(Litmus Press), John Ashbery describes Amy King's poetry as bringing "abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living."
as one of the "40 Under 40: The Future of Feminism" awardees, and she received the 2012 SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. She organizes "The Count" and interviews for
: Woman in Literary Arts and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
A recent visit to the Baltimore MOA allowed me to bask in the beauty of Degas, Monet, Seurat, and other favorites. Impressionists'
are easy to love. Perhaps a little less easy surrealist art is an acquired
taste. I don't love poetry for its measured formulaic success in making a mark
of beauty; I love it for the way it makes me feel. This is the same thing I love
about the strange.
I might hang a print of the painting above in my living room
or use it as a palette for a color scheme. But "What the Water Gave Me" by Frida
Kahlo is at times' unbeautiful,' even incomprehensible. How am I to understand
the strange images that float above the bather's legs in Kahlo's painting? My relationship with Kahlo's work has evolved. And when I view it, I consider it in
the context of the artist's story.
Liz Hager blogs about Kahlo's painting, and about it, she writes,
"The painting is one of Kahlo's most visionary and disturbing; the
sophisticated water fantasy provides the vehicle for a densely-packed portrayal
of the artist's subconscious. It's almost as if she crammed her entire life
into this bathtub scene. Kahlo returned to the same symbols...many of the items included here are in other paintings, some
without much alteration."
Someone recently
asked me why I love Amy King's latest book, I Want
To Make You Safe. I've mulled over my response. Why do I love the strange stuff of Amy King's voice?
Without a
sex-o-nista season, the pizza is burning
the other room
down, and these cracks aren't
as pungent as the
crack the great state of Ohio deserves
when you rock 'n'
roll over; so grab your poles,
go by the lake, and
eat up to embrace whatever organ
makes you gyrate
those hips, lace those long legs up
to our waists and
turn out a turntable on this party face,
sans with or
without us, our great groaning lusts a marked
increase in the
moon's ancient pull by the top of the stairs (69).
I love it because, like Kahlo's painting, I Want to Make You Safe is a collection of odd images floating in a tub above the bare legs of the narrator. The observer is alone in the artist's head. Likewise, King's poems are dream poems. When we are in the dream, it is not odd. We don't question the absurdity. That is how I've learned to see Dali too. In magical realism, we suspend our disbelief. In Surrealism and with the absurd, we suspend our expectation of the expected and allow for the outlandish with the commonplace and other uneasy matchups. Such art forces us into a stream of conscious response. It is there that meaning, if any, is found.
King's voice is the body under the bath-water soaking
beneath soft and hard floating images. "Hello Lady Bird/ Hola, Smashed
Guitar Parts,/ I take these strings to this neck/and cut the tumor in half—love
is a surgery/ in participles, pus-filled insects./Additional commands keep the
planet well-heeled."
Peculiar
as the voice of I Want To Make You Safe
may be. It is an accessible voice with its casual declarations, "A dandelion
seed also looks for corners to lie,/so here am I/a seated tin can/with
intrusive mice to lend a hand," (38) and
conversational tone: "You think I am she. She is you and everyone who adjusts
too well, (63).
This book is from the author more than
by the author. It revives the unconscious experience where the mind jettisons a
million thoughts into existence simultaneously and leaves the reader to select, order, give attention to what matters at the moment.
Interestingly,
Frida Kahlo made separate paintings of many of her "tub" images. I also get this sense with King's poems. Each piece contains the potential for tangents and
journeys.
I like King's poems because they are semiotic. We think we know things. Pilfer the lint of dreams,/uproot every yellow, follow stigmata for dust./We have always been the first fruit and the first to rot./We are the ones that read the signs after we bury them./(5)
I like King's poems for their asymmetry: Ohio is equidistant from the religious saviour/I've become and the promise of America's decrepit/class. The "critique of political economy" dangles/from the arch of my hot-pants tongue. Pencil lipped,/we're left wanting what?
I like the feminist King in the poem, "Men by the
Lips to Women."
I am the love you light yourself with
and my gender is powerless in this,
We are metered only by our own machines,
While the book is a clock that forgets mechanics.
Her hands can count but would rather wipe warm dew,
The pall from your lips and kiss the lids,
Of your eyes from sleep. Here am I, is he,
with yoke and shadow removed, she is, her in me,
apart from you, man reading men by the lips of women. (31)
The voice of the narrator is interior. She talks to
herself. Readers cannot censor this dream. This voice allows all and speaks the
tongue of the contemporary god. King tells me she likes
Ana Bozicevic's (King's life and work partner) take on her work that
she "scats out these casual masterpieces of rhetoric, then promptly forgets where they came from, makes experiments at careful authorlessness seem funny and humorless in comparison."
Be
assured that despite
I Want To Make You Safe's surrealistic sensibility, King does not kiss to be clever. These
are not facile poems. They are written in the context of a contemporary queer narrative.
I like
I Want to Make You Safe because it is
intelligent. King does tip her hat and in a way that reinforces what I've been
thinking. One of the names she drops in her work is
Claude Cahun's. (9) Claude was born
Lucy Schwob. She began making
photographic self-portraits at age 18 and continued doing so through the 1930s. She took the name
Claude Cahun
and assumed a sexually ambiguous identity. During the 1920s Cahun lived in
Paris with her life-partner Suzanne Malherbe. Cahun and Malherbe (known as Marcel Moore) worked their art together, making sculptures, photomontages, collages, and writing collaboratively.
André Breton, a founder of the Surrealist movement, called her "one of the most curious spirits of our time. "Although she produced a huge amount of work, as well as significant writings, Claude Cahun operated on the fringes of the Parisian Surreallist (sic) movement. It was not until the 1980's that she was discovered (by François Leperlier), and soon became seen as a forerunner to queer theory and feminist art." 4.
It is easy to draw a parallel between Calhun/Maherbe and King/ Bozicevic since both couples shared their art and lives. Both are pacesetters in their communities and both committed to art and an innate right to self-identify.
In his
Surrealists Manifesto, Andre Breton says, ""Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern." 5
And there is other
evidence to support the idea that King's writing is dreamlike. Her poems feature an element of surprise. They include unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. Andre Breton believed that Surrealism was, above all, a revolutionary movement. Perhaps the same is true of King's work.
And there is other evidence to support the idea that King's writing is dreamlike.
Analyzing
last night's vivid dream is daunting, but re-dream the dream and the strange is
readily accepted. Amy King's poems are like that. They are not easy to
understand; don't try. Instead, read them
in the way you might a dream where the odd and discordant becomes part of the
landscape. And then reread them closely.
A brief chat with poet Amy King:
Bluemoon Northeast: I'd like to include one of your favorite poems from IWTMYS here. Which poem do you choose today?
Amy King: "The White of Sacre Couer Against a Blue Parisian Sky"
Bluemoon Northeast: I note that you do some name-dropping in your poems. Among the names dropped
are David Wojnarowicz, Tina Modotti, and Claude Cahun. These artists
and writers share a solid and specific artistic identity and a reputation of
being something of an activist or revolutionist. How do you see yourself in this context? That of being and artistic revolutionist and an
activist?
Amy King: I think the labels are intricately linked – there are simply gradations of
each. For instance, one can be seen more as a "cultural worker" via art. But
the artwork can resonate among folks and inspire action, which echoes the
"activist" label. I'm quite fond of artists, though, whose work and life
somehow speak similar political messages. Watch out for a paper I recently
wrote on the life of Leonor Fini, an artist who never officially subscribed to
being a member of the Surrealists, though her work and life certainly resonated
politically and still inspire others, like myself, to be an independent agent
when the group one is affiliated with reinforces /requires various
oppressions.
Bluemoon Northeast: What other poets or artists feed your muse?
Amy King: Loads. Right now, I've been engrossed with the work and lives of a loose-knit
group of artists: Frida Kahlo. Leonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo.
And many more.
Bluemoon Northeast: What is next for you?
Amy King: I'm testing the waters of poetry still, integrating more "real life" material
of the aforementioned artists' lives into this upcoming work.
THE WHITE OF SACRE COEUR
AGAINST THE BLUE PARISIAN SKY
The white of sacre coeur against the blue Parisian sky
marks passageways that blur whenever we enter this city's face.
By our bankrupt dreams, we hold out for starkness,
remember its eyes to dine in.
But I'm of little use to persons undercover, craving
in these buildings' recesses the corners of smiles,
eyes that bulge behind curtains, looking for anything
that will pull the cork, boil the blood
of displeasure tightened by the work of pleasing bosses
and each neighbor whose fence moves a little closer
each year, moaning to stroke the package
left nightly on my doorstep--of pearly liquid, bottled and tied
with a ribbon the color of fairy dust.
They, a secreted them, would have us die to erase that glow.
Mostly at the height of moon's night do her shady limbs
work across properties and lawns they guard with their lives,
whatever these are, whatever they become, however they burn.
For your listening pleasure, I turn as old as I was born,
stroke the bumpy skin of our whisky illness, manage the pyramids
we've never climbed or crawled within,
enter the Morocco never wrapped by your feet
kissing pebbles, visiting your veins, telling you mythologies
that include how we are the sores of hope riding
the backs of tomorrow, mountain peaks we climb
and shout the names of those to come and those who've been,
each of us who happens to be the world's greatest against every
shade of sky, and every sky that cradles our dying heads, still living.
