Contours of Creative Risk
A Conversation with Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal
Collaborators Valerie Witte and Sarah Rosenthal talk about their forthcoming digital chapbook, The grass is greener when the sun is yellow, out now from The Operating System.
Greetings! Thank you both for talking to us about your process today!
Can you introduce yourselves, in a way that you would choose?
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
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.
Why are you a poet/writer/artist?
VW: My primary reason for being an artist/writer is to build and be part of community — a community that appreciates and makes work that can be any or all of the following: thought-provoking, innovative, playful, entertaining, engaging, inspiring. And by community, I mean: if I can reach at least one other person through my work, I feel fulfilled. I can hardly remember a time when I wasn’t writing. It is something I have been doing since I knew how, what I’ve dedicated more time and effort to than anything else. I’m generally happiest when I’m writing. It’s what brings meaning to my life, for which I am very grateful.
SRR: I create because I revel in the human imagination, an astounding capacity of our species and one that provides enormous joy and meaning, especially for the maker. I create because I see it as my best shot at contributing in a worthwhile way to the polis. Making art is both the easiest and the hardest thing that I do. I don’t feel fully alive when I’m not doing it.
When did you decide you were a poet/writer/artist (and/or: do you feel comfortable calling yourself a poet/writer/artist? and/or: what other titles or affiliations do you prefer/feel are more accurate)?
VW: I’ve been writing since I was a young child, so I’ve been comfortable with the term poet/writer for a long time. I don’t recall a specific moment at which I began identifying as a poet/writer, but perhaps after I earned my MFA, or when I started publishing my work in literary journals — and certainly when I published my full-length book. I usually introduce myself as a book editor first and a poet second. These days people have such a strong reaction to the book editor ID (so many questions!) that I don’t even get to “poet.”
SRR: When I was three, I announced that I wanted to be an artist. I grew up in an art-appreciating home and loved trancing out by looking at the images of art on our walls. Being the person who made those objects seemed like the coolest vocation. The impulse to “be an artist” translated soon into creative writing, for which I had a natural affinity. I wrote as a child and teen and then lost touch with the impulse until a couple years out of college. When I rediscovered writing in my mid-twenties, it was like coming home. Since then I’ve described myself as primarily a poet, although I also write prose and enjoy engaging in other art forms including performance and visual art.
What’s a “poet” (or “writer” or “artist”) anyway?
VW: I view the term “artist” very broadly, as anyone who creates something new and innovative, especially if they are willing to share that creation with others. And perhaps, someone who sees beyond the literal, offering interpretations that involve a deeper level of nuance and thought, and moving others to see things in a different way.
SRR: Poets, artists traffic in visions, the visionary. They are comfortable swimming in dream realms where light and darkness intermix in surprising ways, and they work to translate their knowledge of these realms into art that helps others enter them as well. Poets, artists often find themselves on the outside looking into society’s house. This is thanks to several complex variables including the fact that our society often looks askance at work that does not necessarily aim at accruing wealth, and the fact that by temperament artists often feel more comfortable moving between worlds, Hermes-like. Artists’ marginal position often gives them empathy for others who find themselves positioned as outsiders.
What do you see as your cultural and social role (in the literary/artistic/creative community and beyond)?
VW: With my own art, I strive to engage people intellectually and encourage them to see things in new ways. But beyond my own work, I view my role within the poetry and broader art community as, chiefly, to help circulate the work; to that end, I have participated in several literary organizations on a voluntary basis, helping to produce and promote books and art, and collaborating with other artists and writers on projects and events. Especially right now, in the current political climate (and given the rising temperature of our planet’s actual climate), I feel that art/poetry is one of the few realms that can truly offer hope, a way to open people’s minds and make visible truths that perhaps cannot be seen as readily through other media (news, etc.). As part of this mindset, I’ve become more and more convinced that education is key; I’ve had the privilege of working professionally as an editor in educational book publishing for virtually my entire career, and I am also currently a board member of a literacy organization called First Book, which provides books to children in disadvantaged communities. Through these activities, I hope to contribute by delivering tools and resources to help people develop the literacy and critical thinking skills needed to participate fully in our culture — in the arts and beyond.
SRR: I think of myself as a participant in dialogue, which means it’s incumbent upon me not only to express myself but to listen deeply. In terms of a poethics, I privilege the latter. Good listening is in short supply in our world, yet it’s desperately needed. So regardless of which specific hat I’m wearing — poet, colleague, educator, curriculum designer, coach, editor, beloved — I try to show up open to what I’m hearing, ready to mirror it and to express my honest and caring response. At the least I can continually work on my capacity to provide this; at the most I can inspire others in the same direction.
I’m increasingly interested in what Harrell Fletcher refers to as social practice and relational aesthetics, an interest that my investigation of Yvonne Rainer’s work has further nurtured. I am drawn to this approach to art-making for its potential to allow me to wear all or at least many of the above-mentioned hats simultaneously, and to activate inclusive projects and processes that encourage creative, attentive interaction among diverse participants.
Talk about the process or instinct to move these poems (or your work in general) as independent entities into a body of work. How and why did this happen? Have you had this intention for a while? What encouraged and/or confounded this (or a book, in general) coming together? Was it a struggle?
As we explain in the Poets’ Note (included in the volume), we launched our collaboration by reading and discussing Eternal Apprentice, a chapbook by Michael Newton and Emmalea Russo. As part of their discussion, they engage with John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s ideas about chance operations, and we became interested in using the chapbook as source text as well as in employing random procedures in our project.
We noted Cunningham’s role as a key figure in the evolution of contemporary dance, influencing several female choreographers who made significant contributions to the field. We also discovered that the two of us had radically different feelings about dance: Sarah has a mostly positive relationship to the form, whereas dance has more troublesome associations for Valerie. With all this in mind, we decided to each “adopt” a contemporary female dancer-choreographer who had worked at some point with Cunningham and Cage, letting our contributions be informed and inspired by these innovative women’s lives and ideas, and thinking through our own respective relationships to dance. Valerie chose Simone Forti and Sarah chose Yvonne Rainer.
In developing this project’s contours, we relied on our curiosity and a desire to take creative risks. Yet looking back, we recognize the shared feminist tenets that undergird this work. Collaborating on the poems challenges the traditional Western concept of the text written by a solo (male) author. The epistolary component adds embodiment to a project highly mediated by technology. In the letters we “show our hand” to one another and to the reader, creating a space of intimacy and vulnerability. Yet we strive to do so in a way that opens up, rather than forecloses, multiple readings of the poems. Each of us, and by extension our readers, are invited to “talk back” and bring other perspectives to the exchange.
What formal structures or other constrictive practices (if any) do you use in the creation of your work? Have certain teachers or instructive environments, or readings/writings/work of other creative people informed the way you work/ write?
VW: Structure almost always plays a key role in my work, and I typically use or create a different structure for every project. Examples include emails with subject lines and status updates, prose blocks that become more diffuse as a book unfolds, copious use of fragments spanning the entirety of a page. Constraints or conventions that serve to help me build these structures include consistent/nonstandard punctuation or capitalization, limiting the number of lines per poem, randomly selecting a number of “chapters” or pages in a section, and visual and verbal/written cues that indicate when a manuscript is looping and perhaps can be read in a different order or way, outside of linear time. I view my poems as building blocks which I ultimately assemble to create a coherent whole. Sometimes I start with a particular structure, adjusting it several times as I continue writing, until I feel that it truly fits the project.
My experience in the MFA program at USF was extremely influential. Before that time, my writing wasn’t experimental at all. In fact I was resistant to experimental poetics, and I would absolutely not be writing the way I write if I hadn’t attended this program. I found myself greatly inspired by my three classmates, Craig Santos Perez, Alexandra Mattraw, and Rebecca Stoddard; their work is always exciting, innovative, deeply original. I was similarly influenced by my teachers (and the writers they taught), such as Rusty Morrison and Susan Gevirtz, who introduced me to the writing of Barbara Guest. I was exposed again to Guest and many other influences later through my work with Kelsey Street Press, including Elizabeth Robinson and Bhanu Kapil. All of these writers push the boundaries of what poetry is or can be, which is what I also strive to do in my work.
SRR: The primary structure I work inside is the long form. I tend to take on a single larger topic and explore it for the length of a book or chapbook. This allows for a depth of engagement and a sense of being held within the contours of a project for a length of time. Each subject matter seems to require its own unique structure. For example, ‘Manhatten’ comprises prose-poem-like columns interspersed with lineated poems. In ‘Lizard,’ narrow, lineated poems, mostly a page or less in length, predominate. My unpublished manuscript ‘Estelle Meaning Star’ features cut-ups sourced from journal entries.
I was introduced to the long form as an MFA student at San Francisco State University, where many of the texts I encountered were book-length or longer (think of Robert Duncan, who envisioned his entire oeuvre as part of one ongoing book). Mentor texts from that period — far too many to name — include works by Bernadette Mayer, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Barbara Guest, Edmond Jabès, and Kamau Braithwaite. Faculty I studied with included Myung Mi Kim, Aaron Shurin, Robert Glück, Norma Cole, and guest instructors Kathleen Fraser and Michael Palmer. The work of peers I encountered in the MFA program as well as in the larger Bay Area scene — most of whom were also working in the long form — also inspired me. Again the list is long but includes Dana Teen Lomax, Jennifer Firestone, Erin Wilson, Elise Ficarra, Stefani Barber, Sarah Anne Cox, Pamela Lu, and Aja Couchois Duncan.
Speaking of monikers, what does your title represent? How was it generated? Talk about the way you titled the book, and how your process of naming (individual pieces, sections, etc) influences you and/or colors your work specifically.
“The grass is greener when the sun is yellow” is a sentence that Yvonne Rainer spoke in a section of her piece Three Satie Spoons. It appears as one of the lines in our book. We selected it as a title for its imagistic vividness as well as for the way it invites the reader to ponder and question. It proposes a relationship of juxtaposition — two separate things happening at the same time — while it simultaneously suggests cause and effect (sunshine is a factor supporting the growth of healthy grass). This vividness and multivalence hint at the lively engagement the book’s contents encourage.
This sentence is the first instance of speech used by Rainer in her choreography. Incorporating speech was a practice she had learned from John Cage; it was also employed by Forti and other colleagues. In Three Satie Spoons, it works with gestures in a paratactic relationship, suggesting a rich, open-ended correspondence between language and dance, a correspondence fundamental to our project. Parataxis and collage are important elements to both of us as individual artists, so it’s natural that we would draw on them as collaborators. They allow for a nonhierarchical interrelationship of diverse materials and ideas, one that invites readers to participate in the making of meaning.
What does this particular work represent to you as indicative of your method/ creative practice, your history, mission/intentions/hopes/plans?
Both of us bring to this work an intense personal relationship to dance and a fascination with the history of dance, in particular the postmodern era of Forti, Rainer, and their contemporaries. We share a love of epistolary form and of collaborative practice. The making of this book has spawned a longer project; we are now working on a collection of essays engaging our personal memories of dance and the work of Rainer and Forti. We hope, among other things, that The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow as well as the larger project it has generated will bring the work of these choreographers and their colleagues to readers’ attention, so that it can enrich others’ lives as much as it has ours.
What does this book DO (as much as what it says or contains)?
This book enacts a dialogue between two writers who seek to understand the thinking behind the work of the artists they explore, and in the process, gain understanding of each others’ experiences and process as well. It creates a space that is both welcoming and challenging, inviting readers to participate in the dialogue while making clear that the relationships between the authors, artists, and topics are layered and complex.
What would be the best possible outcome for this book? What might it do in the world, and how will its presence as an object facilitate your creative role in your community and beyond? What are your hopes for this book, and for your practice?
We hope the book will encourage readers to engage in multiple forms of conversation, not only inviting them to explore the work of Rainer, Forti, and other postmodern artists, but also inspiring them to generate their own discussions about their work and that of the art and artists that move them.
This project has strengthened our capacity to engage in caring, egalitarian collaboration, and we hope the book as an object in the world will provide us with an entry point to present collaboration as a way of making art and a way of being in the world, and to support others who want help using it. We will continue the conversation we started in the manuscript through the essay project we are now working on.
Let’s talk a little bit about the role of poetics and creative community in social and political activism, so present in our daily lives as we face the often sobering, sometimes dangerous realities of the Capitalocene. How does your process, practice, or work otherwise interface with these conditions? I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts on the challenges we face in speaking and publishing across lines of race, age, ability, class, privilege, social/cultural background, gender, sexuality (and other identifiers) within the community as well as creating and maintaining safe spaces, vs. the dangers of remaining and producing in isolated “silos” and/or disciplinary and/or institutional bounds?
In the Age of the Orange Man we are called, more urgently than ever, to speak truth to power and stand against division. Artists and collectivities need to apply their creativity to generating innovative strategies to promote equity and healing, and refrain from causing further harm to our frayed polis, while generously sharing those strategies with others. This endeavor includes acknowledging our own blind spots and continuing to sensitize ourselves to multiple perspectives, taking up lines of investigation within our art that support minoritized groups, and creating or participating in frameworks, such as The Operating System, that take an explicitly activist, inclusive approach to disseminating poetry.
Project Collaborators
Sarah Rosenthal
Valerie Witte
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
