Archive of Longings Poems inspired by the work of Diana Al-Hadid
Editors’ Intro
On the occasion of Diana Al-Hadid: Archive of Longings—a monographic exhibition consisting of 13 sculptural works made between 2010 and 2021—the Henry presented a series of writing workshops developed by Pacific Northwest writers. Al-Hadid’s sculptural practice is fed by mythology, literature, and the art historical canon, often utilizing female protagonists to examine concerns of agency and identity. At it’s core, Al-Hadid’s work solicits reflection on the fraught relationship between archives and longings. Each writing workshop invited community participants to take up this call for reflection, continuing the processes of influence, accumulation, and iteration suggested in AlHadid’s work, while also reflecting upon “archives” that live closer to home and heart. Janice Lee, a Portland-based Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer prompted UW Bothell Creative Writing students to consider their situations within the space of the exhibition as a way to access memory and longing; “Do you feel settled or unsettled?”, “Which object in this space are you?” “What can’t be seen or heard right now?” and “What is haunting this space?” were some of the questions she posed. Patrycja Humienik, daughter of Polish immigrants and a writer, facilitator, and performer based in Seattle, guided participants in an embodied writing workshop. Alternating between experiments in writing and motion to consider ways in which the body and the page share an archive of longing, she asked visitors to consider where in their bodies and memories their longing lives. Rena Priest, a poet and an enrolled member of the Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation, as well as the current Washington State Poet Laureate (April 2021 - 2023), led our final workshop. Focusing on the figure of Gradiva, whose mythopoetic status is a central fascination for Al-Hadid, Priest invited community participants to commune Continued on the next page
with Al-Hadid’s sculptures as an avenue to reflect upon personal obsessions, as well as the role of inherited tropes in shaping how these reflections turn up in their writing. Participants experimented with repetition as a way to access, identify with, and respond to Al-Hadid’s works. While the experience of sharing space with Al-Hadid’s work cannot be replicated on the page, we invited participants and facilitators to submit pieces inspired by the workshops for inclusion in this poetry chapbook in an attempt to preserve a remnant of the writing series and as an echo of Al Hadid’s processes. In the spirit of Al Hadid’s melding of stories and histories, we collated submissions alphabetically to make indeterminate which piece was inspired by which workshop. We hope this book inspires your own reflections on the relationships between the archive and our longings. We thank Diana Al-Hadid for sharing her practice and artworks with us and our communities. Professors Amaranth Borsuk and Ching-In Chen organized the session with Janice Lee for their MFA students at UW Bothell and we are grateful for the collaboration. Thanks especially to Janice, Patrycja, and Rena, who invited us into playful community with each other and Diana’s work with tenderness, humor, and wisdom. MITA MAHATO Associate Curator of Public & Youth Programs
IAN SIPORIN Public & Youth Programs Manager
Learn more about each of the facilitating writers: https://janicel.com/ https://www.renapriest.com/ https://www.patrycjasara.com/
Do You Remember What it was Like?
ALEXANDRIA SIMMONS Do you remember what it was like? When you had to stretch to reach the door handles; when you hugged Mom and you encircled your arms around her legs? When did you stop asking her for snacks? When did she stop making you lunches? Reminisce about a first-world privileged childhood, one where you don’t remember the cold because she dressed you in bundles as abundant as her love. You know you were not an easy child When you can’t count the trips to the Principal’s; When medicating you was her chore of misery; When sports was the prescription for aggression, and When you were Angst’s accomplice in Occupying her home.
Installation view of Diana Al-Hadid: Archive of Longings, 2021, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle. Photo: Jonathan Vanderweit, courtesy of Henry Art Gallery.
The fact is, when you remember the world being so big, She’ll never forget her baby, so small. You’ll remember the rushing wind in your ears, When you ran across a playground Catching clouds in plastic bags; You’ll remember scaling the metal monument that ‘s now a slide below your height, 5’5”. And she’ll remember her tiny goblin Scrambling into the bus for school, Scrabbling off and home into her arms And around her legs. scan to watch video
Kintsugi
Memory Storage (excerpt)
ALYSA LEVI-D’ANCONA
AMY ELDRIDGE
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Paired with a visual exploration of the liminality between brokenness and healing, Levi-D’Ancona reads poetry that grapples with uncertainty in the journey toward the objects of desire: freedom, love, peace, and acceptance. Levi-D’Ancona draws inspiration from Diana Al-Hadid’s exhibit, Archive of Longings as well from the poetry of Amy Eldridge and Bujinlkham Erdenebaatar.
A childhood home cannot be discarded in the donation bin at the local thrift shop in one large, black plastic garbage bag. It must be broken down into small, more digestible pieces and placed in staggered arrangements on the curb of the street for drivers to pull over, pick through, and place into the trunk of their car. They’ll pull over slowly, as if unsure whether to stop, and perhaps even proceed down the street before making a U-turn at the bend to come back around and sift through the remains. One will snag the table where each and every one of my siblings did homework, from grade school to college, with pencil markings of assignments past still engraved on its surface and the half-eaten bag of chicken feed the flock didn’t get to finish before a nice lady from Facebook Marketplace showed up to take them away. Another will take the tapestry from behind my bed that used to billow like a sail when the window seals began to fail and the wind used to sneak through the crevices of my bedroom and the tiny tin shovel from the fireplace where a squirrel once got caught on Thanksgiving Day. The collection that took 25 years to grow and maintain will be gone within the span of three days.
From How it Begins
Furthest Point West in the
ASHER STEIN
ATLANTA DUNCAN
Y’know it’s in the title Y’know there’s just one way: I want to leave my body leave my body in the spray I want to watch the sunset I want to watch the rain I want to watch the little things What fall into your frame A subject is a river It’s hard and slow and clean It shines like bronze it prospers remembers anything So do you need another? a dying orange cat Who when when you stare it folds itself an origami bat I am here, I am Queer I am full of every fear Which some nice day I’ll capture here Mark the duty, bless my rear
World (excerpt)
1. A woman who can walk through walls. A man walks by and waves at an empty window. There are holes in the mountain, and I can see: Holy mountain. My first love had a voice that sounded like an old recording, Cripplingly enticing, The desire to be desired, Nothing more, nothing left to the one that got away. Desire ends. The curtain closes on a scene. An accident. A death. A severance. A monster “rears its ugly head” but there is no longer Any body left to run, to fear, to flee. Bloody legs pointing to the bloody coroner, the scalpel redundant the job already done. Smoke and Mirrors: Desire begins in the belly of the beast, the churning beneath, a shitstorm spilling out. Under the skirt, in the “womb”, in the body, in the clay The wash. The Mirror. The foundation melting. The woman who can walk through walls holds a mirror like a dead nun in a dream.
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Sitting propped up, loitering on the sidewalk, She went half-crazy with her reflection, flipped it the bird. The ship smiling toward severed legs, The curtain falling, a hungry mouth, a Gaping mouth Holes in the mountain, Holy mountain, The serpent drags The body out to sea furtive It’s eyes averted.
Master Study C.R. GRIMMER John Berger Keeps his primary finger pressed to my lip’s deeper cleft, a purse, to tell me HERE is where we meet:
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Stay with it. Here: a gift. I call it, “Emily Dickinson also had a master.” Have you not always wanted one? Lucie Brock-Broido interrupts like a baby sloth might reach for its arm and fall into a marmoset suit. “My Dearest Master, I am but”—
Well done! You kept going. Now, we add language, words, maybe punctuation, hold off on a true syntax: &;—;&&& /— & Continued on the next page
Is there a conjoining, yet? Where is the year-late electro-field? O— master, mistress, are you even yet my prophetess? I am asking Anne Carson, here, to explain me: Cassandra, did you yet love Ajax? I hear her, now. It’s called a call back, I think:
“But words cannot move like I used to move, foot’s bony blade slicing through ice—”
On Longing at the
Diana Al-Hadid Exhibit CASS GARISON
Storm cloud—face in a copper bowl, solid paint made to look like flowing fabric. Two dismembered legs, foot emerging from sea foam from sea foam a self emerging a loss cutting through a foot a trickling of forms if I lose the part of me that longs for you what will I become? The far off future translated bodies imply desire imply your touch again I should have drawn you more when I loved you.
Weathering
IV Gravity makes water heavy. I should know,
CHASE FERREE
I once jumped through a waterfall, my body forced
I
by the cascade into granite shelf before it could reach the pool
after Diana al-Hadid’s Smoke and Mirrors, 2015.
beyond. The landscape left by the river: a small, inverted
I let my body down to the floor face heavy pressed to feel connected and resisted my cheek against the cool wood of the ground.
V If walking is also falling, I always lower myself to make my way around my life. I want to feel comfort in the balance of tension and weight.
II Out the window, rain thrums the roof’s instrument.
VI The heavy crest of river torments rock. There is no blood. Only the water forces itself to the ground.
Standing feels like disagreement. III the figure in the field beyond the figure in relief – the relief of the figure against the ground – the field behind the figure as the sky blues –
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On Longing-
—REACHING— move the r two spaces over, and add an s at the beginning
CYE SEMRAU My longing is through and behind my eyes in many layers of green, soft moss grassy dark green depths beneath the light touch of my fingers, my whole hand falling in a pattern to the moss, my eyes seeking the pale fragile looking flowers that grow strong on one long stem. My eyes seeking my hand searching in a rhythmic pattern, lighting touching the moss, and then my hand rises up as high as it can I’m a child reaching for my mother’s hand expecting her to grab it. I look into the falling trees above me. The falling, dropping, the many limbs drooping toward me and my hand comes down empty, fast, slow. It falls again beneath the green arch made any color by the light and the wet. It falls again to search quickly over the mossy green soft grass. It searches cautiously, slowly, very slow. Lost, it is over my hand. fingers spread wide and taunt reach up again to the empty space under the arching limbs, behind which I am secured to my mother, Continued on the next page
—for her hand, wanting to feel it catch mine. her hands are warm and rough but also soft and strong. I wait longing for her hand to grab mine under the green of the leaves falling into the moss searching for something lost, my mother’s hand that taught me about longing
Luteal
Voice of the Beloved
JESS ARTIGLIERE
RENA PRIEST A woman was jailed in the Netherlands for calling a man 65,000 times in a year, an average of 180 times a day, which is 7 times an hour. They found 8 cell phones in her home, with only his number therein. They let her out on bail, but as soon as she was free, she started calling him again. What was in her head? What important thing did she need to say? Was she trying to drive him insane? As insane as he had driven her? Or did she merely need the sound of his voice to touch the tiny bones of her ears, the cadence and timbre of his “hello?”
The Henry Art Gallery is located on the unceded historic and contemporary lands of the Duwamish, Suquamish, and Muckleshoot nations and other Coast Salish peoples who call the waters and lands of the Salish Sea home. We invite you to join us in this acknowledgment and reflect upon this context.
Henry