Tag Archives: Arisa White

Digging Deep: The Risky Business of Hearing Voices | New York Writers Coalition

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Growing up with six siblings, the cacophony of voices at home, in Brooklyn’s streets, the entire city, skilled me in the art of channeling voices.

A Penny Saved is comprised of four distinct personae: Penny, her husband David, the House, and oldest daughter Elizabeth and her imaginary friend Jewlie. A Penny Saved is inspired by the true-life story of Polly Mitchell who was held captive in her Nebraskan home for 10 years; she escaped in 2003 with her four children. I reimagined the story here and there to make it my own: extended her captivity to 12 years and gave her three children. Thankfully, throughout the process of creating this book, my community of writers reminded me of my artistic license.

Penny’s voice was the first voice I started to write in 2006. She speaks throughout. Certain details stood out for me from newspaper articles: she was a recent high-school graduate when she married—she was still a teenager; wore second-hand clothes bought by her mother in law; had sisters; and she was in love. I kept that in mind while writing poems in her voice—she was in full trust as is the case when opened by love. Penny speaks from somewhere private and deep, and mythical at times. She expresses herself in all possible ways, since she is denied that freedom in her marriage.

I like to frame and structure what I am doing, so I’m not overwhelmed by the task of writing. Because A Penny Saved is inspired by a true-life story, I knew my end—she escapes. (In the book, I alter how she gets out of captivity.) This is what I built her character up to do. Through her captivity she learns to be strong, births children, and by the end of the book, grows into a woman.

I visually mapped out Penny’s home (and prison), so I knew the environment she would be in for 12 years (figs. 1 and 2). I found images in magazines and online and pasted them into my notebook. I’m fascinated with those omnipresent narrators, like in Morrison’s Jazz, magical realism, and I was smitten with the personae poems in Tyehimba Jess’ Leadbelly. The House is Penny’s number one champion and confidant, a consistent stable presence; it has an opinion about things, without judgment, and keeps a protective, maternal air.

There was a point in 2007 when I realized I needed something more to develop Penny’s voice and the book as a whole. My writing relied too heavily on lyrical inventiveness and the poems needed more heart and body. They weren’t going deep enough. I stopped working on this manuscript for close to two years, because I needed to be attentive to my heart; my own voice—when and why I choose silence; and which relationships grew or depleted me. Having left the East Coast for the West, for the first time in my life, I was three thousand miles away from all things that offered security—I couldn’t write the poems I wanted for A Penny Saved if I weren’t willing to take a heroic journey within. Both Penny and I needed to learn to stand on our own.

What are you willing to risk? The stories we choose to bring to life are based on our capacity to risk.

Continued here: Digging Deep: The Risky Business of Hearing Voices | New York Writers Coalition.

Savvy Verse & Wit: Review of Hurrah’s Nest

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Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White is an illustration of the “untidy heap” or “tangle of debris that can block a stream” that family can become, and it will remind readers how birds create their nests out of the most unwelcome or tossed aside elements of the world from hair to fabric strings and twigs. There are scars here, deep ones rooted in absentee parents and relatives whose ways of doing things countered the practices the narrator was taught. Minor acts of rebellion scream out in dreadlocks and boyish haircuts on girls. There are other poems with child-like qualities in which panties become parachutes and beaded braids become like seaweed in “Last Bath,” which represent happier memories and playfulness shared by young siblings with great imaginations.

Read the rest here: Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White.

Arisa White « Hazel Reading Series

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On Sunday, April 8, Erica Eller hosted the 3rd installment of Hazel, a chain reading series featuring women writers. Readers for this show were: Anna Pulley, Leanne Milway Chabalko, Sara Marinelli, Arisa White, Alexandra Kostoulas, and Mary Samson.

I am sharing work in progress for a show called Mixed, Blended & Whole, to be performed at that Queer Arts Festival (SF) in June. The performance and my writing is exploring racial identity, relationships, and intimacy. Mostly for me, I wrestle with identifying with absence, my father’s absence, and how that affects my sense of visibility, importance, and loveability, even how I regard my own femininity. . . .The neurotic questioning that shows itself in intimate relationships: what part of me is wanted, not wanted; am i?

Here is the final vignette from the recording:

If there was dust, my eyes could not see in this night, her face inhaling the exhaust of his car, driving down East 15th to a set of lights that hold him in red, hugged by a tree-line street that will not judge him for leaving her in the road.

            Her body she lifts and drags to the curb; down and out, she looks at the sky like someone will come and take her back to the moment when this was just fear lurking in the back of her throat. Tonight she has proven herself right. And what does it mean to be right in this case?

            When I ask her if she is OK, first she has to clear the brake lights from her eyes, the grief from her face—I am a stranger who has witnessed the little girl part of herself: deprived and feeling unlovable. If I was to tell her that we are the same, would she believe this look of concern on my face? Will she take this needle and thread I carry and start stitching the wound she thought healed? Will she look for the glass buried deep in muscle and memory and hold it to my face like a note and tell me, This is what I’ve been looking for?

            Second she must find her humanity to come back to. She, in perfect puppet fashion, looks me square in the eyes like chopped-down wood and says, I’m OK.

            I’m hesitant to leave because I know this lie—this final frontier of words you say because you can’t name where you are and you need to be left alone to figure it out. And I leave her there. And the neighbors are taking trash to the curb, and the homeless woman with oversized shoes will seize the redeemables before the truck comes.

Arisa White « Hazel.m4v – YouTube.

Poetry Festival Santa Cruz

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February 12, 2012, Daniel Yaryan and Sparring With Beatnik Ghosts presented the first Poetry Festival Santa Cruz in 30 years, held at the Cocoanut Grove. I read “It was easier to manage,” from Hurrah’s Nest, with the Quiet Lightning reading series–I was a part of a wonderful lineup of writers.

 

 SB Stokes read with Quiet Lightning as well. . .check him out!

 

Mainly because I have been listening to Nicki Minaj, watching Wanda Coleman’s reading, I felt that the rapper and poet have a similar dramatic and passionate delivery. It was my first time seeing Coleman and I was definitely moved. Coleman wasn’t there to see my reading, but while walking back in the drizzle to my hotel room, I ran up to her and gave her a copy of Post Pardon. I wonder what she thinks of those poems, me chasing after her in the night with a chapbook in hand. . . .

 

Check out more Quiet Lightning videos from the Poetry Festival Santa Cruz at: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2335177B52AC46FB.

 

Hurrah’s Nest, Arisa White’s debut collection (Yay!)

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$15, 80 pages, paperback; ISBN 9780944048016; Pub. date February 3, 2012

A vivid and varied collection that addresses family loyalties, dysfunction, violence, and differences, Hurrah’s Nest is White’s imaginative and emotionally honest exploration of growing up the second oldest, first daughter of seven siblings. Childhood experiences are looked at with rawness, sensitivity, and crafted with precision: be it the cutting of her dreadlocks, mother’s abortion, drug trafficking, or her sister’s developmental disability, the language is tender and startling. Hurrah’s Nest—from the confusion of our lives—asks us to make meaning and good from what we’ve bargained and haven’t bargained for.

Cover art by Debby Sou Vai Keng, ink on rice paper, from the series “Days and Nights”

Praise for Hurrah’s Nest

In Arisa White’s Hurrah’s Nest, be struck by its narrative revelation. But be attentive also to the author’s poetry-making: the expansive language and formal richness which enclose Jamar, Ibert, Jackie, Niesey, Kayana, and Risa. Tercets, couplets, surprising line breaks, assonances, and consonances abound. And always the promise of “Trust me, / you’ll soon know.” But then the persistence of mystery, i.e., “the subterfuge of her carapace.”  From Coney Island to Staten Island to the Grand Canyon, the poet moves us through the poems of this vibrant collection. —Cheryl Clarke, author of The Days of Good Looks

Arisa White’s poems allow us to bear witness alongside her to the sound and vision of a family desperately searching for itself inside its wounds, afflictions and brief triumphs. It is a requiem for her loved ones, “polished until it’s opal.” So polished that it’s not hard to see our own faces, our own families speaking back to us through each unflinching mirror that she holds up to herself and her kin in the guise of poetry. A dynamic debut for a voice unafraid to “tread the shit that mothers this ground.” —Tyehimba Jess, author of leadbelly

Every once in a great while, a poet with an immediately recognizable voice appears. Arisa White is such a poet. Although you might first notice the often-astonishing verbal fireworks in these poems, it’s the syntax that is their real muscle. Endlessly inventive, the sentences flex and swivel, leap and contract, pushing and probing until they reveal the fierce and impassioned consciousness that underlies them. White writes about the injury of childhood with an uncanny authority born of a weird marriage of extreme sensitivity and outrage. The result is poems that are brilliantly imagined and unforgettable. —Chase Twichell, author of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been

Intimacy knows no certainty so that when we encounter it in shapely narratives bristling with honesty we feel a gratitude akin to kinship. Arisa White’s passionate and particular poetry and prose present us with opportunities to feel deeply, and to think along with her what she knows about our world. “I hold her like an artery above a river,” what White writes stays written. This book needs reading. —Dara Wier, author of Reverse Rapture

Arisa White’s Hurrah’s Nest is a beautiful, troubling, sad, important book. These poems manage to be unflinchingly autobiographical and real, while also remaining fully and gorgeously poetic. The book is the vital record of a journey through difficult experiences, and I feel very privileged and grateful in reading it to be taken along in this poet’s continuing honest search for “a mindful way to love.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of Come on All You Ghosts

Arisa White arranges and deranges the post-partum experience in a language-intense collection of new poems

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Post Pardon (ISBN 978-0-9830435-2-2) by Arisa White. A 29-page, saddle-stitched chapbook available for immediate purchase at www.mouthfeelpress.com. Retail price: $7.

In Post Pardon, White explores the post partum experience in state of poetic language that author Dara Wier refers to as “fierceless and tender” in order to explore “what is not here and here all the same.” The child in White’s collection is a mythical child and a child that “…is in me grows like nothing in my garden.” This child has a “…face a remix of all those dead faces I know. / I put flowers on his pillow and spend the night in prayer.” Despite this love and this child who exists and does not, the persona cannot “…offer him my presence” and yet she cannot escape his presence:

He reminds me of my function.

My breast : milk

My heart: pump

My body warms. It is blue

and moans under the secret of covers.

Wakes, goes, does all kinds of verbs.

Yes, I’m his mother but what is my location?

What makes this collection of poetry so stunning is White’s arrangement of syntax that evokes a state of emergency mirroring the past and present anxieties of living in a world that is in a constant flux of change and paradoxes. The state of post-partum then becomes any state of existences with no clear borders and with no easy context to pin down.

PRAISE FOR “Post Pardon”: 

A stunning collection of poems that arranges and deranges the post-partum experience. White’s syntax creates a remarkable fluidity that results in an undeniable tonal achievement of the collection as a whole. The poems in this sequence are brilliant and harrowing. Post Pardon is a breathtaking collection that introduces Arisa White as a major new talent. — Cate Marvin

Post Pardon explores what is not here and here all the same.  Arisa White is a fierceless and tender poet who always brings into view what is strange, unusual and critical for our survival. Her poems consider what it requires to meditate and meet what is unknown unflinching. — Dara Wier

A mythical child “hiding the place that will never blossom for Eve’s hunger” is embodied in these poems of “inherited sorrow.” Here “you cannot make edges meet in its original / sin” and the child may or may not be more than a pregnant perception that the poet takes up in language so intense that “the tongue has a mind of its own.” Arisa White evokes an “emergency” state of being that speaks of and to any number of existences while never being confined to any easy context.— Rebecca Seiferle