7TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 ::DAY 12:: KRISTIN PREVALLET on ANNA VITALE
Welcome to the OS’s 7th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by four incredible curators, who are also our 2018 Chapbook Poets — you can read more about their curatorial intentions, their work, and a little more about the mission of the series here. You can navigate to the series archive, of nearly 200 entries, here!
This week’s curator is Mark DuCharme, author of We, The Monstrous; you can check out his full introduction to this week’s entries here. Here’s an excerpt:
The eight contributors here (seven, in addition to myself) are poets hailing from at least two countries and residing currently in diverse parts of this one. They write on other poets living and dead, poets born in this country and in other parts of the globe, poets of different ethnicities, sexualities and perspectives. On inviting each of them, I suggested a theme, “neglectorinos,” or in other words poets not (yet) as widely acclaimed as they ought to be, though I left it up to each to interpret that theme as she saw fit. The results are, I hope, inspiring and invigorating. I hope they bring you new perspectives on poets you already knew about and introduce you to poets you might want to investigate further. Many thanks to editor/ publisher Lynne DeSilva-Johnson for making this welcome act of cultural activism possible.
In closing, I’d like to reflect on the state of poetry in our current world. William Carlos Williams famously wrote, “Look at/ what passes for the new./ You will not find it there but in/ despised poems./ It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.” In that same long poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” he writes about the bomb: “All suppressions,/ from the witchcraft trials at Salem/ to the latest/ book burnings/ are confessions/ that the bomb/ has entered our lives.” Then what are we to make of our lives today, over half a century later, with all the endless wars, drones daily striking distant civilians, suppression perfected to machine-like efficiency, rampant hatred & rapacious greed from low politicians in high places? Poetry, I think Williams believed (& I believe), shows us another way. It is an absolute refusal to live with the Bomb in our lives, even if only metaphorically. It is a reminder that life is not such a mean thing (in at least two senses of that word) after all. That poetry is, even when it is an act of resistance, an act of love.
Or, as Williams elsewhere wrote, “I myself invite you to read and to see.”
I had almost given up on poetry, because poetry had given up on me, she was withholding and I had started to internalize her rejection, so I sought out divination from Selah Saterstrom who said, “do not inflict your childhood wounds upon poetry” and I realized that if I couldn’t inflict those wounds on poetry, nor could I inflict them on a lover, then I had better do some serious excavating to cut out the heart of those wounds and keep them from throbbing. I turned towards performance, but not the kind that needs an audience, rather the kind that spills out into all sorts of messy conceptual ideas and projects that defy genre. In short, poetry had a hard time finding her form.
It’s true that the first time I met Anna Vitale I probably touched my upper lip as mimesis and solidarity with her birth mark. I might have told her about my conceptual existential crisis of language and it might have been clear that she knew exactly what I was talking about.
I met Anna because we were teaching in an ambitious summer program for incoming freshman at Bard College called Learning and Thinking. Hannah Arent, a beloved professor at Bard who is buried in the graveyard at the college, is the beacon and guiding light of the program.
In her essay “Action” from The Human Condition, Aren’t takes umbrage that anyone can ever really be known. Speech and action mark our presence and connect our stories with the stories of other people — we come out to each other, we disclose. But this doesn’t mean that “who” we are is ever really revealed, even to ourselves: “it is more than likely that the “who” which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself.”
In Detroit Detroit, Anna Vitale’s who comes remarkably close to the surface. It is as revealing of her speech as it is her actions but more than this, it discloses the uniqueness of her body and the sound of her voice.
She has the name of the book, “Detroit Detroit” tattooed on her arm. Like her who, the tattoo IS the book.
“It is only visible if I’m wearing a sleeveless shirt…and the second time the word appears its written in its mirror image. It takes people a minute to realize that the word is there twice because its second appearance is only immediately legible in a mirror. It’s a tattoo about legibility, about reading “what happened” to my body in relationship to where I came from, including the other bodies that made me. It’s about geography and difference and being born after the record has already started to skip.”
In this way, the book and the tattoo are interchangeable. I love the notion that books take on many forms that have nothing to do with language. In my own crisis with poetry as form, it was helpful to read Detroit Detroit as an example of what was possible. Sometimes the poem comes through only after you have put your body on the line.
Between the tattoo, the book, and the birthmark I knew Anna Vitale was not content to simply listen to the wise voice of her daimon (the tutelary spirit that guides a person throughout their life, which Arent describes as “always looking over their shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.”) Like me, Anna is compelled to excavate her shadow selves, because somewhere in the fragments of memory’s minefield is the realization that we are plural and ever evolving.
Her bio states that Anna Vitale is a “writer and performer interested in poetry, psychoanalysis, music, and improvisation.”
I had thought that psychoanalysis was a 90s thing — in graduate school I had my fill of it, reading Kristeva and Derrida and Lacan and I thought that this new generation was psychoanalysis incarnate, they didn’t need to spend 30 hours a week reading it. Who has the time? Between the damn culture’s self-destruction in the wave of of technology, video games and social media — and all that wrapped up in becoming famous, this generation has turned the symbolic order inside out. The worst nightmares of all traumatic childhoods are being acted out in the social realm, put into form by technology. How can couches and confessions and digging up the roots of unconscious drives compete with that?
But Anna is determined to bend form into her own creation. How do you come to terms with a fucked up childhood filled with alienation and disappointment, bullies and the Napster of love, where desire is so huge, so unable to be fulfilled, except on a playlist streaming on an evolving gadget? Now an adult, childhood is a flood of memories that are maps of the city you used to navigate on a daily basis — it’s speech and rhythms; it has a particular idiomatic syntax:
So, if I’d had my way, I’d have spent nights with you. Whoever you were. But now I would like to put all that inside a box and shove it, which is to say I wish I could put all this inside a wish and then fuck someone with it. The condensed future of the past belongs to a split. It sticks hard, follows me in the alley. When I crave to be ripped, it’s for history to splay out and satisfy not despite but because of this volcano. It is not enough to force my re-emergence instead of seeking a new form, bringing it out to replace the unknown. A form for longing, a form for insurrection, a form for dedication and sacrifice. God. Fuck this invocation. Fuck this protest song. Fuck this religion. “Where have all the flowers gone?” Fuck that. I’ll cut into this building so quick, it won’t know its split. I set the glass on fire. Cut a head off the headless.
I read Detroit Detroit and breathed a sigh of relief — the prose is fluid as consciousness when rowing itself across the deep crevices of an unconscious rage against all the machines — mother, father, television, racism, kids at school, boys, girls, and the rap music that adds fuel to the fire and water to quell it all at the same time. A white girl in Detroit, coming to terms with being white as other and outsider and yet not able to fully claim outsider status even though her birthmark marks her as different:
“I was a product of living in a place whose scars were on the surface and I found myself with a face that participated in that conversation unbeknownst to me.”
The prose of Anna’s rage is really quite sublime and filled with moments of edgy humor, because daimons are shifty and tend to hide if you can’t find the form to tell the story. Of course the trick of psychoanalysis is doing the work to reveal what is ugliest in you, but realizing that your ugly is just what other people make you think about yourself when they drop the insanity of the world square on your shoulders:
Even though I want to annihilate the world, I pull the world in my direction. The way we are brought close is to be threatened. The world comes, guns ablaze, and the only way I know how to keep it is to pop back. I want to socialize this desire, but the world is not specific, so the list of people I want to destroy becomes just that. It takes up all space. The logic of the world destroying the world where one figure stands in for itself is not exactly the same as smashing a woman’s head by dropping the world on it but it’s close.
Damn that’s honest.
My way of conceptualizing rage also came in the form of theory turned against myself. I learned from reading Chris Kraus that it wasn’t enough to just read about subjects in crisis with their subjectness — if I had internalized misogyny, if I became a poet because of the impossibility of using language to fully explain myself, if my desire to be seen and recognized as human was never in full harmony with my attempts to shake away the feeling of constant absence, if wild, prohibitive sex was the only way to fully express all of this in private, then the poem had to figure out a way to channel all of that into a form.
I talk about this process with Rachel Zucker in the Commonplace podcast:
In other words, I too had to write the book that would express my plural who, and I have found terrific inspiration in the complexity of Anna Vitale’s Detroit Detroit — in all of its evolving forms.
Anna Vitale is the author of Detroit Detroit(Roof Books), Different Worlds (Troll Thread), and several chapbooks including Unknown Pleasures (Perfect Lovers). Recent writing has appeared or is forthcoming inBathHouse Journal, Columbia Poetry Review, Jacket2, and Supplement. She lives in Brooklyn and hosts the Tenderness Junction on WFMU. https://annavitale.com/
Kristin Prevallet is a mindbody coach, poet, and educator. The author of five books, including the fragmented memoir I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Essay Press) and Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn (Belladonna Collaborative). Recent work appears in The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Spoon River Review, and Guernica. She lives in Westchester, NY where she leads workshops on mindbody healing and writing, and works with private clients. www.trancepoetics.com
