this body / that lightning show (Video)
- [Music]
- Hi, I'm Elizabeth Gross and I teach Interdisciplinary Humanities for the
- Honors Program and also serve as the Colloquium Coordinator overseeing those Honors Colloquia
- courses. And I'm very happy to read to you today from my book, this body / that lightning show.
- It's disappearing into my virtual background- but which came out from The Word Works Press in
- June 2019 and also features the amazing, amazing cover art of my colleague Nora Lovell, also in the
- Honors Program. So I'll read a few poems from this body / that lightning show and then I will share
- some of my other work with you. I'll start with an irresponsible fragment of sappho, which there are
- several of these throughout the book. I say irresponsible because while I do read Greek,
- much of the Greek is missing in the fragments of sappho and in some places I've taken permission to
- fill in some of the blanks with the words that I think belong there
- even though there's absolutely no way to know. Fragment 20. On the stock brightness and with luck
- fate will take harbor in the black earth sailors might lift in big gusts to dry land,
- might sail heavy things like when and everything raining if this work dry land.
- Antelopes of Thera. After the fresco of Akrotiri Thera 16th century BCE.
- And this one has an epigraph also from sappho but too small for me to translate in any way that
- changes the beautiful work that Anne Carson did. Fragment 162. With what eyes? (and it's a question)
- One, Atlantis or not accident in the form of a goat discovered the city,
- famous unlucky the goat fell through centuries and centuries of volcanic ash, archaeologists
- followed in all, Did the goat survive? Do goats have the kinds of eyes that see color?
- Two, the only way to make something last is to forget about it for a long long time.
- Three, we just bought a copy of the ancient fresco, a birthday present for my father on a lark, the red
- orange sky rides heavy on white mountains winding just over the antelopes laughing heads, hung up
- in the room days before mandatory evacuation, that sky the only solid shape, Should we take it with us
- along with the insurance papers the family photos? no leave it on the wall, that one must be my voice,
- my family didn't know the story, what they survived, painted animals accustomed to loss.
- Four, 21.5 hours to Dallas stopped in our car, an endless line of people waiting to run for our
- lives. Five, before Akrotiri spewed into the sea, the citizens kept up their jewelry or whatever
- and fled their painted halls, if they died in their ships no one knows about it. Six,
- then flood, then return, drive to understand what happened here but keep the windows up, no one
- should breathe this, twisted trees choked by salt water and muck holding up the unexpected chairs,
- boats, cars, the sky is the limit, tiny pyramids of mold and dust piled up on all our picture frames,
- not one of them crooked, a hole in the ceiling of my parents house the approximate size of coffin,
- me underneath thinking lucky, lucky, lucky looking clear up to the blue plastic tarp and the light
- shining through. Seven, the strong black marks around the antelope's painted eyes took everything
- in, as tree bark darkens after rain gathering depth or as the eyes of a living deer recede wetly from
- this world into other quieter worlds caught by surprise just after sundown which belongs to them.
- Eight, when I ran away to the archaeological museum on a one-way ticket to Athens I met
- those Antelope's original eyes, the top of the stairs, I wasn't expecting them
- I didn't know they'd been transported from what was left of their island,
- wherever they stand they guard the house, shadowless holding up the walls, I stood under their gaze
- for a long time, except there was no time, everything was protected.
- This body. This body / that lightning show and wide back window, that window box of dirt and
- last year's roots, that old saw waiting quiet in the shed, that noisy mini-factory of hungers, those
- counting seconds before thunder, the television remote on low batteries, the metronome, the practice
- of sight reading, the wind under the floorboards, the hard rain pooling in the windowsills, the
- reddening of certain kinds of fruit, the handmade bowl with fingerprints left in, the loud cicada
- dusk, all questions, the thread, the roped off border, the string instrument played pizzicato and off key.
- I'll read one more from, this body / that lightning show,
- which although it came out in in 2019 is quite old work for me. I had the pleasure of reworking with
- a very talented editor at the Word Works but mostly these poems were completed in 2010 or 2011.
- And much of what was going on then in my work, as you've heard a little bit already, is processing
- the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina here in New Orleans in my own experience of evacuation and
- displacement following the storm. So this one picks up in that story that after returning
- to New Orleans. Levy Return. The riverside is quiet as a sleepwalker but overhead there is a racket of
- green parrots in the electrical transformer grid, invisible except occasional ambassadors coming or
- going, but loud, either it's the warm that draws them or the hum of power, are they still shut up
- in houses in their dreams? the new generation, all wild now, not knowing they aren't from around here,
- late afternoons I walk the low ridge of the flood wall, from the riverside the city is just wires
- crossing the sky, a bicycle riding the horizon, horses running circles at the electric tower's
- base, let the light leave me in tall grasses that sometimes appear when the river is low.
- So now I'd like to read a few poems from Dear Escape Artist, a chapbook that came out from
- Antenna in 2016. And it's very close to me because it was a collaboration with a dear friend and
- very talented visual and book artist, Sara White. We let her press print it and hand bound
- the edition, letterpress printed the covers. And the work is also full of her gorgeous ink
- illustrations. I'm showing you a few of these in places where it interacts with the text as well.
- So I'll just read a few of these as well.
- Dear Escape Artist
- I was watching underwater for your last big thing, I saw you pick the lock with the same
- frayed rope they tied you up with, was there a they or do you do it to yourself? I'm always imagining
- a vein, perhaps this is something we have in common, I wish we could talk it over, high up
- on a ledge, feet dangling, just to pretend we're not holding on for dear life, dear escape artist,
- my research tells me there are at least three ways to die in an escape or die performance,
- drowning, suffocation, falling, and occasionally electrocution, but this was something else,
- despair? the word calls up a phantom couch, the word is weak, there are times the mind invents
- a rescue helicopter and its ladder flinging out to it like a tongue, just to get anywhere else.
- Dear escape artist, I had a dream this morning I was you, the trap was set, it was the kind of dream
- that feels continued from another dream, mine or someone else's bleeding through,
- I was in a ferris wheel in black and white, it was a famous movie, a theory of evil
- at the highest point, everything so still below, paused almost, except a single kite
- whipping the gray air, it's hard to watch the struggle as if its neck could break,
- the dots move slow on the ground, predictable in circles, why not squash them? a man says,
- who is also me, I had to exit the conversation before we started coming down.
- Dear escape artist, lately I can't sleep at night so I construct an elaborate escape,
- build it up in layers around myself like a wasp,
- I start with simple rope and then add chains, then glass, a weighted tank with tiny holes drilled in,
- open to the tide that rushes in, all inside an iron cave, suspended from a crane, draped in a blanket of
- bees, balanced at the edge of the world between water and the nearer parts of outer space, the
- airless dark no one can breathe, I can rest knowing there will be something to do with my hands.
- (illustration for that one)
- Dear escape artist, on the radio I heard about a kind of shrimp that makes light with the snap
- of its claw, underwater launches a bubble so fast it burns hot as the surface of the sun,
- can you imagine letting go of a whole star? I don't know where the light goes, but it must be reflected
- somewhere, right? a floating plastic cup becomes a sudden moon, Dogen says the moon does not get wet
- when it's reflected in the water, nor is the water broken, but here the water is broken after all and
- any stupid thing can hang on to borrowed light for a second or two.
- Dear escape artist, tell me another story about the world,
- I know what I see so make me doubt it,
- what the audience remembers is the story you tell after, not the act, whatever they were looking at when they missed everything.
- So I'd like to close by reading some more recent works, some unpublished works. This first poem
- was written in the summer of 2019 when I had the opportunity to teach at Louisiana Correctional
- Institute for Women through the Newcomb College Institute and Operation Restoration
- Program. I was teaching interdisciplinary humanities like a college prep course
- for students who were just entering the degree seeking program.
- And yeah, so this poem came out of that experience. Passenger Side Window,
- all summer the water is high, just underneath us, where the highway skirts the edge of the swamp,
- the few trees farther out make v's of moving water, where the current slowly wears them down,
- halfway between a living thing and the ruin of that thing still standing,
- a few last vertical ambassadors between us and nothing, I mean between your car barreling westward
- down the stream of the elevated highway and the lake, I want to say something about this landscape,
- what it does to me to take it in and take it in each week, never stopping to and from the prison
- where we teach, losing the light on the way back in the tunnel of green before we hit the water,
- sometimes after we talk and talk, can't stop as soon as we pass the last of the razor wire,
- we want to remember everything everyone said, each rare human glimpse inside this place
- we're expected to forget because this isn't where the story is or when, the story that matters is
- the past, what'd you do to get here, I can't deny wanting to know, but I can leave it in your car
- with my phone, my wallet, my keys, my water bottle, my hypothetical weapons, anything that doesn't fit
- in the clear plastic school bag I carry to clear all check points, I open the glove box,
- you open the trunk, this isn't the story that matters either, their lives do not go blank like
- the missing horizon where lake meets sky, other evenings after we just drive, car radio scanning
- for its preset stations as I search my mind for the words that might help us put away whatever
- we witnessed inside or understand it, somewhere between what we can't know and what we can't say,
- one night the moon burns huge and orange like a thumb over the camera lens through rare breaks in
- the trees, high and cool and bright by the time we reach the swamp where we can really see, just now
- when I mentioned the moon, I felt a moment of relief, like I bent the thing I meant to say into a
- metaphor accessible to anyone who's tried to take a picture of the moon or explain exactly how the
- moon had changed them, impossible, inside the prison the classroom is a classroom and the students
- are students around an ordinary table discussing what it means to be human,
- as if humanity isn't something outside this classroom, they are asked to prove over and
- over with their bodies, even here lining up in the hallway for the guards to pat them down,
- as you and I take our seats on the far side of the classroom so we don't have to watch, and now
- if I were to mention the roses in the prison yard everyone would read them as a metaphor for
- hope or worse, some thorned beauty of survival, wrong, because these roses are real, intended
- by women most forget are alive, and if I were to mention the birds tilted and soaring, wild
- and uncountable, would that image of freedom be enough to free us? throw us back into looking away.
- These last two are my only pandemic poems which seem fit to share in this strange virtual format.
- So these are the newest. Housework, May 2020.
- As the world narrows our dominion grows, finally the world is all women,
- the home is everything, everything now,
- keeping track of which vegetables are likely to turn next in the fridge, sweeping, and planting, and feeding, tending to elders by phone
- the weariness we carry in public places too, are those footsteps too close? and yet I find myself following the moon,
- usually I wouldn't walk at night, beep, beep, a man says somewhere, didn't want to scare ya,
- he throws back one more warning wheeling by on bike, watch yourself in this weather, the moon I say,
- but he's already turned the corner, by now perhaps you've noticed I contradict myself, or perhaps you
- ran outside to gape at the moon over the cemetery like I did, Penelope waited almost 20 years to see
- her household piled up with death, she ruled quietly even as the plague of suitors infected
- the house, ate everything, meanwhile she orbited her own life as a satellite so they couldn't touch her,
- where is the epic of her life indoors? like us, her work was slowing time and grief,
- heading home the street lamp shines brighter than the moon, churning with wings, it's May, I'm too late
- to shut out the lights to keep the termite swarms out already warming through the house's seams,
- I watch from the porch as darkness swallows the neighborhood,
- tomorrow I'll sweep their spent bodies into the tub and down the drain, but I'll find their wings
- flashing back little scraps of light for weeks.
- This last poem that I'll read I just learned won
- the 2020 Words in Music Contest from the Faulkner Society and Podunk Review. So that's very exciting.
- This was also a pandemic poem, one of the two that I managed in this time.
- And it's in a form called the guzzle persian form. And actually it's my very first attempt at
- this form, so very exciting to win a contest. (very first go) Okay, Guzzle at the End of the World,
- April 2020. Don't tell me you don't feel it too, relief, something finally stopped all of us
- at once, like a whistle in the schoolyard, freeze, on one leg balancing finally stopped,
- the clear green waters of Venice flowing with dolphins and swans are just a fantasy
- glimpse of a post-polluted world, our high emission flying finally stopped,
- experts say the mask I wear protects you more than me, but they don't know the pleasure I feel
- not recognizing my own reflection in car windows when out walking, that mirror gazing finally
- stopped, erasing my spring calendar I dimly recall how many times I've wished to slow down time,
- not like this of course, now the future begins somewhere years from now, when this suffering
- finally stops, one of my neighbors died, the rest of us stood on our porches watching paramedics float
- around the purple house in their protective gowns trying to guess whose breathing finally stopped,
- my concentration is shot, I'm not writing, I can only read the things my students ask me to,
- soon I'll submit their final grades and this hydra headed semester will be done, teaching finally
- stopped, alone in the house for months I lose the sense of where my edges are expanding until I
- imagine draping these walls around my body like a robe, all other daily dressing finally stopped,
- it was hours before Mr. James stepped out of his purple house to say his nephew passed, relatives
- arrived, distant until a downpour drove them close, the rain long passed when they're wailing finally
- stopped, on another endless video call, the birds outside trigger my microphone to unmute as my days
- stretch on, screen-bound, indoors waiting for someone else to finally stop the Zoom,
- I focus on my virtual backgrounds, dolphins light moving against green leaves, aquarium scene, I can
- make parts of myself disappear by drinking from a glass, reverse genie summoning finally stopped,
- I lost my job, not right away like so many I love who are struggling now, but after quarantine I'm
- never going back to the work, the office I love, our thoughtful planning finally stopped, from here
- summer is an unthinkable hot blank and yet I long to leap for it, I try to explain to an internet
- friend that I don't have to be this Elizabeth anymore, all that performing finally stopped.
- Thank you very much for your attention in my reading. I just read and read and didn't
- really talk about my work but my understanding is there will be an opportunity for Q&A and
- yeah, I'd love to talk about anything there. It's a real privilege for me since I,
- I'm a poet and have been a poet for a long time but that's not my role
- at Tulane. To be able to share this other side of my work with this community, so
- thanks again to the library and especially Amanda for reaching out to me to participate in this.
- [Music]