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Handholding: 5 Kinds
Poetry. African & African American Studies. Performance Studies. Hybrid Genre. Music. Foreword by Charles Bernstein. Includes digital download code for audio. 5 KINDS is a collection of experimental poetry as a creative response to 5 artistic works by innovative American, African diaspora and European-based artists' Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate (recited by his son, Ernst), Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons , John Akomfrah's 7 Songs for Malcolm X , John Cage's 4'33 and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut . Each of these pieces strongly contextualizes Morris' own work and practice, dealing with the undertones and overtones of race, sexuality, class, gender, ethnicity, power and art-making. Each section is introduced as a reflection of what each piece means to the author and how they came about. The collection contains experimental text as well as 6 audio files (17 digital tracks). One is a "real time" response to the Kubrick film, the other is a collection of sound pieces inspired by the other artists, often recitations of the page-based texts. This is the first text and sound collection of Tracie Morris' that is comprised of exclusively experimental work inspired by other innovative artists.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 6, 2020
[50/166]
(Rereading for summer, below review is from short response paper written during spring semester.)
“Herons eat the smaller bones, the finer points, the details in miniscule. Heroin eats the arteries, the arterioles, the capillaries. Heroines eat nothing. They are self-sacrificing. They are consumed, consummated, summa consommé.” (Morris 92)
I think that sometimes as readers we owe ourselves a break. To expect or demand total understanding from a work is exhausting and can dampen, at least on a first read, our ability to actually read a piece of literature as something to be engaged with on our terms as much as the author’s. Since the pieces in Handholding are removed from the original context of the pieces whose hands they are holding (and Morris says they may validly be read without that context), obtaining a more concrete understanding can be difficult, but Handholding is not just a textual but a sonic engagement. The voice of a slam poet rips through the pages, each piece rhythmic, and Handholding isn’t just messing with texts but with text itself. As in the quote above, words are always being shaped in the hands of the author, molded like clay to move from one connotation to the next. A bird becomes a drug, then a woman. A woman becomes an abstract meal, an object of desire, and then a soup. Notably, a consommé is a soup cleared of fat and sediment, as a woman is expected to clear her body of fat, tying into earlier comments on corpulence. The soup metaphor carries on into the next stanza before taking off for something new, the whole thing hurtling forwards in leaps and bounds as words string themselves together into progression. These strings of connotations characterize many of the interactions in Handholding, where narrative is not always action but connotation linking to connotation to create a tapestry of language rather than a straight line. It does not wait for you, and sometimes it is hard to follow that thread as it bounds back and forth, getting itself caught up in the same place several times or jumping somewhere with seemingly little connection to where it just was, but it’s hard, at least, to look away. Maybe I don’t always get it, but I got something from it.
(Rereading for summer, below review is from short response paper written during spring semester.)
“Herons eat the smaller bones, the finer points, the details in miniscule. Heroin eats the arteries, the arterioles, the capillaries. Heroines eat nothing. They are self-sacrificing. They are consumed, consummated, summa consommé.” (Morris 92)
I think that sometimes as readers we owe ourselves a break. To expect or demand total understanding from a work is exhausting and can dampen, at least on a first read, our ability to actually read a piece of literature as something to be engaged with on our terms as much as the author’s. Since the pieces in Handholding are removed from the original context of the pieces whose hands they are holding (and Morris says they may validly be read without that context), obtaining a more concrete understanding can be difficult, but Handholding is not just a textual but a sonic engagement. The voice of a slam poet rips through the pages, each piece rhythmic, and Handholding isn’t just messing with texts but with text itself. As in the quote above, words are always being shaped in the hands of the author, molded like clay to move from one connotation to the next. A bird becomes a drug, then a woman. A woman becomes an abstract meal, an object of desire, and then a soup. Notably, a consommé is a soup cleared of fat and sediment, as a woman is expected to clear her body of fat, tying into earlier comments on corpulence. The soup metaphor carries on into the next stanza before taking off for something new, the whole thing hurtling forwards in leaps and bounds as words string themselves together into progression. These strings of connotations characterize many of the interactions in Handholding, where narrative is not always action but connotation linking to connotation to create a tapestry of language rather than a straight line. It does not wait for you, and sometimes it is hard to follow that thread as it bounds back and forth, getting itself caught up in the same place several times or jumping somewhere with seemingly little connection to where it just was, but it’s hard, at least, to look away. Maybe I don’t always get it, but I got something from it.
April 24, 2025
from 3. Handholding with Stein: Preface to Tender Buttons, If I Re-viewed Her
72 ‘This conversation with Stein, her musings and my muse. Her inflections on Picasso and my reflections on her, is typical of how artists make work. We make each other. We view, review, view.’
105 ‘What’s a room? What’s an heirloom? To contain something. To define its size by the perimeter, parameter. A room is an act. A performer, a room does.’
107 ‘How do we describe a room? By what it does. This page is an enclosure. It is an envelope(r).
Something can envelope and disperse. Is the author the addresser? Is the speaker the writer? Is the protagonist autobiographical: does owning mean being?
Am I here-ing you correctly?
There’s a stage set up that projects. Is audible from the back. Chinese and Black. When we think of lions we think of manes. The largest one. The old country. The "oldest country." What do you mean "country"?
A country is a room like any other. A country is as roomy as any. A country, like a continent, is perceptual. A lion, like a liar, is based in belief. When they call Richard, Lion-hearted do they mean that he’s African? How can an emblem of Africa be an emblem of Albion? The continental drift is a concept. The Suez Canal funnels it.’
4. Handholding with Schwitters: Preface to “Ursonate,” Resonatæ
118 ‘I guess I’m generating a template of what it can mean to handhold, what it will continue to mean for me to walk with these masters.’
72 ‘This conversation with Stein, her musings and my muse. Her inflections on Picasso and my reflections on her, is typical of how artists make work. We make each other. We view, review, view.’
105 ‘What’s a room? What’s an heirloom? To contain something. To define its size by the perimeter, parameter. A room is an act. A performer, a room does.’
107 ‘How do we describe a room? By what it does. This page is an enclosure. It is an envelope(r).
Something can envelope and disperse. Is the author the addresser? Is the speaker the writer? Is the protagonist autobiographical: does owning mean being?
Am I here-ing you correctly?
There’s a stage set up that projects. Is audible from the back. Chinese and Black. When we think of lions we think of manes. The largest one. The old country. The "oldest country." What do you mean "country"?
A country is a room like any other. A country is as roomy as any. A country, like a continent, is perceptual. A lion, like a liar, is based in belief. When they call Richard, Lion-hearted do they mean that he’s African? How can an emblem of Africa be an emblem of Albion? The continental drift is a concept. The Suez Canal funnels it.’
4. Handholding with Schwitters: Preface to “Ursonate,” Resonatæ
118 ‘I guess I’m generating a template of what it can mean to handhold, what it will continue to mean for me to walk with these masters.’
May 26, 2018
Tell you what--you need the audio that goes with texts. The opener, which is designed to hear in real time as you watch Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT in closed captioning, is a thing to which there is no equal that I know.
January 26, 2017
An exquisite exploration of what it means to collaborate through the etherea of time and space. Tracie Morris bends genre and format to investigate the offerings (and provide her own as a result) of five incredibly ranged artists.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews