Valerie Witte : part one

Valerie Witte is the author of a game of correspondence (Black Radish Books, 2015) and the chapbooks The history of mining (g.e. collective/Poetry Flash, 2013), It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamt of someone (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), and The grass is greener when the sun is yellow (The Operating System, 2019). In 2014 she began a collaboration with Chicago-based artist Jennifer Yorke, and their work appeared in exhibitions in Chicago and Berkeley. She has also participated in residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences; La Porte Peinte Centre pour les Arts in Noyers, France; and Ragdale Foundation. She is a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School and, over the years, helped produce many beautiful books for Kelsey Street Press. Learn more at valeriewitte.com.

Photo credit: Andrew Hedges.

What are you working on?

With San Francisco–based poet Sarah Rosenthal, I am developing a collection of essays that address the work of postmodern dancer-choreographers Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer. This is the second part of our project, the first being a newly released chapbook called The grass is greener when the sun is yellow. For the collection, each of us is writing five essays that discuss a personal memory of dance randomly paired with a theme we’ve encountered in the work of Rainer and Forti. Thus the essays involve sometimes discordant juxtapositions, which can be both challenging and generative. We are comfortable engaging with language and form in experimental ways, and I’ve enjoyed the process of creating work that operates on multiple levels simultaneously, where the connections among the dancers and my memories are often implied, rather than explicit, nuanced rather than straightforward. Over time I’ve given myself permission to infuse the essays with my poetics, and they now take the form of nontraditional formats, such as a footnoted photo essay, erasures, and a sort of scripted play. Focusing on dance is not something I ever expected to do because I have no dance training and have had a rather fraught relationship to the form. However, in both Rainer and Forti’s work, I’ve found natural connections and entry points for exploration. So it’s been a stimulating, surprising, and exciting process.