O-graphe

a sort of bibliography of an arts practice, the O-graphe is an annotated list of work that we recognize as significant to informing, grounding & shaping, our practice as a maker

• A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, Fernando Pessoa

• My “First Poetry Book”—the collection that really opened me up & allowed me to enter, showed me a way that made sense to me to do poetry, especially coming out of a period where I was realizing academic philosophy was not my way of “doing philosophy.” Pessoa writes in heteronyms (including “his own” name, which he viewed as less real than the others) spoke to a multiplicity of voices I knew was inside us, and at the time it was also important to me to see that poetry could take whatever form it needed to take for me; formal poetry was no more poetry any other.  

• Duino Elegies, Rainier Maria Rilke

• Also right around the beginning, with Pessoa, showing me the way with philosophy & poetry not side by side but commingled, inextricable—& in this Rilke takes on the biggest questions of Being in a lyricism of the pastoral & the human with so much attention to the emotion of the experience: the awe & the fear, the grief.

• Beloved, Toni Morrison

• Toni Morrison’s work presents to me a reality that there is a revolutionary moment possible in literature, for the subject to break, dissolve & deindividuate. & Beloved is the most striking example of this spirit that begins in the rhetorical but is always linked to the life of the story at the same time it is connected to the experience of the reader. Beloved’s “rememory” is an example of this work that ends up putting the reader in the position to write the text in order to read it—the reader must implicate themself in some way, and in the implication makes the possibility of dissolving the self. 

• Arrival, dir. Denis Villeneuve (adapted from a short story, “Story of My Life” by Ted Chiang)

• A film that I think takes up the question of grief in a challenging way, that is itself challenging adaptation from a short story which makes for some interesting formal choices. On a larger scale, the plot of making the language to speak with aliens, with the dissociative work it calls on within the subject, opens up how deep the work of abolition must go into our thinking in order pull out the roots of fascism.  Also, the score is done by Max Richter who is one of my favorites, and his piece On the Nature of Daylight, which easily could’ve been on this list.

• The Speeches of Fred Hampton

• There isn’t a collection except on this website, but the videos & transcriptions on the internet have been like reading poetry, revolutionary poetry, poetry in & of the class struggle, a unity of poetry & political praxis, similar to Lenin’s unity of philosophy & politics. I’m reminded especially of a speech Hampton gave about the prosecution of Chairman Bobby Seale where he uses the figure of the hecatomb to analogize between the Dred Scott decision & the prosecution of Seale.

• The End of Beauty, Jorie Graham

• I always read this collection as a kind of response to Duino Elegies, at least in the central figure of the lovers & similar naked ontological questions, but the opening poem taking on the philosophical, poetic through a pastoral look at Adam & Eve is work I go back to almost every day of my life. 

• “No Surprises”, Radiohead

• I think I’m choosing this out of all the Radiohead songs I love because it connects the emotional with the political without losing any of the impact to move from a line like the lyric “a heart that’s full up like a landfill” to a concrete demand “bring down the government / they don’t speak for us.” So often the former renders the latter impossible, and I think poetry is the movement by which speaking that desire becomes possible again.

• A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari

• The first section of this book on the rhizome is enough to crack you right open, either wildly ecstatically angry or symphonies of joy. What did it do: it freed me up to make the choices I need to make about how & where & why things appear on the page. This resulted in some radical changes in form & also material as I began to try to implode the idea of a singular contained voice. I read Deleuze into much of my poetry, but this is where it began with allowing me to let the connections between voices flow.

• “Black Woman”, Sonny Sharrock

• I don’t feel like I’ve ever felt closer to pain in song. When I remember sorrow (which I think of) as revolutionary sadness I think of this song, or Górecki’s Third Symphony which is called Symphony of Sorrow. It’s not like you can put on a song in a utilitarian sort of plug in & make, but that to hear it once marks you, writes up on me forever.

• There Will Be Blood, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

• Specifically, the opening scene where so much is accomplished in the directing, acting, & score to really set up the rest of the film in some maneuvers of deep, close depictions & then absence & doing a “good enough” job in the closeness that we carry it with us & write the rest of the story a way (in this story, an injured prospector’s pulls himself up out of a hole & then drags himself tens of miles by his elbows with a broken leg & back). The imaginary it builds up. It almost validates the brutal actions the man takes up to protect his fortune.