Triple Burner was a participatory and experimental presentation created in collaboration with Eleni Stecopoulos. It took place as part of the Ecopoetics conference at UC Berkeley in 2013. Here is a segment from the compositions and writings below:
“Writing Encounters…
This text is a kind encounter, when our words mixed. Side by side, piece by piece, tone by tone, to form something not quite one nor not quite the other. I am reminded of how we speak so freely of Mei Mei Bersenbrugge, but so rarely of Kiki Smith’s images along with the poem Concordance-do they add, detract, or is it something perhaps so integral, a collaboration of practices, that it becomes invisible? When does the operation become invisible and get subsumed by the thing made? I ask this as we inquire into the mixing of process, of practices, of methods, and of matter, as an instantiation of health.
Health as a kind of stirring. It stimulates. It provides directions, new forms. Opens interactivities. And it gives rise to….
The Triple Burner governs the functions and making the connection between… Think of it like a vat of fermentation:
The top is like the smells, or the mist, porousness. The function is about intake. The lungs, taking in the breath, digesting the food.
And then you go down, into the middle zone - the rotting, and the foam. If you think of the fermentation process, you have the vapors above, and you have the matters in the layers down, all the crud. This relates to the stomach, the mixing.
At the base of the vessel is the clear liquid, the distillation, or the nectar. It’s connected to our sexual fluids, and our piss. The function is to separate pure from impure."
I just spent a weekend immersed in poetry and poetic experiments, through the Conference on Ecopoetics at UC Berkeley. It was an inspiring event, particularly to encounter practitioners from around the country who are investigating the interrelations of words and nature through the lens of aesthetics, poetics, social intervention, direct action, conversation, academic inquiry, and the nature of things. Eleni Stecopoulos and I presented a collaborative performance presentation as part of the Conference, which was entitled Triple Burner. Through it, we wove questioning, reading, speaking, dancing, and shared practice. The presentation was an investigation into realms such as Chinese energetics, healing and nourishing life, Greek concepts, the power of movement, words, and the Feldenkrais Method all through the lens of this great meridian Triple Burner that has no association with a specific organ, rather process, exchange, and interactivity. We felt that the subjects of our presentation would instantiate inquiry and ecopoetics as an operation and term. Our sources were three books that we have in common in our research: Robert Kocik’s Rhurrbarb, Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge’s Concordance, and Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine.
Some of the highlights from the inspired and extensive resources I picked up through the conference:
Panel organized by Office of Recuperative Studies
Beautiful readings by many, including CA Conrad and Tyrone Williams
Learning about incredible presses, such as Brenda Iijima’s http://yoyolabs.com/ and Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s http://www.corollarypress.org/Corollary_Press/Home.html
The collaboration PARK (dance/poetry/photography)
David Buuck’s BARGE and Matta-Clarke Parks
Experiential Lab! Groundworks: http://ecopoeticsgroundwork.blogspot.com/
and Eleni Stecopoulos’ first reading on ritual landscapes – looking forward to more.
Around the time of this conference, I have been reading Jeremy Narby’s Intelligence in Nature. Here is one of the many passages from it which seems quite relevant to the conference mentioned above: “recent research based on brain imaging shows that language is handled by many different brain regions working in parallel. As Susan Greenfield writes in her book Brain Story: ‘One of the most startling discoveries from such research is that saying just a single word causes a unique pattern of activity to ripple the cortex. The experience of the word ‘screwdriver,’ for example, causes a part of the brain called the motor cortex to light up. The motor cortex is involved in controlling movement, so perhaps this word triggers memories of handling a screwdriver to become active…Language…involves an eruption of associations and memories that are different for every word.'”