A year of stops and starts
“A distaste for the political dimensions of art, in this time and place, is a dangerous luxury”
- Adrienne Rich
“How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?”
- Nina Simone
A year in review for me is a study in the dueling forces of perfectionism and procrastination; a desire to always do the best work and a feeling of never having done enough. It’s hard to ruminate on the personal at this year’s end though, as we face the overwhelming feeling that while there’ve been dark times there are even darker to come.
I spent a lot of 2016 attempting to fulfill my commitment to write and perform more poetry. I turned and returned time and again to Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” and Adrienne Rich’s collected notebooks What Is Found There. I spent a lot of 2016 trying to find a way to balance my paid teaching work with my sometimes paid writing work and my rarely paid but life-giving creative work. Oh you fucking hippies, some Dixie-flag-adorned hat wearing confused soul on twitter moans, Get a Real Job. You’ll have to forgive me if I still believe in poetry. You’ll have to forgive me that I can see a link between a disdain for culture, a disbelief in the importance of art, a reluctance to accept alternative ways of living with harmful political and social attitudes. You’ll have to forgive me if I still see poetry as useful, or, to borrow Lorde’s words, “a vital necessity of our existence.”
A few favorites were published in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Felt, and Witch Craft. I was given 20 pages to do with what I would in 4 Poets and was fortunate enough to travel to Toronto for the launch. Ghost City Press launched their summer chapbook series, which allows poets to publish and readers to donate if they have the means. I wrote a letter to my mother. There’ll be more next year. In the weeks following November 8, I gathered at least 4 times with other poets to grieve, to shout, to talk, to share. Poetry can provide a space, a voice, a community.
In 2016, I also found I liked writing about poetry. My friend and unofficial mentor Tommy Pico released his debut book IRL, and I wrote about it for Lit Hub. I liked writing about that book so much, I wrote about it along with two of my other favorite books of 2016 for The New Inquiry. The piece will come out next year.
2016 was also the year I found good writing takes time and attempted to work on my patience. After writing several pieces for the subscriber-driven Mask Magazine, my editor Hanna Hurr offered me a regular column. I made a commitment to write one a month and almost kept it (don’t count them!). Favorites include reflections on a brief but intense love affair, my (not uncommon) inability to wrap my head around flows of capital, a meditation on the seducti0n of skipping school, and a plea to stop chastising poor people for trying to live their best life. Stealth Care is an investigation into the possibility of maintaining health under oppressive power structures, and as we enter a heightened political sickness I will no doubt continue it in 2017.
The latter half of the year saw me begin a number of projects I’m really excited to share with you (an EP I recorded with musician and producer Leila Adu, a new touring performance series, a book-length manuscript, and several essays), but which due to the constraints of time and resources are not ready to share yet. As Kylee Luce and I discovered in our interview series Tiny Talks, the three shared battles for artists are lack of time, lack of money, and lack of space. On the other hand, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Nina Simone, countless others, all the young poets I know and admire, have inspired me not to give up. When they go low, we go harder.
