Honora Spicer | Jacket2

'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.’

Reading JD Pluecker's 'Swamps Fly'

Honora Spicer

A sonic sculpture of a bronze-cast hand with a trumpet-bell arm cups woodchips — Photo Credit: JD Pluecker, featuring a sonic sculpture by Elana Mann.

JD Pluecker’s Swamps Fly is a work of “halloing the wasteland” — greeting anew, pursuing in shouts, seeing/seeping pervasively amid the moor. Against the hollowing of draining, swamp is met as the listless and listened steadfast space.

Swamps Fly was published in Spring 2021, and it zapped onto my radar as I was steeped in investigations of Narragansett territory occupied by the early colonial settlers of my own family. Behind my grandmother’s house was a patch of woods, now bisected by train tracks and rail yards. Biking down a road called Liberty Lane, passing lumber yards and shooting ranges, I came to Great Swamp Monument Road. At the first house, a sign: Drive as though your kids live here. Whose kids? Whose your? I wondered.

Reading 'Los muros no son para siempre'/'Walls are not forever'

A collaboration of Maire Reyes, Nayeli Hernández, Iris Díaz, Ana Iram, Paloma Galavíz, Olga Guerra, Marcia Santos and Alejandra Aragón

Honora Spicer

Visual poem entitled 'Casa' by Paloma Galavíz on right, imagery of wall rubble and writing by Iris Díaz on left

The zine opens to a map of dotted lines: barbs on a wire, punctured lines symbol of trails, punctuation of walking routes. The lines trace a walk taken on October 13, 2019, by border artists Maire Reyes, Nayeli Hernández, Iris Díaz, Ana Iram, Paloma Galavíz, Olga Guerra, Marcia Santos, and Alejandra Aragón. The walk traverses between the artists’ homes through Ciudad Juárez, on the border of El Paso, TX, concluding that “the entire city and its dynamics of exploitation and precariousness is a barrier of containment.”

Reading Yousif M. Qasmiyeh's 'Writing the Camp'

Honora Spicer

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, 'Writing the Camp' (Talgarreg, Wales: Broken Sleep Books, 2021).

The tender, raw poetic investigations in Yousif M. Qasmiyeh’s recent Writing the Camp (Broken Sleep Books, 2021) conceptualize a theory of the refugee camp as archive, taking as local frame Baddawi Camp in North Lebanon, where Qasmiyeh grew up.

Orienting to im/mobility

Honora Spicer

This image is a screenshot of El Paso <a href="https://gis.elpasotexas.gov/planning/index.html">zoning maps</a> accessed online. The ICE detention center described here is underneath the corner where the three maps overlap. — This image is a screenshot of El Paso zoning maps accessed online. The ICE detention center described here is underneath the corner where the three maps overlap.

The questions came out of walks — from El Paso Service Processing Center (ICE Detention) to the Bus Route 50 stop, outside USPS on Boeing Ave. On sandstorm nights, the walk was lean and grimace, spit and hack. The wide stretches required it; long blocks zoned postwar. Required wait, corners of dust lots labelled “Property of US Government,” under the airport watch tower and the Super Guppy’s tarmac gleam.

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. Architectures of Disappearance began as accompaniment to the research project Carceral Geography in El Paso, TX: Creating Sound Walks to Experience Disappeared Histories. 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. Since 2023, this Commentary has continued to be a space for reviews of recent poetic works which extend these themes.

Architectures of Disappearance comes out of my current work on a documentary poetry and historical research 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.

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.

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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