Catching Trains

It is horrendous, this world's condition of dying. Loss of life is the most arduous vista of pain. Let us honor Akilah's life and legacy, and honor her advance toward death as "a field of investigation" by writing a poem....While on your back fold your fingers with fingertips pressing into your chest, this way you conduct the flow of energy back inside you. Occasionally PRESS your fingertips deeper into your chest to better sense your recycled circuitry.... Let the poems and music become an entirely new PLACE you go to. When the CD ends light a candle. WRITE THESE PARTICULAR NOTES BY CANDLELIGHT ONLY!... Notes about death, notes about living with death, notes about the topography of grief, of darkness, isolation, forgiveness, and what it means to give and receive mercy. For the next week keep your notes on you at all times. Walk everywhere with them and BE READY to add to them, or to begin PULLING them and kneading them into a poem, a poem you write for the living who are dying everyday. And STOP sleeping so much! We sleep TOO MUCH!  --- CAConrad, excerpted from Akilah's Legacy, (Soma)tic # 55


This body is constructing a plexiglass box, 8 by 5, that it can get into via a hatch n lock system above, needs knock to be let out of. I've been told there is a magician who is named Chris Angel and that he is a "Mind Freak." A  student said to me that this Chris Angel places himself in suchlike contraptions. And people stare in awe at how he is able to fit into these spaces, how he can endure the cramped extremes of his own doing for so long. Ok, I said, but I was taking the construction of this box--sitting in the middle of my office/bedroom in lying sheets--as a place of banality, making visible the sort of enclosures we're married to most of the time. A place from which to write and a place to stare out of. Suspicion of blind-spots to the cube I inhabit. I will move at the end of the month into a house the bank has owned for two generations. Some enclosures are larger, where  still we perform invisible, intimate, virtuosic, acts of production--like organelles, say, for a nervous system guarded by board members. What's magical about living in a box? Maybe a lot, if the question is what COULD be magical about living in a box? 


I am from the midwest. 


The Amtrak station has not been 
what it names for a long time 
now. It's a clenched limb, monumental cut in the horizon for the sky that breathes. [A gag system also, that sings. The throat of grief. And me pissing in a bucket projected silently on a screen behind the live me pissing in a bucket. I say to E that public incontinence is as rare as public grieving. It's not a matter of who will strain for you, but who will strain with you. Of a once-was. In an is-shape. Post-industrial tape choking off air as it wraps the gullet is also love. "Why?" "The sound is tremendous. Shared and tormented the wind and the skin cohere, so we collect and backlight  the voices 


resolve. This restoration of our electrical current. We will each have mended spines at least once."] A deco foot trapped in a boot of fences. 


One time playing postwar there an Israeli named Zvi fell thru the rotted floorboard to the mezzanine. He didn't die. But it was dark inside, and that fantastic echo, and magic really could steal your fears. 

Trip Down Memory Lain

Here's Mr. Wolach again, this time presenting his multi-media piece. I love this. If you can't read it, he's listed various forms of poetry for sale.  Okay, so that's Round 1 of photos and commentary and it only covers Day 1. So, chew on that and I'll get some more ready for you.  --Snapshot of Prefab Eulogies, from Lidsey Boldt's blog slideshow

So, with Kaia Sand & Jules Boykoff about to kick off winter's PRESS events (David Buuck did so in fall, on the heels of the amazing EconVergence Conference in Portland), I decided it was time to take a trip down memory lane, revisiting our every-two-years large PRESS Conference, as well as listing some of the PRESS artists/activists who have helped make the series hum over the past 3 years.  Here's a thank you to the organizers and guests.  First, the conference: in late 2008 300 of us crammed into various buildings on Evergreen's campus, and in a semi-abandoned 4-story structure downtown for the reclamation of public space public readings.  It was the first of what we hope to be several such conferences that explore various intersections between aesthetic and political practices.  This year we are planning for the next conference (next year), with Rachel Zolf so far trying to come out here on her own dime because the U.S. won't allow her, as student visa holder, to get paid.  The 2008 conference was generative, and so hats off to the student organizers, who really made the whole thing go, spending their summer planning the conference instead of doing more sexy things.

Here's Lindsey Boldt's blog slideshow of the conference.  Nice write-up, giving one the sense of what we did.

There are several other slideshows online, including a very comprehensive one by Tom Orange on Flickr.  You need to log in to see that slideshow.

And here's one of two websites for PRESS, this one for guest info, list of panels, readings, etc. Photos by Shaun Johnson, website by Chris Hoard, now both graduated.

A year later the PRESS: Activism & The Avant-Garde Anthology was published thru Wheelhouse Press (one of the main sponsors of the event).  All guest poets/writers contributed work to the anthology, as did many--but not all--of the activists and/or students.  

Several nice reviews of both the conference and the anthology appear online and in print, but here is one that was published just recently in the journal Prick of the Spindle (interview and review).

After the conference, we got down to work on continuing the series.  And now we're back in the conference planning stages, rethinking it, both in terms of thematics and finances.  How will this recession both negatively impact the conference and be a major site of resistance/excavation?  Since this is your conference too, feel free to send ideas for workshops, performances, and panels, here as blog comments.

PRESS Guest Participants (by year):

2007-8

Sarah Mangold (poetry, talk on Bird Dog Magazine)

Jessica Balsam (TACO founder, installation art)

Bill Porter (translator, Chinese poetry)

Erica Lord (installation art)

Zhang Er (poetry, translation)

Julia Zay (film, experimental critical writing)

Jeffrey Silverthorne (photography)

2008-9

Rodgrio Toscano (poetry/poetics theater/panel discussion)

Kristin Prevallet (poetry)

Lindsey Boldt (poetry/panel discussion)

Mark Wallace (poetry/panel discussion)

Jessica Baron (poetry/panel discussion)

K. Lorraine Graham (poetry/panel discussion)

Holly Melgard (poetry/sound art)

Jules Boykoff (poetry/panel discussion)

Tom Orange (poetry/panel discussion/poetics theater)

Jennifer Bartlett (poetry/panel discussion)

Alice Templeton (poetry/talk)

Jais Brohinsky (Agit-Prop Theater)

Nicholas Hayes (poetry/panel discussion)

Steven Hendricks (prose/book arts workshop)

Zhang Er (poetry)

Leonard Schwartz (poetry)

Kaia Sand (poetry/panel discussion)

Tung Hui-Hu (poetry/panel discussion)

Laura Elrick (poetry/panel discussion)

2009-10

Rob Halpern (poetry, workshop)

David Buuck (poetry/performance)

Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand 

Chris Mann 

CA Conrad (forthcoming Soma(tic) workshop/PACE Action/Reading--March 4 & March 7)

David Abel (forthcoming reading/workshop--last Thursday of May)

Sarah Mangold (forthcoming)

Eleni Stecopolous (forthcoming)

2010-11

Rachel Zolf (forthcoming)