DOWN
Page 3
Number one hundred and seventeen is mornings
Number one hundred and eighteen is my feel
Number one hundred and nineteen is my coast
Number one hundred and twenty is this wheel
Number one hundred and twenty-one is my girl.
THE PROCESS NOTES
I’ve been working on DOWN since 2009. It began as different project, Hinterland B. For years, I was writing about a big, bare field. There was a body in it. The newspapers said that someone was gone. The newspapers said that someone had been found. These were not the same person. The TV kept on chattering, people lost interest, the cycle moved on. I was thinking about this field as secondary: not Hinterland A, but Hinterland B.
I thought that the hinterlands were the most rural and remote places. Turns out, this is not true. A hinterland is more familiar; the waste fields around ports and airports are hinterlands. A hinterland serves as a buffer between sanctioned spaces for living and working and the trade hubs where we are not supposed to go. They are the regions between the everyday and the truly rural lands that we too often imagine as depopulated.
I was thinking about what takes place in these areas: illicit sex, beatings, illegal dumping, kids forging their own selves and places. I was thinking about hinterlands as locations of secret pleasure and concealed terror. Invisible, off to the side, that hard, uncultivated and often contaminated ground seemed to hold the possibility for a strange coalition. I wondered what connections might be made in these discarded spaces.
At the same time that I was working on Hinterland B, I was also working on performance writing using song lyrics. I liked how the repetitions structuring chorus and verse shifted when stripped of their melodic accompaniment. Gertrude Stein said she was inclined to believe that there is no such thing as repetition, only insistence. Frank O’Hara said that what was happening to him went into his poems. This was insistence but with more anxiety.
This was happening to me. I was interested in the ways the lines became so tense and upset. I was interested in the ways they set off funny little moments of recognition.
It was hard to learn how to use these kinds of words: tell me you want me; tell me you need me; tell me I’m into something good; tell me what you want to hear; tell me baby; tell me you love me; tell me why. I was trying to write a text caught between being completely poignant and completely flattened. I wanted to write in the language of pop songs, a language for love and one that I did not yet speak. I wanted a text whose insistent and repetitive borrowing would not slide into critical superiority. I wanted to do it like a song does: over and over again. Machine-like but utterly sincere.
To my surprise, I saw that the words in these two projects overlapped: the same hawks flew across the pages. Everything came back to the birds and the bees. It was all the tension between telling and not telling. I put the two together. In this way, DOWN became a book about likeness. Andy Warhol said that everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way. Maybe that’s true. But I wanted to put this likeness in tension with the things that aren’t liked, the things relegated to the hard-packed field. There is a kind of wager here: can we take this junk language and make the connection, flatten it all the way till we’re living in the same environment?
If we look at the field, then we already are. So let’s get there.
Major sources for the poems in this book include G. R. Swenson’s 1963 ARTnews interview with Andy Warhol; Aaliyah’s ‘Are You That Somebody?’ (1998, covered by the Gossip in 2010); the Temptations’ ‘My Girl’ (1964, filtered through the 1991 film My Girl, starring Anna Chlumsky and Macaulay Culkin); Frank Ocean’s coming-out letter (2012); and Frank O’Hara’s ‘Morning’ (1951). The ‘Bury It’ poems rework a brief conversation included in an otherwise-unrelated academic article about rhetoric; ‘Starlight Tours’ draws upon news reports on the initial investigation into the death of Neil Stonechild (1973 –1990); the ‘Brush’ poems draw upon a variety of news sources and on text accompanying the photographs in Chad States’s Cruising (2012).
OOOH, YOU MAKE ME LIVE
For many exchanges of manuscripts and ideas I am grateful to Rachel Zolf, Divya Victor, Julia Bloch, Janet Neigh, Maxe Crandall, Diana Cage, Gregory Laynor, Laura Neuman, Matt Goldmark, CAConrad, Jordan Scott, Jason Zuzga, Jena Osman, Megan Milks, Amaranth Borsuk and Jeanne Heuving. I’m grateful to Emma Stapely for giving me the text from which the ‘Bury It’ poems were made and to Dan Schank for introducing me to the work of Chad States, which has been so helpful. To my colleagues and students at UWB and at UPenn, thank you for our conversations.
Thanks to Susan Holbrook for your generous and sympathetic editing, to Alana Wilcox, Evan Munday, Leigh Nash, Stan Bevington, Sarah Smith-Eivemark, Heidi Waechtler, Rick/Simon and everybody at Coach House for your support of this project and your enthusiasm about my work. I’m especially indebted to Katrina Ohstrom for the beautiful cover photo, which was taken at Northeast/Edison/Julia de Burgos High in Philadelphia, a public school that was abandoned in 2002 and will soon become a Save-a-Lot supermarket.
Many thanks to the editors of the following publications, where excerpts of this book have appeared: Harriet: The Blog, Line, Revista Laboratorio, TrollThread, The Windsor Review, Matrix, I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women and P-Queue.
But most of all, thanks to Jesse Long for making it possible and making it good, to the pets for getting in the way, and to my friends and family for the broader context. Things mostly work and sometimes don’t. It’s such a relief to be with you all.
SARAH DOWLING is the author of Security Posture and Birds & Bees. Her poetry was included in the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, and she is international editor at Jacket2. Originally from Regina, Saskatchewan, she currently resides in Seattle and teaches at the University of Washington Bothell.
Print edition typeset in Aragon and Aragon Sans, from Canada Type.
Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited by Susan Holbrook
Designed by Heidi Waechtler
Cover photo by Katrina Ohstrom
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