by Logan Berry
Still from “tools and meat” a video poem by Jay Besemer featuring text and audio from a piece by the same name in his latest poetry collection… More on this below!
THEORIES OF PERFORMANCE, a new poetry collection by Jay Besemer, is due from Lettered Streets Press by the end of May, and pre-orders are available now. Runaways’ Logan Berry interviewed Besemer via email about the new collection and how his poetic practice intersects with theater and filmmaking, among other interesting subjects.
Three excerpts from THEORIES OF PERFORMANCE follow the interview–be sure to check those out.
Here we go:
LB: Your writing occasions a slowed thoughtfulness from me. There's a dreaminess. A happening. A careful attention to what it's like to experience things in the moment. The poems articulate/dramatize the feeling of thinking and experiencing, which are rendered in a way that's both personal to you and something shared with the reader. At the end of the book in the "ABOUT THIS BOOK" section you write, "To do its work properly, it relies upon an active engagement from (and with) its readers, across repeated and varying occasions." Do you have specific engagements in mind you'd like to activate from your readers?
JB: Thank you for describing your own bodily experience of the book! I have always tried to bring something forth that activates (I like that word, thank you) a bodily awareness, or a shift in awareness of bodily state, in audiences. Somehow to invite audiences to know their bodies, or themselves through their bodies, a little more or a little differently, through my words. I'm less interested in communicating (or able to communicate) an experience than in evoking it. I do better to pass along an awareness from body to body instead of an abstracted/detached "understanding" in audiences of something happening through or in me. I think there's a lot more "common tongue" across bodies (which we all inhabit) than across language (which, perhaps, inhabits us, and inhibits us as much as it may empower). I would rather reach for a shared sense of bodiedness than a kind of other-to-other communication-fostered separation. But I don't have a specific end result in mind for that--my hope is only that something happens that brings an awareness of one's body and its realities at that particular point of engagement.
LB: I love what you're saying about the "common tongue" across bodies. It's a compassionate goal, one that I imagine requires an intense level of meticulousness. In theater we have the benefit of the spectacle, the physical conditions/format/container that can communicate extra-textually. To achieve a shared sense of bodiedness through the text alone is remarkable, and I think you really do it.
I'm intrigued by your use of "audience" instead of "reader." Could you tell me a little more about that?
JB: Wow! Thank you! I'm going to respond to your question about my choice of "audience" over "reader" through your comment about compassion. I am a Buddhist, so to embrace compassion as a goal is a long-time practice. I feel what I need to bring that to being is not meticulousness but a release of control, knowing the risk of sloppiness, but knowing that sloppiness is life, is full living, not a thing to be rejected! Maybe in my process I'm inviting a way of making that allows for both precision and sloppiness, because that's what the work itself needs. I'm not sure how to language this--I'm trying to say that my poetic process involves an opening up of my own body to what's coming through it, to use words imperfectly but intentionally, as an extension of that body, or another version of my body in a different material, to contain a version of bodily experience and interaction that my own flesh can't sustain or reach. This feels very weird to say. It's so unsupported in this culture.
I know what you are talking about in drawing from theatre practice: spectacle, the setting of the stage/space itself as an aid to communication on multiple levels. You may not know this, but I have a theatre/performance background myself, from early childhood through about 5 years ago, off and on. I have done a lot of puppetry and mask work, along with various ways of placing poetry within a more space- and body-centering practice. I've also written various performance texts (not usually performed) and texts that may fall under the general category of "poets' theatre." The realities of my illnesses/disabilities have meant that I can no longer be involved in physical performance, but I keep moving toward it in my work in other modes. So I have a lot of focus on what may be called page-as-stage, and on ways of making a performance space outside of physical space. What you say about my text having the power to bring about "a shared sense of bodiedness" is extremely validating to me--it means it's working! I'm very grateful for this reflection.
I say "audience" rather than "reader" because of those elements of my practice, and also because increasingly I am moving into a video practice that is also spectacular but in a different way or ways than theatre. (A frequently-updated selection of video poems is available at my website: www.jaybesemer.net/videos.) If someone's experiencing a poem of mine through a video I've made, are they "readers," "viewers," "audience"? It's a question of what "reading" is, what happens in bodies that read, and how many ways a body can read. I'm trying to move beyond my own and others' limited frameworks of what the verb "to read" means on a bodily level, from sensory input pathways to cognition to muscular, pulmonary or vascular responses to the text--and emotions, pleasure, all of the things that take place while engaging a text. But also, as a former composition/rhetoric instructor, I have adopted and adapted the sense of "audience" as part of the circumstances surrounding the generation of any text. It's a way to say "who I write for." Except that "write" in this case may not involve words, or originate in words. And not everyone who experiences my work is part of the vague cloud of presences I imagine as I make the work.
LB: When I read the line, "ah, the mouth of your sadness opens" from "THE THING YOU KILL THAT IS NOT," I wrote this note: "The body is acted upon. Versus 'in control.' But continues acting." So I think the process you describe, your "opening up of (your) own body to what's coming through it," is indeed creating communicable embodied material.
JB: I am intrigued with the messy line between bodies as actors and bodies acted upon, and how just as you say, the two can happen together. I guess I'm curious about the relation between mindful or intentional action and the automatic kind of response--a pre-cognitive one, as my therapist calls it. I have a deep and complex trauma history; one of the conditions I live with is severe complex post-traumatic stress disorder, which I'm learning comes to affect every bodily system especially in the type of long-term extended trauma I experienced. In learning with my own body's realities, I am learning how difficult it can be to bring intentionality to bear on something that happens on an amygdala level, say, or how unexpectedly a physical symptom can bring about an emotional response--like the weird sorrow I feel in the midst of a migraine. Maybe my attempts to learn with my body through illness symptoms are somehow making use of that paradoxical acted-upon-actor embodiment. Of course, every body in contact with themself, other beings and a world outside them is an acted-upon-actor...
LB: Circling back to something you said before, I know what you mean about this kind of reflection/process/conversation not being supported by the culture at large! Something I love about your text is how you so clearly show the intense impact capitalism has on the body and on language. In "MAY I JUST SAY" you write, "it isn't / to eat anymore. it's all / developers & single-malt / jargon." I laughed out loud at that, but also felt sad and disappointed. The personal and the structural conflate there in a way that feels uncomfortably true.
JB: I love that you laughed at that! I think it's hilarious too. As Chicagoans those lines have a special meaning for us, don't they? Those lines are about Wicker Park; I don't feel safe there anymore. It's clearly not for me, but 20 years ago when I moved here it was a locus of my activity. Some of my old places remain (Myopic, Quimby's, Sultan's Market) but the overall feel has changed. What capitalist gentrification defines as "safe" for itself and for the normative (white) people serving it renders the whole place unsafe for the rest of us.
One of the conversations I'm having a lot these days, across various contexts, is about death, loss and grief. I read a lot of architectural theory, and in that loose discipline I see some discussion of the need to mourn the loss of places, of space, of relationship in and with the exterior volumes that hold our movements. But I don't see much of that discussion happening elsewhere, except in the pandemic context where it's framed as a loss of interpersonal intimacy--it's not the places or spaces themselves that are mourned, but their function or use as contexts for social contact. Not that this is wrong, but it still isn't what I'm getting at in those lines. I think I'm going more for the sense that this external, coercive, violent set of parameters is intruding on people's lives, discarding physical locations or built structures as irrelevant or "unproductive" regardless of the bodily-emotional meanings they hold for the people who have relationships with them. We don't need to reach very far to connect that kind of rendering-places-disposable to rendering-(certain)-bodies-disposable. Who will be left to grieve those of us who have been deemed disposable?
LB: I did not know the extent of your theatrical background. Do you think those experiences inform your poetic practice?
JB: Definitely! I'm still picking up the traces, following back as it were. This is old stuff. In many ways I am always trying to "get back onstage"--whether figuratively or, in earlier times, literally. When I was a kid, the only time I felt safe was when I was onstage. Various elements of theatrical practice have moved through my poetics, but most recently I think I've tried to "get back onstage" by positing my books as performances in a different format. THEORIES OF PERFORMANCE is itself an example of what its title names. I think you're picking up on that.
LB: I'm glad you brought this up. Would you be willing to tell me a little about your theories of performance, especially those you were thinking about while writing this book? In "REACH" you write, "ask the wrong / person in the wrong way. / theories of performance / redirected planet under/ dubious circumstances / there is never a time when I do not reach for a word." I have a hunch that my question might be asking you to do something too reductive, so no worries if you'd prefer not to answer!
JB: Well, this definitely won't be reductive, so that's not a problem! I have no pre-existing module of theory I can offer; I think I've been discovering my theory through practice.
In the "about this book" section I make connections to some of the experiences actively forming the book, particularly when I talk about "Transition Narrative: The Musical." In that case I was positing an imaginary stage performance that put forth a thesis by exaggeration, concerning questions of conforming to gendered norms in order to increase the likelihood of an appropriate social response (the right pronoun and honorific, not causing shock or pushback in the men's bathroom) for my performance of maleness in the long years of transition when I was not consistently read correctly by others. Personally, the behaviors I needed to perform in order to consistently be treated as a man often contradicted my actual, natural ways of being--particularly those around taking up space, speech, and the display of affection. It was a very tense and very bodily line to locate and move around, along, across. The poem makes use of stage performance as a trope to highlight social performance and its own modes, its own systems of power and subjugation.
In "Reach" the process of bringing that poem out was less directed, though it does have some crossover. The lines you quote here reflect some of the tense uncertainty of any encounter with a stranger, always wondering if my social performance would be validated, but there's an awareness too of having to negotiate encounters with an abusive person who was part of my life at the time of the poem's making. The kind of performance both types of encounter demanded were very similar, and the risk in each was a kind of annihilation of the self I was working so hard to make space to be.
The italicized line is actually the most important in the poem. It's something I actually said to my husband in a conversation about writing vs. speech. For him, the struggle is to write; he is adept at spoken communication and can extemporize where I can't, yet writing brings him up short. I am the opposite. It is painful and exhausting for me to speak, yet writing can sometimes come very easily. (This is mostly what has taken me out of physical performance and any online performance that demands an extended stretch of speaking). I said that line in response to his suggestion that in writing processes I don't have to work to "reach for a word." But as the line says, that's not true. No language comes naturally from me.
LB: Your poems don't end with a sense of closure. Truths unfold line-by-line, and oftentimes the final line complicates the whole, creating more questions. In reaching for words, in discovering your theories of performance, how conscious were you of form? You mention at the end of the book that there was a significant revision process. How did the poems change between first draft, concept maps, and their current state?
JB: This is such a deep and layered question! The formal considerations were specific to each poem, and in general when I make a poem its form depends on an awareness of what the poem needs, in terms of shape, to do its work. I think in all modes of my process--handwritten drafts in a notebook; or erasure directly from source text; or collage of cut text and image; or video incorporating sound, moving image and text--I center the poem's own needs. One reason I'm so keen to posit my work as an experience/engagement/relationship with the audience is that my own experience of making that work is one of relation, a constant negotiation with the poem. In the case of poems in this book, that meant collaborating with each poem as if it were a person. Perhaps I'm offering up the space of the page as a room in which the poems make their choices of bodies and movement and costume.
You bring up my concept maps! The thing to know about the maps is that they are a macro-level tool-- their purpose is to tell me what the book itself needed. I used them between late drafts to get a feel for possible ways to organize Theories in accordance to what the book as a whole was trying to do. The only poem-level negotiations they influenced had to do with inclusion. The first draft was handwritten in a notebook--this is how I work in non-sourced "interior" poem projects. A secret: I rarely revise individual poems, and if I do it's fairly minimal.
Unexpectedly, for THEORIES there was an added layer of individual poem revision that happened at the galley stage of the book. Because of one of those InDesign flukes that sometimes happens, the first galley I got contained some major formal disruptions on certain poems. It was so disorienting I could only find my way through it by consulting the original Word file, coming up with my own alternate galley, and offering that for comparison and orientation. That process opened up an unexpected chance to make poem-level changes that better reflected the needs of certain poems, so in the end it was worth my initial panic. But it also confirmed once and for all the intense connection between my own body and the bodies of my poems, and my books!
LB: This is off-topic, but I'm curious--what was your source text for CHELATE? You mention it's part of a trilogy of erasures in the "ABOUT THIS BOOK," and I can't resist asking you about it now since you mention erasure as one of your main composition modes. It should probably be stated that CHELATE is one of my favorite poetry collections ever.
JB: I don't think that's off-topic; we're talking about process and relationship in and through my work, so it's relevant. But I need to start with a clarification: the trilogy is not sourced; the books published between the trilogy volumes are. The wording of the comment in the About is confusing--that's one arena where I had to reach very strenuously for my words and didn't totally succeed! This confusion is worsened by that problem of time-of-writing vs. time-of-publishing and the idea that things get published in the order they're written, which for me is definitely sort of impossible! I work on several projects at once, so nothing linear happens in art or life for me. (LOL) Here's what the breakdown is:
TELEPHONE (2013)--unsourced
A NEW TERRITORY SOUGHT (2014)--sourced from a quirky 1930 entomological text by Julian Huxley called Ants
CHELATE (2016)--unsourced
CRYBABY CITY (2017)--sourced from some of my older cast-off shorter projects whose texts were run through processes of my own invention, heavily transformed, and then compiled into a book.
THE WAYS OF THE MONSTER (2018)--unsourced
Thanks for your kind words about CHELATE. People have a lot of connection to that one in particular. I do too, but I think at this point other people's connections to it are more important. The book's out there doing its work, which is what it wanted.
LB: Are you working on anything new these days? What books and/or movies are you thinking about lately ?
JB: What I'm working on now is mostly not poetry, though I have something new in progress there called SIMPLE MACHINES. That's kind of a return to my beginnings, very spare and quiet poems, which feel very right to me, also very comforting somehow.
I'm doing a lot of video work, kind of toward a long piece of, what can I call it--autopoetic speculative nonfiction? Before the pandemic I had planned to drive with Rupert (my husband) from the very western edge of New York State, where I hold some land, eastward through New York, ending up in a small town in Connecticut, where someone dear to me--but not directly present in my life--lived until his death in 2016. The project centers on my bodily relationship with the various regions of upstate New York that were part of my life in the past, and while my mother was dying, and how history and trauma and illness and different griefs move and change through time, body, land, the body moving on the land. But now that everything is more difficult in terms of movement, the actual travel portion may not happen. The "travelogue" may be...interior, fantastic, speculative, fictional.
I'm also journaling nearly every day, and doing intensive trauma healing work with myself, and basically trying to live anew after the terrible stuff of the last 6 or 7 years.
I'm reading a lot of Derrida. I am also really getting into filmmaker's diaries and journals; Joyelle McSweeney got me into Derek Jarman's journals and I'm hooked. I also am reading some of the recent Chantal Akerman books, always Tarkovsky, anything on or by him. I've been really exploring my relationship with film these days, partly because of my video work (well, mostly), but I also blame the Criterion Channel! I'm a subscriber and it's been a game-changer. Right this second I'm obsessed with Jafar Panahi's work done under house arrest and prohibition from making films. He uses what I call vernacular technologies (non-pro gear like cell phone cameras etc.) like I do, and works under constraints that are similar in practice but completely different in purpose and reason! I also think about Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films several times a week, particularly UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES and CEMETERY OF SPLENDOUR. I also am watching Chris Marker's SANS SOLEIL a lot these days. And I just saw THE FITS by Anna Rose Holmer, which is amazing. I can't even say everything that film gives audiences; it's just so rich and wonderful. No easy closure!
I tweeted something the other day about how blurry the line is between poet and filmmaker, and I think the films and filmmakers I mention have/do that poetry. That thing you/I/we/one can only call poetry.
Cover design by Ryan Spooner
THE EVENT
The event shocks us all. In a zone behind the drainage canal, a partitioned, gridded-off cake of rubble field.
Those motor sounds through the night, generators talking under iridescent applications.
It’s a drawn-out event. Durational as a dream. After one week the food trucks establish territories, migrations.
Some funded knights draw tubs, chug mud into dull nodes, shuddering with institutional glee.
Rotations in the staff respond to subliminal signals, changes of value assigned by legislators. Unpaid internships are offered, filled, renewed. Shadow economies. There are deaths. People are raped, body & soul.
Look for the site & you will find it. The event is central to all places & made of terror.
It is connected by tubules to its spectator-glands. You may feed it if you wish.
TRANSITION NARRATIVE: THE MUSICAL
suddenly as my eyes meet my own eyes
in the mirror (hello eyes hello) there is
a fierce chord in the air indicating that
the show begins with the end of striving
toward heterosexual femininity &
proceeds with very rapid & focused
growth of body parts including hair i.e.
my chin erupts in a golden fall of silky
beard that keeps getting caught in my
belt buckle so sometimes mid-sentence
my face is yanked down abruptly as
though i must weather a powerful attack
of shame music & dance build to a climax
here (that’s right, it’s a musical) as the
physical changes accelerate my shoulders
broaden into one of those dairymaid’s
yokes from storybooks complete w/ pails
& i can’t fit through the door cue the
chorus in cow costumes who sing the
lilting “heckler’s round” while i spin my
now magically-masculinely-privileged
body into a blur i fall to the boards
exhausted my twitching feet in the air
& fart an extemporaneous rant against
everyone who isn’t me the chorus lifts
me up bearing me joyously through
the audience & back up to the stage
for the duration of the closing number
“at last & forevermore & irrefutably
you are a man because we say so!”
curtain
INHABIT THE ROAD
your pinewood strangeness,
your dust—
inhabit the road as
some inhabit a shirt
the way tall meets
flat, wheel meets
word, questions spoked
with lines of approach
or with flags rolled up
on poles tight as
morning glories
road like a large sky
that holds an animal
of woe or strength
an animal watching the
movement of other
animals road like an
indecisive summer
from which there is no
clear return
inhabit the road in
multiple vectors &
guises the one contained
in the other & immediate
as rain
Thanks for talking with me, Jay! And thanks to the Lettered Streets Press Editors for allowing us to share these three poems!
Jay Besemer’s books and chapbooks include The Ways of the Monster (*KIN(D)/The Operating System), Crybaby City (Spuyten Duyvil), Telephone, Chelate (both Brooklyn Arts Press), and Aster to Daylily (Damask Press). He was a finalist for the 2017 Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature. He lives in Chicago.