Kelly Clare
This room doesn’t exist anymore, but for some very lucky years, this room was called The Space, in Galesburg, IL. My former professor and friend Monica Berlin opened the doors on weekends, sometimes weekdays, with the promise of quiet company and coffee. When I’m reading or writing, I pretend that I’m here. Everywhere else feels temporary.
Readings
A work of theory or criticism
Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image” (e-flux, no. 10, Nov. 2009)
Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” was revelatory for me both as a writer and an artist. At the end of the essay, she writes about the “poor image,” which is to say: the copy, the thumbnail, the compressed file.
“One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then—please, anybody—show me this real thing. The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities.”
Although Steyerl is mostly speaking about film and cinema, I’m interested in applying the idea of the “poor image” to all media, especially visual poetry. Instead of a visual poetics built around refinement and presentation, why not an approach focused on the interwoven reality of where the language comes from—and what sticks, or what cannot be unstuck.
It’s tempting to apply Steyerl just to digital media, but I think the poor image has been around forever. I’ve been experiencing a very lengthy thought that connects Steyerl’s idea of work that is “about its own real conditions of existence” to the collaged poems of Susan Howe. Howe’s xeroxed words are so close together they’re almost illegible.
These compositions are not necessarily acts of erasure—the poems don’t feel as if they’re cut away, airy with gaping holes. Rather, they enact a synaptic, metonymic compression: indexes, quotes, ledgers, letters, and notes all combine, rubbing shoulders. Her scrappy collaged poems function like the visual strata of the historical landscape she is bringing forth. She must have those torn words on the paper itself, the old lead type, the wear and tear.
We’ve always had ephemeral media not meant to last but simply to move, and this effort toward motion must appear in any resulting poetic response. As a writer, reader, and editor, I want a visual poetry that celebrates those “fractured and flexible temporalities.”
A visual book/poem
Jen Bervin, Silk Poems (Nightboat Books 2017 and multimedia installation MASS MoCA 2016)
In thinking about materiality, I remembered the less-noticed aspect of Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems. Working with Silklab at Tufts University, she created a silk biosensor embedded with a version of the poem printed in nanoscale. This tiny, silk poem could then be implanted under the skin, monitoring (for example) the level of glucose in someone’s bloodstream.
Unlike the continuous wound of a tattoo, silk is compatible with body tissue; even the sensitive human brain accepts the material. This is another type of motion, another type of materiality essential to the work itself—poem as sensor, poem as internal ode, poem as spool under skin. The paper book feels like a pale transcript to me. I would prefer the microscope.
Work like this iteration of Silk Poems reminds me of how far I can push a poetic practice, where language can reside. At various points, I’ve made edible poems (mostly pancakes), interested in how the digested pancake letter “L” becomes part of the human body on a molecular level. Even when I’m writing “page poems” I try to remember it’s a choice. If the poem isn’t a biosensor, is ink instead, why is it living that way?
A work of art/performance/film/album/piece of music/etc.
Agnès Varda, untitled performance and gallery installation Patatutopia (Venice Biennale 2003), The Beaches of Agnès (2008), The Gleaners and I (2000), Daguerréotypes (1976),
As someone who teaches art and writes poems, the barrier between the two sometimes gets a little slippery (and arbitrary) for me! One of my favorite video clips of all time is of Agnès Varda, dressed as a potato, ushering people into the gallery of potato hearts at the Venice Biennale (which can be found in The Beaches of Agnès). I love her documentary-ish, essayistic films like The Gleaners and I and Daguerréotypes.
Varda, for me, is what happens when playfulness is not simply an affect, but instead is a practice built on fascination turned excavation. She’s just so earnest. She’s just so interested. She’s standing in a pile of gleaned misshapen potatoes, plunking each one in her bucket. She persuades a lawyer to stand in a field of decaying cabbages explaining the legalities of gleaning. She walks as far down the street as the extension cord allows to interview her neighborhood butcher, her pharmacist, her tailor—not about their work, but their loves and dreams. She fills a beach with mirrors, frames of floating surf, completely undoing the horizon line.
I think Varda’s non-linear pushing past the initial flashy joy, past the “fun fact”-ness of a new idea, to land somewhere more complicated, more human, is something I aspire to. Go watch her work.
The first poem you remember loving (and how you feel about it now)
Mary Ruefle, “Kiss of the Sun” (from Indeed I Was Pleased with the World, Carnegie Mellon Press, 2007)
It almost felt too vulnerable to write this response—some precious thing are better kept close to your chest, you know?—but in my first undergraduate poetry class at Knox College, I was introduced to “Kiss of the Sun” by Mary Ruefle. I loved this poem. It made me cry. I still love this poem. It still makes me cry.
The careful procedure of “Kiss of the Sun” reminds me of the plans that my parents and my tiny, young self would make in case of fire or flood or mudslide or tsunami. “We will meet at the birdbath out in the yard.” Or: “We will get out of the house and find each other next to this hydrant—this one, do you see it?” Something about the simple gestures in the face of disaster, the attempts to locate one another (like Muriel Rukeyser’s “signals across vast distances” in “Poem”) give me comfort.
As a consummate planner, I struggle not to spend all my time planning what to do when the power grid ultimately fails, or how I will find my loved ones after disaster strikes. It’s hard not to collapse inward while still looking at the news around me. Poems like “Kiss of the Sun” and books like Inger Christensen’s alphabet (editor’s note cf. Dan Beachy-Quick Nov. 2021 issue) have allowed me to combat this type of collapse, steered how I’ve built my omnivorous practice both within and beyond language. In fact, my final artist statement when I graduated from college is almost directly modeled from “Kiss of the Sun”:
“In case the infrastructure of cellphones and grocery store bouquets crumble, and the apocalypse we often think of as imminent finally takes place, every art supply store a collapsed shell, I’ve taken to looking at my side tables, my socks, my household plants, my shelving units, and thinking of them as materials, with material possibility, such that if the world becomes a small collapsed bundle in which I cannot buy more fluorescent paint, I can take a comfort in knowing the detritus, whatever I can gather, is a thing that can be made into other things.”
This poem is also the source of a lifelong love for oranges and all citrus in my art practice. I’ve put oranges on a 12-foot banner. I’ve piled them up in the gallery. I’ve bought John McPhee’s Oranges as a gift for others multiple times. My friend Lorelei D’Andriole and I smashed lemons with hammers and invited others to do the same. People have asked me to explain this citrus cosmology of mine, and it’s been hard to translate my deep affection.
For me, the orange, its sharp sweet sting, glowing almost neon, is optimistic. I also am thinking now of my friend and mentor Monica Berlin. How she would walk around The Space, a writing and literary center she founded in downtown Galesburg, IL, with a clementine in hand—she always somehow had an unending supply. On rare occasions she would toss the clementine in the air. Then, she’d look over at me. And I’d look back. And that was it. We’d go back to our work, our worries, our to-do lists. The Space is gone now. As of November 4th of this difficult year, so is Monica Berlin. This love for oranges has always been in the face of loss, but now more than ever.
Writings
from “NEARLY EARLY ARTLY NEVER”
Kelly Clare is an artist and poet based in Western Massachusetts. Her visual and literary work appears and is forthcoming in FENCE, Second Factory, Prelude, Tagvverk, and New Delta Review. She received an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Iowa, and before that attended Knox College. She is an Editor at Ghost Proposal and was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2019.