PHENOMENAL ROOMS
Aífe Murray
Chain 3, Spring 1996
First
I was a painter, so for me, words shimmer.
Each
one has an aura. Lines are laid on the field
of
the page, so many washes of watercolor.
—Susan
Howe
The light of attention as illumined from below drew Sari
Broner: her color-xerox collage process of gilt joss paper
allows her language to bloom and manifest its formal
hybrids.¹ When Dale Going first began learning the trade of
a letterpress printer, she remarked on her initial surprise
at the weight of each individual letter—this correspondence
with the weight of words punctuating the breathable page,
as a dancer across tangents, in her moving second book
The View They Arrange.² The physicality of Denise
Lawson's language/page: word-kernels inform her sensuous
first book
Where You Form the Letter L.³ The
delicate space defined by overlaps of tinted plastic,
poetic text and photography work as notation in Jaime
Robles' constructions ...
.. ."Daughters" of Barbara Guest and Kathleen Fraser (whose
origins are in the New York School) / of (former painters)
Susan Howe and Norma Cole / of Objectivist poet Lorine
Niedecker / of innovative expatriate writers H.D. and
Gertrude Stein / of English "novelists" Dorothy Richardson
and Virginia Woolf / of American Emily Dickinson.⁴
These four west coast women—partaking of the immediacy of
the 'zine movement—have seasonally placed the control of
"publishing" into the hands of twenty to thirty women
writers, who inherit the traditions of spatialized text,
concrete poetry, chance poems, graffiti, xerox art,
artist's books, Kathleen Fraser's visuality, Susan Howe's
sound forms, and Emily Dickinson's poetic
innovations in "print." Broner, Going, Lawson, and Robles
have devised a spiral bound publication-by-contribution
book that they "publish" and distribute, to
participants, with their eight hands.⁵ Seasoned book editor
and designer Jaime Robles was impressed by the "simplicity
and the liveliness" of 'zines in which people,
geographically dispersed, were conversing and engaging
ideas.⁶ A desire to stimulate exchange among artists and
writers led Robles to approach the other three. Together
they formulated the logistical simplicity of
Rooms
which entered its third year in March 1996.⁷
…immediacy
is itself both an aesthetic and practical satisfaction of
Rooms
…the
visual and written chaos of it that you don't get in a
closely edited journal—Rooms
puts editing in the
hands of the reader
…an
open window…playful…democratic forum…having a
place
to place work is an incentive to write…Rooms
is a
site of
influences…there's
very little lag time between writing it and the piece
appearing…each
contributor [chooses] what she wants—the visual
freedom
and variability afforded…Rooms
diffuses power
issues around
writing
and the persona ofthe poet…we were feeling the
irreplaceable
loss
of HOW(ever)
—not trying to "continue" HOW
(ever)
but do
homage
to Kathleen's important work, to make another place for
women's
experimental
writing…now, after doing it awhile, it has a presence of
its
own. It's a room. As if you opened a Poet's House—with
chairs,
reading
materials…things can be unfinished, in process…larger than
the
intimacy of a letter—a resonance in the many voices…
At a time when the page has been undone: when the printing
press no longer defines lyric dimensions, these women push
against the limits of the page/canvas, testing it as a
formal constraint. Inviting vellum overlays, splatter of
paint, xerox collage, matchsticks and cool blue geometric
acetates inserted at cuts in the paper, red toner poems,
plays, essays on other writers/other forms, notices,
letters, ex/change—everything acts and reacts to what came
before or the poem it lies against. Low tech and high tech,
Rooms' work ranges between studied design and
transparent invention.
The computer has re-defined the page as scrolling
indefinitely, language that might wrap around a city block,
just as the internet has turned the page into a concept and
catapulted poetry—once song— into the interactive silence
of space. Poetry can no longer be pinned exclusively to a
tangible surface or to the ear (bereft of the body) in a
rapidly shifting (uncertain) world.
Simultaneously—reactively—performance art, spoken word,
monologists, hip hop, salons, and the importance of
"discourse" are at an all time high in the urban/urgent
landscape. Art is made of that fusion, reflecting the
worlds multiple communities/
displacements/relocations/experimentation on the fringes
the "border" as juncture.⁸ Dickinson reacted to the
printing press, making hybrid forms in the upheaval of her
own historic time. Similarly the Roommates (and we mean the
four conveners/collators of
Rooms as well as all
the women who participate—it has that kind of trafficking
between orchestrators and contributors) also are bypassing
the dictates of the publishing world that seeks
commercially comfortable verse. One day writers and critics
will discover these interactive, conversational anthologies
(in the old senses of those words), amazed at the
collective power—the call and response between the
Rooms writers—in the same ways that Dickinson
scholars marvel at her daring "visual/visceral" use of the
page and "domestic technologies."⁹
Rooms is one
manifestation of poetry that has moved onto other surfaces
and has taken other surfaces onto its pages. And who is
paying attention to this?¹⁰
Who is going to write
about this phenomenology of rooming with words on/off the
borders of the un/known page?
Kathleen Fraser and the Roommates have contributed to this
piece.
1. Broner's work has appeared in two
publications from Em Press (Mill Valley, CA):
Everything is Real Except the Obvious
(1992)
and Fascicles, Volume 1.
(1993).
2. Dale Going, The View They Arrange
(Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1994). Going publishes
innovative writing by women in the fine press tradition
under the imprint of Em Press (Mill Valley, CA).
3. Denise Liddell Lawson, Where You Form the
Letter L
(San Francisco: San Francisco State Chapbook
Competition Winner, 1992). Lawson is a member of Kelsey
Street Press (Berkeley, CA).
4. Many of these poets are associated with innovative
writing, not to be exclusively boxed by the above
categories, only to suggest origin influences.
5. Between them, these women have extensive experience in
fine printing, the arts, book design and editing, and
publicity. Perhaps because of this combined experience,
they have deliberately chosen this particular low tech form
for Rooms
.
6. Former publisher of Five Trees Press and later
editor for Lapis Press and Bedford Arts, Robles currently
collaborates tvith Peter Josheff (of Earplay)
on
spoken word and music. Tlieir first collaboration was
performed in San Francisco at Intersection for the Arts, in
October 1995. Work has appeared in small press editions in
the U.S. and Greece (these are available through Robles).
7. Rooms "publishes" writing by ivomen. For more
information, contact Rooms,
c/o Jaime Robles, 652
Woodland Avenue, San Leandro, CA 94511.
8. On this issue, see the performance work and writings
of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. His Gringostroika
(St.
Paul: Graywolf, 1993) addresses the borderizalion of the
world and the transculturation that arises from that flux.
He notes that artists of color, especially with absence of
institutional support, go back and forth between art and
politically significant territory; making art "of fusion
and displacement that shatters the distorting mirrors of
the ‘western avant-garde'" (16).
9. Two articles which examine Dickinson's work as collage
and canvas (in ways one sees evidenced in Rooms
)
are Jeanne Holland's "Scraps, Stamps, and Cutouts: Emily
Dickinson's DomesticTechnologies of Publication " (189-181)
and Jerome McGann's "Composition as Explanation of Modern
and Postmodern Poetries" (101-138) in Ezell and
O'Keeffe, Cultural Artifacts and the Production of
Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body
. Ann Arbor:
U of Michigan P, 1994.
10. Kathleen Fraser's essay, "Line. On the Line. Lining up.
Lined with. Between the Lines. Bottom Line" (in Frank and
Sayre, ed. The Line in Postmodern Poetry.
Urbana
& Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1988. 152-114) remains one
of the most important and moving essays on a sampling of
contemporary genre-bending feminist poetic practice. Also
see Linda Kinnahan's new book, Poetics of the
Feminine: authority and literary tradition in William
Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen
Fraser
(New York: Cambridge U P, 1994). As an
innovative writer and a scholar, Rachel Blau DuPlessis is
tracking what's happening in mixed form and feminist poetic
practice. See The Pink Guitar
(New York:
Routledge, 1990). On November 3, 1995, Small Press
Distribution hosted a forum in Berkeley CA, with over 60
people in attendance, on feminist presses publishing
experimental or innovative ivomen writersTlie Bay Area's Em
Press, Kelsey Street Press, and Rooms
as well as
Korc Press (Tucson) were among current women's innovative
presses represented. Moderator Kathleen Fraser raised the
question of why, with so much interest and so much
happening in the contemporary women's tvriting scene, there
isn't more critical writing on these innovative writers.
Now that How(ever)
has ceased publication, there
is no regular forum for reviews exclusively devoted to
contemporary-innovative-feminist writing. Most critical
work, other than academic attention to the Language poets,
tends to mill the usual traditional feminist
tokens:Levertov, Lorde, Rich, and Walker.