Crevice Communities Exhibition 2021
Karla Kelsey and Nancy Kuhl
Lift, Lace, Sharpen, Unpick, Ground, Play: An Interstitial Collaboration 2021
Poetry
Corsetry
Within this crevasse the universe multiplies, pleats in aquamarine,
cornflower, green orchid, flamingo with base notes of vetiver,
ambergris, and civet. We make an interstitial when. Panther
befriending dove and abolishing corsetry’s long lace first threaded
through an eyelet at the waist, fed in an upward zigzag, skipping
every other opening, and then looped across the top to zigzag back
down, firmly tied where the affair had begun.
Is or was?, isn’t that
our question now?
Why don’t you tell me instead, I said as we settled on the rocks at
the shore, about electromagnetism.
--
Turquoise, set in silver, for example,
or a rod down the front of the corset:
to itself, the body is always an index
left alone in the crescent cut.
The second option: the body is always
a puppet, always dead or alive to itself.
I wanted to move not you but the surface,
the interval, the posture recombining:
folding, knotting.
What you wanted to keep
for yourself: animal musk and orchid.
--
Unthreaded through the eyelet the secret creates another opening,
although there we find the body even in its nudity, musk, secretion,
already riven with qualification. Pitch-dark, pierced in suede, not
from the rabbit, as you had cried to me, nor, of course, from the cat
you insist is the origin of all sacral ache—always dead or alive to itself.
Before me: wind-stripped basalt to which I have brought only
salt. Skin overlain with skin may be the only solace as the soul
currents along its wire ungrounded and unhooked.
--
What does it mean when what you wanted for yourself is already
forced between corset’s skin and bone (fastened and laced with notes
of ambergris which does and does not smell like the sea)?
The fact is, we have
direct language:
the body doubled
the body now beset
We aren’t talking about failure. We’re talking about insufficiency or
getting by or (as ladies used to say) making do. In this analogy, the
comparison is to the interstitial fauna of marine sediments—to the
creatures living between grains of sand.
--
Silver broach and bezel,
Egyptian turquoise: blue
standing for a mineral
past, an overlayering, sand-
stone or basalt, a knotting.
Such intervals thin you,
pull you across inland field
and rockface, finally across
the sea. I dream of ancient
fluid surfaces, sulfuric smoke
and molten roiling. In my fist,
in my pocket, flat as a watch
and telling its own time.
There are other options.
Environment A
Sublimate, sculpt, ground
20 minutes
Due: Saturday
The cat is always dead or alive to itself, whereas the body, like the puppet,
is constructed as an index of forces that act upon and
through it. A posture, for example, ensured by a wooden or metal
rod placed down the center front of the corset until volumes,
always more than one, emerge from surfaces, recombining with
lines, folding, bridging, knotting. A hunk of rough turquoise, set in
silver. The first option was keeping myself such that when anyone
addressed me, they pulled what I wanted to keep for myself out of
me. The second option was out of which our moment emerges all
animal musk and orchid.
---
lift, unpick, locate
20 minutes
Due: Wednesday
Turquoise, set in silver, for example,
or a rod down the front of the corset:
to itself, the body is always an index
of forces that act upon and through it.
The second option: the body is always
a puppet, always dead or alive to itself.
I wanted to move not you but the surface,
the interval, the posture recombining:
folding, knotting.
What you wanted to keep
for yourself: animal musk and orchid.
---
re-flow, sharpen, escalate
20 Minutes
Due: Thursday
Egyptian turquoise found in sandstone
that is, or was, overlayered by basalt—is
or was, isn’t that our question and now
set in silver a broach
when the fashion for
broaches had long ended but you wear it
replacing the corset as if stone were
superior to cotton and whale which had
pulled you, admittedly thinned you, across
inland field and sea.
The second option, you
interject, as if there were options, the body
is always a puppet always dead or alive to
sucking on the hem of the nightdress letting
out the dogs to hunt for ambergris.
I wanted
to move not you but the surface, the
interval, the posture recombining:
folding knotting
what you wanted
for yourself: musk and silver.
---
salvage, color, replenish
up to 45 minutes
due: Wednesday
Silver broach and bezel,
Egyptian turquoise: blue
standing for a mineral
past, an overlayering, sand-
stone or basalt, a knotting.
Such intervals thin you,
pull you across inland field
and rockface, finally across
the sea. I dream of ancient
fluid surfaces, sulfuric smoke
and molten roiling. In my fist,
in my pocket, flat as a watch
and telling its own time.
There are other options.
—
Lift, Lace, Sharpen, Unpick, Ground, Play: An Interstitial Collaboration
We are two poets who live in different cities that seemed relatively close to one another until pandemic lockdowns changed the shape of our world. Missing frequent, multifaceted in-person conversations, we devised a poem exchange to fill the gap. Over time, what was a straightforward sharing developed into a collaborative writing project.
Beginning from assembled quotations from favorite writers (shared without attribution), one poet creates “an environment.” She guides next steps by defining standard limits, including: 1-3 verbs of engagement (e.g. “sculpt,” “flood,” “blossom”); a temporal engagement limit (“work for no more than 20 minutes”); a deadline (“return to me in 48 hours”). We exchange the work, revising both the text and the limits until one poet initiates the last pass with an invitation to “replenish” the field by collaging fragments of the last, new quotations, and other raw materials. The exchange begins again.
If our textual environments have been fueled by a shared love of collage and assemblage, our time limits were devised to set our own creative rhythms outside of the work-consumer rhythm that commodifies everything—especially in a time when our homes became our workplaces and our beloved cultural spaces (the libraries and museums where we often met) were indefinitely closed, impossibly distant.
Co-authored work exhibited includes “Environment A,” a raw fragment from our exchange including engagement limits, as well as a finished work, “Corsetry,” a poem that includes reference to interstitial spaces – not unlike the interval that is a break or seam in a rock face. Our collaborative practice allows for the creation of an interdependent, creative, “crevice community” in the “thin soil” of a fraught era. Time and language are our crevices: our limitations and our ground. Our collaborative environments offer opportunities to unspool ourselves from singularity, to unmake ownership and differentiations between self, other, text.
—
Karla Kelsey is the author of one book of essays and four poetry collections, including Blood Feather (Tupelo 2020). She uses the lyric form to investigate the philosophical and historical. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University, Pennsylvania; Karla co-edits SplitLevel Texts.
Nancy Kuhl’s poetry books include Granite (A Published Event 2021), Pine to Sound (Shearsman 2015), and The Birds of the Year (Grenfell Press 2017). She is Curator of Poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
nancy.kuhl@yale.edu
—
Provenance: Peer reviewed submission
