asking to take (a)part to take (an introduction)

Inspired by such recent participatory, relational and investigative poetry projects as Kate Schapira’s Town, C. D. Wright’s One Big Self, and Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, from which I took the idea of a questionnaire, I wrote a set of questions. The first two were suggested to me by pieces in the “Taking Part” art exhibit at the Athens, GA Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the rest followed by association from those first two.

I emailed these questions to friends, colleagues and acquaintances; I placed a binder of them in the gallery space for people to fill out; I have started a website to cull further responses; I waited and wait for answers. I hope you’ll offer me yours at whatmostvividly.com.

These were the instructions:

Please answer any one or as many of the following questions as you like, in part or whole, however you interpret the question(s), and as honestly as you can. Some of them are presumptuous; feel free to correct their assumptions. Please feel free to pose additional questions, with or without your own answers, even if (especially if) you don’t want to answer any of these. I won’t be offended. Feel free, also, to write the reason you don’t want to answer a given question.

My plan is to use your answers in part or whole, as they come or as I adapt and transform them, and/or the writing of mine which they inspire. My plan is to see what happens.

To all those who have entrusted me with their responses, I hope I haven’t offended, disappointed, angered or irritated you. Thank you for your generosity.

what most vividly (why don’t you remember)
(for Billy in Providence, who always asks after my dreams)

What dream do you remember most vividly and what message does it bear?

The dream of my home, lights in the house.

The dream of watching from a tree the lights in the house in my childhood.

The dream of living in a tree in a tree in the woods.

On and Off and Off and On and On and Off.

High up in the tree, I grew rough skin, fur.

A dream of alienation, a dream of the strangeness of being.
Dream of adaption, adoption; a dream of adaptation

What dream do you remember?

Walking around downtown, pregnant. People
coming up to me, smiling, people I know coming up, touching
the baby through my belly. The sun is warm.

What dream most vividly?

I never remember my dreams.

And what message does it bear?

I wake up and discover someone leaning over me, long knife
stabbing and slashing. The pain
is overwhelming.

Do you remember most vividly and what?

An evil man dressed like a TV bandit
a bandit in black-and-white stripes
                                                      a black mask
spreading oil on the stair landing outside my childhood bedroom.
                                                      This is the first dream.

Do you remember?

The one that came true
For someone else.

I never remember my dreams.

Blood soaking the sheets.

What dream what message?

A massacre
a serial killer

After a miscarriage

On a horse in a field, grass to the saddle.
Sun in my eyes, a mob grabbing at my clothes
pulls me off. A pack of wolves.
They cut his throat. I wake up sweating.

Remember vividly?

I’m kissing the boy
I thought was the love of my life
until I met the love of my life.
Small stone in my mouth I don’t want him to know.

What dream do you remember?

I am a young woman. I am a boy, a man. I am in a house, in the kitchen
in a bedroom, a young woman. A boyfriend.
There is a boyfriend. A giant bed on which the boyfriend and I are kissing.
Between a girl and a boy. I begin to move
between a girl and a boy. I look up and across the room.
He wears the color of a clown, undulates more than dances.
I am in the kitchen, now the young woman’s brother, with the boyfriend.
Everything is personal.

Most vividly bears what?

Many vivid and most of them suddenly upon me as the day
with its technicolor realism. The one most immediate
a repeating nightmare
when I was four or five or six months old, four or five years old, or six.
It made me terrified every night, every night sleepless.
I had to have light. Would lie awake
until my sister fell asleep, so she wouldn’t notice me
turning on the lamp.

The vividness less visual, aural or
tactile: almost completely
feeling. The details simple:
a dark wood, black trees, inky sky.
The smell of wet dirt and damp mosses. I can’t see
him or her but I know I’m being pursued and hunted and I am terrified.

The air ice in my throat, running
so long and hard I can’t feel my legs anymore. It’s terror I have never felt.
And every time,
                          just as I’m about to be caught,
                                                                              I feel his
steps behind me the faint thump in the earth from his footfalls
and I wake.

What dream and what does it bear?

I never remember my dreams.

What do you most vividly and what?

A recurring dream a boy
a girl, slender with long blonde hair
floats like veils in the currents, caged
in a city beneath the sea.

Night after night I return to this place
swim to the girl. I know nothing, she seems unbearably sad.
Night after night I manage to free her.

Night after night she is caged again.

What dream do you remember?

The Russians invading a beach near Savannah. Our home
underground tunnels. Lost from my mom, my brother
I saw shot.

What dream?

I never remember my
remember my dreams
more now, as if waking into life
more fully somehow now,
as if
         love
                     as if
because of
                     as if
                                 art could

                                                                  but no but only
                                                                  maybe only a heightened
dissatisfaction and
with satisfaction
                                 though                      and through
                                                                  a heightened possibility of

but no not only
and yes                                                      a definite shift

Why don’t you ever remember your dreams?

A storm is coming,
a storm is coming to flood the world.
The storm is going to flood the world, the country, the county. Our town
will flood and we have to flee. The fear rising it’s rising I’m alone
I’m alone and I can’t find my cat.
The flood is coming and I can’t find my cat, my pet, Penelope. My world
is flooding and I can’t find my Penelope anywhere.

I find Penelope, and pick her up and hold her. She rubs her wet nose,
the side of her head, her ear; she rubs against my neck, my jawbone, my ear;
she rubs her head in the crook of my neck and shoulder.

And what does it bear?

I pick up Penelope and I hold her, I pet her, and realize that this
is not Penelope, not the real Penelope. I realize, or my
mother is there to tell me, there of a sudden to tell me that this is not the real
Penelope, the true Penelope, this is not
the original Penelope and there have been many (how many?).

This is only the latest Penelope, the one
I’ve had most recently, and for an unknown number of years.

I don’t remember the rest, can’t recall that there were others, are others, out there
somewhere, but fully realize that this Penelope purring in my arms is not
my Penelope, the original Penelope. Where are they, where is she,
somewhere where they’re safe?

Don’t you remember?

I see a younger, smaller Penelope
scurrying along the side of the house,
mouse-hunting, but I find I care less for her, feel
no tug towards scooping her up.

How could there have been so many, how could there have been
any others?

But don’t I love this Penelope, hasn’t she been my Penelope, this Penelope
nuzzling me now in my arms? Where are they all now and how many?
How many
would I recognize or claim? Are they scattered over the world,
populating only the cities where I’ve lived, or are they all here, in this place?

Are they scattered about or huddled together in their dejection
or in indifference
to their fates? Are they hungry or well fed, are they looked after or on their own,
where are they, where is she, which is she, my Penelope,
down in the basement or
up in the attic, are they out in the fields
eating daisies and mice, back in the woods, up on the hills,
beneath the simmering stars, the quavering sun, the shadows, the shade
of others’ porches,
or gone?

What dreams now?

Where is she, my Penelope, the original, the true? And who is this Penelope,
here in my arms, purring as though she knew me, as if
to say she loved me and had been waiting for me
to find her, or does she just want me to take her,
to not leave her with the brood, to save her from the flood, to feed her empty,
flopping stomach,
fear rising.

What dream most?

Penelope, Penelope, oh, Penelope my Penelope,
how could I have abandoned my Penelope so easily, left you for dead,
deeded you away to strangers, to the estranged world outside our door,
to your poor wits, to the fates of chance and a bad world’s whim?

Penelope, Penelope, which of you is Penelope, the original, the true,
my Penelope, and where? Is the original
even true, or is this one in my arms, whom I’ve come to know but now realize
I only half recognize, my Penelope, tell me,
where are you? Are you in the basement, the attic,
a neighbor’s porch, a deserted park?
Are you under the stars, Penelope, the stars now pouring down on us beneath
the clashing moons of this strange place, Penelope,
flailing into the sea,
onto the trees, flooding it all, Penelope—it’s coming, I know, it’s rising,
Penelope my Penelope, my true—or are you
on the hills,
beneath the stars,
in their sharpening
shadows, Penelope, in the shade, the shadows the clouds
dart over the hills, or in the fields, Penelope—
the clouds, the mist, or the rain—or in the stars pummeling
the earth, the fire, and in the roots stretching ever more hungrily down?

Everything turned on its head, Penelope,
every single thing falling up out of bed.