The Brooklyn Rail

No Land and Anne Waldman “met on the street” and “exchanged a flower” on May Day 2012, and so opens The Velvet Wire. They began working together on poems, films, and performances, and picked up a ritual of emailing throughout the “monastic night.” The Velvet Wire reads like a sort of shrine to their friendship, a holy collage of lines from each other’s work, nightly notes, and poems made together and for one another, often painted on, and printed for the reader to witness. Such intergenerational and radical closeness models how all of us can sustain one another, and how to “take care in this perilous time,” as Anne signed her emails to me during our interview. The pleasure of reading The Velvet Wire comes partly from how these poets blend acts of love with the weaving of poetic lineages, partly from the blending of simple notes like “pick up the phone” and “eat” with the mysticism of their poetry, and partly from seeing laid bare the messiness and the glee of true care. The Velvet Wire is a mosaic of language and imagery for understanding the shared interior, an archive of our need to belong together, and an experiment in “our resistance,” they call it, to a society of brutality and excuses.

The material form of The Velvet Wire is an extraordinary art-object in itself, published by Granary Books. Of the mere thirty-three made, one lives in the New York Public Library, and many others in the archives at various universities, where anybody can take the pilgrimage to read one. And this rare, not-easily-consumable book seems like the appropriate form for a sacred-feeling text. Gregory Corso’s poem, “I Held A Shelley Manuscript,” concludes the book, and Corso holding “the dying page” of Shelley becomes these poets holding each other, and becomes us too holding whoever we seek out and work into our own lineages.

Bradley King (Rail): The two of you clearly share a familial love for each other’s work. On one page, a poem of No Land’s about found families—“the act of kinship a city gait, where you / are taken by your own volition to your relatives”—is typed out alongside a Waldman poem where she seems to pray, “be everywhere, daughter who vexes night.” Could you say more about the other’s work and about how you came together on this project ? (Waldman uses line-breaks in her responses. For more about No Land and Waldman’s other collaborations mentioned below, see their bios.)

Anne Waldman: We’ve worked together before with a group of poets and musicians I like to call RIZOMA in a women’s prison in Mexico City. And we continue to collaborate with friends and family in the free jazz and art/poetry worlds, and the more and more essential small press sites.

I think No Land is an artist of many talents. Her black & white still photography, which is so much about living in a vibrant human world, is especially strong. Her performances are mysterious and magnetizing. Her poetry is emotionally fluid and gets more extensive and layered as well. Our community is serious, works hard.
Poesis is about making.

And also building creative infrastructure that holds heart and mind and body together with the work itself as sacred, enduring, and useful to future art and poetry realms. And our own sanity right now.

No Land: Anne worked with William Blake’s Book of Thel—about an unborn being who is sussing out the planet to see if she should join the world—in her book Voice’s Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born, and I was drawn to transmute these works in The Velvet Wire. Anne called to me and provided me with many “spirit-assignments” in poetry and art, and I felt this was her way of “dragging Thel to earth.”

Rail: Are there relationships in the history of poetry, small press or otherwise, that you two are channeling in The Velvet Wire ?

Waldman: Keep an image of Gregory Nunzio Corso at Shelley’s tombstone, where I also paid homage to Gregory’s tombstone nearby. We artist-poets visit a Buddhist stupa together. Chant, take photos. And I guess I’d use the word “transmission” and what the poets call “lineage.” Gregory was a court jester in many ways, a trickster, a kind of raggedly seer.

No Land: I found Corso’s book Way Out, published by Bardo Matrix and Ira Cohen, one day in Oliver Ray’s library. It was exactly the type of magical humble object I wanted our book to resemble. Each page of our book is composed of handmade elements in the spirit of the Bardo Matrix. My art pieces in velvet are made of gold paint, ink, chalk, and iridescent dusts on handmade papers, and they speak to themes of the immaterial. Much of my artwork has a fragile feel, and I think Bardo Matrix was a sign for me that books do not have to be robust, standard objects. They can be as we are: ephemeral, fragile, and magical. The Velvet Wire has been through about thirty different iterations and there are versions with much more poetry. It’s mercurial. It’s moving. And we are so happy for it now to be part of the exquisite Granary Books archive. The night of our book release was also the opening of an exhibition of our art pieces from The Velvet Wire, alongside my wider art works (drawings, paintings, photographs, poetry scrolls, and cinema-poems). The show was up from October 27 through Nov 1 at Off Paradise, NYC.

Rail: Reading this book, I get a sense of a collective inhabitation, maybe what could be called a “co-divinity.” Can you offer any myths, or previous lives so to speak, that illuminate such an intense sense of connection?

No Land: Your poet-tribe may exist out in the ether, composed of living and bygone and un-yet-born poets. This “poet’s temple” is formed and together you walk a type of spirit-highway. As a young poet, you are looking out at the world and you want to believe with enough people in a shared understanding, you can create another kind of world, but it feels impossible. If your poet-kin are not alive,  you may just confer with them privately, intimately. We know the tales of Allen Ginsberg hearing Blake’s voice, Waldman writing in homage to María Sabina when she wrote Fast Speaking Woman, etc. I had the feeling as a young poet that I would be in service to this poet temple.

Before I knew her, when Anne would perform a poem, I might get this sense of a calling.  I was hopeful to show Anne that there was something I understood about the mission of poetry. I tried to tell her quietly through my art and was grateful that she received the transmission. This sense of shared, wordless understanding is rare. When we met I had just dropped out of art school and I didn’t really know how one could have any kind of life through art. She welcomed me into a world of poetry with her. It gave me shelter from the storms of the world.

Waldman: This brings up for me a reference to the word theopneustos, or god-breathed inspiration. The Spirit. Tantra also means “thread.” I think of exhalation

and shared space and being intergenerationally in the same Kali Yuga, dark time, we need to illuminate for ourselves and others. We must dedicate the merit of all we do to those without that power to imagine the pages in the dance of poetry and image. Never forget those under siege.

Yes, inhabitation! No Land and I have certainly been in each other’s presence on numerous shared occasions in a number of rooms in New York City, Colorado, and Mexico. After the landscape of protest we extend that to performance as well, and cinematic interludes of poetry and image.

I think No Land and I have often felt powerfully the quantum entanglement of
“spooky attraction at a distance.” Because we are both night owls we also experience instances of telepathy.

And also, the nurturing mother Demeter and Persephone. Persephone is abducted while picking flowers, No Land and I met at the labor protest
And she approached me with a flower.

No Land: There is a daughter sense, but I feel also like sisters through different generations. And yes, telepathy, like the phone rings in the middle of a bad night. She would know, and she would put me to work. What’s our next project?—giving a sense of her belief in you being strong when you’re needing someone to remind you who you are.

***

By co-divinity, I mean No Land and Waldman are after something akin to what John of Damascus, the eighth-century monk, called perichoresis: the mystic’s long-sought oneness with God—which in The Velvet Wire becomes the co-inherence of these two women, acolyte and elder. He described perichoresis—which in the original Greek suggests dancing around something in circles—as “the abiding and resting of the persons in another,” so that “they adhere to one another, for they are without interval between them and inseparable and their mutual indwelling is without confusion.” Threads, the exchanged flower, telepathy, wires through the night, weavings, “filigree works”—this imagery whirls through the poems, emails, and visual art to create a hymn of mutual indwelling, and a provocation to our viciously atomizing society.

There is a subterrain activism to how The Velvet Wire realizes the shared interior of these mother/daughter/sisters. Waldman’s work has always been not just a poetry of friendship—like Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, Bernadette Mayer, and many of their poet-friends—but also an anti-power, an anti-colonial poetry of how, as a female, artist, and spirit-led animal, to live collectively and strongly. She has mentored and connected poets tirelessly through her work at the Poetry Project and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. The Velvet Wire extends Waldman’s vital lineage through No Land, and, in some sense, wraps anyone who has found this book into their “resistance” too. “A Velvet Wire is a channel,” Waldman wrote to me, “a conduit, a kind of dream book. A mutually acknowledged archive. And a way of experiencing mind to mind art making. It continues for me in a way …” The open archive has already grown to exceed this Granary Books edition, and I’m told that an expanded book will be more widely available soon. Perhaps The Velvet Wire’s most needed gift to its found family of readers is its vivid, diverse vocabularies for receptivity, listening, and mutual strength, and its adjacent teaching that the most powerful poetics might come in the form of my own favorite line from the book:

Anytime you feel sad you can
just pick up the up phone and
call me