Recently, poet & pedestrian journalist for poetic activity Feliz Molina at the Huffington Post sought out the amazing Frank Sherlock & myself to speak about Occupy.Together. Please read what we had to say here.
THE POETICS OF THE POSSESSION DANCE
By Debrah Morkun
It is not new to say that poetry is the language of the dead. Many poets who have come before have said just this, and have engaged in practices to summon the dead to let them speak. I have lately been engaging with arts Afro-Caribbean in origin that have been working quite well. Some of these are inspired by Santeria, and some by Allen Kardec, noted to be the first to bring Spiritism to Latin America.
The most essential ritual to bring down the dead is called the “possession dance.” I note that the term “possession,” in our culture, often carries with it negative connotations. Some people want to cast it aside as something unreal – something that cannot be evidenced by practitioners of Biopower, and thus untrue. Others believe that only negative spirits possess; thus, the practice should be avoided. I disagree with both conjectures and argue that to invite the spirits of those who have passed into the body is an amazing way to receive transmissions that can become poems, once crafted & recrafted into images that the mind can see. To rationalize the experiences of dead-speak is short-sighted – to open oneself to the wellsprings of magic is the only way to engage the epiphanies that can cut through the material so pertinent to Capitalist production. Those who believe they are being “ridden” by the Saints or other spirits are generally difficult to control by normative means, and as such, do not have docile useful bodies. Thus, engaging with Spiritist poetic techniques is one of the most resistance-laden practices in the World.
In the Cuban mystical tradition known as Santeria, the possession dance is the most important of all practices. It generally occurs during a ceremony called a “bembe” in which practitioners dance in repetitive movements to summon the Saints (or the “orishas,” one in the same). The dances involve heavy doses of repetition because it is through this that the body enters a state relaxed enough to open for the Saints. Once the dancer is ridden (that is, “mounted” by the spirit), he/she goes into a trance-state & is no longer seen as mortal flesh, but as the Spirit itself. At this point, those unridden at the bembe run over to the Saint to engage him/her with life questions. It is said that the Orishas always answer, but often in tongues that include many languages – often the Yoruba dialect among them. This dancer is possessed by the Saint that has chosen to come down -- & now he/she possesses all knowledge. It is especially important to note that the Saints travel through the head, in the same way that the unconscious is structured like language. The Saints are preserved in the heads of us. The Saints travel by water. They made their way to Cuba suffering in Slave Ships from Yoruba land. They made their way to the U.S. in the heads of many Cuban exilos. The Orishas are an active pantheon, and as such are very accessible. The Saints flourish because they travel in the head.
It is difficult for the average American to communicate with the dead because death is, for the most part, hidden from us. The typical funeral procession does little to satisfy the need for the dead to be fed & honored. In Santeria, you must give ashe to get ashe – the dead will always speak with a little prompting, especially if you offer ebbo. To propitiate the dead, it is essential to consider what they liked while living. A seashell for Aunt Esther, some whiskey for dear old Frank, a pack of Camel Lights for that guy who looked like Grover Cleveland. In some Spiritist circles, there is the practice of keeping a boveda. This is an altar for one’s dead ancestors. This should be kept in a room not normally visited by strangers, for the dead deserve respect.
The act of writing a poem after engaging in possession dancing allows for the dead to speak. In his poem Khurbn, Jerome Rothenberg writes, “it is in the scraps of language / by which the century is read to us the streets the dogs / the faces fading out the eyes receding / they are the dead & want so much to speak / that all the writing in the world will not contain them…” What once was still is. Trace elements linger forever. It is not merely a game of precious memory. I remember writing a poem for my grandmother just after she died. When I finished the poem, I heard a strange music playing. I went downstairs & found that my iPod had turned itself on, and was playing the haunting song “Handwriting” by The Rachels. My Catholic mystic mother always told me that when she sees a cardinal, she knows that the dead are speaking. That she is being visited. Once she told me the ghost of a little girl lived in the backyard of my childhood home. The trace elements linger. It is not merely a game of precious memory. Collect them, collect them, & put them in the poems.
There is an importance in searching for these trace elements, because some of them contain pieces of you that have scattered & need remolding. This is a different kind of encounter with the dead – a moment of eternal recurrence – a pattern of possession dancing that brings the self to light. Most often, though, this involves engaging with a philosophy of history – a Hegelian dinosaur chronotope in which only the most golden sepulchral will be enough to contain the remnants of time gone in the air. In The Maximus Poems, Charles Olson writes, “My problem is how to make you believe / these persons, who lived here then…” In Maximus, Olson constantly refers backwards – to the past of Gloucester’s timeline – to demonstrate Gloucester’s present – which in turns elucidates the continual present. The poem is thus haunted, so to speak, with tons of dead people, the ground work of a Magic Opus. A dead woman plays a harp in the square.
Unfortunately, there is a very rich history in squelching death-awareness. This movement is conspiratorial. If we are aware that one day we will die & think about this often, we will live much different lives. These lives might not benefit the State, but they will benefit the Masses. When this death-awareness-squelch manifests in poetry, a sturdy hegemonic politics of appropriation is revealed – let the dead speak for the dead because they cannot speak at all. Let the poets speak for the poets because other poets are the only ones who understand. Let me categorically sift through the internet backlog of millions and selectively choose & publish it all again. The companies will then assign a grab bag price tag to my book of spliced together internet lines & you will read them regurgitated like vomit. I am uninterested in loan words, which are vomit words.
In this grave consequence – or consequence of the grave – there is a remonstrance – the wellspring of language of the dead – a pure poetic act akin to early sacred theatre – not only speaking of the death of the gods & how this manifests in modern tongue – American corporatese – but in the head of the young virgin who carries the carcasses in her chariot to the underworld – that which must be passed through – to receive the kind of epiphany immediately received when engaging in possession dance. In Khurbn, for instance, Rothenberg writes, “let them account the value of a body (the soul has no account) and let the / living refuse the living unless a price is paid.” In a true moment of resistance, a moment that cuts through like epiphany or ecstasy, the soul, which has no account, or no value, is unpedastaled. To break through, then, as in chora, the invisible must manifest & mount the poet, and from there, death-speak.
Jack Spicer wrote letters to Lorca, or Lorca wrote the letters. Spicer believed in poetry as dead-speak. “The poems are there,” he writes in After Lorca, “the memory not of a vision but of casual friendship with an undramatic ghost who occasionally looked through my eyes & whispered to me…” “This is how we dead men write to each other.”
To engage in the poetic process of possession, or, rather, in the possessive process of poetics – to ignite the possession dance that leads to poems, here are some steps to follow:
~First, announce that you would like to be ridden. Make this known. Say it aloud at least three times a day.
~Create your own boveda. It should be in a room not often visited by strangers. Keep it in a backroom, or hidden in a closet. Leave offerings for your ancestors on this boveda, & tell them weekly to give you good poems.
~Buy some maracas & wear white. All santeras, after making the saint, must wear white for an entire year. This attracts the Saints. It is also noted that Emily Dickinson & Mark Twain, two emissaries of American Literature, wore only white, and obviously received inspiration.
~Ask the dead to enter your head. To do this ritualistically, shave your head & draw symbols on your head that only your ancestors would know. If you don’t want to shave your head, sit for a day with symbols painted on your third eye.
~Pay attention to your dreams, and literally do upon waking what was done in your dreams. The dead speak through dreams, & lead us to places where epiphanies & inspiration can occur.
~Create a repetitive dance that allows for inner-mesmerization. Dance in this fashion until the words come. Until you Chariot. Until the Saints are in your head. Finding a way to engage the maracas in this dance is helpful. Remember that the beat of the maracas should be just as repetitive as the dancing.
~Once the dance is complete, write the poems. The poems will enact the dance.
The Saints travel in the head.
If the poem ends before the possession does, and you wish for a clear head, drink a cold glass of water. If this doesn’t work (if possession persists), wash your head thoroughly.
This essay first appeared in the fantastic Radical Poetics Journal, Sous Les Paves
,2011, edited by the most amazing Micah Robbins. I have a feeling that this journal will go down in poetic & radical political history, so please write to Micah Robbins to have it delivered to your door.
THE AMERICAN DREAM IS AN ABANDONED AMUSEMENT PARK
by Debrah Morkun
This essay appeared originally in the amazing journal Sous Les Paves, December 2010, edited by Micah Robbins. The essay was born from question(s) posed to me by Brenda Iijima, one of the greatest living poets. This is what she asked me:
Debrah, In your present work, HERA CALF, you told me you physically travel to sites that appear in your dreams & then, these encounters & the experiential data you collect become the substance of your poems. How did this process initiate itself for you? How do you think your brain psychically calibrates & entwines you with these particular locations? Do you think of your work as site-specific? Thanks for your amazing poetry!
I don't know if I answered her, but this is what I wrote:
My dreams have always been pure language-inflected balls of light. Only recently have these images of light begun to speak loudly. Usually when they open their prankster mouths, they emit gibberish, a post-Capitalist applause to not living in the Old World anymore. Recently, they have been speaking in terms of cardinal directions & the balls of light look like they are hanging off streetlamps. Sometimes the signs under these streetlamps become visible, & I can clearly read them. Reading is an activity I heard one isn't usually able to do in dreams.
I remember one night when the dream vanished. I was walking through a maze, trying to find the Great Book that laid on the grasses outside the maze. I kept getting lost, coming into contact with an Old Man who had reindeer antlers, saying he would lead me to the Patriach of Poetry. I declined his offer & raced ahead; surely I would find the Great Book eventually. On my own. Without the Patriarch's help.
Once I finally got to the end of the maze, there were several naked people standing outside a blue room carved into a mountain. The eldest one held a book in his hands.
When I opened the book, the maze was replicated on its pages, several atoms splitting & growing into planets, & the sun was a macabre glisten at the end.
Alice Notley, one of the living Great Mothers of poetry, writes, "Insomuch as women dream, they participate in stories every night of their lives." She wrote this in an attempt to squelch the idea that the Woman Poet cannot write an Epic, that this is a Male Form. She writes that earlier women hadn't written epics because they were usually domestic -- kept out of the public sphere where the Epic Stories happened. She writes that even women who live domesticated lives actually have the capacity to participate in daily stories, insofar as dreams present stories.
Now that women are able to make many choices about their lifestyles, they are not so kept from participating in daily narratives of chance. We do not have to wait until dream time to participate in action/adventure/love/despair/sex/voyeurism/conquest/exploration. Thus, I take her statement a bit futher, and say that Insofar as women explore, they drum up earth memories. To find locations to explore that are a bit off the radar can provide the inspiration & suspense of the Epic Form.
Thus, I see my responsibility as a Woman Poet of this new epoch to write in the Epic Form -- to write poems that are not merely echoes of others that have come before -- to not rewrite the Male Epic, but to write a new kind of Epic. One that is inspired by my dreams & the places they can physically take me in the Waking World.
I have had ACTION dreams in which the Muse comes & says, "this way, this way." One time this way lead me to Ohio, to a town just outside of Cleveland, where there is a famous abandoned amusement park once called Chippewa Lake Park. This site is famous among urban explorers. My dreams have initiated a place for me among urban explorers. I am exploring & drumming up Earth Memories. These Earth Memories enter my poems. As I currently live in the United States, these earth memories sometimes sound swaggering pioneer, sometimes Indian, sometimes a bit like a talking animal. I talk to animals like they are my plants, for every sane person talks to her plants.
After the Cherokee Powwow in upstate Pennsylvania (I dreamt I needed to attend it & did), I went walking around Chestnut Hill (which I also did in the dream & thus upon waking). I passed the Old Philadelphia Print Shoppe. In the window of the Shoppe was one Old Print picture of Chief Chippewa. I fell into ecstasy.
I think the dreams come because I practice ecstasy on a regular basis. It is like knowing that there is a new female character at the end of the book of the 20th century emerging, & she is one guided by dreams. In H.D.'s Notes on Thoughts & Vision, she writes, "We must be 'in love' before we can understand the mysteries of vision." I believe this love to be a surrender to the divine, a glimpse into the wilderness that is like a mirage, with sudden bursts of atoms dancing. If I am composed of parts, if I am composed of monads, & these parts & these monads are the compostion of all other things, I must be able to replicate constellations in my mind. With the notion of vertical consciousness the word takes flight, as I am interested in flight-words rather than loan-words.
I want to quote Charles Olson, for he wrote the Hermaphroditic epic. I do believe The Maximus Poems are androgynous, though many might argue this point. In Book II of Maximus, he writes, "while on / Obadiah Bruen's Island, the Algonquins / steeped fly agaric in whortleberry juice, / to drink to see." I believe in a process that leads to a state many would dub hallucinatory -- "to see" -- but these eyes aren't propelled by a whortleberry or drug -- it comes from engaging in the process of the everyday -- the horizontal -- that leads to this ecstatic lens -- the vertical -- where you catch light. I make no demands of the ether -- I carry about my mundane tasks -- the little things -- I fold my washed clothes & place them in dresser drawers -- I walk to the subway -- I deal a deck of cards. It is in these moments that I know I will dream eventually. As Mark Twain says, "the tank fills while you sleep." Often the thoughts also come while you're waiting for the bus on 33rd & Whortleberry.
A DREAM OF PHILADELPHIA & ITS POETICS
by Debrah Morkun
(as I can only speak in terms of dreams)
Philadelphia. A two-river city with jetsam startled along its banks. The new spirit which dominates the poetry of this city is scattered along the Delaware and the Schukyll, scattered on the streets, scattered & fragmented. To illustrate my feelings of poetry in Philadelphia, I will speak in terms of a triad that exists in any poetry of place: 1. The poetry of location; 2. The poetry of community; and 3. The poetry of song.
The Poetry of Location:
We are scattered. The world, we now know, is flat, though for centuries we bought the hysteria of a round world. The world is as flat as we can make it, as we fold the creases of our own personal interiors along subway maps. An orange line and a blue line, a poetry that can run up, and down, vertically and horizontally. In Philadelphia, our poetry is orange and blue, a syncopated coloring of a world drawn with SEPTA chalk.
In Philadelphia, the poetry speaks of neighborhoods. One dotted line on the map that indicates that here a world begins, and there, one ends. We have the poetry of Fishtown, of Queen Village, of University City, of Germantown, of Olney, of Bella Vista, of Cobbs Creek, of Kensington, of Port Richmond, of countless other neighborhoods too long to list. There is a local color of these neighborhoods that finds itself into the poetics of this place.
Our poetry here is dotted with skyscrapers, finite and indifferent, and therefore, the poetry here is finite and indifferent.
To me, Philadelphia was the magical city of my childhood where I first went wild.
But most importantly, the poetry of Philadelphia hangs on the branches of the trees in our city parks. The places where Philadelphians congregate to feel the noise and pulse of a community-city built on the history of a country.
The Poetry of Community:
I moved back to Philadelphia in 2007 with dreams of being a part of the city’s poetic community by creating a space for poets of my generation to grow and collaborate. I knew that community and togetherness was necessary for the powers of poetry to reach complete fruition. I knew that a group of poets could help each other impregnate the soil of particular land if congregated in one urban setting small enough to allow for closeness, yet large enough to offer enough culture, excitement, and inspirational moments. The other requirement was for the city to have cheap rent, as poets can’t create too much if they must sweat to earn enough to pay monthly rent. As I had experienced them, the old mainstays of poetry movement in this country, New York and San Francisco, no longer met this requirement, and they seemed the trodden paths, the bastions of poetry establishment in which one could only participate to be the spoke in the wheel of another person’s dream.
The poetry community of Philadelphia is especially appealing in the fact that its most sacred organizations are grassroots, stemming from the work and dreams of ordinary extraordinary men and women who tirelessly give the gift of their talents and seem indebted to the city for its multitude blessings.
I can speak about the formation of The New Philadelphia Poets. I had moved to Philadelphia sunny-ed from California, with another stint in New York City under my belt. I had begun poetry groups in other cities, and wanted to perfect all that I had learned from these experiences in igniting a group in Philadelphia. I was ready to engage my home city for the first time, armed with the experience of other lands. Engaging with the chance operation techniques of John Cage, I took coin toss walks. Before embarking on these walks, I would pose a question that I wanted my experience on the walks to answer. I would then set upon the journey, walking until I no longer knew where to walk, and then tossing the coin to dictate my direction.
One night, I set out with my coin and engaged the question, “where is poetry in Philadelphia?” I found myself that night in a bar in Northern Liberties named Deuce, which is no longer there. In that bar, I met another poet and he became the first person to join the group that would later be called The New Philadelphia Poets.
The New Philadelphia Poets was a group birthed on chance. A coin toss walk. For that reason, I feel that there is a sense of chance and synchronicity in our poetics. A randomness exemplified by the finale of our Fringe Festival performance, Invisible Keepsakes, in which we scattered pieces of poetry typed on paper around the floor of Isaiah Zagar’s Magic Gardens, picked up lines at random, and read them aloud – only to scatter them on the floor again. This randomness creates a longing in the language. The longing isn’t for order, though often that is necessary.
This randomness is embodied in the visual qualities of Philadelphia. The ecstasy the city’s murals bring to passersby who walk the crooked streets. The visual cues of the semiotic city where street lamps are hung next to store front awnings and the air chokes the fumes of the old factories. This randomness takes its cues from the history of the city, though in a new country, is one of the most ancient of cities.
The New Philadelphia Poets takes as one of our chief missions the desire to create new spaces for contemporary poetry in Philadelphia. I cannot speak for all of my peers & collaborators, but to me contemporary is a term that speaks of freshness and boldness – so we aim to write a poetry that pushes the boundaries of that of which language, written in Philadelphia, is capable.
Now I only wish to see the landscape of Philadelphia being used more fully as we continue to propel our city to the heights of poetic renaissance. The city is highly walk able, danceable, chant able. There are many historical landmarks, and places for people to congregate. I dream of the city of Philadelphia becoming one huge poetic stage, in which poetry leaves the academies, the bars, the bookstores, the coffee shops, and enters the domain of the pedestrian. Poetic carnivals on the streets. Poetry written on the sidewalks. Readings in the parks. Readings outside historical landmarks. Poetry being screamed by poets running, dancing down the streets.
& Now I end with the Poetry of Song…
When the tides of San Francisco feed the peasantry of my idols
I go to Philadelphia
When the night in its weariness brings stars to the floor
I go to Philadelphia
With the roses of New York, and the mist of the Hudson,
I go to Philadelphia
When the perfume of the scarlet trail quickens the state of buffalo,
I go to Philadelphia
With figs in my hands and tobacco leaves blooming,
I go to Philadelphia
A new avalanche, a new time,
I go to Philadelphia
This essay was originally given as a lecture for the Poetic Arts Performance Project's Symposium on the state of poetry in Philadelphia, 2009. To hear me read this lecture aloud, & to hear the lectures & discussions of myself & the other poets who spoke that day (CAConrad, Tamara Oakman, Sherod Smallman & Michelle Myers), visit the link on my MULTIMEDIA page.
