poetic labor project - october 2011

8/3/2019 Poetic Labor Project - October 2011

1/26

Poetic Labor Project

October 2011

BILL LUOMABRIAN WHITENERIDA YOSHINACAJACKQELINE FROSTJILL RICHARDSLINDSEY BOLDTMELISSA MACKMICHAEL NICOLOFFSEAN LABRADORY MANZANOSTEPHANIE YOUNG

WENDY TRAVINO


2/26

BILL LUOMA works as a developer in the mobile software industry. He is the authorofSome Math and Works and Days.

Days & Works

My Lap

Touch

Romplr

Virtual

Paranormal State
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-lap-band/id452867125?mt=8http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/touchtunes/id378351144http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/romplr-remix/id318456033?mt=8http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/virtual-zippo-lighter/id291622252http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paranormal-state-emf-meter/id301915840http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-lap-band/id452867125?mt=8http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/touchtunes/id378351144http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/romplr-remix/id318456033?mt=8http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/virtual-zippo-lighter/id291622252http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paranormal-state-emf-meter/id301915840http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-lap-band/id452867125?mt=8


3/26

BRIAN WHITENER has worked as a sports photographer, dishwasher, musicreviewer, adjunct, and in a prison. His most recent projects include False Intimacy(Trafficker Press), De gente comn: Arte, poltica y rebelda social (UniversidadAutnoma de la Ciudad de Mxico), and Genocide in the Neighborhood(ChainLinks).He edits Displaced Press.

We live in a world of experience, of worlding, no longer (just) a world ofrepresentation. What I mean by this is that experience (in quotes) or work on therealm of the possible (which shapes the actual), on being (in quotes) itself orworlding, has overtaken prior cultural formations predicated primarily onrepresentation and breaks with (prior) representational schemes. One banalexample (of many) could be the last Bjork album which is distributed acrossmultiple platforms, more an environment (an operation on the virtual) to be lived,moved through than an album, (of photos, of representations, of discrete piecesof aural structures) as if Saties music had become not just like the furniture, but had

wanted to become the walls, light, and time as well.

If the classical figure of early twentieth century capitalism was the street-walker,who directly sells their body as a commodity, one figure of labor today is the camgirl,who sells an experience, access to a psyche, likes/dislikes, personal information,who creates and sells (not just) a body, but a worlding (not yet a world). If theclassical figure of early twentieth century capitalism (ironic emphasis on therepetition) was the worker, who sells their labor power, one figure of labor today isthe redundant surplus briefly integrated into the circuit of production only to bethen discarded, shunted beyond the edge of the human on the other side of anontological gap, into another world, desaparecido, which is another worlding,

equally dark.

If the classical figure of early twentieth century war was shell shock, which outed asfatigue and disconnection, the figure of war today is post-traumatic stress disorder, acondition that is located somewhere between the mind and body, between matterand spirit, that draws a new line between the material and immaterial; that is, onethat acts neither on the body (discipline) nor the mind (ideology) but on a (new)total complex. In the medical literature, no one can figure out how to treat these newforms of trauma as they sometimes out as physical, sometimes as mental (can weconclude then that it is neither? But rather a new line, a new body, a newdemarcation between the virtual and actual?). Look at all the traumas around you:natural disasters, crimes, wars. Where do they come from? Is it crazy to think we livein a world that is being disciplined by new forms of catastrophic experience, bytrauma. Meaning that both the category of what counts as a trauma has beenamplified and that more potent vectors of application have been created, making usexposed at every turn to sensations that used to be reserved for the most far offbattlefields (as the shocks of WWI were coterminous with the rollercoaster, theanimated cartoon, cinema). Note that the term catastrophe only takes on its current
http://traffickerpress.com/http://traffickerpress.com/http://traffickerpress.com/


4/26

meaning (mathematically) in the 1950s and then (more generally) with the onset offinancialization: catastrophic risk (a black swan, a risk that cannot be foreseen, thecatastrophic event realized on the vector of trauma). We live in an all or nothingworld, a world of no return.

Turning to our world, a literary world: Have you noticed that no one is celebratingthe 100th anniversaries of literary modernism? Is that because theres nothing tocelebrate, because we find ourselves in the same tragic position of individual soulsfacing a systemic crisis? Or because we live in an intensified world following adifferent vector, one of worlding, trauma, and moves to new forms of innervation,and not representation, shock, and the bodily apparatus of cinema? Is what has beencalled chaos cinema, post-continuity cinema (the end of classical Hollywood editingin blockbusters like Transformers) a symptom of the end of one bodily apparatus ofcinema and the slow invention of another that prepares a new mind/body unit (anew line between the material and immaterial) for trauma, for the loss of the priorreferent?

Literatures strongest links remain with representational and anti-representationalschemes (two sides of a single coin) and the bodily sensorium attached to theapparatus of the book. The question is not how to leave behind representation butrather how to connect literatures devices, knowledges, and affective relationships toan edge that would match the new problematic of experience, of worlding, oftrauma, of this new line between the concrete and abstract.

We dont have much time today, so allow us to speak in images, as if written on walls:Through the waters of history cuts the prow of a ship known as financialization, onone side is inscribed war, on the other communization. To not out as war,

literature must find ways to connect with the latter.


5/26

IDA YOSHINAGA has worked some crazy-ass jobs in tourism, fashion, television, law,education, journalism, feminism, and finance. But mostly, she's a recoveringacademic, the first in her immediate family to attend college, and three decades later,still inexplicably addicted to the university. She writes oncolonialism and languagein US-occupied Hawai'i,fantastic fiction and genre theory, and transmedial

narratology in comics and film.

Labor Day Hawai`i 2011

Furlough Fridays, Furlough FridaysSaved money for the people of Hawai`i:Once a month, publicly funded, "lazy"State workers were forced to take unpaid leave.They said taxpayers heaved great sighs of reliefFreed from the pricey burdens of community

Schooling, social work, traffic safety,Affordable housing, food and environmentalRegulation, and other jobs so easyNo doubt private firms could do 'em(They said), practically for free.

Furlough Fridaysgrand management experimentBy our ex Governor, a gift to RepublicansIn states across the union. But her test wasAnti-unionwhich collectively organizedGovernment office clerks, schoolteachers,

And other public employeesin garbage,Transportation, public healthcould clearlySee. And fought. But my union, of collegeFaculty, more white and male than brownAnd yellow, in which we Asians and HawaiiansComprise a struggling minority, thisCollectivity of the brightest minds at theState's flagship research university,Got their comparatively sweet pay raisesBargained with her, got divided & conqueredFrom their public union siblingsStayed silent when our janitors &Secretaries & other campus colleagues wereFurloughed straight out of affordable lives.

Furlough Fridays: our mid-2000s gift from Hawai'iTo Wisconsin, Minnesota, other states with historiesOf strong labor struggles, teaching Republican leaders
http://viceversajournal.com/2010/10/01/yoshinagahawaii/http://viceversajournal.com/2010/10/01/yoshinagahawaii/http://viceversajournal.com/2010/10/01/yoshinagahawaii/http://viceversajournal.com/2010/10/01/yoshinagahawaii/http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mat/summary/v024/24.1.yoshinaga.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mat/summary/v024/24.1.yoshinaga.htmlhttp://www.kriso.ee/Postmodern-Reinterpretations-Fairy-Tales-How-Applying/db/9780773415195.htmlhttp://www.kriso.ee/Postmodern-Reinterpretations-Fairy-Tales-How-Applying/db/9780773415195.htmlhttp://viceversajournal.com/2010/10/01/yoshinagahawaii/http://viceversajournal.com/2010/10/01/yoshinagahawaii/http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mat/summary/v024/24.1.yoshinaga.htmlhttp://www.kriso.ee/Postmodern-Reinterpretations-Fairy-Tales-How-Applying/db/9780773415195.htmlhttp://www.kriso.ee/Postmodern-Reinterpretations-Fairy-Tales-How-Applying/db/9780773415195.html


6/26

That if you prime a group of elitist, self centered,Racist public workers, you can keep cutting theirBudgets, make them beg for scraps, and not onlyWill they say yes please may I have another, butThey are only to happy to repeat

Long colonial histories of racial dispossession,Gender oppression, and I-got-mine greed.

Furlough Fridays!


7/26


8/26


9/26

JILL RICHARDS

I teach comp, mostly to freshmen. The next class that I keep planning, that keepsgetting put off, is entitled, Women, Modernity, and Revolution. The title is pretty

self-explanatory. But today I want to talk about one section of the course and theway it speaks to problems in contemporary protest movements. The sectionconsiders representations of social revolution as narrated by a young girl. My textsare the graphic novel, Persepolis, the film, Pans Labyrinth, and the young adultnovel, The Hunger Games. I want to talk about these texts today (somewhatdistantly) because they all present, in various ways, a very specific fantasy. All ofthese works use a young girl as a narrator because she offers a seemingly neutral,purely spectatorial viewpoint. Children are not expected to be political actors, sohere is a subject that does not have to take a side. For the child, merely observingseems to be a natural, even a neutral position. These texts suggest that only bad ordead parents would not work to maintain this stance of neutrality and inaction until

age 18.

However, in both these texts and in real life, the nimbus of adulthood surroundingeither side of age 18 is a little confusing. Protective, panicked, outraged, orexasperated responses to militant political action often use the figure of the childwho cannot know her own mind, or foresee the consequences of her actionastheir primary rhetorical stage. This often has nothing to do with the specificities ofage 18. Some of you may remember an email that a prominent Berkeley professorwrote last year, complaining that the undergraduates involved in the occupationmovement were always coming to her asking for help, always expecting her todefend them against the university. Or you may remember the complaints after the

freeway protests, that anarchists were leading unwitting children unto the freeway(three juveniles were arrested, but not taken to jail; their parents were called).Finally, some of you may remember one strain of negative reactions to the OscarGrant riots: the concern for the safety of Oaklands children (not just in the riots, butalso presumably sleeping in their downtown Oakland beds).

And Im sure you are all aware of the student protests in Chile right now. You may ormay not be aware that the student protest movement in Chile has a longer history. Ilived there in 2006, and want to speak about my experience then to provide someground for a more detailed discussion. Five years ago, students in the public andprivate school systems went on strike across Chile. Students occupied their schools.The largest, most prestigious universities got the most press, but smaller highschools and private schools were also occupied. According to La Tercera, more than500 schools were on strike. More than 350 schools were taken over by the students.This led to a general strike that included high school teachers, truckers, and otherworker unions. During this time, I was mostly in Santiago. The second-largest city inChile, Valparaso offered more of a dance party occupation, or Santa Cruz-esque,atmosphere.


10/26


11/26

LINDSEY BOLDT lives in Oakland and commutes to San Francisco and Sausalito towork as a teaching artist with elementary and middle school aged people and as aneditor with The Post-Apollo Press. She is also co-editor/publisher of Summer BFPress with Steve Orth and contributes her labor to Writers Bloc and OccupyOakland. Chapbooks include "Oh My, Hell Yes", "Overboard Rampage" and "Titties

for Lindsey" (forthcoming). Her first book, Overboard, is forthcoming fromPublication Studio Press.

-Introduce self-Tell the people what I do for work: teaching artist-Difficult to decide what to focus on today so I decided to talk about a place in my lifewhere the topics of day converge most dramatically: poetry, activism and work,which for me is in my work as a teaching artist.-Read a poem from Ulloa-Po! and from Marin Juvenile Hall Anthology

So, those poems sort of blew me away and still blow me away whenever I read them.I want to say first that when it comes to teaching poetry, there isnt much teachinggoing on. You dont have to teach kids to write poetry really, because you dont haveto teach kids how to be imaginative, or inquisitive or observant--all qualities thatpoets tend to possess and for the really brilliant ones, how they express theyreunique kind of genius. One of the things Ive learned from being a teaching artist isthat poetry is not a specialized realm of esoteric knowledge harbored, cherished andprotected by a small group of believers.

Id like to let you all in on a line of questioning that I often preoccupies me. I dont

think its necessarily a very productive line of questioning, but it happens. It beginswith me considering the state of things: When we are in the midst of anincomprehensibly high stakes global crisis, when our rights are being pulled outfrom under us by increasingly obvious slight of hand, when Im never sure if Ill havework, when some of my students parents are either already unemployed or live infear of becoming so, when some of my students live in a near constant state of chaosthreatened by violence, neglect, indifference, and the very real prospect of andexpectation that they will end up in prison.

Why teach poetry? If I really want to help youth today why not teach civics or radicalpolitical history or farming or environmental science instead? How can I justify mypresence in their classroom? How can I communicate the importance of poetry?What do I, a privileged girl from Washington State, have to teach or inspire in mystudents? Would they be better served by someone from their own neighborhood?Someone who came from a similar background? Would my students respond betterto and gain more from a different kind of artist, say, a different artist? Does my styleof writing, my aesthetic communicate or perpetuate a culture of oppression? Whatdo my students really need to know to survive? What tools can I give them?


12/26

And then I try to relax, try to remind myself that poetry saved me, that it has beenessential to my survival in no small way, so there must be something to it. Then, I tryto tease apart a mess of emotionally laden memories, patterns of judgment and guilt,etc. and figure out what it is about poetry that is special, that is important, useful,

essential, that lets me give it and myself a break. I come back to the qualities Imentioned before: imagination, inquisitiveness observation and also reflection.These are important skills.skills. They wont show up on any standardized test, but without them nothing canchange.

Certain things have been made concrete for me through teaching that were only everabstract. The fact that I know the work of very few poets of color well enough toconfidently bring into a class and even fewer poets of color personally, has beenmade very clear, and the more I try to do something about it, the more I realize howmuch work I really have to do.

So, as the school year ramps up, Ive been thinking a lot about what I can do this yearin my personal life and in my poetry and journalism classes. I spent a lot of thesummer reading, learning, and talking about current and historical radical politics,community organizing and radical pedagogy. I feel afraid about a lot of things. I feelunsure. But I also feel excited about experiments i.e.:

-Bringing the Black Panther Party 10 pt Program to a middle school classroom andasking students to write their own version.-Performing/having a day at the beach on a BART platform-Bringing a section of narrative from Karen Tei Yamashitas I-Hotel to an elementary

school creative writing workshop and hoping the students there will find somethingin it to relate to.-Performing the qualities of imagination, inquisitiveness, observation and reflectionin my role as poet, teacher and within a role that feels new even though it was myfirst, the day I was born in the United States, that of a citizen.


13/26

MELISSA MACK does research on publicly-funded social service programs. Singly orcollaboratively, she has written many many reports that she often imagines housedin the bowels of the federal departments for which they were written, in unmarkedcrates a la the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. To make money, she has alsohung out ("provided training to") women on welfare, had a paper route, hung out

("supervised") developmentally disabled sex offenders, sold vegetables, hung out("counseled") with court-involved pregnant and parenting teenagers, and weeded.

September 4, 2011

Dear Poets and Laborers,

Im away because of a work trip to Washington D.C. to feed the machine ofgovernment. I do contract research on publicly funded employment programs for aU.S. Department which shall remain nameless, speaking of the occasion of this Labor

Day, yet so far from satisfyingly.

I grew up inside a military industrial evangelical complex the only way I figured outhow to deal with was to follow the rulespoliteness, selflessness, financialresponsibilityand cultivate an inner life I didnt tell anyone about. But the innerlife is as penetrated by The Complex as the outer one (as St. Paul, Giorgio Agamben,and many others have noted), and all unawares I kept mine contained, clean,heterosexual, and imaginative only in so far as it related to attending closely toweather and to practicing a secretly catholic devotionality that kept my heart soft.My paintings looked like Lionel Richie songs, and my animism applied only to thewoods behind my various suburban houses. Why am I telling this story?

And the word of the Lord was precious in those days; there was no breaking forthvision. I Samuel 13:1

Well, obviously, thats not true anymore.

Anne Carson says, Mere space has power. Were here, arent we? And there are sucha proliferation ofheres these days. (e.g. huge swaths of the Arab world, the streets ofOakland, that darling occupation in Vienna where they made the youtube dance jointvideo about hand signals that facilitate collective conversation).

In The Time That Remains, Giorgio Agambens commentary on Pauls Letter to theRomans, Agamben talks about division. The division hes interested in is Paulsdivision of Jew/non-Jew. But I want to think about the division between poets andlaborerswhich recalls the penetration of the complex into the human interiorbecause the reason we are gathered today is that we are all both poets and laborers.But there is an external division too. Were here and a lot of other people arent.Theyre rusticating or computing or fighting wars. It isnt us and them that


14/26

concerns me. Just, my sense of alarm is growing that huge portions of my vitalenergy are poured into a job that is not my Real Work. I want to be here with you allthe timein all the iterations of that here and you that existdoing that RealWork. Which of course is a false division, since having to go to my office most days ofthe week for most of the day is a reality I cant ignore. But Agamben. He identifies in

Paul an idea of a messianic (for our purposes, read that as revolutionary) division ofthe laws division of people (for Paul, into Jew and non-Jew, for me/us, into poet andlaborer). I dont have time to explain it in detail, but such a division renders aremnant. (Agamben calls it a dialectic with three elements rather than two: Jew,non-Jew, and non non-Jew.)

The division of division renders a remnant that prevents the laws divisions frombeing exhaustive. Which to me means our identities as Poet and Laborer arentexclusive. Though we are exhausted.

Agamben also talks about Pauls idea of the messianic (revolutionary) calling that is

the revocation of every vocation [read: worldly condition], released from itself toallow for its use. Which I take to mean, Im still a social scientist. If I now have twovocations, poet and laborer, well, let them both be revoked and rendered inoperativeexcept insofar as they can be used to joyfully rock the casbah. Let them render us aremnant, hittin our rackets like tennis players, as MIA says. We do our jobs, wework to undo the world in which we have to have the jobs we have. Also most of usmake poems.

Here are some remnant, revocational activities I especially like these days: Sex.Potluck. Reading and thematic and political and writing and radical ladies groups.Moots like this one. The making of music. The making of poems. The doing of

actions. The saying of spells, the reading of signs, the close attention to theformation of sound in the mouth, into words, into cries of ecstasy or rage or grief.The insertion of the body into spaces ostensibly public until you realize the cops inriot gear have it surrounded and are closing in. Radical generosity meaning thepooling of resources, the sharing of housing, the making of texts and books, thebringing of ones inadequacy, the willingness to participate in struggle wherever wefind it, the making of friends.

Id really rather walk across lawns in the dark, watch the light change, make love,meet all strangers in mutual gazing, or not, and have that be safe, have that beproductive activity. I dont think its too late for that, exactly. But just like how I have

to bill my time in tenth of an hour increments, I have to tithe my time to struggle too.To self- and community-educating. To acting out in the presence of my employer andfellow employees. To clothing myself in remnants from the clothing swap. (Thankyou, whichever ladyLauren, was it you?offered that cute royal purple puffedsleeve sweater with the lavender seed-pearls sewn on the front and marks ofmending here and there. I wore it to address The Department.)


15/26

MICHAEL NICOLOFF has worked as a temp, a legal assistant, an unpaid intern, aliaison for orchestral conductors, a copyeditor, a writer's assistant, and (currently) ininventory at an educational nonprofit. Work of a different kind has appeared in 6X6,TRY!, The Brooklyn Rail, The Recluse, and elsewhere.

I want to talk a little bit here about my working life, my writing life, and the self-images that come out of our relationships with others. I can pretty much tell youright now that Im not going to reach a well-wrought conclusion, and while Imhoping this wont devolve into just a catalog of questions and anxieties, Im going torisk that in the spirit of collaboration and hope that something here resonates withenough of you to add to the conversation. So to begin: Most recently Ive beenworking for an educational nonprofit in Oakland, at a job that started as a two-daytemp assignment and then didnt end. From what I wear and the office-buildinglocation, and the administrative assistant job title, too, this could easily be any one ofthe business-casual clerical jobs Ive held before and that Im sure plenty of you have

too. But its different for me in that rather than being tethered to a desk all day(though there is some of that), Im working primarily in packing and shipping, whichmeans Im working primarily with my hands and am on my feet to the point that Imight actually want orthopedic shoes. I build a lot of marketing samples containingeducational pedagogy, using a variety of plastic sleeves, multicolored printed labels,and lidded boxes, which I in turn pack up in larger boxes and stick with labels fromUPS, the US postal service, and, rather rarely, Fed-Ex. I am, like, the best with bubblewrap.

Now, Ive chosen this job, and gone from temp to permanent with a salary bump andbenefits, because it affords me certain opportunities. I do like the people I work

with, and its also nice to work for an educational company whose philosophy, whichis based around learning as a social act, is one that in broad strokes I actually agreewith. But the ultimate reason it works for me is that theres a significant portion ofmy day in which I work independently and in silence, performing rote labor thattaxes my mind and creative abilities in just a limited way. That independence andsilence in effect gives me free airspace, and so I listen to whatever range of musicfrom the library, radio shows, and university lecture courses I can get my hands on.(I am perpetually looking for more, so if you have any recommendations, pleasemake them.) Its become a sort of boss-sanctioned form of de Certeaus wearing thewig, of seeming to do the work one is paid to do while in fact re-appropriating thattime for personal use. The fact that my supervisors are aware of it hardly makes thisinto some kind of sneaky blow to capitalist hegemony or whatever, but it does allowme a space in which to educate myself, and what Ive realized is that given thelimited number of jobs Im qualified for, one of the biggest factors for me in choosingone job over another is how much of an opportunity I have to claim that kind ofspace for my own activity. I have the feeling that Im not the only one in this room forwhom this is a consideration.


16/26


17/26

Ive put it here feels too simplistic, but theres nonetheless a thought in here I mightwant to trace outespecially knowing that shes felt some of the same difficulty intaking that downtime when its me whos doing the home life maintenance.

But for now I want to add another archetype to the mix, one Im going to in a lazy,

problematic shorthand call the political avant-garde writer. This is, of course, thatindividual who seeks after radical aesthetic strategies, for personal pleasure and as amode of enacting a politically oppositional culture, but believes also that theseaesthetics need the teeth of a more macro-level radical politics. Thats another imagethat I think can easily be complicated and deflated, but like the masculine providerimage above, its one thats in circulation, and one that I believe we often measureourselves in relation toand, often or not, feel that others are measuring us againstas well. This isnt something that needs to be done overtly very often, or done byvery many people, to have a sort of disciplining effect. Ones life situation andresponsibilities can change over time, one can get a little older and be moreenmeshed in workaday getting by, only to abruptly notice at some or another

reading that new people have appeared who, at least on the surface, are younger andsexier, with better ideas and more time to write, and whatever the degree of theirpolitical activity, have produced an image thats cooler and more ideologically pure.Its kind of weird to find myself saying that at age 30, I know, and Im not going toexclude myself from this either, because I know that I can be and probably have beenthat cooler and more ideologically pure looking poet to someone else.

But the point is that regardless of the truth value of either of these archetypalimages Ive mentioned, received knowledge places these archetypes in tension, andwhile negotiating our relationships to this tension and overlap is one of the things ofbeing human, its nonetheless a challenge. In other words, regardless of the

specificities of a persons real life, the images of avant-garde artist and traditionalmasculine provider dont really go together, and much as wed like not to articulateourselves and others in terms of these images, as Ive said, I think its still prettycommon to do so. And this makes it very difficult sometimes to reveal the verymessy details of ones life in the labor sphere to the part of ones life thats in thepoetry sphere without fearing being categorized as a certain degree of non-entity. Totake a similar example, many of us, myself included, like to think that were prettyaccepting of the human variety we come across, but what exactly would we do witha kind of left-leaning, aesthetically radical Dana Gioia type who works in, like,finance? I cant see the outcome being social shunning, but Id bet that person wouldfeel like theyd have to sequester that portion of their life from public view just to get

by socially. Im not sure thats such a good idea. Id rather see that personsexperience be welcomed, because Im sure theyd be aware of at least some of thecontradictions theyre negotiating, and because the knowledge theyd bring to apolitical/cultural conversation and the input theyd in turn receive could, I think,lead to some pretty transformative learning experiences for all those involved.Feeling like one has to keep portions of ones life at the margins seems like a poormethod for fostering effective, truly rooted community, political or otherwise.


18/26

But beyond addressing our imagined friend in finance, I wonder about what elsecould be done to dissolve some of the self-image-policing that goes on and to limitthe power of this avant-garde poet archetype has in us downplaying some of thevital details of how we spend our lives. I actually think that last years Labor DayConference and the conversations that came out of it lent themselves to this kind of

dissolution. I know that many of us who were there felt that in the wake of it wewere more comfortable discussing our iffy-feeling day-to-day realitiesparticularlywhere our money comes from, and the trickiness involved in how we structure ourtime. And so I guess Id like to see more of this kind of exploratory conversation,because in it theres the possibility of pluralizing the conceptions of what being apolitical avant-garde writer looks like, in terms of how one lives but also in termsof artistic outputin form and subject matter, yes, but also in terms of process, andin sheer amount of that output. As Ive gotten just a little bit older, I know Ive facedthe frustration of not being able to find the time and energy to write in the way that Iused to when I was in my early 20s, where Id sit down and work for hours. I thinkmaybe its time for me and for anyone whos felt the same way to let go of that

frustration a bit and instead find processes and forms of creative output that meshwith our everyday existences, regardless of whether that ends up looking like whatwe think a poets process and product should look like. I mean, I think findingprocesses that fit ones specific circumstances is what were all doing anyway, but Idlike to see that articulated not as a deviation from the ideal but as a basic fact thatguides our ever-evolving work.


19/26

SEAN LABRADOR Y MANZANO

Loves Labours Lost

Ever critique the empire in these positions: push-ups, sit-ups, pull-ups, self-destructs, 59-Chevies?

After my first year of college, I was restless, impatient. I knew I wanted to documentthe military, the cold war, The Spanish-American War, The Philippines-American War, WW2, Vietnam, Beirut, and Afghanistan. But I didnt know inwhat form or shape. I took on my stepfathers challenge, to know REAL work. Ienlisted.

This path is rooted in the military base library, my day care. My parents gone forhours, returned at closing. Having exhausted childrens lit, I explored military

history, anticipated the course of future wars. (So when 9/11 happened, I was notsurprised.)

I wanted to be a journalist, always wanted to write for the Stars and Stripesbut Itested too high and qualified for bubbleheadNuclear Submarine Sonar Technician.But I didnt see myself listening for anomalies hundreds of feet submerged. I went tobootcamp unfortunately in winter north of Chicago. I wanted to embody the physicaland mental indoctrination experienced by so many of my fathers, uncles, andcousins, alas the snow.

Imagine, marine bootcamp in Full Metal Jacket for an approximation of my

experience.

Before, I appreciated my familys military service voyeuristically. War films. No onetalked. My stepfather, a Vietnam Vet, and I sat quietly through bootlegged VHS tapes.I was 10 watchingApocalypse Nowand The Deer Hunter. My stepfather warned, howI will understand these movies and their context when I was older. Gallipoli had aprofound influence. Accepting the futility of the infantry charge against a trench. Inmany dreams I ran towards bayonets and machine gun nests. Waking up wonderingif I could do the same in real life. Jump on a grenade to save the many. My childhoodfilms were Romantic. Then Saving Private Ryan set the standard for gruesome.

Having critiqued my experience enough, I endured the Navy 8 months, leaving on afailure to adapt. The military psychiatrist loosely translated: I should be in college,and was eager to speed my return to the civilian world.

9/11 happened in my last year at CAL. My first conversations at the Free SpeechMovement Caf afterwards were about re-enlisting, but this time in the Army. Id callthe recruiter every other month. But I feared the previous Failure to Adapt in the


20/26

navy would be an obstacle. In 2002, I went to SFSU for the MFA. I was the onlystudent in my workshops writing insistently about the War. Then the invasion ofIraq led me to finish the MFA at Mills College.

What was I supposed to do for gainful employment? My resume has travelled the

world. From the Bay Area to as far as the American University in Kurdistan.

How was I to pay off student loans, or child support? Where was my Bailout?

When I was 10, I collected Soldier of Fortune magazine. In one issue from the 80s, apicture of a mujahedeen child soldier cradles an Ak-47. He was stoic. My family has ahistory of children in War. My mother was a refugee in her own country. Otherpictures--children maimed from Soviet mines. I wanted to be there. Why couldnt Ibe a child soldier? At the rifle range, I was sharp within 100 yards..

So these images from my youth, and the desperation of unemployment, finally

pushed me in to the Army recruiters office in Alameda. I was resigned to learn astrategic language (like Farsi, Urdu, Arabic) or to disable IEDs. I psyched myself tokill. For 8 months I waited for my re-entry file to be processed. For 8 months, I wrotefor McSweeneys about the anticipation becoming a Poet on the Ground. I didpushups and sit-ups. I imagined killing people, how easy it would be in the rightframe of mind. Applying transference. If the Dept. of Education wanted its moneyback, then the Dept. of Defense must put a weapon in my hand. The eerie and mostexhilarating part of reenlistment, I was expecting to sign my name to a $250,000 lifeinsurance policy, and naming my son as beneficiary.

Then karma intervened.

Now, I am beginning my 2nd year teaching English, Poetry, World History, AmericanHistory, Government, Economics. (And echoing Jackie Frost, last year I taught myhigh school students The Libidinal Economy in Charles Dickens David Copperfield.Likewise Marxist Buddhism in The Matrix Trilogy. And I teach Gardening. At aBuddhist School.

I am trying to understand the meaning of this karmic intervention. What I must doin return for such Providence. So this book/this conversation, Conversations at theWartime Caf: a Decade of War 2001-2011 was produced. So I host a monthly MFAMixer in the City. So I get people to write on subjects as Suicide to Stockholm

Syndrome. So I teach my students how history is a record of violence. HowCompassion is an end to history.


21/26

WENDY TREVINO has worked as a Summer Recreation Leader with at-risk andspecial needs youth; a LSAT Instructor and Site Director for The Princeton Review; aHouse- and Pet-sitter in Iowa City; a Teaching Assistant and Creative WritingInstructor at UC Davis; a Guest Services Attendant and Development Intern at theCalifornia Academy of Sciences; and a Writing Consultant for SFJAZZ. She currently

works as a Grant Writer at the Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco.

The We of a Position

I started writing this at 6 this morning, after 5 hours of sleep, after a night of doingnothing, after a couple of hours talking on the phone with Lauren Levin, after a dayof seeing a very disorganized friend off to Kuwait, where he will teach for two yearsin order to have a free place to live and pay off a fraction of his grad student loans.

I started to make a list of things that have happened, beginning with global financial

crisis & ending with me standing here in Oakland, reading something aboutlabor, writing, and fighting. Without even trying to include everything, I ran out ofsteam by the time I got to the third instance of looking for work and the first wordof students occupying UC buildings.

I started to respond to a piece that Stephanie Young so generously sent me, a piecethat included a piece of something Id said about working with people that are hardto work with, people you might not like all that much or at all, people you might notknow. How it is still possible, how it is already how most people work every day injobs they wish they didnt need. How it reminds me of my family, a very large groupof people that includes people who just appeared in a field to work one day. How it

isnt a family in the traditional sense. How it includes a kid named Taco, an orphanwho would ask for tacos from other field hands, a kid the barrio my mother grew upin took in. How it includes a woman my mother met working in the fields and herson and another woman who took care of me as a child. How it includes theneighbors my mother lived with when she ran away from home at thirteen as muchas a [woman] my mother recently met on a flight to New York. How the supportthese people have given each other is financial as well as emotional. How incontinuing to support each other XXXX.

I started to think about my father picking cotton as a kid and the hierarchy of thefields. How poor whites and Mexican-Americans got first pick. How undocumentedworkers went in second, and African-Americans picked last. How my father saidgetting first-pick made him feel special until one very hot day, in Lubbock, during abreak, his family went looking for water. How none of the white people in townwould give them water. How on their way back to the fields, a truck of African-American farm hands offered them some. How they didnt even have to ask. How myfather says were all living like thatnot even knowing who our friends are. How myfather passes for white until he speaks. How a farmer and his wife, in College Station,


22/26

told my grandmother they would adopt my father and raise him as white when hewas four years old. How the men who hired my father at XXXX in the seventieslaughed and said they were meeting the requirements of affirmative action with aman who talks like a Mexican but looks white. How, when my father tells this story,he doesnt even seem mad.

I started to worry that what I was writing was dealing too much with identitywithout dealing with it. I remembered why I hesitate to talk about these things.Because what I am trying to say is that we should really think about who our friendsare. What I am trying to describe is what is described in Tiqquns Call as the we ofa position. A we that includes people we do and dont like. A we that includespeople we havent met yet and people we will never meet. A we that sees thehierarchy of the fields and calls bullshit without being dismissive of its bullshiteffects. A we that is aware of other fields.

I started to worry that I would cry reading this in front of a room full of people I

respect and am just getting to know. Mostly because I read what Id written toDereck, my partner, and he said some of you might cry. I started to consider havingDereck read this and worried about the effect a white man, an adjunct professorfrom a working class family might have on the text. A white man whose grandfathergrew up on a Choctaw reservation, moved to Arkansas and bought land because ithad once been illegal for Native Americans to cross the Oklahoma border intocertain parts of Arkansas. I wondered which option I would worry about, then doanyway.

I wanted to talk about how I started slowly to see this we. How I had been lookingfor work, then working six days a week and all that time reading. Reading Sianne

Ngais Ugly Feelings, thinking about envy, asking, To what extent do homosocialgroup formations rely on antagonism? Reading Ian Baucoms Specters of theAtlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History, thinking about theBritish slave ship Zong. Reading the first chapter of Marxs Capital for the nth time,listening to David Harveys podcasts. Reading Foucaults Discipline and Punish,engaging in an argument about Social Networking Sites, weak intimacy andcollective action in because poetry is not enough, a secret group on facebookconsisting of me, Brian Ang, Tiffany Denman, Joseph Atkins, Jeanine Webb, MayOught, Erin Steinke and Dereck Clemons. In a cubicle, an unpaid intern, arguing onfacebook, with people I do and people I do not often see, arguing Im not sure theweak intimacy that characterizes even strictly fb relationships is so different than

that of the intimacy characterizing most work relationships or relationshipsbetween peers, and while it is true that relationships are implicit in collectivizingand while propinquity remains a determining factor in whether one participates in aparticular collective action, I think its a mistake to think people have to be onintimate terms with each other prior to collectivizing / in order to collectivize.


23/26

STEPHANIE YOUNG lives and works in Oakland. She is a full-time administrator ofgraduate programs and part-time teacher of poetry at Mills College. Previously shecould be found executive assisting, sales analyzing, shelving mass marketpaperbacks, cleaning houses, and selling cookies. Her most recent book, with JulianaSpahr, isA Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the

Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism .

Something about Sheila de Bretteville crying about money in Lynn HershmanLeesons documentary film Women Art Revolution.

Something about Sheila de Bretteville crying about the feminist art movementsfocus on womens exclusion from systems of power, rather than identification withothers who also lacked power, also lacked money.

Something about the moment when several of us started crying about student loan

debt at the Department retreat.

Something about how I started crying in therapy about everything I seem as yetunable to give up, and couldnt stop.

Something about willingly giving up the individual bodys privilege: as white, of amoderate income which both allows and requires that I travel most days withmoderate docility the paths laid out by ATM machines, highways, places of businessand institutions. Something about willingly placing that individual body in the wayof arrest or even direct injury by the state, as an experiment in identification withbodies marked otherwise, bodies vulnerable to regular interruption, harassment,

arrest, detainment, imprisonment and murder by the state.

Something about heroic regard for this particular experiment in identification.

Something about militancy in the U.S. right now as an art project, acts of imaginationin the wake of state repression, in the wake of COINTELPRO, something aboutimagining a future of being on the street together, if not yet on the street together asin Chile, if still outnumbered by riot cops and cameras.

Something about the swagger of one art projects dismissal of other art projects.

Something about splitting off material from emotional care.

Something about something Wendy Trevino said at the Durruti Free Skool meetup afew weeks ago, something about being able to work with and care for people whoone dislikes, or feels irritated by, or ambivalence towards. I remembered this asbeing able to work with and care for people who one hates. Probably because I havebeen obsessed with that Tiqqun book The Terrible Community: a post-


24/26

authoritarian power apparatus. It apparently does not have a bureaucracy nor someconstraining form. But to produce so much verticality within the informal, it mustresort to archaic configurations, roles handed down that still survive in crowdedcaves of the collective unconscious. Thus the family is not the organizational modelbut its direct antecedent in the production of informal constraint and the

indissoluble living bond of hatred and love. The euro family euro critique.

Something about the family Wendy talked about, the family that extends, on a plain,without so much verticality. Working with and caring for others who one dislikes, orfeels irritated by, or ambivalence towards. I need to say that the family Wendy talkedabout is a specific example located near or on or beyond the U.S. Mexico border.

Something about Etel Adnans To Be In A time of War.

To be the panic of constant information.

To be hurt, distrustful, competitive, envious, angry.

To be singing in the car, my hearts a stereo, it beats for you, so listen close

To be THEN YOU ARE STILL THE ENEMY. To be unsure of everything, unable to askfor or take it back with force. Are the wetlands everything? To wish the wetlandsback as difficult as anything else, necessarily my own death and yours.

To somewhat falsely oppose decomposition and insurrection.

To be post-camp messianism on the one hand, labeling everything else reform or

collaboration with existing structures on the other, just, dangling there. Unsure ofeverything.

To be intimidated by the debt collector. To seek assistance from a non-profit.

To be ashamed of ones self.

To be full of desire and fear.

To be making art projects. To be making art projects together.

Every miscarriage is a work accident.

To be Claire Fontaine, to be dismissive of Claire Fontaine, to find Claire Fontainesomehow useful. To pivot and grind. To frottage with Claire Fontaine.

The return of the repressed threatens all my projects of work, research, politics.Does it threaten them or is it the truly political thing in myself, to which I should giverelief and room? () The silence failed this part of myself that desired to make


25/26

politics, but it affirmed something new. There has been a change, I have started tospeak out, but during these days I have felt that the affirmative part of myself wasoccupying all the space again. I convinced myself of the fact that the mute woman isthe most fertile objection to our politics. The non-political digs tunnels that wemustnt fill with earth.


26/26

The materials presented here were originally presented at

A Gathering on Labor, Art & Politics

at the Niebyl Proctor Marxist Libraryin Oakland, September 4, 2011

Poetic Labor Projecthttp://labday2010.blogspot.com/[email protected]
http://labday2010.blogspot.com/mailto:[email protected]://labday2010.blogspot.com/mailto:[email protected]

poetic labor project - october 2011

Documents