begin to arrange
An Excerpt from The grass is greener when the sun is yellow by Collaborators Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal.
Welcome to [RE:CON]CRETIONS! A new series of excerpts from our forthcoming and recent publications.
Today, collaborators Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal share an excerpt from their new project, The grass is greener when the sun is yellow, out now from The Operating System. Want more? Check out “Contours of Creative Risk,” a collaborative interview with these writers about their work.
I begin to arrange
unscripted remarks and laughter
objects in space (interweave flickering)
at my body’s house
like birds in a flight cage
redefine territory
the difference between inhabit and invasion
the best solution
improvised wings
turn us loose
inside our enclosures
the light from our eyes
illuminating our mind’s I
preparing us for what
the site of an eternal performance
we lie under boxes / whistle
what “going away” signifies
reflect / like a pool
accumulate / tiny bits of movement
deep feelers / are we really down here
no history no / tears
the name in the negative
slows our sounds and sentences
the pattern fractured / bones
in our mannequin dance
and at the end we see it all
we turn our butterflies loose
edgewise to the sun
Project Collaborators
Sarah Rosenthal
My work charts the space between limitation and freedom. It documents ways we can be trapped by socially imposed rules of any kind. My writing also explores how repressive childhood experiences and a variety of traumas can calcify into debilitating beliefs and habits. At the same time, it asserts the right to take up space, take risks, liberate self and word and form. It enacts these freedoms by foregrounding creative process, including the creative potential of error, damage, and fragments; by addressing taboo subjects; by using surreal/dream imagery and linguistic structures that defy reason; and by dissolving boundaries between inner and outer, self and other. My projects have tended to focus on female characters who are identifiable and porous/multiple. I employ creative processes that ensure the work generated will surprise and teach me.
My poetry collection Lizard blends aspects of contemporary womanhood with facts about various lizard species to question what it means to be a human at this historical moment, in relation to other humans, other species, and the planet. My book Manhatten combines fiction, lineated poems, dream matter, and art reviews to tell the story of a young woman coming of age in New York City. A narrator named Sarah Rosenthal, who may or may not be the author, navigates experiences and relationships that are by turns disturbing and comical, in prose that borrows much from poetry including associative leaps across time and space, and pleasure in language’s musicality.
Other publications include the chapbooks The Animal (a collaboration with visual artist Amy Fung-yi Lee), not-chicago, sitings, and How I Wrote This Story. I am the editor of A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Writers of the Bay Area.
Besides the collaboration mentioned above and my collaboration with Valerie Witte focusing on postmodern dance, I was a founding member of diSh, a performance ensemble that created pieces combining words and gestures, and am currently working with multimedia poet and translator Denise Newman on creating a platform featuring reviews of underrepresented literature by individuals who have limited or no prior experience reading or responding to such texts. I live in San Francisco where I am a jurist for the California Book Awards and a Life and Professional Coach. I also develop language arts curricula for the Center for the Collaborative Classroom. More at sarahrosenthal.net.
Valerie Witte
I’m interested in the intersection of words and other media, such as visual art, music, and technology; Blade Runner-esque explorations of relationships (with baseball references inserted, as needed); and collaborative projects related to origami flower-folding, reclaiming language related to restricting of women’s rights, and now, the works of postmodern dancers.
With Chicago-based artist Jennifer Yorke, I’ve developed projects based on my manuscripts Flood Diaryand A Rupture in the Interiors, which culminated in exhibitions in Berkeley and Chicago, as well as a residency in La Porte Peinte in Noyers, France. I’m a co-founder of the Bay Area Correspondence School, where I’ve exchanged mail art; spearheaded the writing of a collaborative Facebook poem about the “war on women,” which led to the creation of the chapbook A Body You Shall Be; and helped coordinate multiple events, most notably the BACS Variety Show and Art Extravaganza in 2017. For eight years I was a member of Kelsey Street Press, a long-standing publisher of innovative writing by women.
My first book, a game of correspondence, was published by Black Radish Books in 2015, and my chapbooks include It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamt of someone(Dancing Girl Press) and The history of mining(ge collective/Poetry Flash).
A native St. Louisan, I arrived in San Francisco in 2003 and lived in the Bay Area for 12 years; I currently reside up the road in Portland, OR. I received my MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. In my daytime hours, I edit education books in Portland. More at valeriewitte.com
ABOUT THE COVER ART:
The Operating System 2019 chapbooks, in both digital and print, feature art from Heidi Reszies. The work is from a series entitled “Collected Objects & the Dead Birds I Did Not Carry Home,” which are mixed media collages with encaustic on 8 x 8 wood panel, made in 2018. Heidi writes: “This series explores objects/fragments of material culture- -how objects occupy space, and my relationship to them or to their absence.”
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Heidi Reszies is a poet/transdisciplinary artist living in Richmond, Virginia. Her visual art is included in the National Museum of Women in the Arts CLARA Database of Women Artists. She teaches letterpress printing at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, and is the creator/curator of Artifact Press. Her poetry collection titled Illusory Borders is forthcoming from The Operating System in 2019, and now available for pre-order. Her collection titled Of Water & Other Soft Constructions was selected by Samiya Bashir as the winner of the Anhinga Press 2018 Robert Dana Prize for Poetry (forthcoming in 2019). Find her at heidireszies.com
