As a writer and performer I remain
conscious of those who have come before--the poets, artists, musicians and
writers who first uttered the sound-word-images we share. It’s humbling to think of ancestry and our
place in time preceded and followed by many others with similar and different
stories to tell.
In Traces our protagonist speaks words
from Allen Ginsberg and e.e. cummings, invoking poets and divas—celestial,
divine-shining devas--to help her trace her story.
Wandering
the Chelsea galleries on a white-hot July afternoon I slipped inside the cool
shade of the Matthew Marks Gallery and stood before a video projected on the
far wall. My experience produced the
following journal entry:
She has set her spoken word poem to
video, she has placed words and images in dynamic proximity to each
other—sometimes they match, often they don’t.
But the magic comes when they veer off from one another: shifting kaleidoscope not set never exact
transience is what I’m grasping at.
She lifts her arms, clad in a bell-sleeved kimono robe, up and down in
an undulating wave, raising and supplicating the gods, slicing the molecules in
the air, stream-currents zinging into a scratchy 16 millimeter froth. The image blurs. It’s the galaxies of the cosmos,
superimposed.
A little research on Kyger led to an
interesting connection:
Joanne Kyger traveled from Japan to
India in 1962 with her husband, the poet Gary Snyder, where, together with
Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, they met the Dalai Lama.
Her artist statement, from 2005 for
the Foundation of Contemporary Arts in New York includes the following:
“My attention to writing is a daily
practice, which then builds an accumulative narrative of chronology. Which ends up as the story of one’s
life. An historical sense of ‘self’,
breathing and experiencing what is common to every human—the local, the
ordinary, the non-motivated sense of just ‘being’. One is
also aware of the accumulations of lineage of all those writing persons who
have come before and to whom one owes the inheritance of this written moment.”