Here are our introductions for the most recent and wonderful c/c event!
Patrick Lucy: As a kid my grandmother had a small white bookcase in the backyard. It was so I could make multi-level sand-castles. It was amazing, connecting up little ponds by straws, those summer hours with a grandparents unending love. “I take the sunrise whole in my mouth each morning, asking What’s your name?, looking for my own name,’ Patrick Lucy writes in The Land of Mouth Breathers and through this connect, this worry, this curiosity that asks for the entirety of the sun to gather a kind identity with him that brought me on board.
Lucy’s got this strange infinite availability for the present, but it isn’t his, like possess, but a bit of us, or a bit of all of us. As if through his hands and feet he connects deep the tissue of our smiles, our contained senses of where we might want to feel this life as good together. It’s hard to explain, like his eyes are really big and when they look at you, they are really, so wide, that you can see a real and actualizing hug with you. In Live Fields: Growths 1-5, he writes, “standing in a doorframe/flooded by light and memory/flooded by white blood cells,” and yes, that’s what it is, light, memory, blood cells. Yes. Please welcome Patrick Lucy. ND
CAConrad: A deeper kind of beating, the way one heart can step through and be in the world. You can’t find the right words, an emanation, an invoking. CAConrad doesn’t have time for bullshit. In Aphrodisoios he writes, “argued up the evolution of/borrowed faces to/angle potent/my pregnancy dream told me/not born but evicted.” Maybe I find a slight ditto in our rural knowledge, a call-out letter to get up and speak on spare time of others, to spin the bottle of the oracle, to be full, so full of life, a coldness not kept in the warmth or the wellness of this planet.
If we are really lucky, the words we use up give the strength to attend to the struggle. I know of this slight tone in my chest that leans up into my voice, acknowledge that I can be emotional today, free enough to be emotional about how the world is and what it’s doing. Conrad writes in Express an Interest in Listening or Flowers Won’t Bother, “greed it/seems/has no/memory//the little/bones they/throw us/break/my heart//some/days/i taste/the world/in a poem and/want/to be of/service/to that/taste.” Being poets, we ask is poetry enough in a world that is no shelter for anyone but the very wealthy, where the real flames of life are burning out all over this planet, cabled up, hung from the scaffoldings of all this white-light-buildings. I don’t know. I know that this voice helps, says, if you need to cry, you can cry. In that same poem, he writes, “They say crying/in private helps/non one//they say touch/a gill of light/down there.” Well, hello. Please welcome CAConrad. ND
Camille Roy has a badass statement of poetics called Experimentalism, which you can read on the internet. One of the things Roy writes here is, “We are impossible beings, ruthlessly evading scrutiny. Yet recognition is the beginning of transformative emotion.”
There’s two other quotes I’ve been circling around. In the introduction to Cold Heaven, Roy writes, “With something constantly at stake, timing is everything.” & in 2 Pure Girls, “June & I look at one another; something is at stake here and we don’t know what.”
Here, we don’t know what is at stake but we can be sure that something always is and remember when you live here, timing is everything. Here is the place between people, between social categories, between registers, between identities. You could call it poetry or queerness or being a girl or Sherwood Forest. It is the moment ruthlessly erased by dominant modes of narrative, which, it goes without saying, but I’ll say it, feature de facto cisgendered hetero masculine subject positions and make the complexity of almost everybody’s experience (erotic and social) illegible.
In Roy’s writing, I find these moments, of porousness, precariousness, made legible. And the sense of recognition I feel in reading, hurts, really good, like the beginning of any transformative emotion.
Please welcome Camille Roy to Philadelphia. MB
