Backstage #7

Greetings from Portland.

Writing from Portland where I’ve been co-teaching this week with Jess Arndt. Jess is a magical person, a wonderful teacher, and a wily coyote of a writer— this is our third year working together, and I always learn so much in their presence. I also feel like they make me look better in the classroom. Like somehow in their company, my singularity (ie my less likable qualities) sort of softens in their presence. I’m willing to bet this is mutual and I hope that our creative-collaborative chemistry positively influences how others relate to practice. Writing is such a notoriously solo activity—it doesn’t have to be— and the structure + ethos of this particular low-res MFA is great about disrupting that.

Some memorable texts we brought into workshop this time around include “Soft Talk: Thoughts on Critique” by Leslie Dick (2018) and “Hot Poem” by Nora Treatbaby. Maybe because Jess and I are prone to boredom, or because we are idealists, we always end up workshopping the workshop and trying new models to see what might yield a more creative, intergenerational, less extractive exchange amongst ourselves.

The very fact that there are two mentors, rather than one, already introduces a new dynamic into the usual workshop model. The students can’t exactly project authority (or rage or veneration) onto two people with the intensity that they seem to project onto one; and neither can we as mentors occupy the throne without also making room for the Other to join. We’re not indifferent to power, but maybe because we share it, the relation feels more casual, conversational, and less formal. In some ways, the success of the collaboration makes it more challenging to return to conventional workshop models.

This working style is amplified via the faculty conversations. In the past we’ve spoken about estrangement; this time we’re exploring “off-grid”— which may have emerged organically in response to the series of out-of-office messages, bounce backs, auto-replies, and Substack missives I’ve been putting out. (“I’m currently chasing a dream called prose.”) Jess spoke a bit about the grid as a scene of enmeshment, contact; overlapping axes, and also shared a moment from Agnes Martin:

My formats are square, but the grid is never absolutely square; they are rectangles, a little bit off the square, making a sort of contradiction, a dissonance, though I didn’t set out to do it that way. When I cover the square surface with rectangles, it lightens the weight of the square, destroys its power.

I suppose I think of the grid as a site of hegemony: it is a matrix of control. So I like the idea of this soft subversion, suggested by Martin. The rectangle as a power move that invites an almost-undetectable or imperceptible asymmetry. I thought of how just the night before, Jess observed, while driving, their new pants were also asymmetrical. Somewhere in the riff, I was reminded of a line by the poet Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi: the soles of my feet remain the same even if I run away. When I was thinking about this line, I imagined “soles” was “souls.” Another asymmetry.