The reciprocal
This piece began as a standard interview and evolved into more of an epistolary between Dan Mahoney and Allan Stone Chair in the Visual Arts Catherine Clinger.
One of the best parts of being the editor of COA is I get to spend time talking to my colleagues about the work they do at the college. What a gift, being forced to spend time listening to really smart, engaging people talk about their passions.
I loved my time as a college student—once I actually accepted that role—and I wanted to be nothing else. I spent many years getting my BA, many more getting my MFA… I would do it all again. The spaces where talking and listening and learning happen are charged spaces, magical spaces, (un)safe spaces. Spaces like that have always been a draw for me. COA is a space like that.
Enjoy the Reciprocity
—Dan
Catherine Clinger: The first thing I did at COA after I was hired in 2010 was interview Alan Jenkins, who was The Times Literary Supplement poetry editor. He and I had a great conversation that turned into an exchange centering on words and boats, forms of reciprocity in leaving and returning, utterance and the undocking from a pier... altogether a good night. Which makes me think now of reciprocity and the complicated nature of what it meant to the Greeks. In myth, literature, song—the ancient Greeks have a different association with what reciprocity is, and what gifting is... A boat journey invents the world. For the Greeks, reciprocity was more about backwards and forwards movement than it is about the giving and taking of items. Reciprocity means to cross distance. What Jenkins and I were talking about in the here and now—and in the poetical sense—is what it means to cross waters.
Dan Mahoney: When we first spoke at your house and there was strong coffee and Bowie, your dog, it was such a rambling, inventive, fun conversation. You mentioned the Anne Carson book, Economy of the Unlost which sent me down a crazy rabbit hole. I could not write this article until I finished reading that book. I loved it, because, well, Anne Carson. One thing that made a huge impact was Carson's discussion of the Greek word xenia, a ritualized form of hospitality that bound the culture together. Xenia allowed Odysseus to make his journey and count on hosts to put him up on his travels. Xenia means guest but also host, which I think is fantastic. Talk about crossing waters and the movement of being in dialogue with a person. The space a good dialogue opens up is exciting and terrifying all at once. In Unlost, Carson talks about one of my favorite poets, Paul Celan, and how he is a poet of negation, but negation for Celan does not mean nothing or crossing out, it means the space between, as in, the negative space that exists between when a poem is written and when a stranger picks it up and reads it. The poem is intention—crazy energy waiting for a mouth.
I met Anne Carson in the early 2000s, when she visited Santa Fe to give a reading. Before her talk, she wanted to see the mountains. We sat on the back bench of a car that made its slow way from dawn on the high road loop through Carson National Forest—ancestral Pueblo land and 16th century Hispanic villages—I wished the ride could cancel the eponymous Kit Carson’s cruel deeds. Like Paul Celan, Anne Carson recognizes that the in-between shelters potency, not-nothingness. In an essay written about Jitka Hanzlová’s Forest cycle, John Berger noted her photographs reveal the forest is what exists between the trees. That day on the road, it was clear that Carson’s glance into the forest of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains educed the Greek dryads. Her silence was an event, just like the air between the trees. Her plunge into the forest without leaving the vehicle melted the road, the depths in the passenger and the land reproduced a xenia of sorts in both the becoming and continuity of going. The Lannan Foundation hosted her reading [and those of numerous other writers and poets], providing experience of unmediated reciprocity with no expectation. This is the character of The Kippy Stroud Foundation, honoring its namesake. Our work sprang from wanting to continue these kinds of conversations during the academic year, here at the college, expanding into performative and visual arts. We've been able to host quite a range of people. Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley were incredible in so many ways. Okwui Okpokwasili and her collaborator Peter Born were amazing. And then, most recently, Edie Fake. And there's nothing linking those artists except the fact that they've done a residency at COA. The Foundation has been expanding their focus, and together we have expanded the programs, bringing local Maine artists into the mix [Heather Lyon, Posey Moulton, Annika Earley]. The first iteration of the expansion was in the spring 2024, when Posey Moulton came and worked with Jodi [Baker, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman Chair in the Performing Arts] and Dru [Colbert, COA professor emeritus] on the outdoor spectacle Graupel.
It's been extraordinary to share this place with such wonderful artists. I was only familiar with Okpokwasili’s work from Jodi [Baker, Woodward & Newman Chair in Performing Arts] teaching Bronx Gothic [a performance that fuses dance, song, drama, and comedy to create a mesmerizing space in which audiences can engage with a story about two 12-year-old black girls coming of age in the 1980s]. I don't remember if it was in the article COA wrote about Okpokwasili or somewhere else, but she talks about charging the space in a performance. I love that idea. It brings performance back to ritual and the charged space of ritual where the holy arrives. In Bronx Gothic, Okpokwasili has her back to the audience for the first 20 minutes of the piece, which builds this expectation and frustration where nothing is easy or quickly pleasing... Talk about punk rock. I remember seeing The Residents, I forget what show they were doing, but it was magical because they charged the space with sound in their black tuxedos and giant eyeball heads... They were working long form, slow-building an atmosphere, and then someone yelled from the audience, When is the show going to start, and there was this collective groan because it was clear the person was waiting for a present that was already present.
Fake
Ah, the range of audience! Being present to the present, or not… A boat ride to cross waters becomes treacherous when the stability of the vessel is endangered because people rush to one side to see something they assume will be there, a mass move to affirm expectation, rather than embrace chance. I was blown away by Edie Fake [fall 2024 College of the Atlantic Kippy Stroud Artist-in-Residence]. Edie’s work doesn’t just imagine a world, it builds our capacity to see worlds in the vernacular and create thresholds through which to move beyond the limits of what we mean by vernacular and normalcy in architecture and social life. Edie's talk was so inspiring; to be there with someone trying to put words to something that's beyond words. Sometimes when an artist or poet speaks, they have prepared a talk or there are prepared questions for the audience, and it is all very nice and tidy and boring. Edie had organized his work in a slide presentation and maybe had some notes but was not led by pre-thought, Edie’s whole being was led by being present in the doing and talking at the time. Seeing that talk and how he went about revealing self, that's part of reciprocity, in terms of gift... Gift is sacrifice, sacrifice is gift, and oftentimes gifts—going back to the Greeks here—gifts are given to the unknown, like to a divinity. But you need to give the gift form, so it ends up becoming an object or a person or blood.
A gift. Yeah. Mary Reufle talks a lot about wasting time in her book, Madness, Rack, and Honey, which is a funny way to engage an audience. She says poets need to waste time because it's part of the creative process and poetry disequips you from the requirements of life. There is something so wonderfully anti-capitalist about the word disequips, and poetry is certainly anti-capitalist. Sending poems into the world hoping they find another mouth may be a quixotic vocation, but it is also an attempt to make sense, to bridge distances. Carson, too, says the attempt to make sense is an exchange; a gift. She says, You don't make sense for yourself; you make sense to tell someone else. I like that. Fake spoke a lot about moving around the country and creating work with others, about collaborating and building community. It was his artistic journey and, like you mention above, there were notes but I could feel Fake stumbling into parts of his own past as if they were just occurring. Does that make sense? Like, there's that saying about how the past is always changing because of what's happening in the present; when Fake spoke that night, I felt him engage with that sort of changingness in real time. It was stunning.
Well said, you!
Encountering
My role has always been as a teacher at the college, sometimes as a facilitator of interesting conversations that happen. I love helping to bring people in. We [with the help of the Kippy Stroud Foundation] bring people to COA because my colleagues and I have worked together to identify a person (or people) who would offer an unexpected departure from our pier. In that way, we get to re-gift... and sometimes it all seems so effortless and sometimes it is about trying to ensure that a gift will actually be worked, not just used.
You're killing me with that distinction: worked, not just used. I guess the difference is in attention, right? Like when you are working with a tool you are actively engaged in form and function and improvisation versus simply using a tool to complete a task. Attention... Celan, in his Meridian speech (which I read because of Carson and Unlost and I was down a deep, deep rabbit hole at that point) quotes Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka, Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul. Attention is prayer. And now I'm off to Whitman and his Crossing Brooklyn Ferry where he anticipates generations to come after him who will journey across the Hudson River to Manhattan as he is doing in the poem, and how we will wonder about him just as he is wondering about us. And what is a poem if not a prayer? And I feel Whitman entirely present when I read that poem. And once when I read Crossing with middle schoolers, they got really freaked out: We don't like it that someone was thinking about us 150 years ago… it's creepy. And I knew they were feeling his presence too.
Oh dear, dear Walter Benjamin, the rabbit hole deepens! In Light, the Danish poet Inger Christensen wrote, "It’s very strange the eggs are everywhere… impossible, We must get closer together, but beloved what will happen with all the eggs everywhere, what will happen everywhere to us." Compounding and amplifying what we already have and know is not the mission of the Stroud Residency Program... It's definitely the opposite. We just hosted Serubiri Moses’ delivery of the inaugural Kippy Stroud Memorial Lecture. Moses was a complete pleasure to be around and engage with. Now that we've established that we have the capacity to host and bring people to COA, I think the next sightline for me is for the interactions to become more porous within the community. The generosity of Kippy Stroud prompts us to remember to make space for intellectuals and artists, rather than keep them in their place. Be hospitable, invite the encounter, over and over again, everywhere, be present within it, summon the Dryads, move forward and backwards, listen, but don’t stop. Keep the eggs and boats and forests shielded from being smashed together, cooked and compounded into a single, stagnant note. Let’s not be hospitable to monoculture.
We need new music and words to challenge and extend ourselves... The algorithm is killing us. One of the things that killed Bill Haley and the Comets (of Rock Around the Clock fame) was the algorithm that made them big stars in the first place. Haley was really attuned to when his teenage audiences reacted to this or that specific moment in a song, and he took very precise notes: this sort of break went over big, this guitar part they loved, sax here... It was a musician as chemist sort of thing with Haley. After Rock Around the Clock came out, The Comets played to massive crowds that reacted to everything all the time... Haley could not hear any specific moments because his shows were now one long moment. Oh, Catherine Clinger, I don't want the conversations to end. I want to keep talking to you and Kourtney and Jonathan and Reuben because I'm afraid of what happens when conversations end. Because I never know what I'm going to write until I begin and trust the words will find me. Because words come from somewhere else, and the job of a writer is first to listen. Because attending to what people are passionate about is a gift. Because Serubiri Moses is a poet and poetry is a type of prayer. Because Celan says, "The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of the encounter?"
