(OPENING REMARKS) J: Rachel Levitsky’s NEIGHBOR came to me at the perfect time: I had recently moved from a very entrenched suburbia (Boulder, CO) to a very particularized urban setting(Philadelphia). Growing up in the suburbs of Massachusetts, and really having very little experience with city-living until I moved Philadelphia in my late 20s, I feel as though the intertextuality of relationship that the city necessitates - and indeed, the place of poetry to pile on experience, perspective, conditional difference, was in a large part, lost on me. Initial writing interests drifted towards Olson’s expansive spatial claims; the cities I imagined were Calvino’s invisible ones, one’s made in the mind; distant, shining, idealized.

 

In NEIGHBOR Rachel writes:   

 

“I am a collection / of desire // precariously / housed” (2)

 

The condition of “precarious housing” has particular importance within the currently global community, a community shot through by paranoia, violence, inequality, but also one holding an amazing well of sustaining desire — the wish, the longing for something else (or the universal scope the Latin root desiderare suggets: “(to) await what the stars will bring”) – that thing which causes suffering but also allows us to continue existing. And desire’s precariousness, it’s “likeliness to fall or collapse” has something to say about that troubling autonomous “I” as well; that is, how to approach living in the thick of it, where the conditions of “individual space” collapse due to the sheer volume of life. Apartments resonate with the sounds of other people – singing, fighting, fucking – to the point where the mineral fact of a living space becomes super-saturated with the pressing physical presence of multiplicity. Here the ”I” has no choice but to engage with the “we”, moment by moment. This becomes the test of NEIGHBOR‘s art.   

 

The appropriateness of this book in regards this event’s focus on translation lies in the act of “translation” as a central concern of NEIGHBOR‘s prosody itself. NEIGHBOR deftly navigates within the spaces of the ineffable, testing and questioning these limits – the distance that comes from extreme closeness, physical closeness that abuts extreme isolation. This world of extremes, of overlapping noises and sound-sources poses an important model and questions for thinking about relationship. That is: how do we explore this space of ontological translation down new avenues? – to write a local space in a way that then transcends its own limited culture, and instead addresses core issues of what it means to be a NEIGHBOR in the global sense? This global NEIGHBOR, including the all the positive and negative connotations of this label, is always the local neighbor as well. I am very excited to hear Valerie discuss the act of translating such a text, as well as exploring the questions of how we navigate global neighborhoods that will inevitably arise. Thanks so much to both for coming here today to share — our neighbors to the north Rachel and Valerie.