7TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 ::DAY 19:: KEITH DONNELL on JONI MITCHELL
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 Jacq Greyja, author of Greater Grave. Their introduction to this week follows:
The willingness to follow ghosts, neither to memorialize nor to slay, but to follow where they lead, in the present, head turned backwards and forwards at the same time. . . If you let it, the ghost can lead you towards what has been missing, which is sometimes everything.
In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon traces the holes in institutional knowledge — holes which become visible through a sensual recognition of that which is both missing from popular discourse and which connects, at times inexplicably, to the echoes of erasure within her own life.
[O]ur encounters must strive to go beyond the fundamental alienation of turning social relations into just the things we know and toward our own reckoning with how we are in these stories, with how they change us, with our own ghosts.
This week, seven writers engage in a like practice of unravelling how the self coincides and grows with poets living and deceased. They will lead us through varied accounts of following and hearing the murmurs of their chosen poets, traversing through both archive and selfhood. The writers present their findings intimately, at times erratically, boldly accessing the internal landscapes through which we come to know and love others: through music, serendipity, childhood, memory, (in)direct address, and waves of longing. The entries for this week move beyond memorializing the work and biographies of poets, instead submerging us within an intimate process of reading that is complex, affected, and without designated points of beginning or end. These entries, at the very least, offer us a glimpse into what Gordon calls the reality of being haunted by worldly contacts.
Keith Donnell Jr., originally from Philly, currently lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is an MFA candidate at San Francisco State University and holds a M.A. in English from the University of Southern California. His work has appeared in journals, including Juked, Berkeley Poetry Review, Redivider, Bayou Magazine, and LUMINA. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of Fourteen Hills.
Joni Mitchell, born in 1943, is a Canadian-born singer-songwriter and painter. No short bio could ever begin to do her justice. Nevertheless, Rolling Stone has called her “one of the greatest songwriters ever.” Her decades long musical career reflects a continually courageous and dynamic artistic evolution. If you are not familiar with her music, you need to be, as soon as humanly possible.
