No One Starsong

That crowd not
Separated by death
Allegiance to little
No one starsong
Of possession again

This is the way
We tour the end
Like it were not
The end by an-
other beginning

We are before the
Threshold of
Another beginning
The world will shed
The world what

The world will shed…

Are We Human, or Are We Dancer?

This past winter I wrote a piece on Daria Fain's and Robert Kocik's performance "The Extent to Which," sponsored by Danspace. You can now read the piece in the current PAJ: a Journal of Performance and Art. Here's an excerpt...

"For Fain and Kocik, the right to determine genetic material should be left to poets, artists and other sensitive, creative people. As such, they are the unacknowledged geneticists of the world. In Germ, Fain/Kocik continued their attacks upon a genetic essentialism which not only discriminates among human beings (and therefore upholds various bad isms of our culture), but also human, animal and (in)organic life as they depend on one another. The germ becomes that which, via mutation, can leap over whole species in a single bound, therefore acting as a kind of wild card among the larger phylum. But the real germ of Fain’s/Kocik’s collaborative work of course is the aesthetic itself, as aesthetic phenomena may shape and alter genetic material. As Kocik pronounces in Overcoming Fitness, “May poetry determine phenotype!” By determining phenotype, poetry and art determine life itself; “nature” and “nurture” (pseudonyms for the real and the imaginary) are no longer mutually exclusive, but contingent upon one another."

Another Nail House

--for Dale Smith

Another nail house and another rip
In the tale of us that house lifted

Into the air by balloons is the question
What will be left to critique when

Capital is through with us and what
Is ironic about those land grabs the

Poem must preserve a place to remain
In what is not real the poem must be

An active force in a universe that is
Heterogeneous however real.

I Have a Basement Apartment. Now What?

I Have a Basement Apartment. Now What? debut presentation

From 1990 to 2005, more than a third of the new housing created in NYC outside of Manhattan were phantom apartments – illegal conversions of basements and cellars. These invaluable sources of affordable housing, often occupied by New York's newest immigrants, also happen to violate many of NYC's building and zoning codes and pose serious safety threats. What should happen to all these homes? Who decides?

This summer, CUP Teaching Artist Hatuey Ramos-Fermín and students from the College Now Program at Hostos Community College investigated these hidden homes. The group talked to tenants, landlords, the Department of Buildings, housing lawyers, and advocates to uncover the politics of living underground.

Join us on Friday, August 7 as we present the results of their investigation: "I Have a Basement Apartment. Now What?" – a comic book produced in partnership with Chhaya CDC and Make the Road New York. A dramatic reading and comic-making workshop will be followed by presentations from students and community organizations on mediation strategies and avenues for new legislation. All attendees get a comic.

Friday, August 7, 7 pm
I Have a Basement Apartment, Now What?
Make the Road New York
92-10 Roosevelt Avenue
Queens, NY
Take the 7 to 90th Street/Elmhurst
(718) 565-8500, ext. 409

Two Poems

What I does we refute by being
We and sometimes a dialogue

Or the beginning of an action in
Space names become consequent

To this that they were not each
Other’s mine and I can only express

What it knows through this event
There is the truth that with only

Knows—everything else just a
Sympathetic hole outsourcing us.


What sings us the beaks too big
Wing span too large for this cage

I am made of make and I am made
Of these things not me and to let

Them cry no singular thing are we
This shop-floor not exploitable that

Would kiss these lips instead these
Glass houses in which we won’t

See me and no one will accurately
Describe a feeling for what is right.

(June-August 2009)