Vacancies & Sacrament of the Ordinary

• 2011-07-19

  

  The Gallery

• →

  Tired Eyes: 3 Collaborations

  Photography by Kate Ambrose

  Poetry by Matt Gundlach

  We’re face to face and hand in hand

            While under bridges

            Of embrace expire

  Eternal tired tidal eyes

                     The night is a clock chiming

                     The days go by not I

  Guillaume Apollinaire

  from ”Mirabeau Bridge”

• →

  Dave’s trades

  I             Fabricator

  junk lays about, he finds it

  rigs it into its right place

  scrap metal, plywood, planks, parts

  piled in his lot and shack

       and then the bulldozer

       refuse to the last minute 

  stuff strewn about the past

  and could-be till rigged into story

  II             Fool Killer

  God’s guy. Awake in 72-hour stints,

  running on coffee and beer;

  dust and smoke like incense

  drifting from shack to the humid heavens.

  Spark, thrown stones—

  spit slung,             get the fuck off my property

  axe in squatter’s hand.

  Kicking Satan’s red behind for

  fifty years and

  III            Doctor

  a tumor a lung’s monkey wrench

  right-tight turn. Ribs broken by

  prison guards. Hacking tired defiance.

  The bulldozer’s coming, and the rain.

  Physician, heal thyself.

  IV            Dealer

  Scripts—sell ’em. No pain relief.

  Some cash for food.

  100 pounds to gain for chemo

  and a habit and Slim Jim

  so thin

  no meow no purr but always in lap.

  eating it all

  V            Preacher 

  If I told the story what would I tell

  except the sunrise

  at dawn in the west

  sky blue pink.

  on the road again

  The child prodigy revival preacher

  fuck the bulldozer, the past.

  I’m under the stars

  the best ceiling,

  the way I want it

  the present future

  sky blue pink in the west

• →

  Mamita: 100 Years Old, 60 Years Blind

• →

  Taron’s Eyes

• →

  Vacancies: Public Poetry Installations

  Vision sets out

  journeying somewhere,

  walking the dreamwaters:

  arrives

  not on the far shore but upriver,

  a place not evoked, discovered.

                 Denise Levertov, “Relearning the Alphabet”

   

  Things magnify.

                 Tomas Tranströmer, “The Prelude”

   

  But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. 

  Luke 10:33

   

  Compassion requires vision. Not as an abstraction that we associate with being a “visionary,” a seer, the ability to see other realities—the future, the supernatural—but a matter of attention in the present. Compassion starts with looking—allowing our eyes to receive what is before us. From looking, an act of submission, we turn to seeing. Attention lets in the light to shine on our imagination. Jesus tells us that the Samaritan “saw” the man on the road to Jericho—and his eye, attentive, did not just look at the man, but moved him to compassionate action. It takes a prophetic imagination that the priest and the Levite lacked—they looked, but their imagination was captive to the false narratives, so when they looked, they saw not a neighbor to love, an equal, a neighbor. Jesus says that they saw him, but they must not have truly seen him, but saw him according to eyes of inattention head and heart directed by dominant [hegemonic] narratives.

  See, act. See, say.

  There enters the poem, an act of attention.

  And now I see that poetry is a form of attention. And, too, I believe that poems are presences, themselves the consequence of attention, themselves the consequence of vivid presentations, events as may be called, in Dame Julian of Norwich’s word, “showings.”  (Donald Revell, The Art of Attention)

  Not using poetry for a cause (“to use is to misuse” – Levertov), but presenting the what is seen ( the language given to me from eye and ear attentive to this unique space) allowing the same act of presence and attention for the reader.

  What is it that we are looking at? The First Ward. A neighborhood. One oft-overlooked; for decades a ghetto. (Drawing attention to broken social space takes a certain Samaritan eye.)

  The First Ward is a gentrifying neighborhood, with juxtapositions in wealth along racial lines that are painfully clear. The vacant lot was to me the clearest symbol of this change—embodying the tensions of transition, ownership, and identity, being mediated by text (that is, the commercial text of a real estate sign). The vacant lot is where Vacancies started: adding creative language into the visual format of the commercial sign was a way to stand within this space as resistance and as play.

  In the Vacancies project poetry may be read as protest, but that is extremely limiting. Poetry is also play. Social, political, yes, but also personal—because it invades a politically charged space, trespassing on the territory of commercial text with the play of creative language; trespassing on the walkway of negative social change, walking backwards, saying it different having seen it different.

  Vacancies only asks that we pay attention, and be willing to submit our eyes to the images and our ears to sounds.  No abstractions.

  As a part of Mission Year, I was given the opportunity to live and serve among the poor for a year. I also, as a member of the pilot Arts Team, took on the task of serving the community through creating. The poet, I believe, is the servant of the work (he/she does not use the poem, the poem uses him/her). So this year, I made things. This is what happened.

• →

  “Houses Like Halved Pears”

• →

  

  Having Heard of Rivers (After Langston)

• →

  

  Oyendo De Ríos

  (My own translation of Having Heard of Rivers)

• →

  

  First Ward Elegy #1