The latest news about (home)Body: European premier

a poetry/dance/video installation which is a collaboration between choreographer/director Cid Pearlman, myself as poet/dramaturge, video artist Mara Milam, four commissioned poets JJJJJJerome Ellis, Naomi Ortiz, Willie X. Lin, and Tanaya Winder, nineteen dancers and movement artists, composer Jonathan Segel and an amazing video crew. It premiered at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, as part of the Rydell Fellows exhibition, January-March 2022.

(home)Body had its European premiere September 18-25 at the Viimsi Artium in Estonia as part of the PÕHJA KONN art festival.

(home)Body invokes complex relationships between embodiment and place. We explore questions such as: What does it feel like to be at home in your body? What are embodied experiences of home across intersections of identities and expressions? With a multiplicity of voices, dancers and poetic imaginaries, the work speaks to ideas centering home and body through personal, experimental, and topical approaches. The films involve site-specific and immersive environments both natural and built. Spaces and bodies interact in a collaborative and choreographic conversation. The intent of (home) Body is to offer a dynamic, varying and open assemblage of an interdisciplinary and intersectional art from which to draw.

Cid Pearlman’s video installation “home(Body)”

https://viimsiartium.ee/en/festival-pohja-konn/

https://www.cidpearlman.org/

Two poems in summer 2023 issue of Quarterly West

Happy to be with other wonderfully talented artists! Two poems entitled Comforted in the Deep Duress of Time and The Nest of a Letter I Lay In appear in the summer 2023 issue of the online journal Quarterly West

Comforted in the Deep Duress of Time

Ruin of weather unboxed in a truck of wings

and the small pebbled letters under scattering feet.

I sound different near a distant bridge.

The skyline pretends to be a crane

it could pick us up and pretend

to be a kind tongue, an emptied tongue.

An egret with a bent neck sleeping near a low metal sign

with old bullet holes makes a catastrophe of shore.

The words “Sea Lion” might be a monster or a caress or both.

The ramshackle jetty of an urban port in colloquy can’t help.

Slivers of rag and cellophane move across waning sand

and the lights going out across the channel.

The Nest of a Letter I Lay In

The many children of nowhere poems.

Absent certain words she cries.

The scrap of tire gives her gaze purpose.

Curbside estuary in rancid rattle.

She doesn’t say the name of the bird,

she doesn’t say.

To pantomime the reek of collapse.

The rare appearance of plover here.

An opaque aria between inlets.

Photos of a photo.

When she forgot herself as matter.

Sacrifice of wind in her teeth.

That was how it started,

tidal city.

Trying to describe.

The sticky seduction of failure.

Pieces of splendorous trash.

The many stairs to tender beaks.

https://www.quarterlywest.com/issue-109-leto

Quarterly West is the online literary journal at the University of Utah. QW was founded by James Thomas in 1976.

Poems and prose in Writing the Self-Elegy now out

Writing the Self-Elegy: The Past is not Disappearing Ink

is out from Southern Illinois University Press, edited by Kara Dorris

With a group of fantastic poets and writers two of my poems from my manuscript The Body is a Wild Summons along with my prose, The Name of this Essay Changes Every Day appear in the anthology.

The press writes: “honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others.
 
In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.”

http://siupress.siu.edu/books/978-0-8093-3906-8

Check out this poetry Panel in February 2022

Amazing poets! Join us.

Self-Elegy: A Poets’ Panel, with Kara Dorris, Tanaya Winder, Denise Leto, Stephanie Heit, and Rusty Morrison

Who can’t reach back into time, find a moment that feels unfinished, a moment we wish had ended differently, a moment that still haunts and defines us? The self-elegy is reflective, reinventive, and confrontational, interrogating and elegizing past versions of self. To say self-elegy is new would be naïve – for how can we truly mourn another without mourning the self created through that relationship? Yet, this awareness of self (and how the self is created) seems more prevalent than ever before. In this panel, 5 poets contemplate self-elegaic moments. With Kara Dorris (organizer), Tanaya Winder, Denise Leto, Stephanie Heit and Rusty Morrison.

Register on Eventbrite

A new poem in Orion: Bodies in Nature Survival Lessons from Disabled Communities

Virtual Poem Series, #13

A new poem in the journal Baest, Issue 6: Animal West

https://www.baestjournal.com/issue-6-list

Check out this beautiful journal and my new poem, “Animal West.” I wrote the poem during an ongoing collaboration with the poet Pat Reed called, The Baylands Poetry Project: Aimless Wandering with Instructions.

From the editors: bæst is as much a journal of queer forms & affects as it is rope / materiality / interiority that aligns & dislocates historical & present bedfellows, maladies, contagions, weather systems, language (non)families, orgasms, domains, states of exile and/or exception, (dis)identifications, dearths, bloods, guts, excretions, legibilities & illegibilities & illegitimacies & cavernous fields of feeling, landscapes of (be)longing, the rocks of queer inhumanisms & smatterings of matterings.

Pandemic Artifacts from the Zoomshell: A Turtle Disco Disability Culture Collection

Check out this new publication with amazing poets and writers in which a poem of mine appears, “O Poem.”

Gift PDF: Turtle Disco Pandemic Artifacts from the Zoomshell We are delighted to share with you this collection that witnesses the pandemic through art and writing created during Turtle Disco Zoomshell offerings. Edited by Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit, featuring work by Samar Abulhassan, Marc Arthur, Roxanna Bennett, Beth Currans, Sarah Dean, Jose Miguel Esteban, Elena SV Flys, Raven Kame’enui-Becker, Megan Kaminski, Victoria Lee Khatoon, Denise Leto, Naomi Ortiz, Hannah Soyer, Chanika Svetvilas, and Tracy Veck.

Turtle Disco is a somatic writing studio in our repurposed living room in Three Fires Confederacy territory in the College Heights neighborhood of Ypsilanti, Michigan. We, Petra Kuppers and Stephanie Heit, started Turtle Disco in 2017 as part of our art/life practices, to cultivate disability culture experimentation, creative self-care, communal inquiry, connection, and awareness.

My new collaboration with Cid Pearlman and Mara Milam: home(Body)–announcing the 4 poets we will be working with and the semifinalsts and honorable mentions

https://www.cidpearlman.org/

(home)Body Poets

Cid Pearlman Performance is delighted to announce the four poets whose work will be featured in our upcoming dance/video/art installation (home)Body.

(home)Body is an art installation with dance video, poetry, and live performance. It will premiere at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History in January of 2022.  

The (home)Body Poets are:

JJJJJerome Ellis

Willie X. Lin
Naomi Ortiz

Tanaya Winder

Each (home)Body Poet will receive a $500 honorarium. 

Bios & photo credits can be found here.

We have also selected nine Semifinalists and nine Honorable Mentions whose poems will be published on cidpearlman.org in November of 2021.  

Semifinalists

• Robyn Brooks
• Dina El Dessouky
• Meg Frances
• Tse Hao Guang
• Stephanie Heit
• Petra Kuppers
• Sarah Rosenthal
• Michael Warr
• Chun Yu 

Honorable Mentions

• Rukhsar Ali
• Mrinalini Harchandrai
• Elizabeth Hassler
• Julia Lepe
• Londeka Mduli
• Ojo Taiye
• Elizabeth Upshur
• Patrice Vecchione
• Tajinder Virdee 

(home)Body Lead Artists
Denise Leto (Poet/Dramaturge)
Mara Milam (Video Artists/Director of Photography)
Cid Pearlman (Artistic Director/Choreographer)

This project is made possible by the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship at the Community Foundation Santa Cruz.

Cid is honored to have been awarded a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship at the Community Foundation Santa Cruz for her creative work. This includes $20,000 in unrestricted funds.  Other artists in the 20/21 cohort include Ann Altstatt, Marc D’Estout and Edward Ramirez. All four fellows will show work together in early 2022. 

Poets

JJJJJerome Ellis

Willie X. Lin

Naomi Ortiz

Tanaya Winder

Lead Artists

Cid Pearlman, Artistic Director/Choreographer

Denise Leto, Poet/Dramaturge

Mara Milam, Video Artist/Director of Photography

Some poems of mine in the new journal: Mollyhouse

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1028513

DENISE LETO

MYTHICAL MAP OF A ROOM (an excerpt)

How long have you lived inside this candle?

I have lived inside this candle since you left.

It was cruel light in her mouth when they kissed.

Touch can be seen or unseen.

I will make you a desktop that looks like the night sky.

Your room will be a greenhouse.

I will keep you constantly under mist.

Feed your hands with my hands.

I will make things for you.

The skin just above your hips.

In your green eyes gathering.

Here are the oil paintings I made for you.

Here is the chair I carved.

And the opera I wrote.

I sewed a blanket for you.

I designed these shoes for you. Soft. Leather. Aubergine.

Black stitching on the tongue. Put them on.

I painted a room-size ocean for you.

I held you when you jumped into the bucket of snails.

I drew a turquoise cave. Your initials in the overlay.

You will never be cold.

I will make things for you.

I will make things for you.

I made this for you.

***

ELSEWHERE: A PLACE

The time her eyes looked like doorknobs

and once like sand crabs.

Count the poison dandelions,

pretend they are locks of hair.

Take your shoes off, your blouse, your cantilever.

Play the broken part: apart.

Needles, bottles, brother.

Future, tender, liar.

Hello bone urethra.

Hello stellar coroner.

Hello chipped nail polish.

If and if and then.

***

THE ARCHAIC FRAME OF BODY

Bone as an exhalation of form

glass stained by glass

Time as a mirror of negation

no help in the heap of surrender

Home as a parlor of fish

the yard in your world in duress

Words are unfavorable to infinity

we could not have known what leaving would mean.

***

(home) Body: Poetry call for Submissions

(home)Body is an art installation with dance video, poetry, and live performance.

https://www.cidpearlman.org/

Submit Poems to our new interdisciplinary project!

Four selected poets will each receive a $500 honorarium for an original work

Five additional poets will each receive honorable mentions and one or more of their poems will appear on the project’s webpage.

This work is a collaboration between artistic director/choreographer Cid Pearlman, video artist Mara Milam, poet/dramaturge Denise Leto, and ten dance artists.

The poems we commission will seek to represent a multiplicity of voices. They will inform the content we create and will function as scaffolding and inspiration for the dance and video.

We are looking for poems that speak to ideas around home and body in personal, experimental, and/or topical ways. The poems can range in metaphorical and embodied complexity. For example, the body in question can be the personal/individual body, the communal/community body, the body politic and/or the synecdochal body.

There is no entry fee.

We welcome all poetic forms and approaches (lyric, experimental, performance poetry, slam poetry, prose poems etc.)

We very much encourage new and emerging artists.

We are particularly interested in seeing submissions from BIPOC poets, poets from the LGBTQIA+ community, young poets, and poets from disability communities across all cultural and socio-economic backgrounds.

Submissions open: November 24, 2020

Deadline: February 15, 2021 at midnight PST

Send to: hombodypoets@gmail.com

Please do not submit until you read the complete guidelines and learn more about the project at:

www.cidpearlman.org

This project is made possible by the Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship at the Community Foundation Santa Cruz.