Surrounding fields

Surrounding Fields is an investigation of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and an ars poetica. Having made three visits to the Jetty, documenting the trips photographically, this project explores the experience of interacting with an art site constructed as a 'non-site'. In addition to the photographs, I have included text, dialogue, code, and scientific facts that acted as the lyrical subtext for each trip. Considering the ways in which the experience of art in a museum is unhinged by Smithson's Jetty, my project investigates the role of the art viewer and trip taker in that unhinging. Smithson's Jetty blurs the boundaries between figure and ground, text and context. Accordingly, I hope that the texts in my project begin to zoom in and out so that the foreground and background for each trip become unstable in the ways all of our trips become as they get layered with memory, screened by desire, thought through, and mediated by our tender machines. In my approach to poetry as a field, "art becomes inseparable from the search for reality," as Lyn Hejinian puts it in My Life. The concept of mediation, so foregrounded in visual art, becomes a useful concept when it comes to thinking about what I'm doing in a poem. I'm trying to say something but all I have is words. This feels dreadfully insufficient so many times, but it's the constant failure of words to get at what I'm saying that I find so beautiful. Sometimes the words stop pointing to anything else and just gum up like paint on the end of a brush. Moving between the visual world and the written world becomes an act of translation that is generative in its failure. I like to emphasize and find beauty in the failure of words. In searching through what it means to see things and to experience the media of the world, I keep going in circles. The circles, like Duchamp's notion of delay and Smithson's Spiral, feel very satisfying because it allows a concept to come out of the lyric.

SURROUNDING FIELDS by Cami Nelson A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctoral of Philosophy Department of English The University of Utah August 2012 Copyright © Cami Nelson 2012 All Rights Reserved The Univers i ty of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Cami Nelson has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Craig Dworkin , Chair 5/11/2012 Date Approved Marnie Powers-Torrey , Member 5/11/2012 Date Approved Lance Olsen , Member 5/11/2012 Date Approved Paisley Rekdal , Member 5/11/2012 Date Approved Maeera Schrieber , Member 5/11/2012 Date Approved and by Vince Pecora , Chair of the Department of English and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Surrounding Fields is an investigation of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and an ars poetica. Having made three visits to the Jetty, documenting the trips photographically, this project explores the experience of interacting with an art site constructed as a 'non-site'. In addition to the photographs, I have included text, dialogue, code, and scientific facts that acted as the lyrical subtext for each trip. Considering the ways in which the experience of art in a museum is unhinged by Smithson's Jetty, my project investigates the role of the art viewer and trip taker in that unhinging. Smithson's Jetty blurs the boundaries between figure and ground, text and context. Accordingly, I hope that the texts in my project begin to zoom in and out so that the foreground and background for each trip become unstable in the ways all of our trips become as they get layered with memory, screened by desire, thought through, and mediated by our tender machines. In my approach to poetry as a field, "art becomes inseparable from the search for reality," as Lyn Hejinian puts it in My Life. The concept of mediation, so foregrounded in visual art, becomes a useful concept when it comes to thinking about what I'm doing in a poem. I'm trying to say something but all I have is words. This feels dreadfully insufficient so many times, but it's the constant failure of words to get at what I'm saying that I find so beautiful. Sometimes the words stop pointing to anything else and just gum up like paint on the end of a brush. Moving between the visual world and the written world becomes an act of translation that is generative in its failure. I like to emphasize and find beauty in the failure of words. In searching through what it means to see things and to experience the media of the world, I keep going in circles. The circles, like Duchamp's notion of delay and Smithson's Spiral, feel very satisfying because it allows a concept to come out of the lyric. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………... iii The Red Effect……………………………………………………………………......1 After the Land Spills…………………………………………………………………..2 Delay ………………………………………………………………………………....3 All Was Monster ……………………………………………………………………...4 Naming and Boxing…………………………………………………………………...5 Wool………………………………………………………………………………......6 Intersection……………………………………………………....................................7 Photography Describes a Game…………………………………………………….....8 Glaze your Prussian Blue ……………………………………………………………...9 Alchemy ……………………………………………………………………………..10 Blue Extract …………………………………………………………………………15 Remnants ……………………………………………………………………………16 Irreducible Nucleus ………………………………………………………………….17 Coastal ………………………………………………………………………………18 Stain-Mouthed……………………………………………………………………….19 The Road Nights Through…………………………………………………………...20 Then Poppies………………………………………………………………………...21 Disk into Shell ……………………………………………………………………….22 Blue John Canyon ……………………………………………………………………23 Views of Le Crotoy…………………………………………………………………...24 Cleavage in……………………………………………………………………………25 She Was Holding a Photograph …………………………….. …………………….…26 Word Over …………………………………………………………………………..33 Earlier, Salt Lake City ………………………………………………………………..34 Spiral Jetty ………………………………………………………………………..….35 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………..……36 Hypothesis ………………………………………………………………..................37 Variable ……………………………………………………………………………...38 Variable ……………………………………………………………………………...39 Memory twists………………………………………………………………………..40 Line Drawing Day …………………………………………………………………...41 Blue John Canyon ……………………………………………………………….…..45 1 The Red Effect As totally pure colors, only yellow and blue can be perceived by us without being reminiscent of something else --J.W. von Goethe At the end of certain oils, (pastel). Gesso boundary, date for invention, a meeting If the swing of an apex came to its opening: Her equations remain diagrams of dance French and depression hip hop and loss Something with a beat The size of Jacob's [____________________] wrestle with the angel If the swing of an apex came to its opening: They found each other eager as the drain (OOOOO) pulling paint to the center- landscape neon 2 After the Land Spills It is breakfast again You can see what you want A red hot suit A smoke bale of a dress, we were burning ourselves into Tuesday It is 12:27 in Salt Lake City 3 Delay Focus on possible cleavage Cloister, zip-locked, upholstery Rotted metal, offer her up moss Arcade photograph, future ghosts Ours is the stuff of claustrophobia delay Please, green box, keep it all together 4 All Was Monster- a pattern inching on material a box flexed, O Lord, the opening slipped wind leaves hit brick - a 7-eleven, a Citibank sign and then I'm trying to tell you it was like black ice in summer tar. Simple holes for buttons to slip into and you never listen when night sounds out July 5 Naming and Boxing Why can't we imagine a grey - hot? Ludwig Wittgenstein To name the concept of desert: To split burnt linen To find a midnight unseen by others (Umber and ocean and pepper) I found you in front of a map- Naming and boxing I see you as a dark but completely visitable place 6 Wool I am completely unable to see you outside of color away from drawings When the ink has spilled - Losing or coming into vision? as in where the light allows mountains to flatten into desert. Remember that trip, remember the lines and lines of red? 7 Intersection suitcased shadetreed Bien (O) Sur (K) ed Haven't I told you how we could make it work? The color of vowels: Bien holding us open for days Sur leaving the ocean for blue You would live far away I would yearn for a reunited, for an itinerary crux crossing, we would remain open to flight 8 Photography Describes a Game 28 O Street With all the irregularity of a pixel pattern we can be very precise blue's late historical arrival as a true color This is a story about us Wie muss man dieses Problem ansehen Sattes Gelb ist heller als sattes Blau. How can we solve this problem, Goethe asked light gold is lighter than light blue. It's hard to remember, but it was a cactus bonfired with sunlight 34 miles north of Tucson 9 Glaze your Prussian Blue All the air you can imagine everything the skin of a pear consumed by today we were in the same room and said nothing Glaze your Prussian blue -- Unnamable bench, unnamable t-shirt, unnamable glass Dust on beauty I am re-creating the landscape to suit my own vision of you Raw pigment as building as all the things I want to hold Up together in cellophane - an island, that hill 10 I want you to consider grappling with alchemy, give Rothko the benefit of the doubt. I want his paintings to stop deteriorating. I want to stop associating their destruction with ours. 11 The subject has been addressed with a ladder, its size obtained from boiled rabbit skin and eggs 12 means fall short fabric box deteriorates into field 13 Rothko said, I tried to keep it as good as it was in the can synthetic ultramarine, cerulean, titatanium white organic Naphthol red and Lithol red 14 I'd cross the ocean for a heart of gold You, always dreadfully fugitive from light NM28 disfigured white, a chapel pure red does not exist 15 Blue Extract Title: It is not at all clear why the Indian pea plant and the Mediterranean shellfish contain almost the same blue extract within a couple bromine atoms. Exigency: A field word a word that opens into its dimensions a breathing machine glass without turns a word that means more than white but not different from white an alchemy hugging the walls yelling for beauty a word that still finds its arm lifted for things for no smoking signs and fluorescence Poem: The bloom situated between the liver and the neck Neck's co-attachment an intimate one One drop of dye per shell Shell piles still littering Littering the eastern shore of the Mediterranean 16 Remnants I'm getting to the bottom of it blur to average out: lip into moss white mercury ash, cinabrum and sinois I'm beginning to understand you as an object the phenomenon of finding leaves coming into your window Remnants from milk glass and thistle pigmenting silver light nothing, odalisque bent hipped and full with vision: Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality 17 Irreducible Nucleus Hot geese V in I imagine they are hot. and then out: an irreducible nucleus of white enveloping the visible with flight above travelers moving from Salt Lake City with instruments in the trunk with letters to mail 18 Coastal ledged up white rock and the sway of seaweed caught against coastal accents weighing in September 23, 2008 booted out of shadow, scalpeling vision miles lopped off blueness To: the indigo of shellfish, the robes of Mary 19 Stain-Mouthed Tho' she kneel'd in that place where they grew stain-mouthed wavelength poised flushed with hand writing possibly holding the fell, slipped tint as tried surface band of twigs / darkness / She's telling you it is violet only in the finger 20 The Road Nights Through presses olives beneath car tires green hills change name with light each one articulating the other you- diphthonged into sunlight and fire gorges itself on until night turns into its own vowel Goethe believed yellow and blue were the only pure colors and as such could never remind us of anything else. Some kind of losing the last thing. Why and wider, his face was large against the dimming light. Her tongue was a jellyfish lost in its own sea. They spent time like this in mostly orange light. 21 Then Poppies I want a courtyard of pallor then poppies dress & pigment in cloth light scattering in to hiding vermillion as a gap She is the close up of a scarf She is the robe and the hat 22 Disk into Shell marine fossils disk into shell deposit into everywhere but Norway We are talking about the origin of white We are asking it to mean us and to offer answers Paris gilder chalk layers extend red grounds whiting whiting through We can talk about what white is made of, we can say it is heroic, that it has ideas She tells him she will send him a letter. She says it will be kind and possibly romantic. 23 Blue John Canyon Utah, November (after and for Bergvall's Fig) The occasion was a misspelling. The occasion was a fig too easy to eat, easy with soft mash. Eyes accustomed to the dark burn Green shits red Green patterns green Landscape always undoes itself, reaping its own colors bellyward, sun I want & I want & That is to say, I want to put it all together, horizon hyphenate Ask, Are we seeing these colors in the same way? In the early hours smell cold juniper. He can do the math. He can pull his weight on to the sandstone. Pressurized air, frequent delays Abyss my skin, story a muscle What I'm saying is that it was all just a little too big sometimes Was an invitation, sticks, and an architecture of red Canyons narrow traveled. The occasion was anti-monumental, a girl holding bright yellow sheets of paper He says: I love Stevie Wonder, to be earthly and still ecstatic As in Waiting to see what the window wants to say As in I'm navigating this place Return silver stained: return, silver 24 Views of Le Crotoy bathers sand fluorescent vegetation en masse couplets wound over color fields as water erasures s a i l s a n d b e i g e a r c h i t e c t u r e) brine thickens through pier wood, lumbering on how color comes in waves, one touching the next blue field⎬ blue field⎬ blue field⎬ You were pulling the paint in to see the land I was asking you for pigment and a box 25 Cleavage in Dying, as in to spin the coast-flat Mojave into a circle without future tense To everyone else it looks like the same tree over and over again A black hole has swallowed movement, is like dark- not quite empty. Blur to the same mechanical mean, find bait / sell tackle In the train station in the business center David received a call that his mother died. I told him I was sorry. Leonardo in a letter: I know how, when a place is besieged, to take water out of trenches Material salvation, as in wax, salt, something shiny to pick up the light Gold hills gather at the center, heavy machinery just below Clay nights, horizons full and sometimes bare, oceans and not oceans Cleavage in. Look up at the same time: Outside the dark pink air it was a great ride, it was lost, it was a postcard 26 She Was Holding a Photograph and he was in it and she was measuring the points between one triangle and another and she was wondering about his jeans and the red dirt that he must have stolen from the desert and how in black and white photographs red looked like 27 bright brown and how he had asked her that day about the rotation of the light on the flat surface of the desert and how she had only stared at him because of the thing that was on his mouth like a fly like juniper like the sound of bells in summer like a dry piece of linen after it 28 had caught fire against the cedars and she hadn't thought she was ignoring him but now looking at the photograph she remembered she was silent against his question and that it had been about light and that he was very interested in the points of rotation and that the 29 equipment he had was only a camera and could not as he explained measure the light as it rotated but only as it was flat and rested on the desert as opposed to carrying the desert rounded into atmosphere at least this is how she understood it and wanted it to work as she 30 had imagined a number of times it would have worked for the French painter Poussin when he was thinking about the way blue would get bluer and how she had imagined painting may have been different if the Greeks moved to the desert and how perspective may have been 31 more interested in orange but this was all a way of diverting her mind from the man who had asked her a strange question with a piece of something in the corner of his mouth and facing the light while he was asking about the light had made her think he was very aware of 32 the landscape even if he had so much of it on him and how he held the camera and why she had been given a photograph of him weeks later and why this photograph then forced her to reconsider the points of light as she had remembered them and the rotation. 33 Word Over sometimes I think about how many times I have used the word over light is an anchor that can hold things, a container today, welling up pitch light is a hanger and a bench light is the frame and the hue when I open my palm, blackbirds when I say your name, gesso thick junk faced light empty burn jet light the circles tell me where to draw you, fisticuff a missing vowel, a first time to leave a middle pulling a limp into a song pitch white, sallow monkey lines twisting, pitch white, plates of white, plenty of ink drenching simple paper how paper could be so light under foot a bullet hole of a drawing some kind of losing the last thing, pin hole scrape-voiced animal in the parking lot telling me all about it all about gravity gravity gravity gravity gravity 34 Earlier, Salt Lake City November 1, 2008 around slipping gravity a sketch of eternal body- graphite, coal, tar sending letters to the cities I liked most and the dark slip blown walls of a construction site when seeing it all as a silhouette of fists 35 Spiral Jetty October 15, 2008 wrapped written around this Laocoon bed gorged up with basalt with jet black traps of white ejected blank struck with the turn of day 36 Conclusion November 15, 2008 against gorged envelopes of shadow death, Jose, death is gonna come every wonderous thing seen every coming a definition of elements jarring loose in piles of sound 37 Hypothesis January 2, 2012 on that gangly rock revelatory, liquid, not-light rock the girl bends hip to elbow and the old woman falters a little off her axis. she wants to see the line right. she wants to find the life there. 38 Variable November 2, 2011 Water filter, languid-not-light Figure: water Figure: jetty Figure: rock Ground: rock Ground: hostage Ground: buried 39 Variable October 22, 2010 Space wrapped around machines A whir in the pit A city made from quiet things Pulling out sound And putting it back Your arms are a different shape Your teeth a different color 40 Memory twists Her white limbs cherry blossoms Abandoned to concrete Or tombs Lined up 41 Line Drawing Day up parting with directions a map of nomads moving west the divers ready with materials hands waving up a surfacing of blank a silent underneath a landlock linelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelinelineline line 42 here is a wall that reminds me of my vertical existence a cable of light fastened to my hips a pool of swallowing at my feet and the moment before jumping a bliss of muscle on sand hardened against my shoulder like a photograph of the way you'd said something 43 arms gone up October arms gone up surrender relegate slip-shot sutures your leg will keep working for another ocean your hand will keep folding light over the air you move aside forgiveness as a plane of moon-lit sand hid from view but not from silver 44 Hat periods protect from the chemicals of photography scarf commas emulsify, burn dark, dry light tattoo of exaltation lugging itself over her arm I believed that poem about white I wanted you to meet me there Colon as in this is the end and the beginning Quotation mark as going on for days, landscape trilling and scraping Out an ending so long that it leaves perspective up to everybody else Simple magpie, simple font, the same mark as never standing still in waiting for the next letter and the next and nothing more 45 Blue John Canyon near Green River, UT: wood busted up into lines glowing black against pitch was once standing, once slatted light blown through like limbs lengthened out ligaments of lumber and shadow this was the landscape's tattoo of exaltation lugged over its arm 46 First Snow and the Little House, After Steiglitz What white could blow apart, spread sheeted once covered and flat just two black squares and the brief line of branches across 47 every kind of resonation buried Every move sucked clean by light. A piece of paper at 473 fourth avenue