MARTHE REED after MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE

deposition | dispossession

climate change in the Sundarbans (excerpt)

Sundari

trees

Ganges

delta

drowned

and  t e n d r i l l e d   p r o f u s i o n

another

twilight Ganga’s

blessing

bad dreams

the least of it

Jowar

flood eats

everything

even the ebb

one hundred and two

islands consumed by

(( politics

sea and

salt     (( g  r  e  e  d ))

waxy

elliptical

leaves                        adrift

            over its water

: :

bhasha

f  l  o  o  d  e  d

   p  e  o  p  l  e 

: :

Mousuni Island

West

Bengal

480 people

      /mi²

far

beyond

eco

system

carrying

 capacity

: :

Every year, chunks of the 3,500 kilometre mud embankments collapse,

and every year they are repaired with fresh mud.[1]

: :

8300 acres 1969

7000 acres 2009

erratic monsoons

worsening cyclonic intensity

rising sea levels

5200 acres 2017

: :

what sound does the water make flooding in from the sea

expressed

as a carbon

dioxide equivalent

: :

dis

placed

women

sex

workers

feeding

their families

: :

a body

kept

safe

: :

a communal

what we might know

space

: :

stranded

in

silt

---

[1] “Between the Dark Seas and Living Hell,” Manon Verchot, Indrani Basu & Joanna Plucinska. http://projects.huffingtonpost.in/articles/sundarbans/

*****

The Poet’s Notes on Her Poem

Choosing to address the catastrophic effects of climate change in the Sundarbans of South Bangladesh and India, I intentionally adopted a collage technique from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge. Drawing on a diverse set of resources, I began by collecting notes on small pieces of paper (end cuts from chapbook-making, in this case), clipping notes from each source together. My sources ranged from scientific publications, the IPCC Synthesis Report, and research on native plant and animal species, to discussions of culture figures of the region, addresses to ethics and climate change, to literary texts such as The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh, Travels In The Mugal Empire by François Bernier, and Schizophrene by Bhanu Kapil. The final component were notes addressing my own responsibility and that of the U.S. in climate change. I laid out the text on our dining room table, 10’x3.5’, arranging by juxtaposition a conversation between the texts, “smoothing out grammar,” as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge writes, marrying fragments to one another.

Marthe Reed has published five books: Nights Reading (Lavender Ink, 2014); Pleth, with j hastain (Unlikely Books, 2013); (em)bodied bliss (Moria Books, 2013); Gaze (Black Radish Books, 2010); Tender Box, A Wunderkammer (Lavender Ink, 2007). She lives in Syracuse, NY, and is co-publisher and managing editor for Black Radish Books. Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing in the Anthropocene, edited with Linda Russo, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press (2018).

AGNES MARTON after MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE

Away, Out

             to Marina Abramović and Frank Uwe Laysiepen

We turned the Wall into a break-up destination.

Crumb couples now swear they would end up here,

should no desire remain to recall the cake.

What Marina trudged from Shan Hai Gnan

was stones, not dessert but the main,

stumbling from under her feet. She kicked

them to show who’s boss; the bricks and

the tamped earth hesitated to applaud.

I approached her from Jaiyuguan,

my perched arms around her wouldn’t un-

clutch, I scaled her jelly skin,

no matter how much I had wished

for a clean cut. Each and every square

inch of her was willing, even

eager to share history, but not with

me, not any more. Eight years later I got mail,

at least the envelope said so. “Dear

Marina Abramović, you used to be

my Duracell goddess with nerves full

of ire; singing the Marseillaise: ‘Tremble,

tyrants and traitors,’ always replacing

SWEET with SWEAT in ‘home, sweet home.’

Did you manage to unlearn? I covet

you mesmerized, wondering why, I’m

not sure if your blades are still

jagged. Cheers, Shaminella Turul.” I binned

somebody else’s doubts, no forwarding

address. How dry of me, the past. The older I am

the more I resemble to water. To a sea to swallow,

Marina. I fill every vessel, transparent.

What was empty will be empty,

I’m the in-between. Marina. My tide

is your ebb. The same, one, nothing sharp.

*****

The Poet’s Notes on Her Poem

The lines ‘Separated lovers on a coast keep walking / toward each other.’ in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poem ‘The Reservoir’ reminded me of Marina Abramović and Ulay’s project ‘The Lovers’ at the Great Wall of China. My response is the fictionalized version of the project and its aftermath, also referring to Ulay’s commitment to water . In a 2011 interview in the Brooklyn Rail, he stated: ‘Recently I decided that whenever I meet someone, I should introduce myself as “Water.” Think of it: our brains are about 90 percent water, our bodies about 68 percent. Not even Waterman, simply Water: it makes people curious, they say, “pardon?” and I say again “Water." This immediately starts a conversation and creates an awareness about it. This new name conveys my deep concern about water.’

Agnes Marton is a Hungarian-born poet, writer, librettist, Reviews Editor of The Ofi Press, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, founding member of Phoneme Media. Recent publications include award-winning Estuary: A Confluence of Art and Poetry, her poetry collection Captain Fly’s Bucket List, and three chapbooks with Moria Books. She has won the National Poetry Day Competition 2017 (UK). http://www.facebook.com/agnesmartonpoet/

MARY BURGER after MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE

Some New Opinions on Matter

We wish for certain things to be true; we postulate or propose that certain conditions exist. An example that may help to make the undefined elements more understandable is the written word.

An osculum is a little mouth. To osculate is to have contact with or have characters in common with.

The older woman and the younger woman decide to meet for breakfast. On the street they walk slowly, their deliberate steps a camera’s movement in the black- and-white newsreel footage of a European city during the war at a moment when the worst of the shelling has just stopped, with the ruined remains of buildings on each side and occasional eruptions of smoke or falling debris catching the eye. Their conversation traces a lyrical soundtrack, an arrangement of strings over the buzz of a straggling bomber or the heavy grind of a military transport. They want to continue talking but they are cold.

Later the older woman explains how the decision by the mayor of her large city to spray pesticides over the entire metropolitan area obliged her to leave the city, and her family, for three months.

They represent someone but they are not its or his name. In not being his or its or her name they already have a greater possibility of being something than if they were as a noun is the name of anything.

The Hungarian mathematician Janos Bolyai said, “I have created a new universe from nothing.”

This is the subject in which we never know what we are talking about nor whether what we say is true.

Some day our efforts may be chronicled in a storehouse of culture, like a failed expedition across the Antarctic continent, regarded not for what we set out to accomplish but for the fact that we accomplished anything at all, that we survived our own poor preparations and excessive ambition, that we managed to leave any trace of our passage through a landscape that can rightly be called hostile only when we regard it for our purposes alone, that must, when regarded on its own terms, be called self-sufficient or, simply, indifferent. Our surviving artifacts— the few paltry items of civility that raised us above the bone age, that showed some technological intelligence and complex manipulation of our environment, the modest gifts we made one another, simply more personalized adaptations of the ordinary supplies we all shared—all these might some day astonish as much as Crusoe’s goatskin trousers. The photographs that capture the ordinary alongside the magnificent, the jerky films we made of one another, then as now as astonishing for the bare functionality of the crude technology as for anything we managed to portray, though then and now the very fact of our existence in our extreme circumstances making for astonishment enough, and just going through our day, feeding the dogs, feeding ourselves, in itself comprising a cinematic event.

He said that what we call fame is nothing but the sum of all mistakes circulating about one individual.

The boxer meets an opponent who is a dream-distortion of himself in the sense that his weaknesses, his capacity to fail and to be seriously hurt, his intellectual miscalculations—all can be interpreted as strengths belonging to the Other; the parameters of his private being are nothing less than boundless assertions of the Other’s self. This is dream or nightmare: my strengths are not fully my own, but my opponent’s weaknesses; my failure is not fully my own, but my opponent’s triumph.

The Puritan sensibility would have understood a mouth filling with blood, an eye popped out of its socket—fit punishment for an instant’s negligence.

She returns to the site where the woman staged her own drowning, and imagines her own lips blue against her waxen skin, her matted hair pressed to her brow, her own head flung back sharply in the arms of her pursuer. The heavy iron chain that separates her from the water’s edge, the steel-cold waves that pound against the stone breakwater, the very quality of light in the early dusk—all have become more tangible to her since she witnessed the woman exhibiting a state of extreme distress. That the woman was feigning the distress in order to delude her pursuer, that she was herself no more than a fictional creation, and her image as immaterial as a beam of light, did nothing to detract from the tangibility.

It is possible she needed to believe that the horizon and the stars were hopelessly obscured behind the night clouds, that the sextant was useless. It is possible she was one of those who could steer the correct course only when she believed that navigation was impossible.

The two women go to see a film, about which one woman tells the other she believes that the couple in the story resemble herself and her own lover, she being the wandering adventurer whose curiosity and taste for thrill lead him more than once into a dangerous situation; and her lover, the ravishingly elegant socialite, intent on taming the adventurer’s wandering ways or accompanying him if that need be, whatever might prove necessary for the realization of their love. The dazzling beauty at first appears bored and even irritated by the adventurer’s thrill seeking. His resistance to their relationship appears based on true incompatibility: he is not temperamentally disposed to appreciate exquisite clothing and its attendant graces; she displays no taste for dangerous locales or the pursuit of misadventure.

Slowly, however, a reversal emerges between the two. The adventurer, disabled by some previous bravado, cannot pursue his latest intrigue, and so enlists the aid of his socialite. At first reluctant, the young beauty comes to immerse herself in the drama of a suspected murderer and the search for evidence to incriminate him. While her immobilized lover looks on in white-lipped alarm, she thrusts herself farther and farther into the pursuit, finally facing a danger beyond any her lover had imagined for her. Her bold, even reckless undertaking, her face-to-face encounter with the killer, her assault and near-death at his hands, have the glorious effect of cementing her lover’s desire for her. Yet even while our hearts swell with this realization, the question must be asked: were his affections quickened because, in witnessing her endangerment, he realized how vital, how irreplaceable the girl was to him? Or because, in regarding her fearlessness, he decided she was after all an adventurer worthy of the name, and therefore a pleasing companion for him?

The greater question is of the girl’s own motives—was her feat of daring one that came about spontaneously, and therefore a contradiction of her behavior thus far with her absorption in social graces and her impatience with thrill and intrigue? Or was this act merely a further demonstration of her feminine wiles—was she aware that her display of bravado, undertaken in her customary feminine attire, would capture her lover’s heart by its very unexpectedness or incongruity? Either interpretation leaves the girl’s character pushing uncooperatively beyond its bounds. If femininity is not an involuntary helplessness but merely a matter of taste—if the feminine character is as capable of daring and strength as the masculine but merely chooses not to display it then surely our current fixation on the excavation of gender is no match for the beguilement that comes from encountering your love moving toward you out of a crowd with an unrehearsed smile for you and you alone.

It is a geometry, a familiar, even friendly system of order, the vectors with their helpful arrows, the two planes intersecting agreeably to form a line, the angles uniting into a cooperative arrangement of interior and exterior space. But for naming these shapes she has no vocabulary and must refer to approximations.

A few days after they see the film the woman writes to her friend that the fixation of a minor character on the red glow of his cigarette burning in the dark is like something she has often searched for, like a picture of time.

_______________________
Note:
The boxer meets an opponent... Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing. 

*****

The Poet's Notes on Her Poem

Some New Opinions on Matter was seeded by an actual walk with Mei-mei some years ago, and germinated through my affinity for the ways that elision, erasure, and overdubbing coalesce into the tissue of narrative, seeming to present the planar and linear movements of events and thoughts in time but revealing themselves again and again as the particles and fragments of disparate matters, until ‘alike’ and ‘various’ alternate in a continuous vibration.

Mary Burger is a writer and visual artist living in Oakland.  In all her practices, she’s interested in the instabilities of perception and how we form and re-form our understandings of ourselves. The piece Some New Opinions on Matter was published in her book of collected prose, Then Go On (Litmus, 2012).