A Rupture in the Interiors
Finalist for the 2022 Airlie Prize, published by Airlie and available here.
“Valerie Witte’s sensuous and harrowing A Rupture in the Interiors investigates the notion of skin as sheath, as protection, and projection. A ‘she’ narrates in fragments and slippages the body as territory through films, threads, pleats, folds, through confine and texture, dyes, boundaries and all that is permeable. Also in question is the pronoun ‘I’ and the punctuation mark of a slash or dash or cut that runs through each carefully, delicately constructed stanza. The wonder of this book is how it makes one feel as though one is holding not page, not book, but the fine texture of skin itself. Ultimately, this book strikes the song of the body’s largest and most visible organ, where we are the most vulnerable, where we first appear then finally disappear where “we are almost human anyway.” —Gillian Conoley
Listening Through the Body
An essay/chapbook from the collection One Thing Follows Another (punctum, 2024), a collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal. Available from above/ground press here.
The overall collection explores the work of dancer-choreographers Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti. Through a combination of chance operations and via innovative forms and techniques—including collage, erasure, and our own inventions—we deconstruct the essay form to examine what we as poets can contribute to the conversation about these pivotal figures in postmodern art.
This essay interweaves recollections of studying Japanese taiko drumming with examples of Forti’s use of sound—especially voice—and her focus on connection among participants in her works. This juxtaposition creates a series of overlaps between taiko and postmodern dance, between my experience and Forti’s, and between Western art theory and Eastern art forms, especially through the lens of the female artist.
The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow
Collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal, published by The Operating System. Available for purchase here or I can mail a copy for a few bucks.
“Witte and Rosenthal approach the linked figures of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer from multiple viewpoints, and indeed from different attitudes toward dance itself—rather like the attraction and repulsion anyone sensible feels toward this energy. Witte resents dance’s powers of exclusion, while Rosenthal responds to its open invitation, and they debate these positions with extreme generosity, each taking the other into account and tracking her through question, dare, a step forward, two steps back, across the lines of geography and social system. Just when you think you’ve got them placed, the book comes to a shattering close. But don't worry, folks, Rosenthal and Witte keep dancing with the work of Rainer and Forti ... this party’s just getting started.”—Kevin Killian
a game of correspondence
Published by Black Radish Books. Available for purchase here.
“A GAME OF CORRESPONDENCE offers readers a deviously devised descent beneath simple meaning. We glimpse what lurks beneath the socially sanctioned behaviors that contain and constrain experience. We explore, in the often beguilingly simple language of modern communications, the question of how we know ourselves to be in ‘correspondence.’ Both of that word's denotations (the ‘exchange of communication’ and the ‘quality of equivalence’) are detonated in the game: unsettling uses of seemingly simple syntax act as fuse, both as lit wick and as device of fusion. Both enjambment and unexpected inversions of meaning, mid-phrase, alter a reader’s expectations, as the two individuated, yet subversively ‘corresponding,’ halves of this text ask, each with its own context and conflicts: How do we recognize our kin, our intimates, our selves? How are we to comprehend the correlatives and preponderances that haunt even our simplest assumptions?”—Rusty Morrison
It's been a long time since I've dreamt of someone
Published by Dancing Girl Press, available for purchase here.
In a future Earth, where the environment has been severely altered by human behavior, is it possible to reconstruct the planet? This work explores such a future via a remade Earth, in which humans are conduits transmitting commands from outer space, instructions for how man-made objects which mimic those from earlier nature, such as “trees” or “flowers,” should function. Earth’s new trees and flowers are prosthetics, built and controlled using technology based on that of human prosthetics. Their behavior and movements are driven by human thoughts, which in turn are dictated by forces from outer space. The notion of transmitting messages by radio waves and electrical currents is a nod to Nikola Tesla’s work on alternating currents and radio technology, and is also inspired by poet Jack Spicer's idea that poets receive messages in the form of radio signals from Martians. In this remade world, the poet is merely a transmitter of messages from beyond, a bridge between the “material” and “invisible” worlds.
Artist books based on Flood Diary
Text by me, book design/images by Jennifer Yorke. Available for purchase; contact me for details.
The History of Mining
You can find copies of this chapbook at Books & Bookshelves in San Francisco, or email me and I'll send you one for a small fee ($8).
