Countless Schemes
This newsletter, entitled “Countless Schemes,” is a lyric essay, including various excerpts from other writers and artists, exploring grief, numbers, health, and hope. Toward the end are updates
Newsletter: Countless Schemes
I’ve lost count. I’ve been looking for my numbers. I see figures adding up all the time but I can’t seem to find our hours. I’m out of touch with the digits left, with the right digits. What precisely is the engine of my search and how much exactly does it all cost? I desire the exhaustive without the exhaustion.
How many earlier versions have existed before what you see now?
I’ve had so much to say but have been…
afraid? exhausted? overwhelmed? avoidant? angry? mad? bad? sad? sick? concerned? preoccupied? high? sober? tired? anxious? depressed? pressed? compressed? compunctured? punctured?
…
I’ve had so much to say but have been… punctured…
We should learn to breathe again
Before we suffocate
All this talk but even then
We excommunicate
…
There's nothing to say
Your eyes said it all
I'm not looking away
Your eyes hold everything, everything
–from “Everything Everything” by Lianne La Havas. I started to hum, then sing this song while writing this piece.
Not sure the relevancy, only certain of the feeling of synchronicity.
“Countless Schemes” by Eve Ewing
https://therumpus.net/2022/07/07/rumpus-original-poetry-three-poems-by-eve-l-ewing/
From Eve Ewing’s poetry collection “1919” (Haymarket Books, 2019)
Countless schemes have been proposed for solving or dismissing this problem, most of them impracticable or impossible. Of this class are such proposals as: (1) the deportation of 12,000,000 Negroes to Africa; (2) the establishment of a separate Negro state in the United States; (3) complete separation and segregation from the whites and the establishment of a caste system or peasant class; and (4) hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race. (The Negro in Chicago, xxiii)
1
you don’t have enough boats
we came here head to toe
spoiling like old meat
in every liquid thing a body can make
the bravest gone to Yemaya
and now we are millions
and now we demand to sit upright
and so you don’t have enough boats
2
you would give us the most wretched desert,
not the desert of our fathers where god is watching
and manna comes down like the snow.
you would give us a desert of sorrows and nothing.
you would give us the dream
where you want only to yell and no noise comes
you would give us all that is barren
you would give our children sand to eat
3
we been had that
4
you said
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro race
hope for a solution through the dying out of the Negro
hope for a solution through the dying out
you said hope for the Negro dying
hope through the dying
hope for the dying out
the solution dying
you said dying. the Negro
the Negro dying
the Negro hope
hope the Negro
you said hope for dying
hope dying
dying
dying
you said hope
This poem strikes so many notes. It crushes me to see this text, these schemes that repeat countlessly throughout history, countlessly forced upon so many peoples throughout time, place, and space.
“you said hope for dying / hope dying / dying / dying / you said hope”
In some sense, there is a hope that remains: the poem ending in hope, the poem dying in hope, hope as the final word, the poem made in part in hope. But there is also a skepticism about the hope– that the “you” said it and not a “me”, that the hope is dying, that the hope is for dying, that hope is weaponized toward the dying.
Whatever hope remains, if it is useful, is a hope that engages directly with text, with history, with evidence, with study. Whatever hope remains, if it is useful, is a crafted hope soaked in pessimism.
“we been had that”
So much remains. So many remains. Whatever hope that remains. Whatever we remain.
The poem remains, remains useful, remains hopeful, remains pessimistic, remains dying.
“Note 208
In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes that poetry is ‘the skeleton architecture of our lives… It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.’
We predicate our hopes and dreams.
The grammar of a possible life made in the sounding of it. The work of words– opening into possibility.”
–from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
“My people know how to survive. We will survive despite this world.”
Bisan’s video today was of Khan Younis, Gaza, Palestine, a beautiful city. It is now a beautiful camp. Bisan looks beautiful as she smiles into the camera. It is a beautiful morning to be alive. There is a beautiful school made out of a large tent. Beautiful volunteers gather beautiful children in a beautiful group to exercise. Later they will tell beautiful stories because beauty is something we can remember.
Some of these beautiful people still carry keys to their old beautiful homes toward one day making a beautiful return.
There is nothing beautiful about genocide. There is nothing beautiful about apartheid. There is nothing beautiful about famine. There is nothing beautiful about thirst. There is nothing beautiful about the situation and conditions.
And yet, so much beauty is made. And I see it. I feel it. I must feel it. It’s beautiful.
We remember, fondly, beautifully. We know how to remember, despite all the erasure. We remember everything ugly and make it beautiful despite this world.
“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating and then representing beauty is what humans do. With or without authorities telling us what it is, I think it would exist in any case.
The startle and the wonder of being in this place. This overwhelming beauty—some of it is natural, some of it is man-made, some of it is casual, some of it is a mere glance—is an absolute necessity. I don’t think we can do without it any more than we can do without dreams or oxygen.”
–Toni Morrison, from an interview with Toni Morrison conducted by Claudia Brodsky Lacour in Morrison’s office at Princeton University sometime in 1992, audio shared in 2019 October 23, The Paris Review Podcast, Episode 13.
“Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.”
—Saidiya Hartman
Beauty is a method:
reading in the windowsill
running after the police
a list on a slip of paper in a book
the arrangement of pins in cloth
the ability to make firewood out of newspaper
–from “Beauty Is A Method” by Christina Sharpe
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-is-a-method/
“Note 138
In response to a question about his approach to beauty in his work, the artist Glenn Ligon replies:
I agree that the question of beauty is a charged one for people of color. Beauty is a force that is seemingly outside of culture– which in the end it very well may be– but the discussion around beauty is often used as a way to preempt any debates about exclusion or marginality or privilege or any topics that had some currency in the art world of the late eighties and early nineties. Now it’s like “just show up for the banquet, bring a gift for the host, and shut up.” I think it’s fine for artists to bring flowers, and I love flowers as much as the next person, but sometimes you have to hold your flowers like a weapon.
With beauty, something is always at stake.”
–from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe.
“The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine”
despite the actions of the few,
and excessive retaliation,
drones,
planes,
bombs,
tanks,
rubble,
buildings demolished,
vanished houses and neighborhoods,
hospitals targeted,
U.N. shelters disrespected,
murder,
death,
deliberate killing of noncombatants,
babies buried alive,
amputations,
hunger and political starvation,
lack of or no water,
strategic sanitation,
daily terror,
and terrorized daily,
military maneuvering,
moving here and there,
to return back again to nowhere,
trauma with all its manifestations,
international parleys and hesitation,
defiance to the realization of two nations,
global aid thwarted,
global amnesia,
siblings and relatives gone forever,
parental worries —
in the face of apex arrogance
and ethnic cleansing by any definition...
still your laughter can be heard
and somehow you are able to smile
O resilient Children of Palestine!
–by Marcellus "Khaliifah" Williams, executed by the state of Missouri
“What is happening already happened and will happen again.” (from “Life of the Mind” in MISEDUCATION)
But this is not an inevitability. As foregone and foreseen as things seem, nothing is inevitable.
These are choices. Choices are being made every day. We make choices. Choices do have consequences, and as a result, we respond.
We are always responding. We are made responsible or made to suffer consequences. We are made culpable and are consequently made to suffer.
A fear I’ve held since 2020 finally happened: My family and I got COVID back in mid August. The hypothesis is that we contracted it at my Great-Uncle’s funeral. Nobody was masked in the church. I had my mask in my pocket. I brought extra masks for my mom and my grandma, too. But none of us put them on.
I went to a poetry event the next day but felt off. There I performed unmasked. Only one person at that event was masked. I realized during that event, feeling the weight of my fatigue, that I was getting sick. And sure enough, the next morning I took at COVID test and got my first positive. The next morning the rest of the house felt symptoms as well. I heard about attendees of the poetry event also noting they got COVID. I felt so sick in so many ways, that I bore some culpability for the spread.
I felt so stupid for not masking, so complacent. I very much blamed myself– something I’m sure the government loves as they further distance themselves from any culpability aside from occasionally offering free expired test kits.
I always carry a mask on me and I always wear it on public transportation (my main mode of transportation), but I got more lax about wearing it on most social occasions. I still even feel pressured to demask when I read poems: sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. But since getting COVID I am back to being more strict about my masking. I find that I am often the only person masked in rooms again, and that as a result, people are less likely to talk to me. They may or may not even recognize who I am (though I often find that a ridiculous excuse). This has been the case for years now.
Worse, the questioning of the effects of COVID after. Since having COVID, a cough remains for all of us, mucus remains. For me, a lingering pain in my throat, an itchiness in the ear, a presence in the sinuses, moments of particular notice of my heartbeat.
Gratefully, my vitals are normal. I’ve been to the hospital and doctor’s offices more times in 2024 than I have in my whole life, so thankfully there have been many recent tests that give me some peace of mind as much as they stir with anxious questions.
But one thing I’ve recently noticed in the past 3 weeks that I have not noticed prior: someone, usually just one person, but someone, after seeing me masked, will decide to mask up as well. I’ve seen it at events, on the bus, at my recent poetry readings. It’s only ever one person but it still feels meaningful to me. And it has happened every time at each event I’ve read at.
A hope remains, even if it is a crafted hope soaked in pessimism.
“Everyone is welcome in the kingdom of the disabled.”
I encountered this line in a book titled Black Madness : Mad Blackness by Therí A. Pickens. I love this book for so many reasons and I highly recommend everyone read this text. It is a book that highlights the intersections of Black studies and disability studies, and each section begins with epigraphs of poetry. It is a book with lines that have lyric-lingering, and indeed, Pickens is, of course, a brilliant poet (here is a zoom reading featuring Pickens reading her poetry and engaging in conversation with Kiese Laymon).
Many lines in her work stay with me. That line in her work stays with me. That line welcomes me in. I stay. The kingdom welcomes me in. How long does a kingdom last? Here and now, for however longer, I’ll stay.
“These detonated explosions of hand-held devices maim on several levels: bodily, as events of mass impairment that will likely lead to hundreds of permanent disabilities, some of them preventable with proper medical care, which may not be available (please note I use the term disability loosely, as it invokes a liberal rights apparatus that Palestinians — and now, perhaps, the Lebanese — cannot avail themselves of); infrastructurally, as medical facilities are pushed beyond capacity, overwhelmed with injured patients needing emergency care at exactly the same moment, an impossible scene of treatment; psychically, as people in Lebanon walk in fear and terror of the next event, and a global audience ponders how else and where else such tactics might be used; and communally, as a short-circuiting of communication through social media and messaging platforms render people cut off from local and diasporic connections, isolated in their terror.
The simultaneity of the explosions, yet dispersal of the injuries, seems significant in a spatio-temporal sense: a kind of distributed, spatially diffuse massacre.
I always understood the "right to maim" as broadly relevant to any context where "not-killing" is proffered as a "humane" alternative to contain and control bodies — in effect authorizing less harm vis-à-vis killing, but a greater, ever-expanding scope of violence. We see this with the logic of non-lethal weapons, which are narrated as instruments that avoid mass killing — but in fact therefore allow greater usage of these weapons to harm, to debilitate, to maim. During the George Floyd protests we saw a proliferation of "crowd control weapons" (CCWs) used to attack protesters, with police forces shooting rubber bullets into protestors’ eyes (in France, the U.S., Chile, and many other locations; there is also long-standing practice of security forces shooting pellets at the eyes of people in Kashmir). The right to maim is by no means tethered to Israel, even as Israel might be an exemplar of its praxis.
I agree that the framework of liberal humanitarianism is not needed as cover for Israel's heinous acts of violence in this instance, nor in the genocide on Gaza. Instead, I think the right to maim is functioning as South African Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi explained, in the testimony he delivered at the International Court of Justice hearings in January, where he stated that Israel will maim “what it cannot destroy.” In prior iterations the “cannot” was about the restraint of force or the appearance of disproportionate force. But now the “cannot,” both in Gaza and Lebanon, appear to be about logistical constraints; and in that sense, it might be perhaps only a marker of time (“we cannot yet”). The recent horrific attacks on southern Lebanon and in Beirut, killing hundreds of people, indicate that the right to maim and the right to kill are no longer in a supplementary relation — one modulating or covering for the other — but rather, both are explicitly enacted as strategies of violent decimation.
In instances past, maiming was a tactic to minimize death — placating global actors, while nevertheless creating huge harm through mass impairment. The tactic was explicit at times (during the first intifada) and covert at other times (the number of injured in Israel’s 2014 Gaza War, for example, was rarely noted, as there was so much grief about the number of dead). In this case I think the nature of the spectacle — which involves, as you note, the fetishization of dismembered body parts — is crucial, because it is tutoring international audiences in the value hierarchy between Israeli and Palestinian and Lebanese bodies. It appears akin to the mass injuries sustained during the 2018–2020 Great March of Return, during which western mainstream media routinely printed images of rows of Palestinian men with amputated legs, in wheelchairs, and bandaged and on crutches. Through this spectacle, the amputated limb had become a signature injury, a carceral assemblage of the “humanitarian” use of maiming, the media focus on disaster capitalism, and the tactical attempt to contain resistance. Signature injuries are, to some extent, biopolitically preordained: a particular injury becomes what a certain body is known for, what it is expected to receive and assimilate, even before it happens to the body.
I feel that what is being normalized is the mass impairment, through the most horrifying dismemberment of body parts, of Palestinian and now Lebanese bodies, as the value of these bodies, as what these bodies deserve and are destined for. In that sense, the humanitarian rationale is no longer needed — only the collective witnessing, tutoring, absorption, and sanctioning of a global audience that is only too happy to have their racist anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian world views confirmed. It is as if to say: if these bodies are to remain alive, they must only be alive as mutilated.”
–Jasbir Puar on the Pager Attacks and the Right to Maim, Published on 24 September 2024
https://thepublicsource.org/blog/lebanon-front/jasbir-puar-right-maim
As disaster after disaster after disaster folds and unfolds and folds and unfolds, there are the lives taken and the lives that remain.
And as the lives lost remain forever altared, the lives that remain remain forever altered.
Health is a word always on my mind…
always as questions… as always questioning… as always… as all ways…
as a year approaches of the effects and aftermath of openly aired genocides…
as a year approaches of my grandmother’s cancer discovery…
as a year of compiling questions about my own gut-health still looming as various gut feelings…
as many years later and toward pandemics, as many years later and toward mass shootings, as many years later and toward police shootings, as many years later and toward fires, as many years later and toward spills, as many years later and toward collisions, as many years later and toward explosions, as many years later and toward floods…
Healthy is a word I dislike. How can we even know for sure? In such a sick world, who can really be healthy?
Heal is a word I’m not sure about. It means something different than we think. There is the way I want to heal, and the ways that I do, and the ways that I don’t. Sometimes we do our best and sometimes we don’t– sometimes we know and sometimes we don’t. How can we even know for sure?
But I’ve seen wounds close. I’ve seen remission accomplished. I’ve seen seeds burst and grow.
Another poem I’d like to share– my poem “Countless”. It is a poem dedicated toward all the lives lost and lost.
Lives lost and lost. Lives lost and lost…
Some context about the poem before I share it:
In late May and early June of 2023, I had the incredible opportunity to attend my first writing residency at Firefly Farms hosted by Sundress Academy for the Arts. During my time I read a lot, [surprisingly because I imagined it would be a more solitary affair] met a bunch of cool people who also happened to all be talented writers, explored the nature of the land, took care of the animals on the farm (the dog, the sheep, the chickens and roosters, the ducks, and new little ducklings and chicks), and wrote some poems- maybe 10 or so total, with maybe 6 being poems that I liked. One of those poems was about waking up one morning to find that the 3 baby chicks were dead.
In my American life as a sub/urban middle class person in Colorado, death is something our culture distances us from. Wildlife is pushed out of our human zones for the most part. Even the squirrels and birds and insects appear more as nuisances than neighbors. I lived in a house bought by my parents, with a lawn and a backyard– more and more I’m in awe of this blessing and privilege. We have a garden now but we didn’t always. There used to be frogs that would somehow end up in the window wells of the basement. There used to be horses across the street from my house, across the street from my elementary school that I used to walk to by myself. We meticulously hunted the miller moths that came into the house during summer with fly swatters, rolled up newspapers, or soapy water. Spiders and ants and gnats and flies were all fair game for casual killing.
I am captivated by numbers. As a debater in high school, winning a debate always seemed to boil down to weighing numbers of some degree. In college a friend got drunk and began spending money, downplaying the affair by saying “it’s all just numbers.”
The thing about numbers, though, is for every number you count there are many more numbers that have gone uncounted.
So every like on social media there are more people who have seen and not engaged. And for every person who has engaged, there are more who have not seen.
For all the money I have, I am made to want more– worse, I’m made to need more.
For any case reported there are more cases unreported.
For any story told there are more stories untold.
For any death known there are more deaths unknown.
And so, the poem:
Countless
***
I wake up & I am alive
today. & so I begin
to count:
Two, buried
beneath the pine shavings.
Why are they buried?
I see; because they are dead.
I don’t believe my eyes. They’re dead.
The third is heaving, grieving,
dying– soon to be dead,
too, buried.
***
There is a long tradition of poetry about killing
insects. I’ve lost count of all that have lost
their lives underneath my crushing limbs
& yet here I am still adding up the numbers.
(I say “Here I am” to hold myself to a count/account)
This week– 5 ants, 1 spider, 2 wasps, more
that I have inevitably ended without my notice,
or worse, ended at the hands of my fear, that I’m free
& allowed to kill something because I am frightened
because when I want them dead I want them dead.
Clifton & Giovanni taught me the limits
of my cruelty & my freedom.
I’ve tasted the burnt flesh
of lives living as I do, dying
as I one day will.
I’ve seen death, the afterlife of a body
dressed in coffins, ashed into urns, hospital
gowned on a gurney, & tucked among rubble.
***
In the (our the) beginning
of the (our the) pandemic–
the truth is too massive:
We can only assume, the counting is limited.
Illegitimate leadership always refuses accountability.
As a result, there are so many uncounted deaths.
***
countless–
to count less, to count fewer,
to not count, the uncounted,
the unaccounted, the un
-accountable,
to always count
on the uncounted
***
In the (our the) beginning
of the (our the) genocide–
the truth is too massive:
We can only assume, the counting is limited.
Illegitimate leadership always refuses accountability.
As a result, there are so many uncounted deaths.
***
There is a long tradition of poetry
of lives of life within cycles
of birth & death & after.
I’ve read the poems by the poets
who watch the world burn & take note
of animal corpses & human cadavers alike.
I’ve read the poems by the poets
we, the world, watched burn.
I wept & witnessed the wisps.
***
The scale of poetry is so heavy
it tips
over.
I look
at the motion
-less eyes
of any being & see all
the lives I can no longer see.
All of my freedom to associate,
to generalize
one lost life
into many–
Always awakening in the wake
of wakes, the tides. I am tired.
I am afraid to rest– The rest…
***
I want
to stop
missing
the missing.
I want
to return
to the un
-counted.
I want
to unearth the lost
histories waiting
to be
retold
again to
the earth.
***
I mourn
the counts.
I grieve
all the uncounted.
I plead
for accountability.
I hear, “What else
could I have done?”
I say: Count. Name.
Continue.
Continue,
Continue–
***
2024 has been a year of reckoning
The etymology of reckon is rooted in the German word rechnen: to enumerate, to count up, to name one by one.
The notion of "order" is always related to power, but of number and lines makes me think of something closer to a natural order, a terrestrial order.
A terrestrial reckoning.
All of us are united as Earthlings. Everything affects everything else. The smoke of explosions. The forests on fire. The melting ice. The oil spills. The chemical disasters. But what that also means is that helping ourselves and our communities have ripple affects. Unionizing and striking at your place of work affects everything. Showing up to a protest affects everything. Studying and sensing changes everything. Sharing words affects everything.
So I dedicate this poem to the countless of the Earth, to the uncounted of the Earth, to the reckoning of Earth.
Countless beauties, welcomed into another kingdom.
I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to find the right words to communicate so many things.
I’ve had so much to say but have been… punctured…
Even this newsletter– which currently is less of a newsletter than some kind of lyric essay, it seems– I’ve tried in prior months to write and then didn’t release.
In early August I had a 6000 word newsletter drafted entitled “Mourning Body Politic”. I made a tweet that said I was retiring the manuscript of the poetry collection, and the newsletter was a long thinking through that decision. I’m glad I didn’t share the piece but I think my decision to stop submitting BP remains the same.
I’ve stopped submitting in general. My submittable submissions manager is empty for the first time in years. It’s not that I don’t have work: I have so much work to share! Rather, I have had my trust lost in many publications. The publications that do have my trust have rejected my work for one reason or another. I’ve been lucky enough to have had the manuscript shortlisted for prizes a number of times– it is a number that assures me of its resonance, which is the whole point. It is a number enough to stop adding to the count. The count of times, of fees, of lists, of days, of complaints, of potentials.
If I am submitting to anything, it is in another sense, it is to another sense. What is sensed cannot be unsensed. So I’m considering alternatives, knowing the sacrifices. But that’s okay. So many of us are looking for alternatives, and I’m given hope in watching beautiful alternatives sprout.
I’ve had a passing thought if my gut issues are related to my art issues, that each have to do with problems in releasing. So I admittedly feel a particular gut feeling about things and have a particular urgency to release.
Okay so what does that mean? It means I have music content that I want to release. I keep saying this like a desperate promise. But I have demos which make it all feel real even if there is only a horizon point.
So here is the newsy part where I talk about past events and upcoming events.
I had the honor of reading at THREE different book releases of brilliant poets in the literary communities I share. The books are all really fantastic works, no bullshit, so I highly recommend giving these books a read and these poets more of your time and attention.
Alejando Lucero’s Sapello Son (Bull City Press 2024)
https://bullcitypress.com/product/sapello-son-by-alejandro-lucero/
Meg Kim’s Invisible Cartographies (New Delta Review 2024)
http://ndrmag.org/chapbooks/2024/08/invisible-cartographies/
Oliver Baez Bendorf’s Consider the Rooster (Nightboat 2024)
https://nightboat.org/book/consider-the-rooster/
Each of these launch events felt really special in their own way. Indeed– launches are special events for authors, getting able to finally share materially something that has been a presence in their lives for a time. So I do mean it when I say honor– it was an honor to be present in these moments and invited a bit closer into community together. Other writers were invited to share work as well, and every time I share the stage with another, I feel a particular kind of bond. Grateful for all of these bonds, all of this collective energy exchanging.
I also got to perform at the Jaipur Literary Festival in Boulder, Colorado. I read alongside Crisosto Apache, Andrea Rexilius, Julie Carr, Hillary Leftwich, and Bianca Mikahn. I admire and respect each of these writers’ works, so it was a really lovely moment together. I have so many moments and memories that I share with these artists now– what a boon the Colorado literary community is, how vast and how many talented people are all around.
I was on a literary panel at the Writing In Color Fest at Lighthouse Writers Workshop where I got to be candid about my experiences with publishing. Very poetically timed, I got an email with a rejection during the panel.
I also got to teach a workshop on wordplay at the Creative Colorado Writers Retreat hosted by Twenty Bellows and Beyond the Veil Press. It was really well received I think and I got to share poems by Franny Choi, Emily Pérez, and Harryette Mullen.
I got to perform at the Clocktower Cabaret in the Off The Clock burlesque show and will be there again this Friday October 4th. It’s a really fun show with a rotating bunch of amazing talented performers. If you are celebrating a special occasion or just wanna be flashy and have an excuse to dress up and go out, I would recommend getting tickets to a show.
https://www.clocktowercabaret.com/shows
https://ci.ovationtix.com/35628/production/1113016
Upcoming I have not one but two museum takeover events. I will be taking over the social media accounts for the Clyfford Still Museum later this month, so that will be fun. I’ll try and write some short original poems for that, share some writing prompts, and of course, share some art.
With Slam Nuba, I’ll be a part of the Untitled takeover of the Denver Art Museum on the final Friday of October. The show will have a mix of comedy, hip hop, and poetry performers. There I will be performing poetry as well as giving poetic art tours of the contemporary art gallery on the 3rd floor. I have some pieces picked out to highlight as we walk through the gallery, and I’ll also have some poetry to share and some poetry prompts to write to. It’ll be a really great time.
https://www.denverartmuseum.org/en/untitled
Finally, the last thing I have on my poetry calendar is my poetry workshop for the Queer Creative Fest at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. I am teaching my “Body Poetics” class once again, one of my favorite workshops to facilitate. If you’ve never taken it before, it’ll be a treat, and if you have, I’ll be sharing new poems so it will still feel fresh as we visit and revisit conversations with our bodies. If resources and or budgets are limited, I recommend looking into the writerships that Lighthouse offers.
https://lighthousewriters.org/workshop/queer-creatives-fest-body-poetics?session=7378
Lastly, I quietly released a project of beats called ECTOPLASM. It is a collection of beats that I wanted to use as a sampler. If you are an artist looking for beats, consider checking out ECTOPLASM and seeing if any of my strange sounds resonate.
https://soundcloud.com/phaentombeats/
Thanks for sticking with me as always. Until more.
(Apologies for no audio this time: it’s a long piece!)
With warmth, gratitude, and an extended hand, as always.
–Aerik