Honora Spicer | Jacket2

Reading Margo Tamez's "Father | Genocide"

Honora Spicer

Margo Tamez’s Father | Genocide was published by Turtle Point Press in 2021. A book of Ndé Dene [Lipan Apache] ‘place, memory, and poetics,’ Tamez describes currently living “on unceded sqilxw lands on the Okanagan Indian Band Reserve #1 (near Vernon, BC) as an invited guest.”

We are on opposite nodes of an entire continent, and I knew nothing of the smoke.
The fire’s widening container a made architecture of disappearance.

'You' and the poetics of slow violence

Reading Jose Antonio Villarán's 'Open Pit: A Story About Morococha and Extractivism in the Américas'

Honora Spicer

Jose Antonio Villarán’s Open Pit asks how to write a catastrophe whose immanence is dissipated across space and time. Tracking the poet’s research on transnational extractivism in the Peruvian mining town of Morococha, Open Pit essays a poetics of Rob Nixon’s “slow violence,” catastrophes (being products of human choices) which play out across scales that defy a pinpointed “there.” Writing in Davis, CA, to a young son in Philadelphia about research in Morococha, Peru, Villarán sets a network of places as actants, grafted onto variable patterns of placement on the page, carving tracks of space for the words of people interviewed in Morococha, descriptive language on the products of research, and autobiographical first- and second-person verse.

Open Pit was published by Counterpath Press in 2022. The Spanish Tajo Abierto will be published in June 2023 by Álbum del Universo Bakterial in Lima, Peru.

“I want to be there with you and i’m not”

'Make absence more conspicuous'

In conversation with Celina Su

Honora Spicer

Orange, White and Black curved abstract shapes on the square cover of 'Landia.'

“If the forbidden cityscape is corporeal, then it is a proper burial, the entrails of the buildings devouring themselves with a vengeance” (Celina Su, “Seeing Like a State,” in Landia)

This commentary was written in collaboration with Tatiana Rodriguez and Adam Heywood, research fellows through the EPCC-UTEP Mellon Humanities Collaborative, when we gathered in conversation with Celina Su in February 2022.

We were drawn towards Celina Su’s Landia for what it could show us about paying attention and making present urban disappearances.

A poetics of proximity

Honora Spicer

Dumpster outside El Paso ICE Detention Center on Mattox Street.

In the scorched lot, the feral cat cuts through snake grass and candles of sotol toward the Buffalo Soldier gate to Fort Bliss. The corner’s barbed limit abuts Cherbourg Avenue and Sioux Drive, two opposite crosswalks across Airport Road, two cardinal directions of colonial settlement. Boeing Drive commences east from the military reservation gate, tracking down a settled tract: United States Postal Service, NASA, T-intersecting its opposite end like a spike into the sandlot buffering the El Paso Service Processing Center, ICE detention. Boeing Drive is the suspension bridge hung between Fort Bliss and immigration detention, a hammock over dune hummocks, making illusion of sky’s aloof float. What does it mean for this avenue to be one line between military fort and migrant detention? For Atlantic Aviation offices, subcontractors of ICE for deportation flights, to be located off Boeing adjacent to the NASA shuttle take-off? How to make sense of one fence away?

What is poetic research? What formal practices make adequate response to empire’s calculated proximities and tactical gaps? These research notes emerged from one month of archival and ambulatory investigations in El Paso, TX, in November to December 2021.

'Attention is the most important thing we can give to one another'

In conversation with JD Pluecker

Honora Spicer

A sonic sculpture looking into the trumpet bell-end of a metal-cast hand in firs — Photo Credit: JD Pluecker, featuring a sonic sculpture by Elana Mann.

This Commentary was written through collaboration with Mellon Humanities Collaborative fellows Rebekah Patnode and Tatiana Rodriguez about our conversation with JD Pluecker on October 26, 2021. This Commentary follows Reading JD Pluecker’s ‘Swamps Fly.’

The header image was taken by Honora Spicer in May 2020 on Boeing Ave. in El Paso, TX. The image is taken through a chain-linked fence and depicts a chain link and barbed wire in the foreground. Behind the fences are two parallel blue and silver ICE buses parked on the tarmac of El Paso International Airport, alongside a white ICE van for unaccompanied minors. On the left are yellow private airplane hangars. On the right is the front portion of a white airplane, with the hatch of the deportation flight open, and a figure in a white sweatshirt entering the hatch. In the background are the rust-colored Franklin Mountains.

Architectures of Disappearance accompanies the research project Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Creating Sound Walks to Experience Disappeared Histories. Drawing on approaches of carceral geography, this Commentary convenes contemporary poetry, visual art and performance that takes a geographical approach to making visible physical and linguistic architectures of movement constriction.

Funded by the Mellon Humanities Collaborative at El Paso Community College/ University of Texas at El Paso in 2021-22, I led the project as faculty fellow, collaborating in collective study with a group of student fellows whose words, doubts, sparks, and leads will also shape this page. The Commentary form will invite investigations that mutate out of our embodied experiments, archival research, and community writing workshops in El Paso. Study will be constituted by the snags, glitches, and serendipities of a research process built on relationships and emergence.

Architectures of Disappearance comes out of my current work on a documentary poetry project called POST BOND (excerpt in Tripwire), focused on one square mile in east El Paso containing the ICE detention center, migrant shelter, post office exchange, airport runway and NASA forward operating location.

Honora Spicer is an experiential educator, writer and translator. She is interested in pedagogies of teaching social justice through the moving body, and experiential education approaches to histories of constriction of movement in the US settler-state. She has taught history at El Paso Community College, alongside open enrollment courses in Place-based US History. In January 2019-July 2020, she lived in El Paso, volunteering with humanitarian and abolitionist organizations in migrant shelters and immigration detention centers. Her literary translations from Spanish have appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-day, Asymptote, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere. As of 2022, she is writing a dissertation in History at Harvard University and lives in Providence, RI.

Reach out with responses to this Commentary and ideas for connections: noraspicer at gmail dot com. I would love to be in conversation.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Jacket editors here.

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