Valerie Witte : part five

Why is poetry important? 

I’ve never considered myself a political writer, but faced with the deep distress caused by the current political administration, I now recognize the importance of poetry more than over. In an era defined by accusations of “fake news” and constant mendacity of the president and his cronies, it’s especially critical to acknowledge that language truly matters, to call things by their true names, as Rebecca Solnit would say. Many, many times over the past three years, when something disturbing has happened in our country or elsewhere, I’ve been convinced that the only way to counter such forces is through art. Poetry is a way to express what is otherwise impossible to articulate, to find common ground and to spark the imagination. It often feels like our only hope.

Valerie Witte : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing? 

In Forces of Imagination, Barbara Guest opened my eyes to the possibilities of analyzing writing and art, illustrating how theory (never an interest of mine) could be accessible, beautiful; how a discussion of art can itself be art. (I later became a member of Kelsey Street, which published Forces.) Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse” introduced me to his theory of field poetics, giving me permission to view the page as a space where a poet can feel free to create a form that is “an extension of content.” From Gertrude Stein, I learned the possibilities of repetition, and of bypassing the rules of punctuation and grammar to achieve something particular in a poem. At Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, I took a class called “Martian Poetics,” inspired by Jack Spicer’s Vancouver lectures—poetics of the strange. My chapbook It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed of someone involves a speaker communicating with an alien of sorts and features communication via radio signals—all references to these lectures. I encountered most of these poetic icons at the University of San Francisco—that is where my writing completely changed, essentially from being somewhat traditional to being experimental in form and content—a shift resulting from encountering these poets and others in the program, as well as exposure to the work of my classmates and teachers.

Valerie Witte : part three

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with? 

Usually through performance. I participate in collaborative readings and events fairly often, usually in Portland or the Bay Area, where I used to live. I am also a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School, and we produce events periodically, which by definition have a collaborative component. I love incorporating different kinds of media into my performances. For example, I sometimes record audio of myself reading the poems and then play the audio as I read live, creating overlaps and dissonances to enhance the audience experience. I recently created a slide show of images to accompany the audio. It’s definitely a goal of mine to create an experience that is “not just a reading,” that will surprise and hopefully delight the audience, engaging them in ways they wouldn’t typically experience or expect at a poetry reading.

Valerie Witte : part two

How does a poem begin?

I don’t write poems so much as extended series, which generally develop into a full collection. I usually start by selecting one or two source materials. For example, for my book a game of correspondence, I used text from a gothic experimental novel called Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, an encyclopedia of ghosts and demons, and the film Blade Runner (the title of my book comes from the film, as the characters play a game of correspondence chess). I compile language and then fold in material from my own life—observations, dreams, experiences. I continually play with the form and move lines, phrases, words around—sculpting language to create a cohesive whole.

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.