Words written in chalk on a low concrete wall.

Farid Matuk

Project Description

While at Headlands I will continue work on two linked book projects, one a collection of poems and the other a series of essays that hybridize verse and prose forms. I will read drafts aloud and look out the window. I will lay pages on the floor of my studio and walk around them like the wild turkeys going down the hills outside the barracks. I will continue to think and write about what Henry “Box” Brown, Luce Irigaray, Sojourner Truth, Adah Isaacs Menken, Bert Williams, George Walker, W.E.B. Dubois, Hortense Spillers, Kobena Mercer, ASCO, Richard Pryor, Daniel Joseph Martinez, my daughter, and others have to tell me about getting over, about strategies of agency that can help us deflect or work through the narratives that white supremacy and heteropatriarchy project onto our bodies.

Artist Statement

One must needs go amidst villains practicing open inquiry such as Dr. Perloff speaking on poetics and feelings in the shade of a brutalist amphitheater. It was Little Peggy March who took a pure devotional from the French and kids today. The white boy comes into any of us to be increased and is feeling. Grand larcening freighted breath endearing heroics in the drama of very being as we know. Suppose one is bred an immigrant to work the minor stages where people come to be smeared. Just one brick at Reginald Denny’s head afternoon April 1992 if you’re looking to read one of those systemic inaugurals. How few scenes, and do we suppose the generous made bona fide within danger? Holy Mothers sing their magnificats with the white boy inside to magnify him, bear him along. Peggy March could sing, I will follow him/ wherever he/ may go. Feelings may not be for us, but tactically we can say they are. Poetry, though – somewhere behind provocation, real close to impossibility.

Alumni New Works is a project-based award program that supports the cutting edge contemporary creative practices of Headlands Alumni, and provides impactful resources toward the development and completion of a project.