This past Saturday, we had the immense pleasure of introducing H. B. Irwin, Pattie McCarthy & Marcella Durand.  Below you’ll find the three introductions.

H.B. Irwin: It’s a distinct pleasure to introduce HB Irwin this evening. I know HB through a larger community of writers, artists, thinkers, musicians, and all-around creative people in the East Kensington/Fishtown area of Philadelphia, but I know her work primarily through the wonderful blog she keeps: all the oceans ink. HB’s poetry calls attention to the act of understanding the self within the midst of cultural and spiritual white noise. It is a work that is deeply concerned with exploring a space of personal honesty, of cutting away aesthetic excess in favor actual experience, whether in thought or action. And what is real, what can be hung onto, is a sense of the non-static, the indefinable. In her poem “ipsum” she states: “This is the thing many people foolishly call one thing.” This seems to be the best place from which to begin. Please welcome HB Irwin. [JT]

Pattie McCarthy: The words are of the real. McCarthy writes in Verso, ‘quadrillion is a real word’, and there is a spread, a start in the stars and I don’t know if or when it comes back.  She goes on to write, ‘& they all alight somewhere like so many/devices in heraldic lists/although we only see them wheel (gigantic) alongside the turnpike.’ They do alight, quadrillion circulate, a single molecule of light somewhere, devices as simple mechanics, simple cells that relate to a complexity too big to consider, to take into the body in full. I try, but I don’t know where it goes, the wheel, it’s metallic glean spare, abandoned on the grit of the roadway. In Pattie McCarthy, I’m finding a personal relationship to a research that vivisects the living. History in the innards of movement configuring. In marybones, she writes, ‘I’ve never seen a dead person with their eyes open/all this time/they were pulling off/her apparel she….never changed her countenance.’ Yes, this is happening. Right here, a view to study history, eyes open to the dead, to the face that doesn’t change expression even while the ‘its’ is, itself, being removed. [ND]

Marcella Durand: The politics of Marcella Durand’s poetry find origins, in part, within the act of close attention. Her fascinating and expansive book Traffic and Weather uses this idea of the politics of sight as a refrain, descriptions and ruminations on reflection reoccurring throughout. In reading, I am reminded of Indra’s net from the Hindu cosmology: where the experiential world is figured as a single matrix, a complexity of interconnection that spans the universe. The net’s innumerable points of weft and warp are bound in polished beads, which reflect the whole upon the singular. Marcella writes “…the city is like ourselves. The sound reminds us of rain. The rain simulacra begins. / And surrounds us with reflective waters” (22), then later in the book “Each facet reflects another part of itself / but never self-reflective: always moving out. / More rain, until every surface reflects” (40). Instead of a reductive “we are all the same” statement, this mirroring calls attention to what is different, irreducible; a system of infinite interrelationships that doesn’t resolve itself in any easy equation, but instead allows each path to lie open in inquiry. What is, for me, most effective in supporting this multivalent perspective throughout Marcella’s work is her richness of detail which belies definition. To look closely does not mean to catalogue, but instead, as in the increasingly varied surface of a cellular structure through a powerful microscope, to begin to see the vastness and intricacy of the mundane, the taken-for-granted. Challenged to look again, with surety fading, we can begin to see ourselves and the world we are a piece of, intimately, in wonder. Please welcome Marcella Durand. [JT]

It was such a privilege to host Rachel Levitsky and Valerie Mejer for c/c003 on Saturday May 7 to discuss issues of translation around Rachel’s essential book NEIGHBOR. Below is a transcription of the intro I gave toward the event’s focus: