Memoria
2022; State University of New York; Volume: 12; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/phi.2022.0016
ISSN2155-0891
Autores ResumoMemoria Kyle Dacuyan (bio) Acousmatic sound is what we hear without seeing the originating source What is its psychic analogue In the physical spaces of St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery—where The Poetry Project has been situated since 1966—I perceive something radiant and ineffable, residue enduring in some shifting form beyond a veil And still very materially in the soil or the walls of the place Stubbornly the church leans diagonal against Manhattan’s grid, its rose window in the belltower facing a true south, and so at noon a kaleidoscope of pink and rust strikes the altar, then sweeps across the floor, a tide of hours Spring of 2020: the light is what is mostly here, and all it catches—dust and memory, feeling, particles spinning out of reach Someone is tuning a piano for performances that will not happen I am listening with faith We will need all of these octaves of pitch to persevere Even without listeners for this moment, however long the moment is [End Page 147] I am working alone in a corner office of this church, and behind me is a ladder leading to filing cabinets in a crawlspace, an unruly archive of newsletters, journals, flyers from our various ancestors in poetry and performance Thousands of people have shared their work here for more than fifty-five years, many thousands more have listened, and the weight of spirit, the weight of listening continue with a substance that exceeds the verbal Everything we are in is an afterlife of words I miss our co-conspirators, the dancers The Poetry Project came to St. Mark’s in 1966, and in 1974 some of those poets, with their friends, set up a sister arts project, Danspace Poetry and dance feel, to me, such intuitive allies, and so much that has constellated out from this site owes to their duet Before the pandemic, if I was feeling fatigued from speech and correspondence with poets, I would watch the dancers rehearsing in the Sanctuary I have this vision of a useless structure we are nonetheless together bearing, and in this vision, both poetry and dance have no function because they reject the structure in which function is a measure of aspiration The vision is of poetry and dance as articulations of pure instinctual care or pleasure Poetry and dance as divestment In this vision, we are called to the immediate and important pleasure of radicalizing all aspects of human presence on this planet—politically, economically, our health measures and institutions, labor practices, our governments, our justice systems, our practices of consumption, which are always and inevitably ecological I don’t believe or I don’t know how to do this from every place and sphere at once even as the at-once-ness feels urgently necessary But I believe culture is a place where this work can begin or can begin with more conviction to truly change [End Page 148] In the solitude and archipelagoes of this year, I am wondering what do more truly collectivized models of art-making look like How do we abolish structures of nepotism, transactionalism, sexual violence, hierarchy, jealousy, pettiness, which 100 percent shape the ways culture is formed, circulated, and borne on us Why poetry, why dance, how to anarchize culture as a force of entropy within the bigger fabric of human work and relation The units of speech and embodiment we are conditioned to believe must have a function When I watch dance, when I listen to poetry, I am remembering how beautifully the body is an architect of catastrophe, fallible embarrassment, teacher, rude jubilant, congregant of accidents Everything I am, say, imagine, manifest begins from the temporary and limited vessel of the body in space In a dream I am assembling a theory of poetry as dance, dance as poetry, the feeling of intelligence somewhere in my dream body though upon waking the elements disappoint me in their deflation Just an approximation or not even—a remnant There was, I think, something to do with the trinity of abstraction, representation, and literal human material—materiality? matter? No other medium synthesizing these realms as performance does, and of course...
Referência(s)