Dear Michael,
I like these 'another' works. I was just reading a poem tonight and in it the poet (Rae Armantrout) referred to 'scare quotes.' I sort of think she means the double ones, and I like that idea, that there would be feeling attributed to quotes, and maybe different feeling attributed to their doubling. I didn't know if these pieces looked like eyes or wounds when I saw them. They certainly reminded me of Burroughs' gunshot paintings which I wasn't much of a fan of considering their history (he shot his wife in front of his son) but people explain the rest of his life as one of expiation - that his writing was that. I would have sneered at that explanation a few years back but now the notion of writing being that long an amend seems like a noble and even formal sort of thing. Your our holes feel entirely different from his. They sit in a way in that interesting juncture between craft and art. The stitches seem a little defiant and coy, screaming home-made and bird hole - a place to hide - in a tree - and still a place of violence after all, a hole is a hole is a hole. Something got done. But looking at multiple versions of these they begin to feel like a bit of a translation - from what to what. I like the title 'another' a lot. Because it's singular so it tugs between its inadequate word self and then those many holes. It seems like a compulsive attempt to get it right, to attach. Then tearing. That you can rent out of love, that rendition is a music of reaching, which is never just once but one long perceptive action(s). Some kind of song, it seems.
Love,
Eileen
-Eileen Myles,
San Diego, March 2007
