Cass Eddington
“Auricle -- desk and interactive installation piece made for the studio Burning Bridge at Art Farm, September 2021 -- with co-collaborators: Peach, Z, Jenny, Grace, Ed, Cindy, Rae, Hannah, Mitchell, Liza, Natalie, Leslie, Olivia & Simone, Phoebe, Walker, Josh, Sam, and Ed.”
Readings
A work of theory or criticism
Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom, (Haymarket Books, 2021)
Chavez’s book traveled with me for quite a while before I read it – the perpetual process of making space for an evolving pedagogy while also teaching to support oneself. I wish I had read it much sooner. Chavez provides strategies based on her own experience as a Chicana writer who has navigated institutional spaces in the MFA and as an educator: messiness as a method to escape self-doubt and repetition as a method for lowering the stakes of creation (and the accompanying anxiety). As Chavez illustrates, most marginalized writers experience a demand for perfection in educational spaces that is actually a reflection of white dominance, and the (invisible) resources, encouragement, and support that comes with it. She interrogates the primary focus on the reader’s experience as an imperative to please resulting from a historic need for self-preservation in settler-colonialist culture. While giving me access to much needed resources, at times institutional spaces reinforced self-limiting behaviors learned from the Mormon religion I was raised in. My need for experiential knowledge also seemed a detriment to the life of a writer and scholar I saw modeled in institutional spaces. Chavez argues that workshop participants “need to exert energy in order to access authority.” She provides strategies for bringing the body back into the creative writing process, emphasizing that writing is ultimately “a relationship with the self.” Chavez’s book provides introductions to other invaluable resources for decolonizing and decentered pedagogical approaches to the creative writing classroom, including Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, and bell hooks’s Teaching Community and Teaching to Transgress. It’s a great companion to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People and Mark Nowak’s Social Poetics for those looking to create models outside of higher ed, too.
A book that made you feel // a work of fiction
Robert Glück, Margery Kempe, (High Risk Books, 1994; reissued New York Review Books, 2020)
Intertwining his own pained narrative of a relationship with a younger lover and that of 15th-century visionary Margery Kempe – an illiterate woman who claimed to have a love affair with Jesus and who wrote the first autobiography – Glück’s novel makes tangible what obsession, belief, and desire make possible: the act of writing and thereby imagining alternatives. Glück writes of Kempe, “Like any fanatic, she needed to show the world what she had become.” Her fanaticism for achieving sainthood and erotic consummation with Jesus mirrors that of Glück’s impossible (because unrequited) love for his lover L. No stranger to fanaticism (cf. a settler-colonialist pioneer ancestry based in narratives of martyrdom and self-abnegation), I recognize it in writing poetry, in withholding my labor from the adjunctification I am too familiar with, in withdrawing my body from cis-heteronormative expectations. Acts of rewriting and forms of refusal require excessive enthusiasm, a necessary dumb faith in order to imagine alternatives. Glück’s descriptions alone make it worth reading. (e.g. Glück researched when specific birds would visit specific regions, and their calls, so that sound guides us through Margery’s at-turns-ascetic-and-debauched spiritual journey.) A part of the New Narrative movement, Glück’s writing continues to make space within literature for a queer erotics. I learn from writers through their lives and their writing – both being a part of the “Work.” I love what Glück says about leading workshops in a 2020 interview with Mairead Case I recently read in LARB: “Leading a workshop is an act of love in the form of attention.” The devotion of attention present in his living is created for readers on the page.
A work of art/performance/film/album/piece of music/etc.
Agnes Varda, Vagabond (1985)
I teach a class for developing one’s own praxis called Gleaning, which takes inspiration from Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I. That film and those classes have taught me something essential about daily survival and acts of making. Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond, following the aimless wandering of female drifter Mona (previously Simone) in what feels like a violent disregard for the self in search of the self, feels much more personal. Like a feral animal, Mona takes what she needs to survive, avoiding the resources and accompanying sociality that would deprive her of the freedom she seeks. Blowing snot into her hand, chewing with an open mouth and never a “thank you” for the food she is given, Mona becomes progressively filthier as the movie progresses. She causes viewers to question the markets of desirability and exchange, making their transactional logics visible. (“You don’t give rides for free?” she asks when a driver who picks her up makes a suggestive comment.) Mona is a lens through which other characters project their desires, a specimen for study. For female characters, she represents possibility; they envy her freedom. For male characters, she is a scapegoat for accusations. If they do not take advantage of her, they are disgusted by her. (“You scare me because you revolt me,” the agronomist says to her.) She is the archetype of the woman made perpetual child in structures that deny her freedom, so that, once claimed, it appears wild and petulant. In this position of dependence, she doesn’t know how to cultivate something that is her own. “There are so many big houses. So many rooms,” Mona says with wonder, dreaming of occupying homes as a groundskeeper while the owners are away. Ultimately, she relies on others to get by, and her isolation leads to her death. The refusal to participate in structures that are diminishing and the truth that we, in fact, need each other to survive and thrive are two concerns that this film makes me reconsider in new light each time I watch it.
A book you like to teach
Cecilia Vicuña, Spit Temple (trans. Rosa Alcalá, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012)
Regardless of the genres writers are working within, Vicuña’s writing and performances encourage us to view experience as both teacher and knowledge: what can we learn about our relationship with meaning-making through the material of our lives? Through our responses to it? In “Performing Memory: An Autobiography” she describes painting as a child as a kind of writing, as “speaking to the signs,” an undifferentiated and gestural language across mediums. Elsewhere she describes the creative resistance necessary to Western rationalism when she says, “Not understanding opened the door to other forms of imagining.” So often writers do not feel licensed to expression. To that anxiety, I offer Vicuña’s framework: “The desire to say what I saw made me a speaker.” Vicuña’s precarios, temporary art made of litter, that which is “exposed to the elements,” prompt creative revelations found through the refuse that surrounds us. In my own creative process and resulting pedagogy, her work has encouraged self-made rituals and durational acts toward meaning-making, an embodied communion with the material world toward self-sovereignty. She reminds us that beyond questions of current aesthetic trends and publishing politics, “A poem only becomes poetry when its structure is made not of words but forces.”
Writings
excerpted from TRANSIT (Spiral Editions, 2023)
PRE-EXISTENCE
defending, devouring
protecting, pleasing – a whore
for attention the phrase goes
as in methods of survival, no longer
fawning: I’m not here
so you will like me
+
I wouldn’t make my “I” visible
pilfered victuals, living
in darkness stunted and weary
and if thy right “I” offends thee
+
we were taught our form eternal
that we received his countenance, bright child
our own activity
but I can’t touch
his glimmering train
won’t wash his feet with tears
that I was always erring
+
I’m the quiet cipher, the engraver
wielding ink and needle in lamplight
composing in the querent’s skin
the body of a ruminant, my own mind
turning itself over and over in the folds
the quire waiting for its holes
I pierce to begin:
the singer waiting for the choir
the choir waiting for the chorus
for the performance to come together
+
we leave the valley to learn fault lines
trace relief in unknown topography
under thick canopy, this is no passion play
no passing trend
we’re here to reconfigure the bounds
within the book – the duration
of the feeling in the action I record
+
the body yaws between another
and its own haptic comedown
kittens still blind and deaf, searching for a teat
even when they still, squirming at the edges
an arm, a leg, the buttocks, the flesh and blood
we hold, awakening from each new terror
like tight curves of the mountain passes
we’re each other
’s fear and safety, this longing, perennial
yet another fire burning its excess into the atmosphere
I preferred to be my own burning bush
TRANSIT
cf. Agnes Varda’s Vagabond, physical belonging
I discarded everything
I didn’t need
to make myself
recognizable
to myself, a distillation
beyond accretion, our efforts make
something stable yet changeable
in my dream there were rooms for us all
the furniture distributed as needed
in my father’s house are many mansions
let’s squat ‘til they’re ours
we live here now, I say
laying my dog’s bed down on a new floor
a threshold crossed, I talk to myself
through her, I make a home
of my body – Not a place
but an irrevocable condition Baldwin called it
each step a severing that can’t be restored
what has changed remains
unrecognizable until a vernal
inflorescence, a vocable
I caressed until its sound
unfolded, my attention
arrested
my appetite, whet
I keep my knife with me
my pots and pans remain in boxes
their patina collecting dust
are we wandering or withering?
we are revolting
[THE CEREMONY DOESN’T END]
the ceremony doesn’t end
I heat the water to wash the wound
I hear the spirit in my guts, shitting
not quite daily, doubt is hungry
for love, sexting
screenshots of cabin porn
why would I want somebody in my house
an identification of desire that saddened me
but I wanted to draw love toward me
not clinging from fear like we keep our jobs
for the insurance
he stayed, afraid there was not enough
love
enough to eat, everything I ate, scraped
from the bottom of the pan
the word girl
like a bird, named, captured, and trussed
roasted with root
vegetables and alliums
representation: a small loop of digestion
we are kept by what feeds us
[IT TAKES ME A WHILE TO SEE THE WOUND]
it takes me a while to see the wound
how long do you wait before seeking care?
I clean the debris while sullying the codified order
iodine wash with a wet washcloth
all that was needed
my agenda: not dying
without loving the body
for what it might become, imagine
what we might do, at eighteen my friend
and I nearly whispering, filling each other
with promise
parking for free in the seminary parking lot
we did not attend, we portent the most illicit
joy, ourselves, we want justice
for all
don’t you see, you have been searching
your audience is waiting
Globeville, fall 2022 -- One of many temporary makeshift desks I made for myself while I was living itinerantly for a year plus.
Fruita, spring and summer 2022
Arkansas holler, fall 2021
Denver, 2023
Cass Eddington is a poet, teacher, and editor. They curate vocationalpoetics.com -- an accessible space for creative autonomy and radical communion. On the rightful territory of the Cheyenne, Ute, Arapaho, and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples (so-called Denver, Colorado), they live with their dog Jupiter and teach at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. A PhD candidate in the University of Denver’s Creative Literary Arts Program, they hold an M.F.A. in Poetry from Colorado State University where they also teach for CSU Online's Creative Writing Minor. They are the author of VERNAL HURT (Magnificent Field) and TRANSIT (Spiral Editions) with recent work found in Annulet, Deluge, and DREGINALD.