Full Foreground

Notes

65 Notes Full Foreground composes a musical sequence whose desire is for lyric discourse to voice bodily sensation in the shadow of global command. It speaks of discontinuous times and locations on the borderlands of Mexico, the United States, and beyond, from 1997 to the present. The prologue poem was written in the weeks prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq; the afterword, on the ten-year anniversary of the September 11 attacks, with language lifted from N. R. Kleinfield (New York Times, 12 September 2001, p. A1). From that duration and geography is reflected a language of current events, journalism, state demagoguery, the ethnographic account, and the pathologies of violence and massacre; extensions of a self—“myself”—in spaces of public address. Flatlands: In 1997 I joined Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide in her actions through the US American South, beginning in Memphis, Tennessee, southalongtheMississippiDelta,thentothecityofOpelousas,Louisiana,and its environs. I wrote: “Iturbide’s vision turns an inverse anthropological eye to the emergency that can erupt from the most mundane phenomenon.” The poem is indebted to the generosity of Rose Shoshana and Bruce Berman. In addition, another poem beginning “The plain terms this place a conversation . . .” refers to Iturbide’s photographs of the matanza (or bloodshed), a commercial slaughter of goats in Mexico that has taken place each year since the colonial period, almost exclusively in the regions of Huajuapan de León (Oaxaca) and nearby Tehuacán (Puebla). More information on this photo exhibit is available online at http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/iturbide/. Dispersed throughout this book are a series of three-word clusters: concrete poems first imagined as television screen-grabs, later as campaign buttons appearing when “government cameras / pulled away to the crowd in a televised / speech before the rally A hundred thousand / of us in epileptic intent our flag to the forces . . .” I worked in 2010 with artist Rob Verf who deployed the language to energize a nine-minute video: words, pasted onto Styrofoam orbs of various sizes, hover in an aquarium that gradually fills with water, forcing sphere and phrase into a gentle fury of movement and action. Today I submit the set as an intermittent totem of carbon thriving to matter. ...