kith & kin

A poetic meditation on love and grief by a giant of the Bay Area literary community, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Kith & Kin is a serial poem composed (initially) over a one-year period. While each day might commence with its prompt, the writing inevitably would exceed the designation in its associative process, taking me in diverse directions: dreams, problems Saidenberg was working through, personal matters, the everydayness of my life, fictions of the self, parts of language and broken phrases, birds, dogs, moons, weather, etc. So each morning, in pen in my notebook, deferring the inevitability of screens and devices (work, obligations, ‘real life’?), Saidenberg would produce conditions to write about things Saidenberg tended not to want to look at or acknowledge—their body, their organizational obsessions and messes, the banality of their everyday—in part to gain access to what I had excluded, that excess. But, she writes, “I also had a hunch that if I got as close as possible to myself, I would find myself in proximity to others who are also with me, ones who mumble, who yell in rage, who are recently or long dead, who dream me at night, who are lost to me, whose beings my being is composed of.”