Kimberly Alidio, Teeter

 

Everyone who happens tolive where

my father’s family happenedto live at the time of
naming has namesbeginning
with the same letter asmine. A name
cuts off the unrulysequence of
discovering a new thingtopped off by
a moment of awareness one’sbeholden to
something new. Ofretrofitting one’s
classical senses: brownbag, al-Qamqám
in disregard of discovery’s
doctrine. Even reducinganomaly or
variation to naming isenchanting. An old
catalog of names is theold story of
mine. A dream is round& uncertain

Thelatest from Upper Hudson Valley, New York poet Kimberly Alidio, following after projects the resound (Black Radish Press, 2016), : once teeth bones coral : (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*, 2020) [see my review of such here] and Why Letter Ellipses (Chicago Il: selva oscura press, 2020) [see my review of such here] is Teeter (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2023). The threesections that make up this collection—“HEARING,” “AMBIENT MOM” and “HISTORIES”—arebuilt as self-contained structures, whether long poems or suites, all of whichexplore through different elements of patterns of sound and rhythm, bouncingacross line breaks and long sentences. “the occasion to / try out consonants /is when the cry / cuts into / another language,” Alidio writes, as part of “AMBIENTMOM.” A bit further down the page, writing: “this composing / in unlearned /languages // prenatal perceiving + / processing prosodic patterns / aPangasinan of the everyday / palpability of experience [.]” She writes a polyvocality;threads of history and language, existing as a kind of single, ongoing sentence.This work is expansive and experimental, including a cluster of “Autohistoriography”poems in the third section, which suggest a furthering of what Fred Wah oncecoined as “bio-text,” employing a life-writing, but one propelled, first andforemost, by language; or even, far earlier, as George Bowering wrote his firstperson language prose poems, Autobiology (1972). As Alidio’s “Autohistoriographyof Arrival at a River” begins:

            Divorcing one’s queer partner is a chance to divorce one’sart community, one’s social circle who gives one visibility & cultural milieu.& this was both a nightmare & a dreamy comfort. “Why are malls so depressing?”asks S. We were queer children, in some kind of girlhood, in the suburban ‘80s,when it was the height of sociality & familial reproduction to be deadinside, to feel nothing, at least, to feel not much of anything. Isolation isnot always the queer person’s precarity. As S explains, for such a being, isolationis a radical choice. We want an alternative to the binary that accounts forbeing a “woman” whose “community” once destroyed her. After all, one can loveonly one person at a time, someone says. & one must train one’s love towardthe proper object, no one outright says. The romance plot is key to operationsof brutal competition in public & private spaces. Varda’s Le bonheuris brilliant in showing the replaceability & interchangeability of blondepartners. Amacher’s “sound characters” & “sonic figures.”

Thereis such a propulsive language, in both cadence and purpose, and one that seemsto incorporate elements of the lyric journal, whether the late American poet Bernadette Mayer, a poet referenced within, or the journal-lyric of Alidio’spartner, Stacy Szymaszek. Again, Alidio utilizes subject, but as a means to andeven through an end. As the poem “The summer I was born” begins: “two artistsmade durational works // In NYC & MA, Bernadette Mayer conducted an ‘emotionalscience project,’ in which every day / of my birth month was spent shooting aroll of 35 mm film, recording audio & writing // On the day of my birth,she wrote // ‘I must have no respect for nothingness to photograph these sceneswith sand or snow off / monument valley road the road in the valley of the samemountain monument mountain, a whole / series of them a whole series ofphotographs & one monument & I get a whole new picture of / myself,where is your driver’s license he said, you are drinking beer’ [.]” There is adurational feel to this particular work, at least one of a sense of ongoingthinking, or ongoingness, from one point forward, from one cover across to thenext. As the poem “I might as well connect the dots between,” set amid her suiteof prose-explorations that make up the third and final section:

the data flow of archives& internet algorithms & this anecdote. Generate text, language,drawings, associations around the odd detail, the clashing word, the weirdthing that rubbed me against the grain like a pinhole onto large-scale contradictions& social thinking. Events, figures & even tactics of glitchingradically disrupt both the flow of data & the binary categories of IRL& online. Activate the text. Get distracted but try to leave a trace ofwhere your body-mind goes. My recall of sitting in running tights at thethreshold of the archive is an affective mix of shame, disorientation &pleasure. That I was a kind of glitch. Intone it. Recall that many talismanicamulets are inscribed with spells that need to be read aloud to set the magicin motion. I walked into the house of the archeon, I was processed &regulated in its anterooms & I was then identifiably young, brown, a sweatycis-woman, both a product of multiple colonialism & a U.S. historian. Let’sattune to the quiet & the noise