all codes lead to roam

Through much of the impressionable identity forming ages 8-18, I walked and slept outdoors in the North Florida pine scrub bayou Gulf ecology--the place has informed this psyche this body's rhythms and listens and profoundly. I felt the BP oil assault not only on the visible, locatable coordinates but within my own self the mindbody, where I had already located trauma related to the over development of the region. Poet and theorist Thom Donovan articulates body and place with terms that define both through a dynamic interplay with one another, helping to explain how we are ourselves extensions of a place, how if our waters are driven mad, so too are we.

The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico impacted me physically in a way I have had difficulty making of pain into plain. I was not literally onsite. Yet, the site is in this site, I. How to explain this? See Donovan below.

from "from Somatic Poetics" by Thom Donovan

"Since to any place inhere the things that have been there, and that (sometimes literally) remain there through their ‘half-lives’ (that remain undead, in other words). And since any body is not just a body, which is to say, never only a finite membrane or container but a complex extension, a bundle of what it has encountered, consumed, sensed, felt, and touched—the body is many different places at once (in neoliberal terms, it has ‘gone global’). Place is, then, extended by many different bodies at once (the logic of virus, outbreak, contamination, plague). Somatics is a site—the aesthetic site—where we undergo these places. The existences of these places within the body become framed, but also possibly moved (expressed, transformed, en route). ‘Remediation’ (the shibboleth for any number of public and corporate earthworks projects post-disaster) then not only occurs within a particular geography or topology, but in or at the body as a site coextensive with such places."

maid public

Happy Poetry Month bloggerissimo. For National Poetry Month, I helped select a poem as part of Danielle Pafunda's Cento contest. Here's one of the winning entries:


Isabel Shark "A Dog's Skull"

A Dog’s Skull
for Vanessa Place

in our hearts
a dog’s skull
you have lived
a dog’s skull
learn to petrify
a dog’s skull
to rescue
a dog’s skull
how fibrous and incidental
a dog’s skull
when my tweet time’s up I’ll collect
a dog’s skull
something offensive?
A sleepily indifferent dog’s skull.


Let silence drill a hole in
a dog’s skull
When my tweet time’s up I’ll go for
a hole
in a dog’s skull

the mystery of
a dog’s skull in one cento
Something offensive?
a dog!
Something offensive?
skull!
When my tweet time’s up
a dog in one cento
When my tweet time’s up
I’ll collect
A dog
wrapped in duct tape

Let silence drill
a dog
Let silence drill
hot black dunes

when my tweet time’s up
the wired
dog’s skull
The trick is to make
One cento or
a dog
The trick is to make
a dog’s skull cento