Volume 5, No. 3: Toward a Praxis of Giving

Greetings, bookish friends. It’s March. Winter isn’t over yet (complimentary)! It’s been a really bad year and it’s also, surprisingly, been a year of gifts. I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to receive a gift, or to give one.

The most extraordinary gift I received in February was a podcast: Between the Covers hosted by David Naimon. People have been telling me to listen to this show for years and I’ve ignored them because “I am not a podcast person.” Being wrong about yourself is a gift! If you follow me on Instagram, you know how hard I have fallen for this podcast. It’s why I’m thinking about gifts and giving and this idea of offering as praxis, receiving as praxis.

Between the Covers was hovering somewhere in the back of my mind because I knew David Naimon had interviewed Christina Sharpe, and I was thinking I’d listen to that interview after finishing In the Wake. But when I looked it up, I saw the most recent BTC interview was with Omar El Akkad, about his most recent book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which I had just read. It’s a brilliant book, and listening to the interview deepened and expanded it for me. I wrote a lot about the interview in my review of the book.

For two weeks, I’ve been struggling to explain just how deeply the conversations on this podcast have moved me. The writers who come on the show are brilliant and generous. The conversations are often upwards of 2 hours. I am in awe of the depth and care with which David Naimon reads the work—the body of work!—of his guests. He models curiosity and care as a praxis of reading. His praxis of reading is one of listening, being present, asking questions through and into murk.

In one of the episodes I listened to this week, David Naimon quoted a critic who described what he does on the show as (paraphrasing) “writing collaborative essays in real time with his guests.” This, I think, is the heart of the gift—the pocket of time the show creates, a pocket of generative and expansive space. In this space, it feels as if anything could happen. It’s a space of possibility. It’s not just that the show takes art, and specifically literature, and specially poetry, so seriously. It’s that witnessing conversations that honor the sacredness of the things I love most in the world is transformative. At the end of each episode, I’m left not with a sense of arrival (Aha! I understand now!), but with a sense of ongoingness (Where do I go next?).

Listening to poets speak about their art on BTC has been revelatory and life-giving. It is changing me the way books change me. This kind of change is not fast. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like the kind of change we need the most, because it’s not always action-oriented. Action-oriented change is absolutely vital. But so is this other kind of change: slower, quieter, deeper. This change feels related, somehow, to the atmosphere of giving and receiving gifts that I’ve been thinking about.

BTC is unabashedly, loudly, gloriously earnest. Earnestness, too, is related to giving and receiving. A praxis of earnestness feels akin to a praxis of gifting. I think you should listen to this podcast. I have never become a paying supporter of anything so fast in my life.

In the spirit of earnest inquiry, and toward a praxis of giving, I have a lot of words for you today about gifts I received in February.

Between the Covers

I know I just wrote a whole newsletter (above) about this! But I want to share some specific words and ideas from the 20ish hours of world-opening conversation I’ve listened to so far.

Omar El Akkad: Toward the end of the interview, he states, quite baldly, that he believes this story ends with the liberation of Palestine, with the liberation of peoples all over the globe. He believes this, he says, because liberation struggles are rooted in love “and there is no mechanism of the state that can extinguish that.” He goes on to say (my transcription): “Colonialism is insatiable; it is a taking, a constant, endless taking, and it begins in the concrete—the taking of land, the taking of resources, the taking of the lives of anyone who gets in the way, but it will take everything, it will take narrative, it will take stories. It has no idea how to take love. That is insurmountable, I think.”

Carl Phillips: “I sometimes think of my sentences as ways of publicly speaking, saying one thing, but those who understand see that, “Oh this is a queer person.” They can see that simply by the sentences—this is a kind of navigation system that refuses to have anyone pin me down.”

Dionne Brand on poems as actions and what language cannot do. Rabih Alameddine on rebeling against his own books. Callum Angus on transition as unstatic and nonlinear. Isabella Hammad on political theatre in Palestine. Raymond Antrobus on deaf poetics. Charif Shanahan on the instability of racial categories and writing into impossible language.

Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid

I’m taking an art history class this semester, and I have so many thoughts and feelings about it that I’ve started doing Art History Thoughts & Feelings Hour on my IG stories. In general I have a lot of critiques about how art history (read: western art history) is taught (at least, in the course I’m taking), which I won’t get into here. Here I want to take a moment to tell you that I have fallen in love with this Renaissance painter, Agnolo Bronzino, who was very weird, definitely queer, a burlesque poet, and made some bizarre and beautiful mannerist art that I cannot stop thinking about.

Art historians have been arguing about this painting for centuries. No one can agree on what it means. My professor gave us the fantastic assignment to either guess what it is about or make something up. The painting cast a spell on me; I wrote an eight-part ekphrastic poem in which all the figures in the painting speak. I became so fascinated by it that I told my professor I was desperate to read some of Bronzino’s poetry. She emailed me a whole bunch of academic articles on him, several of which included translations of his poetry. A gift celebrating and honoring curiosity. I know this is her job, but it felt like magic to me.

That’s the story. I don’t know what it means yet. I don’t think it has to mean anything. I am moved, mysteriously, bodily, in a way I cannot explain to myself, by the work of this Italian artist who lived 500 years ago. I made some art about it. A gift.

40 By 40

It’s only been two months, but already my 40 By 40 project feels like a gift I’m giving myself—and I suppose it is, a gift from me to me in the year leading up to my 40th birthday.

I read five 40 By 40 books in February and each of them opened approximately one thousand portals into the world(s).

• Langston Hughes, Blues in Stereo, edited by Danez Smith (2024): A gift of beginnings.

• Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits (1989): A gift that refuses aboutness.

• Pádraig Ó Tuama, Poetry Unbound (2022): A praxis of giving. I write about it later in this newsletter.

• Christina Sharpe, In the Wake (2016): Describing this book as a gift does not feel true, but it does feel true to say it is work that I have received in my body and brain, work that I will go on receiving for a long, long time.

• Randall Kenan, Black Folk Could Fly (2022): A gift of place & aliveness.

Amy Podmore: Audience

During my most recent visit to MASS MoCA, I saw two exhibits that dazzled me.

About this one the MASS MoCA website says: “In Audience, she offers enigmatic plaster casts of found wicker baskets and cornucopias. What we see as the exterior is actually the interior of these baskets, unfolding a vulnerable underbelly in the act of reversal. Podmore embeds motorized glass eyeballs into the woven warp and weft of the basket surfaces, still visible in the plaster translation. Defamiliarized, the molded baskets and their ranging, expressive forms adopt an almost anthropomorphic quality. As their eyes sleepily fall shut and whip open, the museum visitor becomes the one being uncannily watched back.”

All of this is fascinating to me, but I didn’t have an intellectual response to this art. It’s a large installation. I walked back and forth in front of it, and then I sat on a bench for a while and watched these basket creatures, these unnamable, undefinable creatures, blinking. They delighted me. I felt made strange and humbled by them, pulled toward them in curiosity and kinship and unease all at once. More simply: I loved this exhibition. A gift.

Jason Moran: Black Stars: Writing in the Dark

“Visual artist, composer, and musician Jason Moran has said of his artworks, ‘these pieces emerge from my performance practice. My body in relationship to the piano and to bodies in the audience.’” (MASS MoCA website)

I’m always thinking about language, but more and more these days I’m thinking about the intersections of and translations between kinds of languages—visual language, spoken language, written language, felt language, musical language, color language, bodily language, tree language. This art in this exhibit is breathtaking—the shapes, the lines, the flow, the blur, all of it settled inside my soul—and so is Moran’s exploration of language.

About the exhibition, the curator says: “While Moran’s richly-pigmented works on paper initially appear to be abstract compositions, they in fact register the movements of the artist’s fingers across piano keys. Each work holds the keys’ memory of a performance from their perspective, temporally compressed into a visual gesture.” You can explore this exhibition and read more about it here.

What memories do poems hold inside them? What would it mean to write from the perspective of the ink or the keyboard? How do we translate a moment in time into a moment of language? If these questions also ignite your brain, I cannot recommend the Between the Covers interview with Raymond Antrobus highly enough. He talks about deaf poetics, visual and felt languages, and expanding how we define and understand sound.

Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó Tuama (2022)

This was one of the 40 By 40 books I read in February, but I wanted to mention it separately, because it’s a book that embodies and invites a praxis of giving. This collection of fifty poems, paired with fifty love letters to those poems written by Ó Tuama, is a gift not because of how I received it—with delight, gratitude, curiosity, wonder—but because of how I perceive it was written. When I say love letters I mean it. In each essay, Ó Tuama explains why this particular poem has moved him. He tells stories from his life, asks questions, explores meter and rhyme and form. He ponders why a poet made a choice; he relates a choice a poet has made to some other poem he loves. He does it all gently, with reverence, as teacher, friend, comrade.

In all of this giving, all of this offering, what comes through clearest is how much Ó Tuama wants to share these poems. They have been given to him—by friends, by the poets themselves, by other poets, by books. They have shaped him, confused him, comforted him, opened him, and he wants to give all of these feelings away. He wants me, the reader, to have a relationship with these poems, and he knows that the relationship I have with them will not be the one he has. He’s not prescriptive about it. Look at this, he says. Look here, and here. Listen, this poem about a father and a son touched me like this. This poem about a prayer made my heart sound like this. This word feels this way to me. How does it feel to you? I kept bursting into tears while I was reading this, in recognition of a gift received. You can’t take a gift. This specific, personal celebration of poetry is a gift because Ó Tuama infuses the act of offering, a kind of prayer, into its pages.

George Nakashima

Because of my Year of Trees, I’ve been reading a lot of tree picture books. I can’t remember where I heard about Listening to Trees by Holly Thompson and Toshiki Nakamura, but I adored it. It’s a beautiful biography of Japanese American woodworker and furniture maker George Nakashima. It’s written in haibuns, a Japanese poetry form that combines a prose poem with a haiku. Haibuns are often, though not always, about journeys, and I loved the homage to the form and its history in this book that is all about form and history. It follows Nakashima throughout his life, growing up in the Pacific Northwest, working as an architect in Japan as a young man, and then being incarcerated with his family during World War II.

After the war, Nakashima and his family moved to Pennsylvania, where he spent the next nearly half century building a home and woodworking studio. His work is elegant, simple, handmade, and, above all, honors his love of trees. Trees—their shapes, histories, textures, colors, and personalities—are all over this book. It’s filled with the same care that Nakashima put into his work as a craftsman.

As much as I loved it, the real gift here is not this book, but the book it led me to, Nakashima’s 1981 memoir/guide to woodworking The Soul of a Tree. I’m reading it now, and it’s incredible. It seems likely that I never would have encountered this amazing artist if I hadn’t read a picture book about him. Portals are everywhere.

A Book Rec: They Say Blue by Jillian Tamaki (2020)

My friend Surabhi has read a lot of the picture books I’ve recommended over the past year or so. I read A LOT of books she recommends to me (including picture books), so I can’t really explain why this particular rec feels special, but it does. This is a picture book I had not heard of, that I probably would not have picked up if she hadn’t written about it. It is an extraordinary book. Reading it felt like being inside a poem. I am grateful for it, and for how it came into my life.

Some Bookmail

Earlier this year, my dad went to an event with Malu Halasa and Jordan Elgrably, the editors of Sumud, a new anthology of Palestinian writing. He told me he was so impressed by them that he not only bought a copy of the book for himself, but one for me as well, which he then sent to me. It was already on my TBR and I’m excited to have a copy. But, again, it’s the book’s journey to me that feels the most meaningful: We are not alone out here.

Shahzia Sikander: Promiscuous Intimacies

A few weeks ago, my friend Elisabeth, in response to something I posted about art history, shared with me a recent exhibition she had seen by the artist Shahzia Sikander, which included the statue Promiscuous Intimacies, a piece of art I feel completely undone by. The figures in the sculpture are partially inspired by the figures in Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid. This art opened something inside me I did not know required opening. You can read more about the sculpture here. I also read this incredible interview with Sikander, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

Here is one of the many things she says that I am still thinking about:

Evie Shockley

In early February, I got to hear Evie Shockley read from her collection Suddenly We. She was brilliant and generous. She talked about citations and notes, and the way she references other poets and writers and artists in her work. About citations, she said she tries to “leave my stars in traces on the page.”

This is what I’m striving toward, here and eveywhere. This is a praxis of giving. To leave our stars in traces on the page.

Listening to Trees

I don’t think trees are gifts. Trees are their own beings, and though they are deeply tied to humanness, though we share the world with them, though we live, in no small part, because of them, they are beyond and outside of us. The gift for me has been listening to trees. The gift has been: Attention is the beginning of devotion. (Mary Oliver)

I have been paying close attention to bark.

I have been paying close attention to form.

Reading with Friends

This might come as a surprise to some of you, but it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve realized that reading with friends—reading in community—is something that I require for health and wellbeing. In February, in addition to reading Enter Ghost with my in-person book club, I read In the Wake with Surabhi and my friend Kristin (with whom I also enjoyed discussing Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis). I finished my slow reread of Then the War by Carl Phillips—another joyful and generative buddy read with Surabhi. On the first weekend of February, the Queer Your Year book club had our first virtual meeting, a lively discussion of the speculative novel Everything for Everyone. This week I started reading Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as part of a readalong hosted by another wonderful human named Kristin!

This is all a praxis of giving and receiving, back and forth.

Light

I love winter light. Like trees, it does not feel like a gift. The gift is that, despite, despite, despite: I am alive. Despite, despite, despite: I see and feel the sun.

I Don’t Live Alone

I’m currently listening to a BTC interview with Ada Limón about her book The Hurting Kind. I’m only 30 minutes into it and I have already cried. She talks about how, during the pandemic, when she was spending a lot of time alone, she began to realize that trees and birds were a vital and central part of her community. She says she’s not sure she believe in aloneness or loneliness anymore, but that she does believe in missing. And that missing is a form of loving.

I feel lonely all the time. I know I’m not alone in this. I’m not sure I can say that I don’t believe in loneliness, or aloneness. But I’m stuck—utterly unable to get past (complementary)—this framing of missing, rather than loneliness. It’s a way of naming the actual wound—I am missing. I’m starting to think about aloneness, and maybe loneliness, too, as constructs and tools of white supremacy. I often say I live alone, but I don’t. I live with dozens of houseplants. I live with a creature I love in a way I don’t even know how to express in words. I am not alone; I am part of a vibrant (and sometimes difficult) community of birds, trees, flowers, vines, small mammals, and insects.

I don’t think the way to destroy the construct is to pretend the feeling of loneliness doesn’t exist. Instead, I want to name where the feeling comes from. I am not alone. And: I miss. Limón says she started to wonder “whether [she] was lonely or just separated.”

A praxis away from separation. A praxis toward giving.

What gifts have you received recently? What gifts have you given? Wishing us all openness and curiosity and care as we give, and act, and slow down, and ignite in the months and years to come.