#Lindsay Illich

[violettesiren]

I don't know if this is old or new

grief but maybe it grows

by accumulation so old or new

it is the same drift, each

flake falling an addendum

and there goes the porch, the felled

tree stump, window— sill then fenceline

it's all the same snow old or new the snow

into which the heart sinks

Snow by Lindsay Illich

[rabbit-light]

Aubade

O morning earthsmell like small bent basil, a child blinking open

wet with thanksgiving a sky we lay under talking over

birdchatter we spoke the bee tumble gradually an understanding our

lungs became pockets handing out the days

saying here take it just take it in your hand who knew you would

be so good at ax throwing what aim I love the arc of arm

the fog of morning with my teeth on your ear, the morning come

through the windows like children awake now It's Christmas

all the lights your hand couldn't we be opening each other

Lindsay Illich

[largethingslargerthings]

Meditative Weekend of Poetry: Lindsay Illich

Tonight, I’m the loneliest I’ve ever been. It’s been a week since our conversation (if you can call it that) about snow. How it must be cleared quickly no matter how we feel about going out. Today, I saw myself in screens, reflected in their dark glass. Spectral, like an idea when really I wanted to be bloody. They told me to write you without emotion. They said, tell him explicitly what you need. What came out: Concentrate all your energy at the rims of our openings. Paragraphs, like marriages, begin in certainty and end in spectacle: Part metal, part bird. I open and close your mouth like my hand was inside you. Tuesday I gave you the letter. I hear our daughter waking up. She calls out for me, and I get her. In the morning, the light went through the house, lit every surface, like the house was an ear tilted toward the dawn, like it was trying hard to listen.

(”Spectrum”, Foundry #10)

(Suggestions:  I find this poem in conversation with Lisa Hammond’s poem from earlier.  Hammond’s poem was an ambiguous poem about the joy of a relationship that admits its possible failure at the beginning.  Marriage is not so much the end as it is the beginning of a dialogue that may end in tragedy. At the end of relationships, the self develops a dissonant fissure within it as both parties attempt to untangle the self from a body that has combined the both of them: “Today,/I saw myself in screens, reflected in their/dark glass. Spectral, like an idea/when really I wanted to be bloody.”  In Illich’s poem the self is unable to tell which is the true one: is the reflection real and the one perceiving it the specter or vice-versa.  Later, the narrator clarifies that marriages “end in spectacle”.  The entire affair can’t be separated from the circus of perception.  Appearance becomes convulsive, riddled with funhouse mirrors and no escape.  For a while, the world becomes the body as the new reality as dealt with.  In the final lines Illich demonstrates this: “the light went through the house, lit every/surface, like the house was an ear//tilted toward the dawn, like it/was trying hard to listen.”  The world is made into the emotional organ of the body and there is no way out of the chaos for the narrator.  Only perhaps, as Robert Frost noted, to move through it.)

[m5xw3ll]

Queer Discomfort: Desire and Heteronormativity in Richard Siken's Crush

“Richard Siken, a social worker, painter, and poet, born and living in the United States, published his first collection of poetry titled Crush in 2005 after winning the 2004 Yale Younger Poets prize. The collection is described as “a book about panic” (vii) in the very first sentence of its foreword, written by Louise Glück, who elaborates: “the poems are driven by what they deny; their ferocity attests to the depth of their terror, their resourcefulness to the intractability of the enemy’s presence” (viii). In this way Glück, like many reviewers, points to the internal sense of conflict that seems to emanate from Siken’s work. To identify this sense of conflict or panic and simply put it forward as the main characteristic of this book would, however, be a superficial analysis, as Siken himself points out when he says: “All art has conflict. Explanation is easy and the truth is boring. What are you really asking?” (quoted in Mishler 2014). The question here needs to go beyond the mere notion of conflict if one aims to examine the ambiguous representation of panic in Crush. Lindsay P. Illich (2006), for example, takes Glück’s claim a step further: ‘I would disagree. This book is about a species of desire that drives you to panic.’ ”

By Tine Kempenaers

Species of Desire Drive to Panic

[nimrodjournal]

Tell us a little about your work in Let Us Gather: Diversity and the Arts: what inspired it, how you came to write it, etc.

“The Woman Who Rode Through a Tornado in a Bathtub and Survived” was inspired by reports last year that a woman in Texas did just that. I grew up in Texas and suffered nightmares about tornadoes and once was stranded on a roadside near Caldwell, Texas, as a tornado passed, so the story struck a chord. But the image of the white bathtub also reminded me of a sheet of paper, how it must have been like a magic carpet flying through the sky, how writing is the perspective of power but feels sometimes powerless, a desire both compelling and prone to fearfulness. Like me, the woman is reckoning with seeing herself from such a great height, coming to terms with the truth of it when she lands in someone’s (Marianne Moore’s?) garden.

READ MORE

[cacchieressa]

Anatomy Lessons by Lindsay Illich

That you thought china bones existed only in the bodies of dolls— that's one. Ligature for elegy.

The body of you and this body. The body of you and other bodies. The body of you making bodies

of all bodies. A leg crooked over your hip. Tonight, clavicle. Tonight, sweet tendon. Tonight

the chuffing away degrees of separation. That you thought a body permeable, soluble

as salt, that this body could matter after that body didn't— that's two. We are sealed.

Hermetic as walnuts. A cast of bodies lying in dust along the smooth edge

of a headboard, along the winter curve of wrist. That you thought your body

godlike, plunging your hands in its dust and making of it another body—that's three.

[harsh-repose]

“Anatomy Lessons” by Lindsay Illich, read by James Marsters.

[uni-tierra-califas]

[Unitierracalifas] UT Califas Democracy Ateneo, 10-28-17, 2.00-5.00 p.m

Compañerxs: We will convene the Democracy Ateneo this coming Saturday, October 28, 2017 in San Jose at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) from 2.00-5.00 p.m. to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below. In addition, we are including a calavera literaria at the end of the announcement in anticipation of Día de los Muertos. 

Devastating and unprecedented "environmental events," mass-shootings and the epidemic of gun violence, and the acrimonious controversy over flags, statues, and memorials that occupy public squares, government buildings, and parks, at first glance, seem unrelated. To be sure, for some taken together these are unquestionable signs of the apocalypse, but for most, while these events provoke concern they occur unmoored from any cohesive analysis. Certainly, mainstream media, that is the pundits and the commentators that pose as informed critique, and the timid academics who punctuate sensationalist soundbites, recycled in social media platforms for easy consumption, make it almost impossible to fully analyze what is at stake in the immediate crisis, whether it be an environmental, economic, or social disaster. Media heads and academics ask us to compartmentalize "the issue," partly out of cynical disregard for "the mainstream," partly as a result of their own professional myopia as "experts," and partly as a result of collusion to mask how it really works.

The tragic mass shooting in Las Vegas, in one recent example, reflects a seemingly intractable moment of antagonism. In the immediate sense, it is yet another critical moment to talk about "gun control," that is, reducing or eliminating guns all together. Still others worry about the success or failure of guarding against the perceived threat around terrorism. Similarly, the several hurricanes, earthquakes, and fires from Oaxaca's Isthmus, through central Mexico up to Houston, northern California, and back through the Caribbean, including the on-going devastation so notable in Puerto Rico, for supposed "experts" are either evidence for or against climate change, depending on what end of the debate each claims. The violence sparked over memorials, statues, and flags, especially those commemorating the Confederacy in an effort to reclaim white supremacy unfolds in the same moment. Professional commentators want to establish poles or a continuum of tolerance and good sense, making the issue about free speech —that is how much of it should we endure and when does too much of a good thing become intolerable. And as the old confederate statues come down, new confederate memorials are already being erected, on private land prominently visible via public access. The antagonism is as material as stone, marble, brass. 

Framed in the most obvious way, each catastrophe appears disconnected, enabling people to worry about the crisis for a brief moment and then allowing them to move on, getting back to managing their complicated lives in what Winona LaDuke calls our "over-consumptive inefficient energy economy." (see, W. LaDuke, "Winona LaDuke media interview at PowerShift Canada 2012".) But then, how should each misfortune be understood? What ties them all together? Why should we worry that they are connected?

Underlying all of these events is what Ivan Illich named as the "technological imperative." A total faith in technology assumes we can create a newer, more advanced device to assuage or advance our acquisitive, consumptive lifestyle. Of course, it is an arrogance that is raced. The technological imperative according to Illich is a set of practices, habits, statements, and concepts that emerge alongside the rise of capitalism, or what he called the industrial mode of production. It is marked by a shift in faith from a deity or higher power to a relentless belief that technology and technological innovation is our true savior. Ultimately, technological devotion and all that it promises means being hooked on more and more "high-intensity dependence commodities." (see, I. Illich, "Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies," p.42) This misdirected faith in the power of things over time can, warned Illich, have devastating consequences. In addition to seducing us to believe we need more guns, or bigger houses where they shouldn't be (e.g. floodplains, wilderness-urban contact zones), it diverts our attention away from solutions derived from knowledge and wisdom that are already at hand, that is practical solutions that we already know and that are lived in the vernacular, i.e. situated knowledges, grassroots practices, and locally-rooted wisdoms that were once an integral part of our balanced lives. A recognition of this over-wrought imperative can orient us away from teleological thinking and open space for collective reflection on the tools at hand as well as those we have yet to collectively invent.

A closer look at the tragedy in Las Vegas reveals much. The music concert was in every way prepared for a "terrorist" attack. There were high levels of security that have become common-place for public gatherings especially large ones. Our festivals look like airports, our social spaces resemble border zones. In this instance, a lone gunman planned and executed a deadly attack despite all efforts to prevent it that included special militarized training, equipment, and procedures to stop exactly that eventuality. Similarly, the police, both highly trained forces with extra military grade equipment and law enforcement's rank and file, were on scene organized through an interagency network of "first responders," who required over an hour to reach the 32nd floor. Approximately seventy-five minutes passed before law enforcement entered the room where the gunman lay having already taken his own life. He shot at the crowd for no more than ten minutes. (see, J. Lindsay-Poland, "Las Vegas, SWAT Teams, and the Cult of the Gun") More training, more guns, more equipment, and a more complex bureaucracy driven toward greater surveillance and security could neither prevent nor interrupt the worst gun massacre in U.S. history. More to the point, it was people on the ground that came to each other's rescue, protecting one another from the hail of bullets and caring for those who were wounded. The stories of self organization to address immediate needs are abundant and inspiring. They are not about security, but about a fierce care, a commitment to risk everything to fulfill a shared investment in safety.

The technological imperative, not surprisingly in a settler colonial society, is raced. The gunman, Stephen Paddock, posed a problem for mainstream media commentators. They could not understand why a seemingly "normal guy," that is normal read as "white," could be dangerous. Yet, it is the normal "white guy" who has been the self-appointed doyen of the technological imperative. It is most obvious when the technology has been at the service of the dominant group as in the case of all the U.S.'s technological might being used to combat hurricanes and fires on the mainland, while its territories (and peripheries within the mainland) are abandoned. Or, how the U.S. arrogates to itself the role of the world's most technologically advanced, well-equipped police force aiming its "security" at an ever expanding arena of non-white nations. Such technological innovation has its roots in a variety of technologies such as the legislation, or several black codes, from the nation's earliest beginnings that codified slavery and racial subordination, establishing a legal apparatus to insure the subordination of one group over another in the most advanced and innovative democracy in the world. Disproportionate aid, asymmetrical violence, and differential citizenship are simultaneously the product of, and the ongoing raison d'etre of the technological imperative as it traverses settler colonial society like a missile. Surely there is a new device on the horizon that will make our society more secure, more egalitarian, more just...

But, despite all of the technology generated in service of U.S. settler colonialism people find a way to rebuild and repair, to re-connect and reclaim without the cumbersome bureaucracy and technologically advanced apparatus that the U.S. wields at home and abroad to maintain a destructive lifestyle for itself. In Oaxaca's Isthmus communities refuse the aid delivered by corporations in favor of solidarity at the grassroots. Mexico City, once again impacted by a severe earthquake, astonishes the world as a community fearless in caring for each other, self organized to save lives, rebuild infrastructure, and reclaim community despite the interference of the government. Beyond the concerted forces of capital and the state aimed at "destroying the relationships between those below," people in Mexico City refused to cede survival strategies  and solutions to the military agencies and gear that arrived to respond to the terramoto. (see, R. Zibechi, "What I learned from the Mexican people.") A salient image emerges of communities standing amidst rubble with signs that read Silencio, a convivial tool generated with ink and cardboard, to encourage listening, a listening for each other that would save lives. Beyond the clamor of so many industrial tools, what can we hear in the silence?

Ultimately, repair and maintenance is often understood in relation to commodity without fully calling into question the underlying basis for commodity society, that is how commodities operate within a capitalist system. Consequently, it is necessary to recall that the social relation organized around the thing must be interrogated. The point is not to simply fix the broken item, finding new ways to repair ever more complex things and to assume new social formations will emerge through the fix. Rather, the challenge is to interrogate our relation to the industrial mode of production —that is our dependence to the thing in the first place. -- Calavera de piñata La Muerte satisfecha andaba sin rencor Pues el mundo ya padecía de mucho temor Tanta gente maltratada y un dolor tenaz La Huesuda se presentaba de paseo nomás Ese día de otoño nuestra gente obrera Manifestaba en las calles, una raza entera Gente color de Tierra, de todos los colores Exigía justicia, honor ¡basta con dolores! El torpe cabezudo en su casa chabacana Visto su arrogancia tan inmensa y tirana Salió pensando que gritaban su nombre“¡Sí, mi gente, ahí voy, su gran, gran hombre!” Pero pronto se dio cuenta a él no adoraba La gente unida, contra el racismo clamaba El peludo trató de esconderse en el camino Pero se sintió bien perdido en el barrio latino Además de la gente al señor le dio miedo De la Calaca que vio, la verdad sólo un dedo Columbró una tienda que vendía piñatas “Me escondo aquí entre héroes y piratas” Pero la Muerte percibió al imbécil inepto “¡Ya te pesqué, cáscara hueca sin respeto! Una fiesta alegre le daré a mi pueblo digno ¡Qué gozo trompearle a este ser maligno!” R. M. Gámez 25 de octubre de 2017

South Bay and North Bay Crew

[keithgaboury]

heteroglossia: [poems] by Lindsay Illich

David Miller is a friend and Boston-area poet who wrote this wonderful review of a poetry collection by Lindsay Illich. Check it out. from Facebook http://ift.tt/2m94M0m via IFTTT

[poem-locker]

Lindsay Illich, "Anatomy Lessons"

That you thought china bones existed only in the bodies of dolls— that's one. Ligature for elegy. The body of you and this body. The body of you and other bodies. The body of you making bodies of all bodies. A leg crooked over your hip. Tonight, clavicle. Tonight, sweet tendon. Tonight the chuffing away degrees of separation. That you thought a body permeable, soluble as salt, that this body could matter after that body didn't— that's two. We are sealed. Hermetic as walnuts. A cast of bodies lying in dust along the smooth edge of a headboard, along the winter curve of wrist. That you thought your body godlike, plunging your hands in its dust and making of it another body—that's three.