p o s t_m o o t
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K. Lorraine Graham
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K. Lorraine Graham recently moved from Washington, DC to the San Diego area. She is the author of two chapbooks: Dear [Blank] I Believe in Other Worlds (Phylum) and Terminal Humming (Slack Buddha). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magazine Cypress, MiPoesias Magazine, No Tell Motel, Rock Heals, Submodern Fiction, Dusie, and elsewhere. In May, Narrowhouse Recordings will release Moving Walkways, a limited-edition CD of her work. Lorraine has taught poetry and memoir at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, DC. In addition, she edits Anomaly Press, which recently published Lyrical Eddies: poems after the music of marilyn crispell, by Jefferson Hansen.

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Poetics Statement
April 3, 2006

All of my work is an attempt to understand and alter relationships between people. I worry about how people’s bodies and parts of bodies react or interact or don’t and how environment affects these interactions. I worry about how most of the time we’re only vaguely aware that other people even exist.

My work tends to be “loose” even when I’m conscious of working with form or a series of constraints. Lately I’ve been working with visual and sound elements more as a way of foregrounding physicality. I’d love to continue my work in dance, which is a fabulous medium for thinking through social and physical relationships. Given my material resources at the moment, it’s not really an option, but I think my knowledge of that kind of movement is always present in my work, even if it’s not directly obvious.

So. I obsess about alienation, hostility, sex, violence, geography, love, dislocation. I tend to search for moments where social dimensions and embodiment are denied and then I make something to see why. Usually such moments are moments of horror and trauma. For example:

The humidity reminds you of your childhood and makes you feel like you’re on the frontier. In The Sheltering Sky the heroine disappears—alive—into the wilderness. She disappears twice into the wilderness. Once directly into the desert and once into a city on the edge of the desert, long after the hero has died.

This difference is noteworthy. Usually we women in such stories are of the earth in an earth mother kind of way, not disappearing into the earth. We’re usually being fucked while men found cities.

We once had a fight about whether or not we should go to the desert in late July. I wanted to go, of course, and you said, “you can’t disappear into the wilderness like a Paul Bowles character.” I sulked.

I identify with these men who fucked my foremothers while founding cities in the wilderness. This is probably why I find the erasure of getting lost in the wilderness so soothing. This is one of my problems.

I’ve found I don’t believe in sisterhood but I am trying to emotionally identify with it, but even this process seems connected to the founding of cities.

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