from the Assistant Director:
When S asked what was my most important possession, she didn't know I was finishing a manuscript about the suicide of the man who gave me my name. The birthday I’d just celebrated was a mystery. She knew nothing about my back injury and how it prevented me from writing by hand. I fall in love for exactly two reasons. Perhaps it is the metaphor, not the measure, that needs retracting.
(The space is already starting without us. How do you wish to begin?)
When I think of home, I think of a person and I don't want to. Or rather, it seems unhealthy and so I try to think of something else. I think of a candle left burning in the bathroom. Instant mashed potatoes and fried okra. The efficiency of wooded spaces. The sweetness that buries itself gradually in the teeth. I think of trampolines everywhere. Inappropriate levels of disclosure and insatiable laughter. I think of shaking what you hold to make it settle. I think of a friction that does not know it is heat.
Cultural geographers study landscape (both the naturally occurring and the culturally organized) and from this they ascertain the values of the people who live there. The woman who writes the column Dear Sugar is from Portland. L wanted her to be from somewhere more gritty, like New Orleans or Detroit, but then she corrected herself and said, We choose to live where we can grow. I believed in the etymological fallacy the entire time I was researching the history of the word gift.
I keep thinking about questions and how they can feel so generative sometimes. But then how they can infringe on what was making itself known. There are 6.5 million sets of lungs in Arizona and, of those, 123 will stop working today and 246 will be born. How the subjunctive is embedded in the declarative. It’s an excruciating prayer, this reciprocity. M doesn’t need a miracle, he just needs one.
(Here. Here. How could I not be here?)
Henrietta Lacks didn’t donate her cells; they were taken. The cancer that killed her was so aggressive that those same cells have been studied for the last 60 years. They’ve been used in research that led to a polio vaccine and they’ve made possible all kinds of advances in medicine from headaches to HIV. Neither her children nor her grandchildren have health insurance. The doctors who performed her autopsy said that when they opened her abdomen, she looked as if she had been filled with pearls.
(We are unfixed. We cannot undo what we know.)
When my body hurt so much it stopped making sense to me. Or, rather, it stopped allowing me to make the same sense I had made in the world, I had no choice but to surrender. Had to lie in sudden stillness and watch. I don’t consider this courage. If I accept that the body I live in is home. I’m done with hope. (You were never not in my awareness.) What I’m moving in is trust.
(I recognize this as a place. The body is a place to say yes.)
- TC Tolbert, Assistant Director
Community Connections
POG Poetry Reading
Saturday, February 18, 2012, 7pm,
The Drawing Studio, 33 S. 6th Ave, Tucson.
featuring Jamison Crabtree & Myung Mi Kim!
$5 general admission
********
UA Poetry Center Alumni Reading
David Rivard
Thursday, Jan 19 at 7pm
free
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What's the Word?
FUNDRAISER
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WORKSHOPS
2/20-4/16: Counterfeiting: A Craft Seminar and Writing Laboratory w/Kristi Maxwell and Michael Rerick
more info...
4/3-5/8:The Art & Craft of Telling Personal Stories
w/ Penelope Starr
more info...
4/23-5/14:Documentary Poetry: a writing workshop
w/Brandon Shimoda
more info...
5/11-5/13: Short Prose Forms: a writing weekend w/Rebecca Brown
more info...
EVENTS
2/3: WIP UA MFA Student Reading Series
more info...
2/10: I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women(this reading is at the UA Poetry Center)
more info...
2/15: Edge Reading Series w/Sam Ace, Sama Alshaibi, and Mark Lee
more info...
2/21: Trickhouse Live:
An Integrative Arts and Performance Series
w/Khara Ellasante, Ernesto Somoza, and Rae Strozzo
more info...
2/24: Curiosity Symposium: on the topic of Self-portrait
more info...
ONGOING
Trickhouse Live: An Integrative Arts and Performance Series
more info...
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