Julie Carr | Jacket2

A practice of 'towardness'

Archiving human lives, Tucson

Julie Carr

In Sublice, Poland, on the German-Polish border, in a basement of the Collegium Polonicum sits the MyLife Archive, founded in 2004 by Dr. Krzystof Wojciechowski.

Counterpath community garden year one

Growing food/giving it away

Julie Carr

In 2009, Tim Roberts and I opened Counterpath Gallery in downtown Denver in order to expand what we’d been doing as publishers of Counterpath Press. For four years we hosted readings, film screenings, installation and digital work, dance and performance, lectures, and workshops — often up to three events per week. In 2015, we lost our original space, and then, through the nonprofit Counterpath, we purchased and converted an automotive garage with a surrounding plot of land. When we opened our new doors in 2016 it was with a transformed idea for what we wanted Counterpath to be.

Over the next three months I’ll be reporting on a series of social projects instigated by poets all over the country and beyond. I’m choosing the word social over political in order to include the micro, intimate, and local projects that might not fall within common understandings of political action. I’m interested in the slide from the private page and screen to the creation of physical spaces, events and happenings that become sites or instances of transformation, no matter how modest.

It can’t go unremarked that I will be writing these posts during the first three months of the Trump presidency. All of the projects I’ll be reporting on, whether they were instigated in recent months or years ago, are responses to such and seek to resist what he and his cabinet of privatizing, climate change denying, anti-immigration, “law and order,” anti-Muslim, white supremacist, post-truth, and anti-choice billionaires promise to deliver.

Rather than worry about the relationship between poetry and politics, a theme that has been written about exhaustively throughout the ages, I hope to expose some of the many ways that poetry carries us into real-life labors. As Amiri Baraka put it, “a new reality is better than a new movie.”

Julie Carr is the author of six books of poetry, most recently 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta, 2010), RAG (Omnidawn, 2014), and Think Tank (Solid Objects, 2015). She is also the author of Surface Tension: Ruptural Time and the Poetics of Desire in Late Victorian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2013), and the co-editor, with Jeffrey Robinson, of Active Romanticism (University of Alabama Press, 2015). A chapbook of prose, “The Silence that Fills the Future,” was recently released as a free pdf from Essay Press:http://www.essaypress.org/ep-19/

Objects from a Borrowed Confession (prose) will be out from Ahsahta press in early 2017. Carr’s co-translation of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory is due out from Commune Editions in 2018.

Carr was a 2011-12 NEA fellow and is an associate professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder in the English department and the Intermedia Arts Writing and Performance Ph.D. She regularly collaborates with dance artist K.J. Holmes and is the co-founder of Counterpath Press and Counterpath Gallery (www.counterpathpress.org).

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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