Poetry Centered
Poetry Centered
Valerie Hsiung: Breath Mover
Valerie Hsiung selects poems that disorient as they open us to the vital, visceral present. She introduces Roberto Tejada and the poem as a breaking fever (“Kill Time Objective”), Jennifer Elise Foerster as a channel for a multiplicity of lost voices (“Hokkolen: I become the canyon, its dreaming eye”), and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge narrowing the senses to expand what remains (“Slow Down Now”). To close, Hsiung reads from her sequence “a-begging,” her voice responding to the room where she’s recording.
Watch the full recordings of Tejada, Foerster, and Berssenbrugge reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Roberto Tejada (January 12, 2023)
Jennifer Elise Foerster (April 27, 2023)
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (March 13, 2010)
Full transcripts of every episode are available on Buzzsprout. Look for the transcript tab under each episode.
Voca is now fully captioned, with interactive transcripts and captions available for all readings! Read more about the project here, or try out this new feature by visiting Voca.
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JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON:Welcome back to Poetry Centered, the show that brings you recordings of poets reading and speaking about their work, selected and introduced for you by contemporary poet. The show comes to you from the University of Arizona Poetry Center and features recordings from our online archive of poetry readings called Voca. My name is Julie Swarstad Johnson. Thanks so much for joining us today. For this episode, our host is Valerie Hsiung, a poet, interdisciplinary artist, performer, and the author of 8 collections of poetry, prose, and hybrid writing. Her most recent book is The Naif. She teaches at Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In today's episode, Valerie brings together poems that disorient us in order to open us to the vital, visceral present. These recordings are of Roberto Tejada, Jennifer Elise Foerster, and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Valerie, Thank you so much for joining us and for being our host today. Welcome.
VALERIE HSIUNG:Hello, this is Valerie Hsiung. And I'm recording this at my desk in Boulder, Colorado. The first recording I'd like to share is Roberto Tejada reading, Kill Time Objective, recorded on January 12, 2023. In this poem and in many of the works from which the poem arrives to us, which is Roberto's book, Why the Assembly Disbanded, I hear the legacies of surrealism, particularly the influence of Aime Cesaire. There's a diaphoretic quality to this poem, like it's courting delirium the way surrealists often do. The words seem to be courting that breaking point of a fever. You feel the spasms of language, you feel the volatile oils of the lines, and you feel blood coming to the surface of the skin of the lines and sweat breaking from the skin of the lines. I think part of these effects come from the desire in this poem to extend the line beyond its ordinary limits. This feeling of being on a precipice as one is on the verge of taking flight soon, soon, but crucially, has not yet. This feeling of being at a gathering at midnight before a kind of combat and the kind of energy that is needed to gather the spirits, the kind of energy that must be so concentrated in its form. So there's a way that this language is also forming a kind of barricade, a tactical tunnel or armor or barricade to propel the poet into the future from night into dawn into the necessity of what is being called upon them. So it's a language of fortification through the breaking of the fever. What's even more interesting is when the poem begins to shift with that repeating phrase, but for, but for, which to me are two words of mourning. And so even with this prescient and promising, soon, soon, there is a bold contradiction here between the promise and the sacrifice. Here is Roberto Tejada reading Kill Time Objective.
ROBERTO TEJADA:I will end with a poem back from Why the Assembly Disbanded, which truly indulges in the paranoid fantasies of the speaker here.[LAUGHTER] Kill Time Objective."For the sake of my acoustic self, I lead out of danger an anonymous pack from the building entrampment secured by militia. First prompted was the mouth emission. Other species techniques I thought would never keep me from the village emulation. Even now, a third person plural to ask in a chorus concerned with all the unsanctioned disclosures. We had expressed in such adversaries our interest, we had divined from them a quantum of intelligence. Soon adjusted of my amplitude, I escape and striving, escalate the only barrier dividing inside from out. Thick steel at first translucent, gleaming now, but with a weathered crackle glaze, suspending the ability to recognize a likeness. And I panic, overjoyed or appalled. Anyway, the baseline exhausting the tonal pitch insofar as they see not my face, no matter how close they look. First and foremost, classified chief management mostly disapproving. Soon the phonic constellation after hours of the data harvest room tone proximity to source boredom of the solar system estuary trespass. Soon as maps were to the mirror sequence by leaning on the present, complicity was to the frenzy of flesh, muddle of tongues, a ransom note. But for the sake of fighting for breath, already the instrument for transposition in a parasitic image finally proper of this place. I'm the encryption. I'm the statistic no longer bristling in the heroics of metaphor. I'm equipped with artillery that enables me now to bullet an opening for everyone's deliverance. But for the scene change, lodgings very disinfected. New cause for residing that I trace it back to the assignment room and retrieve because arson what I am is placed anew and under observation now. Two performers licentious but so approving of the spinal cord perspective as to marvel at the sheer outrage and wonder of the surgical incision. But for the tangled purpose of the anatomy, we take to name eviscerate. But for the conference hour this week with my parishioners in exchange for the motion in multiple layers, overcoat, many trousers, uniform. In the process also of my ballooning self into the unprecedented scales of subjection. As soon as I recite the lines that tell the world of the authority to petrify, to touch and be tutored or otherwise curbed, but never entirely embraced, no matter the many hours we waited on ledgewood to trust the day. But for the amassing body attributes of my contempt and retribution, but for the ever more audacious interference at the level of my molecular resemblance, but for the album, now, children, please open to lesson 32." Thank you.[APPLAUSE]
VALERIE HSIUNG:The next recording I'd like to share is Jennifer Elise Foerster reading, "I Become the Canyon, its Dreaming Eye," recorded on April 27, 2023. This poem reminds me that every poem is made of a different substance. This poem and the collection from which this poem is excerpted, "The Maybe Bird," seems to me to be made of fog or some other vaporous substance that washes over us, threatens our clarity, creates a sense of psychic disorientation. And part of that, I think, is coming from what feels like the eye being both sung through and allowing itself to camouflage with the environment it moves through so that the eye here is a channel for a kind of multiplicity, a scattering and gathering of a multiplicity of lost voices. It is both our guide and it is being guided in real time itself. The fog may prevent us from seeing too far ahead. But in doing so, it forces us to look to other signs that help us follow a path. It forces us to ask ourselves, do we trust ourselves, can we trust ourselves, what do we place our trust in, what have we. Time compresses and expands throughout this poem, like an accordion. The words situate us in a kind of apocalyptic aftermath, an aftermath that came long before us. I feel the Earth whispering to us in a low tone. This is Jennifer Elise Foerster reading, "I Become the Canyon, its Dreaming Eye."
JENNIFER ELISE FOERSTER:"I Become the Canyon, Its Dreaming eye.""In the last days of my marriage to God, I descended their spiraled library, relentlessly navigating stacks of shell tempered mortuary offerings, sandstone saws recovered from the caves. I lingered on histories, worn stone steps to write these things to recollect myself. What had I unburied, what had I freed, and what is freedom from the human need to catalog and clock our porous loads? I gazed, eyes closed at the moon's cratered walls. Spiders encircled me, spinning their silks as I listened to the tuning suspension of the underground particle colliders vibrating between silence and motion. By midnight, saplings had sprouted from my hand. The clouds dissolved into semi-colons and I with them into a new language of branching gestures. Airborne spores from one infinitesimal thread. A pattern. It was my first act of disappearance. I would return before anyone noticed poems to be found in the forest, not the mind. There's a canyon between this version of me and the shadow on the stairs that is mine. I became this canyon, it's dreaming eye."
VALERIE HSIUNG:The third and last recording I'd like to share is Mei-mei Berssenbrugge reading, "Slow Down Now," recorded on March 13, 2010. Like much of Mei-mei's work, this poem is such a lesson to me in how poetry can be a practice of syncopating with time. Thinking is our collaboration with time, and Mei-mei's poems are doing that. They are giving thought space in the poem to unfold, and they are focused so intently that you see the poem require what feels at times like selective sensory deprivation. Like one sense has to be obstructed or turned off for another to take on ultra perceptive capabilities. And this allows the words, I think, to find 1,000 microclimates within the mundane so that the mundane becomes cosmic. Conversely, she makes elements of hard science feel tactile. This poem is not about the pyrotechnics of language, the gymnastics of language, but are interested in the force of real poetry, thought itself. The form Mei-mei has been writing in for a long time, and which she writes in in this poem, is also a form of chronicity. And to me, this holds such gravity because it asks us to reckon with what it might mean in an ethical sense to make a home within chronic illness like climate change, which is ongoing, which doesn't have one terminus. I think of those who practice endurance for the pain that comes from chronic illness like migratory migraines and how so much of the endurance training requires one to get beyond the obvious naming of certain things like pain. There is a way that Mei-mei's poem is defying delimitation, defying the experience of bodily pain by choosing to define the microclimates and micro gradients of sensation and perception instead. Here is Mei-mei Berssenbrugge reading, "Slow Down Now."
MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE:Each poem is going to get rougher as we go on. This one is called"Slow Down Now," and it's also in four parts. I was reading. There are books that you can read about how to communicate with plants and how to make a relationship. And my subject was the rose, but the plant I found turned out to be a plant called an Apache plume, which grows in New Mexico. And it actually is a relative of a rose."I've been sitting, looking at a plant without feeling time at all, and my breathing is calm. There are tiny white rosettes, and the whole bush is a glory of feathery pink seedheads here in the arroyo. Even with closed eyes, I see roses in the center of my sight. New flowers opening out with pink petals illuminated by sun behind me and gray green leaves. There is no stopping this effusion. Looking at the plant releases my boundaries. So time is not needed for experience. Late afternoon is like a stage, a section of vaster landscape, and my mood is of a summer idle. The dry Arroyo sparkles all around. Meaning I come upon on wild land strikes me at first as a general impression. Then joy suffuses me. I accept that I've aged and some friends have died. At first, meaning is part of the plant. It has not yet unified with my experience as a whole, like site opening out to its peripheries. There's an impasse between my will, my desire, and the resistance of a phenomenon to reveal itself. My seeing is so slow, it seems to disengage. It becomes very cloudy. Then suddenly, meaning as a whole interweaves with my perception. Desire was the motive force, like meteorological forces. I repeat the words freshness, tenderness, softness, the happiness of birds as if speaking directly to a plant. Sunlight is a profusion of pink plumes, thousands of feathery seeds already reaching into the empty space where I've taken a branch. That space was left open by the vision I'm having now. I hold my first sight of the Apache plume and the present next to each other and go back and forth comparing them. I see its multiple aspects as living representations, its herbal actions and fragrances, its dynamic in our ecosystem, its appearance in other habitats, symbiosis with birds, medicine administered by an oracle. These aspects are not referred to not associative, but intrinsic to site. As I run my perceptions backward and forward, gaps diminish and slowly missing images appear or experience fills in. One transforms into another along an extending multidimensional axis of seeing a plant. It's not a metaphor for the flow of our surroundings. One day, you may need a plant you don't yet know in order to connect pieces in yourself or in a person you are trying to be with. It may be a rose bush at the end of the road, a summer rose whitish on the outside of each petal and pink inside, expressing its gestalt visually. When a plant receives this kind of communication, it begins altering chemicals. Its wavelengths reflect in order to offer itself to your imaginal sight for you to gather it. The plant or another person awakes from embedding in the livingness of the world and takes notice of your request. The internal chemistry of plants is one primary language of response that they possess. Through this method of your perception of its color, its fragrance, and infusion of its petals, you not only receive molecules of plant compound itself, but also the meaning in yourself the plant is responding to. So there is meaning in a chemical compound. Even though the rose I want is in the garden of my friend I miss, an Apache plume reveals itself in late light in the Arroyo, when I'm alone. A wild rose, Delphic. Illness is not healed simply by supplying something rose colored and lovely as a medicinal opiate. Beauty provides form for meaning. And though it does help my body form to form, I'm not only what my senses perceive, and my disease is not just physical absence of virus fields. When a plant projects coherent electromagnetic frequencies, organisms respond, becoming more open, animated, connected. They use this amplified field to shift biological function. DNA alters, there's communication across distance. They can intentionally insert information to strengthen cooperative interactions among, for example, an Apache plume, ants, and an agave in the riverbed like human families whose interweaving, loving bonds represent the long term incorporation of supportive co-evolutionary fields, continually embedded with new data to enhance connection. You and I nest within many such fields from a rose."
VALERIE HSIUNG:I'll end by reading from a work of my own called "A-begging." The words you'll hear are both small standalone poems as well as sections of a sequence that forms a longer poem. I always find it a little untrue when poets know exactly what they're going to read before they see the people in the room, before they see the room they're reading in, before they see how the chairs are situated, how the space is configured, what the lighting is like, whether there are windows, how high the ceilings are, what color the walls are. I do think that the poet's role is as much to be a performance artist and a sound artist and a breath mover as much as it is to be a language worker. And I don't think we can say we've fulfilled our responsibility unless we're willing to be permeable to the spaces we move through, we bring our words through, the people we come in contact with, the people we share our words and make ceremony with our words with. And that means, to me, discarding our papers and books from the podium, discarding ourselves from the podium if necessary, when the time comes. So as I sit down to record a poem for you today, I am aware that I can't see any of you, and we aren't sharing oxygen or a room, at least not today. So instead, what I have to respond to is the room I am in alone right now, the microclimates around me, the season of the moment of this day, the light outside my window that's filtering onto my desk, the busyness and quietude of the life I find myself in today. And of course, the very fact of our distance and the intimate distance that this medium allows us. From "A-begging.""Like news that waits for me, treat today just collecting firewood. Take plant into the shower with me after constipation. A basic standard of living. I am happy at 15. Walk back within my friends clarity in a way I can lake down with me into afternoon button, down, button, down. I am happy as long as you are. To stabilize the staircase side to side. The people who love us suffer the most. Hath stabbed me not seldom, not from your instruction. Halo of control. The sunlight in 1,000 splinters. Antlers of another's. Classified like night vision. O fair maiden, instinctively in my self centredness. Like an animal, afraid in the woods, alert in the turmoil of my selfishness. I say to you now from a sublunary vest, leaves the rest of the world to copy. We are not far from the money isn't heads I'll go, not a man who smiles with the eyes seesaw from left over would dress up the wound against invisible walls. I am close to everyone. I am a prisoner. Moodless in a painting of a road, yet called a liar. Back to laundry fort in mint condition. I walk us back on horseback for a bib without breakfast. Someone with their stolen parts offers rainbow on a knife by doing it again. When I ate the wrong things, a snake in my belly and the drawing to recognize what I am is having, keeping their eyes as keys. People are looking for questions to shout into the sky to get the rubber bands out of their quests. Miss levitation, you'll wander the hell's halls, wages or not, dragging trunk along, vending machine spirit, such weathered outskirts where there is no clean toy. Two-headed guardian will paralyze a useful figurehead. The wind is coming from the airport. The conductor is drawing loyalty to him. Drinking, swimming water." JULIE SWARSTAD JOHNSON: Valerie, thank you so much for speaking to each of us and bringing us into this space where you're recording. You definitely gave me new things to think about with your reading, especially that idea of the poet as the breath mover. Listeners, thank you for being part of this space. We recently passed 25,000 downloads of Poetry Centered, which is mind boggling. Thank you for being part of that. It's a gift to know that you're out there listening. In two weeks time, we hope you'll listen again, joining us for a new episode hosted by Diego Baez. In the meantime, you're always invited to check out past episodes and explore Voca. Thanks for being with us again today.
ARIA PAHARI:Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the Indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui. Poetry Centered is the work of Aria Pahari, that's me, and Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audio visual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.