! But, in a good way. We had this marathon session, trying to get me to sound less like a poet. It was pretty hilarious, and it was frustrating at the time, but looking back on it, it was really funny. It was because they were approaching it from a very expert position of being producers creating a radio narrative that worked from start to finish. I didn’t know at the time that Lu was thinking of inter-splicing women’s interviews with my own voice. It had to be a very specific delivery. I think they were trying to erase my voice of any affect, which is hard for a poet, even someone as down-to-earth as me. When you have a certain line break or slant rhyme, you have an unconscious desire as a poet to highlight it, I guess.

When Lu put together the multimedia piece, I had already recorded “Women of Troy.” She tried and tried to make my audio work, but something wasn’t clicking. So Lu asked Brenda--who hails from that area and sounds like those women--to read and record the poem. When you hear the piece, it’s Brenda’s voice you hear, and I think it works. I didn’t quite know how to feel about it at first. I felt a little bit of ownership of the piece, but once I played it and sat with it, I realized it was the right choice. I think poets and really all of us have an attachment—maybe it’s the cult of the author era that we are in—to the idea that the author has some ultimate authority over the work. You think you know what it’s supposed to sound like or mean, and this was an instance where that boundary was crossed and challenged for the better.

I learned that—surprise!--someone else can do a better job than me with my own work. The collaboration opened me up to more possibilities for how the poem can sound--the way I think about it may not be the best way. It was a very, very good lesson to learn.

Lesson Plan - Teaching Poetry with Image Databases

ebfrye — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 11:00:19 +0000

Image credit: My video "reading" of Donald Revell's "Election Year"

Last semester I began to experiment with various programs, particularly iMovie, as I think about how I'd make digital technology part of a course that focuses on poetry. In a brief post, I included a model iMovie file, and speculated as to how such an exercise might be used. Today, as we wrap up National Poetry Month, I'm posting a lesson plan that articulates the possibilities for this exercise more directly.

Goals:

Interpretation of content, historical analysis, visual literacy, public performance, class editions, citation, fair use

Overview of Assignment:

Each week one or two students create a digital “reading” of a poem using images. Students use image databases, such as the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs collection, to pair relevant images with a poem of their choosing. They then record themselves reading the poem and arrange the images in an order of their choosing using a program such as iMovie. On their assigned day, students present their “readings” to the class, and the class is asked to respond. Students are also required to submit a process essay with their pieces that explains the rationale for their poem and image selection and how they are using images to “interpret” the piece. The essay should include a bibliography. The videos will be posted to a class blog or a class YouTube account. The exercise can be used to supplement or reinvigorate the recitation/ public performance exercises that are traditionally part of poetry pedagogy. Posting the videos in a common digital space create a class archive or collection of work, which could lead to further discussions about selection criteria and canonization.

The assignment may be repeated more than once during the semester to suit various ends:

-contextualize the poem historically using images appropriate to the poem’s time period

-interpret the poem’s content (may involve historically relevant but unaffiliated images)

-supplement their own pieces (in a workshop if the instructor assigns any creative writing assignments) with digitally available images or images they produce themselves

The assignment could also be done with an excerpt from a prose piece instead of a poem.

Assignment Length:

Semester-long project with each student contributing 2 videos and 2 process essays (4-5 pages and bibliography)

Materials:

iMovie, YouTube, image databases (Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs collection, New York Public Library Digital Archives, Library of Congress’s American Memory, etc.), class blog (optional)

Preparation Guidance:

Students should be introduced to and spend some time browsing image databases during class. They should also receive instruction for how to use iMovie and have some time to practice. It will also be helpful for them to have a model video, and you will need to set up a class YouTube account as a way to post their videos online. You may then choose to link those videos to a class blog. The videos should work in tandem with class discussions. These may emphasize the interaction of written and visual texts, historicist reading methods, the role of performance, and the impact of digital technology on literary production and presentation.

Dead Malls, Dead Stores - Toward a New American Gothic

ebfrye — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:32:36 +0000

Screenshot, "Pep Boys, 2009," Dark Stores, Brian Ulrich

Brian Ulrich's work focuses on the range of our experience with scenes of consumer culture. In one series, aptly titled Retail, Ulrich documents the familiar settings of bustling grocery stores, well-lit mega-chains including Target, and crowded malls. That series is populated with all types of American consumers. However, in a study in contrast, Ulrich has put together a series of photographs of deserted malls, vacant storefronts, and boarded-up restaurants entitled Dark Stores.

Screenshot, "Rolling Acres Mall, 2008," Dark Stores, Brian Ulrich

Recently, I was introduced to the term "ruin porn." To fill you guys in, in case you aren't familiar, I'll draw on a succinct assessment from from Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish blog for the Atlantic. He cites two helpful definitions, one from John Patrick Leary, who has a lot to say about the visual culture surrounding Detroit: "So much ruin photography and ruin film aestheticizes poverty without inquiring of its origins, dramatizes spaces but never seeks out the people that inhabit and transform them, and romanticizes isolated acts of resistance without acknowledging the massive political and social forces aligned against the real transformation, and not just stubborn survival, of the city."

Screenshot, "Toys R Us 2009," Dark Stores, Brian Ulrich

Sullivan adds to that Rob Horning's comments: "Ruin photos speak to our desperate desire to have our world re-enchanted. We want the banal structures and scenes of our everyday life dignified by the patina of decay, so that we can imagine ourselves as noble, mythic Greeks and Romans to a later age and, more important, so that we can better tolerate the frequently shoddy and trite material culture that consumerism foists on us, see it once again as capable of mystery. [...]We become larger than this life, than these dentist’s offices and deserted boardrooms [...] We will survive it all, we will outlast the mediocrity that made us."

Screenshot, "Klingman's Furniture, 2008" Dark Stores, Brian Ulrich

With those definition of "ruin photos" in mind, I wonder if we can apply the concept to these vacant mall-scapes. Although they aren't arguably "ruined," to use the word traditionally, they are still stripped of their original purpose. Because they are no longer shiny and contemporary, as shopping centers are often expected to be, there is the sense that in their failure to attract and contain consumers, they are indeed "ruined." How do we then, as Horning says, see these storefronts and empty escalators as "capable of mystery"? Yes, it's difficult to classify the romance here, though there is a romance and especially sense of the gothic. The eeriness is different, more evocative of Dawn of the Dead than anything else, though there are no zombies knocking out the windows and, for the most part, no bodies here. What's haunting is the absence of bodies and, oddly, the absence of extreme decay.

TOMS' "One Day Without Shoes" - Awareness, Activism, Advertising?

ebfrye — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 02:45:18 +0000

"One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS via Youtube

Today TOMS shoes conducted its second annual One Day Without Shoes campaign in which anyone (wherever in the privileged world) was encouraged to go without sandals, boots, sneakers, etc. The intention behind the event is to "raise awareness" for what it's like for the millions in less developed countries who daily go without adequate protection for their feet and, as a result, are at risk for serious infections. At the risk of sounding like a cynical jerk, I'm going to raise some questions about how the campaign attracts an audience through compelling visual tools and ultimately how it benefits those for whom it claims to be raising awareness.

From what I've observed by looking at the TOMS website and performing minimal internet searching, the campaign appears to be quite popular with high school and college kids, many of whom, it can be assumed, already wear TOMS shoes. Like other activist branding campaigns, this one predictably makes use of respectable celebrities. A screenshot from the video above shows that Demi Moore was into taking off her shoes:

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS via Youtube

So was Kristen Bell:

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS via Youtube

In addition, the campaign maintains a viable internet presence by encouraging its participants to post videos and photos. Students have been tweeting about the response they've received from administrators and passerby. Curiously, the Twitter feed resembles a composition notebook, perhaps emphasizing that it's acceptable to be distracted from class for such a good cause.

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS website

Similarly, the information that the site provides about its purposes are limited but they use a visual rhetoric that recalls the educational system but emphasizes that this is an alternative to the usual schooling. Also on the website, above some photographs of children playing without shoes (happily, which is odd given TOMS' message), is this blackboard-style equation:

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS website

Is this an education in activism? If so, it's also an education in consumerism. Before the big day, would-be participants were edged toward and rewarded for their participation by such videos as this one that feature fashion bloggers, editors of mainstream magazines, and doe-eyed, hipster dream-girls who give advice on "how to get your toes ready" for the big day. See screenshot and accompanying video below:

Screenshot, "Get Your Toes Ready," TOMS via YouTube

"Get Your Toes Ready," TOMS via YouTube

The video demonstrates the pull of the campaign on other corporations and media entities. In addition to the fashion elite, videos and images of employees at AOL, Google, and Microsoft can be found on the TOMS website. Yet, obviously, the brand that benefits most is TOMS. Now, I certainly don't begrudge anyone a pair of shoes, and, full disclosure, I've owned and worn bare a pair of TOMS myself. But I am struck by how by becoming compelled to buy more TOMS shoes, the "students" are also able to participate in an event that expands the experience of a brand beyond what they usually encounter. TOMS has one-upped the Gap's RED campaign by creating an extended moment of bonding with one's peer group.

Screenshot, "One Day Without Shoes 2011," TOMS website

Because the rhetoric of the campaign provides little information for what its participants should do after they become and make others "aware," I'm inclined to say that participants are not encouraged toward a specific kind of activism but a more definitive aesthetic. Alternative education, attractive celebrities, the relief of comfortable, canvas sneakers after a long walk. This is California dreaming at its best...

"She lived happily on this earth for seven years": Ai Weiwei's Subversive Homages

ebfrye — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 11:00:46 +0000

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

After last week's posts examining representations of the aftermath of the events in Japan, I was especially taken by moving and controversial images from last night's Frontline piece tonight on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake that devastated the Sichuan province.

Ai has come under intense scrutiny for speaking out against the Chinese government in recent years, and a studio that took him two years to build was torn down in January. The Frontline documentary by filmmaker Alison Klayman highlights many of his subversive actions and the ways in which he uses new media, particularly Twitter, to reach a broader audience and challenge the boundaries of censorship. Ai has advocated democracy in China and supported 2010 Nobel Prize recepient Liu Xiaobo (New York Times). Liu appears in the piece.

Image credit: Screenshot, pbs.org

Weiwei was particularly critical of the government refusal to take responsibility for what many viewed as flimsy construction of government housing and school buildings in the Sichuan province. After visiting the area and documenting its appearance, Ai was quite stunned by an image of children's backpacks (below):

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

In addition to surveying local survivors to document the number of deceased children and releasing those figures online, Ai a piece that functions as both an homage to the deceased children. The enormous installation covers a significant part of the exterior of the Haus der Kunst in Munich. The backpacks spell out a statement made to Ai by a mother of one of the victims--"She lived happily on this earth for seven years."

Image credit: Screenshot, "Who's Afraid of Ai Weiwei?" Frontline

I don't have an extended analysis to offer for any of these images, but I am struck by the potential of documentary image (and Ai's extensive record-keeping) both as a communicator of pathos and as essential to artistic process. Also worth noting is the ability of the everyday object, particularly in our commodity-driven cultures, to communicate when multiplied and poised in a certain context. Ai is often called the Chinese Andy Warhol, but his multiplication of a mass-produced item, here a backpack, still insists on a human attachment to the mechanically made. Rather than stop at criticizing mass production or inscribing it glamorous irony, Ai Weiwei insists on its dual ability to invoke destruction on a grand scale and evoke, without fully representing, the particular.

Our Friend the Atom?

ebfrye — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 13:35:17 +0000