Creative Space

March 8, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

I'm coming to understand the mantra that communities are essential to creative artists. The hermit hammering away at his posthumous masterpiece notwithstanding, many of us want to believe we not are writing into a vacuum. Being published is a wonderful affirmation. But what about feedback on work in process or a response that doesn't come with a 90 percent rejection rate? To the purist, there is certainly satisfaction in a well-written text lying on a hard drive, but what about bringing it into the light of a community? We don't live in a vacuum. Writing to a community helps keep us working.

The house reading, which is an honored tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area, provides an informal space for writers and poets to share their work, explore creative practices and activate new ideas. Poet Rob Halpern, an assistant professor at Eastern Michigan University who comes to us from San Francisco, held his inaugural Ypsilanti house reading Friday. SF poet Allie Warren, who read the night before at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, and publisher Brian Whitener shared their recent work and held a conversation on taking the creative space into the community at large.

Rob had a full house of about 25-30 people from Eastern Michigan and Wayne State, who brought beer and wine and hors d'oeuvres. As a newcomer to Michigan and graduate student in literature and creative writing, finding a venue to discuss of all things literature and creative writing is a wonderful novelty. I'm heartened by the turnout and hope it continues.

Here are the bios on Allie and Brian that Rob sent out.

Alli Warren's chapbooks include Acting Out, Well-Meaning White Girl, and Cousins. Recent poems appear in Jacket, LUNGFULL!, and pax americana. Collaborative works can be found in ON: Contemporary Practice (with Suzanne Stein), con/crescent 2 (with Lauren Levin), and Bruised Dick (with Michael Nicoloff). From 2008-2010, she co-curated The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. Alli lives in Oakland.

Brian Whitener works in project called Displaced Press. His most recent publication is a translation of Colectivo Situaciones Genocide in the Neighborhood (ChainLinks, 2010).

Poems by Alli Warren and Brian Whitener:

PLOW POSE

by Alli Warren

I feel like it’s a matter of economics
this rotgut wine
and bad lilt
it takes an industry of
experts, spreaders
their dual-purpose
for tillage and for trade
packing on the path
carting on the plain
who will account for
the kingdom is interested
in crossed high spears
is this the proper place
for oppositional defiant disorder?
that’s the second time this week
my mouth’s mouth
by turns inflated & empty
yanked on the latch to say
in the ether and the air
in the fire that produces things
the fairly specific things
you do with the left hand
a string of endeavors
and yawning and starting to rub
in the dark middle
in a package
in what is wet
in the tempo of circulation
so many relay points
from a single satellite
how I hold it up as an example
of joining through distortion
the bread is plentiful
and life unstrenuous
in bright array
honeycomb in the drone

from FALSE INTMIACY

by Brian Whitener

If I was no longer human, would
I finally see what it means to be
blank, or rather how to be a feminista in Exico, would I finally see that -scape that we, a Antigonean performance,
carefully placed little openings
in George Oppen, I mean fuck
it, they are a bunch of assholes,
that we which would be an affirmation, a non-autonomous autonomy, a skin, an autonomy not of people. Meaning: right now, there is no war. Which is what gives it its importance, as
a critique of landscape, I mean
as a critique of bourgeois landscape, I mean sex and
history do not mix,
my body is a
(possible)
enunciation, without
value, that is,
like an image
If it
is, I mean, true that there
is
no
war, that
is, there
is
no longer a war
no no longer a future from
which to access
If value, the body was not just
“mine” would I finally cease to
be “human,” that is without a future? without access? you
know, in all senses of the word
rather just a skin, full of exits?
What I mean to say is, you’re a language that disgusts me, I’m
thrust into a kind of metabolic, plastic revolt. You disgust me. This is a site-specific act.