Folkcal Fraim 10
Old Complaints Revisited / Triple Exposure / Paris, France / TSE / 2023
Arguing with Susan Sontag
There was a new building on campus, one of those hybrid species of architecture, bicameral, part toxic commission and part blueprint fluidity, futuristically reminiscent of the post-industrial practice of turning something that had already died at least twice into art, something digested into waste then regurgitated into a new school of digestion, a confusing message in an apparition-filled bottle, a spectacle designed in the Pretense Style of visual tension but also as the illusion of being safe to enter, a bastard of spacious emptiness, neither our house or Bauhaus, just a large schizophrenic lunchbox, lifeless as a pantoum of processed food, a squarish head of lettuce with a shiny toupee crawling, like eyebrow-eating sideburns, through the middle top and slapping both profiles. A camera is not a witness. A photograph is not evidence, but an essay with too many aerial views of the imperial self and no (de)construction photos can be an assailant not unlike the winged but beheaded management of weather, a seeder, with silver waves and flames of plasma mythologizing the blood and bone of conquered brickwork, melting and engulfed in claws of intestinal metal, the visible microwaves of demi-urgency, Adam split again, a non-verbal concealed antagonism not just a roof and four walls, but a growth on the grid like a physical argument between organ and organ donor.
As a lifetime placeholder, as a vulgar pattern of predictable paternity, as a tummy-conscious avenging angel of hypertension, the damn thing looked like a faultless gasometer emerging from a gall bladder, and like it weighed as much as a mock apocalypse remixed with the influence of the descendant of whatever fiery phoenix protocol ate the library at Alexandria, a group incubator (for the junior wizards, witches, warlocks and warlords of finance) sprouting shards of sharp, cascading ski slopes, the embryo of yet another Crystal Palace born with a cleft foot, roman a clef, the rebirth of the francophone awkward age, a yellow vest for every mandarin, a plague preceded by garden venom plagiarism, but since buildings were no longer books or made of the human tragedies (sacrifices) that were once used to transform books (and bridges) into soul cyclers, it simply (with a boisterous simplemindedness) resembled an inedible helmet of aluminum noodles minus the floppy ears, aggressively taunting an urban version of the Titanic. And so heavy was the self-debate of its presence, it was impossible to tell if it came up from the ground with good intentions or down from the sky as a vessel of destruction. So, there it belched, ego and keyhole divided by schools of thought, like a thing to be proud of and a thing to be avoided, bourgeois-slumming in our present Woke Age, like a wart of tech, moldy Miami Modern in a state of decomposition, immaculate poor taste, the enemy of the last organic card catalog, anti-Lapidus and Post Flamboyant, one of the original bookshelves, both of Borges’ eyes––a visible work of forking paths, a decimated Dewey, the truest cross of the great library.
From my office of hours (not the cubicle I was offered in San Francisco where I was expected to make grant writing magic for poetry), from a view of the Yard and the vein of job security asphalt known as Bellflower Road, from what is called an “Appointment” after it is called a “Hire,” from the sitting, the waiting, the imagining, the grading, no dimension jumping from Safe House to Station to Historic Site allowed––just the non-glorious Gorilla Glue of workday time, from groundbreaking to construction completion, from the stanza break between semesters, the hum of the photocopier in every class handout, from colleague chatter to commencement regalia, looking out from my university ID photo of expectant disasters, major bouts of minority faculty alienation, spouseless as the very first Kodak, the youngest of the gods of loneliness ready to shoot anyone with authority a mental dart, a series of stares all waiting for a stranger in a lab coat (a therapist?) to develop the roll, each frame––an old complaint revisited, from my own creative process into the process of steel and stone being shoved into form, from luring an idea into language, language into lines and lines into a silence “tais” enough to concretize the pantomime surrounding Nadar’s paradise of portraits, informed by the maturation of his gift for caricature, from turning and turning until the final turn (in turn) returns the end of the line to the eye of the needle; and facing me, turns me into something of a human tuning fork, a utensil of form, sight vs. sound, the perfect argument (neither right or wrong) for the craft of integrity, not a sheet of poetic plate glass but an instrument of berserk complexity and contradiction, a slab of emotional waterfall, deactivated and less annoying than the anointing of stone before it becomes the foundation of music, the most impermanent piece of faculty furniture in the English Department, the degree that refuses to repay its debt to the sun, the camera that cannot see the photograph, the Chair of the Speakers’ Committee.
Vision has always seemed more homeless than heroic to me. Looking again and again at the same image or the same visual acquisition of the senses, rectangle of reality, out of the same syllabus of skull, the same semesters, semester after semester with the same subject-less faces with the same slight exceptions, through the same series of seasonal frames, historical or the opponent of history like a philosophy of nothing but graduation, the same meditative gaze, zoned out but not stoned, a reverse penetration of primitive ideas (in need of and objective hindsight) where symbolism is (like bad cursive) the enemy of memory, its lethal rearranger, the shrinker of the archive of human concerns, the first book of hidden deformities. Joel-Peter Witkin as Provost, unmasking a newly tenured dwarf, nude and multi-viewed. An anorexic Leda minus the megafauna. Another look, third year review of my own concrete pores, cone-shaped nose. Things shift, trade positions of importance, unfix themselves from the original chronology of centered seeing, the many spots of focus that make representations of human experience appear satisfied with camera consciousness, the coming trick of photographic technology. By “capturing” the present, photography extends the past. Expectation is the longest lens of perspective. A farther, more fearless look (into the possibility of images) and the inventor becomes the back of the invention, the digital idea (I.D) not yet a nemesis to internet rights, not yet an act of restriction, rights not yet fully stripped. Pierrot, are you listening, five balls down your breastplate, the flowing grading scale of theatrical poses, stacked in the fabric of measured silence like soft orbs. How is it that the white of your costume never erodes? Photography cannot put the cuckoo back in the clock any more than the reels that run time can prevent the red and yellow sticks of dynamite from transforming the blue face of Jean-Luc’s Le Fou into a series of printed pages, the stillness of publicity stills, no longer too wide, too large and too square, no longer alive to protect the weak.
How a thing (actually) happens, its elemental and rudimentary pieces, threaded (one might say) in sensory fieldwork; how it was acted, the mise-en-sensibility of the auteur’s guided outcome––the stagecraft of any event made of props, the tools of speech and sight, like an obsession with the fire in fear, only matters when real time (drama’s kernel) is out of joint. The past, as a cataclysmic calculation of the future, cannot repair itself. It must be given, at least in creative work or recreated reality, the option of alternate takes, psychological change, the full onslaught of critical challenge, an end-finite number of points, the first page the stranger asked Borges to find in “The Book of Sand.” The balance cannot be kept perfectly, not in empathy, not in passion, not in the brutal charitable trust of nature, and certainly not in poetry that has the form of the moment chosen for it.
The missing frames of the missing scene dissolved on September 11, 2001, and our world returned to the time before industrial time, the sand of the past playacting the double dust of the present like an infectious ash. The pleasure of the image, tragic wardrobe and striptease, a dubious double indemnity. The step-by-step approach of the cinematic novel, the old telling, infused with jumps of Leaping Poetry, Nouveau Roman and Novelle Vague, must be avoided if one is to unearth, with flair (writing that appears to be falling through dangerous air), a great bulk of spiritual investigation, the hidden tradition of the oral, photographic essay like a policeman flowing a skeletal outline of tears. No wings without the organic big bang of China, no understanding my insignificance without the quantum computer of Babel. Photography was doing just fine, repeating its chore of supreme stillness then along came Chris Marker. Video, the mark of the Christ. Shortly after the twin towers were turned into eternal trauma, there she was: moving, critically, through the intellectual rubble left behind by the loss of double exclamation points like an aspect of Sophia made flesh (to restore patience to flash fiction) in the decay of New York City, a great explosion of light, the tough warmth of constant thought, the camp of courage (emphasis on the corrupt cure for rage), the free energy device often mistaken for a white streak of hair, a rumor of itself due to age or dye––birthmark, dark energy or permanent nod of coif to a bygone fashion system. Miss Flatface in short fiction remission. Face-to-face, this was my chance to meet one of Thor’s Sisters, a supersensible multiplication of the elements. Mr. Obscenity about to become a version of me.
“Hi, my name is Thomas Sayers Ellis and I teach at one of those World Fairs known, in our age, as a university. Once an Exhibition, the Great Lakes Exposition, now a campus. It is very close to Lake Erie near the eastern side of the gateway to the American Midwest and I would like to invite you to give a talk or a reading. We can call it ‘An Evening with Susan Sontag.’”
I can offer you $4000.
Can you get $6?
Yes.
I’ll do it. Take down my email address.
Our entire exchange, an impure quatrain pulled apart by the aftermath of our individual disappointments in America as some brand of utopia of imperfection, consisted of just four essential, classic generic lines, necessary poses, no performative axiom of fat. On subject and in camera, public, but behind the closed doors that block cluttered comprehension, in a room of two (full days of the week view of a dead baby), out in the open in a sonata of cicadas and shutters, like a thing capable of growing darker but ready to be discovered (or violently danced upon) once our hard-to-categorize cultural stances like the cardboard box of negatives between us had been mutually exposed. Such awkward prose musings are how drafts of mutual respect might be born.
In this Street Photographer’s literary street dream, I left the bed while still asleep to enter the edges of something I’d read. If she was Gab, I was Stu and perhaps William H. Gass was nearby spinning a homemade museum, one of his vast collections of wordy maelstroms, like the geography of a sentence of the senses, into an organic reckoning. Writers always carry other writers in their hearts (to call upon) when it’s time to bump heads with one another. Had years of page turning the paginated boulder up the language hill prepared me for this encounter or the one that was to come, probably not, but I knew a thing or two about opportunity, and the ignorant courage of social risk taking, and I wasn’t about to become just another homunculus homeboy in service to the ageless armor of intellectual knighthood. Squire silence, surrender, shame, nah, even in casual awe, I was on a mission. I was about to try to take a picture that I did not have permission to take. If not with a camera, with words, The Words, Sartre’s term. If not with words, with the mnemic illustrations of memory––the specimen page of the imagination, the mind’s magician of time. I had already mapped the possibilities of the aftermath of our encounter and like a son of translated life, my need for secretive slow-motion revelation was gaining energy.
A reservation was made at a small inn across the street from the new building, chosen because its u-shaped driveway seemed to curve away from the end of our stalled century resisting the falsity of the usual extravagant interpretations of progress. She knew about the Gehry, which shrank behind her left shoulder like a Golden Section of free-standing disharmony while we talked. I can’t speak for her, but she must have looked at it, at night, and noticed the incorrectly cocooned Zeppelin trying to become a part of a new theological concept of style, like a cave (turned inside out) in solemn combat with a volume of low-end grocery store encyclopedias ignorantly guarding the world’s oldest edition of Plato’s Republic. She knew about everything, but not the shooting, not yet, and not the stabbing. She would be dead before her friend would pose for a photograph with one eye. Neither of those acts of violence had made its way into the adhesive loop of feed that had become the 24-hour news cycle, but neither had her defense (of In America) that “all literature is a series of references and allusions.” If he or she produces great literature, an author can become something of a momentary, unorthodox oracle. This is the figurative shadow I often heard behind the roulette wheel of her not-so-subtle references to capital “G” greatness; and despite her infamous anti-establishment sensibility, I also (peripherally) heard the private rooms where canons are candied, in jars, mason jars, like yams. Leaving when she left, photographed in the most basic pose death knows, she missed a lot and took a lot with her. I tell her now, knowing her energy is still a gathering tribe of elliptical listening, of new forms, of new Type Area, of new nature. I tell her how the gunman hid in the mind of the many unintentional trenches of the building’s interior design. The wrong kind of absolute art, I tell her, is a killer. I tell her now, because the past is a prediction making predator, a gambler that plays chess on its own chest, breathing like a casino basement of banned books. I’d yell towards her, through the stacks of once private and uncorrected proofs, “If you bend, don’t bend like an architectural exercise of sit ups,” I’d tell her, as parchment-forward as I can, that Building 32, another Gehry, is prime for a clash between insanity, firearms, and science.
She was given a tour of the Cleveland Museum of Art (which was a very short walk from the inn) and, afterwards, asked me why I had not joined her. I wasn’t invited. I was still working on the introduction to her reading. I didn’t feel well (I lied) but the truth is that I was too nervous to discuss art and pain for a few hours with the writer who once wrote of Walter Benjamin, “He liked finding things where nobody was looking.” In other words: I was the camera, the looker, and I wasn’t ready to talk about my work––and surely she would have asked. Without a first book, without a first firm aesthetic statement, I didn’t want to be forced to explain or found (yet) or looked at, well, not just yet. Benjamin was right when he said German photographer “August Sander’s work is more than a picture book. It is a training manual.” No, Susan Sontag would not be allowed (not even in the form of a conversation) anywhere near my all-too narrative, identity training manual. Lexicon-less, I would have preferred to walk through the so-called forbidden zone of Little Italy with her, camera-chat with the elder Russian Jews who were tucked away in the minor crevices of Coventry, or take that old world bridge lined with those large, odd statues from a future-past to the West Side for a trip to a used bookstore and Polish lunch in a remarkable market.
Before her reading, we stood in front of the security booth in our long coats like we were thermal (imaginary) beings guarding spheres, low watt solar polarities of the sexes, that were once earthly animals, that anti-intellectual aspect of the Cold War that had been transplanted into cultural discourse by several of its non-aligned evangels, the ones (assigned to newsrooms and editorial staffs), and the ones who sponsor projects that became trips and trips that become full length feature articles and articles that become books. I had a camera, a Nikon, my spyglass, but chose not to reveal its existence or whereabouts. So we stood there, in between the gadgetry of law, like doubleminded cohorts, about to add to our file folders of accomplishments––self-assigned names, type faced, like two agents in a debriefing, rubber stamped with the mannerisms of mutual intelligence, state approved by the academy of the sly disciplines of lies. Euclid Avenue, looped in a reflecting pool, Severance Hall, echoes of the same conduction as Andrew Carnegie’s exposition of book asylums. Documents, relocation, indoctrination, the oldest books all buried in hearings on Industrial Relations. In an untranslatable moment of backward glance, Rilke rides by wearing a flak vest, that special and protective space in the letters of modern apparel where Apollo presides over the nude muses like a metaphor for maternal melancholy (no furs), simply Echo and her torso, torn by light. Brighter, I remember, brightness. The sunlight over Ohio was brighter and more pornographic on the day of the shooting.
My introduction sucked the stereo out of the auditorium’s acoustic ear, unguided dummy, the non-reflective hearing of an instrument tuned to alienation. At the podium, I felt like one of those people without a passport at a small podium trying to speak about someone with multiple passports. With every reference, I felt the width of my knowledge of any place outside of America replaced by bold dashes with absolutely nothing on each side of them, no airport runways, no languages in which I had ever been lost, no shore with a shape I instantly recognized and could claim as a distant or second home. By the end of the first paragraph, I was tired of hearing this early period of myself, my own lack of complaints, the blasphemy made in the service of opinionated ideas, so it must have been an underwhelming and lazy tribunal (for her) to sit through as, while honoring her legacy, the human activity within me came to a mental halt. Need some air, I did, so I quickly stepped outside of narrow me. I improvised, I widened. The reading took place on the part of campus the faculty and students still trusted, dum di, di dum, not the part of campus near the chapel’s sky-high hall of praise where spiritual enlargements are made.
She read from Regarding the Pain of Others. And it went routinely well––no protests, no hecklers, sadly, no embarrassing or challenging questions during the post reading Q&A, not a single hiccup from any Jekyll in response to the comments she made in defense of the 911 hijackers having been called cowards. “...America has never seemed farther from an acknowledgement of reality than it’s been in the face of last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality,” she wrote. No conscience of words anywhere else in public life except the outlandish acceptance of the victim hood of faith and false strength as a natural and predetermined double destiny. The Neo Hydes must remain hidden for now but will eventually take their many places on the Commission. At home, the poets said nothing (but hurt). Daydreaming through the prose of her voice, the moral nudges of responsibility, I received the nuanced nutrients of the work, not the news, and barely heard any of the “fascinating fascism,” her term. Had it, with torture, eloped? Precise prose, military precision, are they branches of the same operating system? And never mind having a photograph of Shakespeare, I’d like to have a non-technical conversation with the camera it was taken with. Seated and centered, directly in front of her while she read, I was absolutely there and absolutely elsewhere, camped out and camp-worthy of my own mode of aestheticism, past the artificial adventurism of the inspiring (though assimilating) power of awe, wondering what would happen if she grew a beard (again), to become a human shield and a pre-event cover story for a friend, a shield of protection from a shooter? Would such an act also, later, be perceived as the beginning of compliancy, of the coming of single file order and single file fear? In the human poetic line, occasionally telegraphed by little, letterspaced lyrical disturbances, often a name will prophesize a fate.
Some years ago, 1993, it was announced that she was going to give a reading at another World’s Fair, one of those institutes of technology, near a river not a lake. If you guessed the Exhibition of Modern Inventions and Discoveries (Marseille, 1874), well, you are closer to the true identity of the hangers and chiselers of cave paintings than art school led you to believe. Select your own interpretation before it, like a noble event, selects you. Naughty as a forged duplication, there’s nothing like a non-traditional body double to add an extra layer of intrigue to an already buzzed evening. And, taking the stage, she immediately apologized for her participation in a necessary deception and proceeded to introduce a rather (at the time) infamous fiction writer who, as you may recall, created a stir of his own, a global one, when a fatwa, wtf, was placed on his head for the contents of his novel. No one was allowed to leave the auditorium during the reading and those who did leave, were not allowed to return. Freedom of movement has always had boundaries. Freedom of speech, victims. To some extent, all Victory Cities are comprised of vicious victors. Forced to unravel through rhyme, the same sound hymnal, to swap places with poetry, a great fiction was developing, one containing the violence of Holy Land geography: Chautauqua. Palestine Park. Bible Study, a sleeper movement self-treated with the radiation of destructive creativity. By attacking the imperfect present, one can make the future an epoch of paranoia. It’s how historians mark the land a landmark. Tragedy, not art, dear Susan, is the supreme game that death plays with the razor-like reality that edits the horizon. Thus, all pain is not only unfinished but a foreigner that arrives in fragments throughout personal history. Neutralize the octaves (for royals and faeries) and Biswanath’s gun, a motivator of its own Sign, becomes Hadi’s knife, a strong sense of prudence and use of reason as rightly guided as the straight path.
Here are a few sketches, not snapshots, of our casual banter worthy of the yellow highlighter: A small, funny American filmmaker sent a camera crew to her apartment in Paris. She sent them away and shot the scene herself. The comedic filmmaker, who she never met and still had not met, did not give her a director’s credit, but she felt as if she deserved one. Of the work of a contemporary, celebrated female French literary critic and playwright, she was not a fan, not of the fiction or the essays. She liked the poem that the poet dedicated to her years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She loved him, she said, but that was before he became mean. “Are you publishing,” she asked, then added, “There are only two places in America where one should publish poems.” “With Richard and Alice,” I said, “I know,” and she nodded. I played the game. To test her and to pass her test, I left out their last names. No need to mention the magazines either as neither were a wonderland of any sort to me. Besides I did not need her to tell me: In poetry, if your themes are small, skin small, and you do not look beneath the guns of any World War, you’ll probably be celebrated.
Under its own sign of profound paeon, the quaternary foot, to the untenured faculty dinners are also something of a test. Dinner is where you sit in an intimate setting with colleagues, a few students and the guest. Dinner is where, if you are the lead host, your literacy for reading the whole room––moods, personalities, relationships––every stanza and every note on the sheet music of evening must be perfectly played or someone, who views his or her self emotionally below the bottom line of the staff, could “feel” left out, ignored or overlooked; and might “come-for-you” when it’s time for tenure or time for a well-earned and needed professional favor. You’d be surprised to know how much voting goes on behind the scenes at a university that was once a World’s Fair, and how much more scene-behind-ness occurs before department voting. University dinners are dangerous and made more dangerous by drinking.
In the polite cage of waiting for our meals, things were going well, cautiously well, the egos of eggshells regulated to the era of the silent cinema before the thralldom of sound. The names, shapes and forthcoming taste of entrees had settled in our minds like the last important dates on a syllabus then, like a personality planned by committee promoted to the status of cultural hero (minus a well-earned grudge of any sort), I misread Sontag, not the Susan Sontag of “In Memory of Their Feelings,” not the question-master. I mistook Sontag for Susan Sontag (born into this world as Susan Rosenblatt). I did it by filling the air between waiting for our meals and eating with a bit of a game show question, and she swiftly improved my misdeed of her, and she did it in the keeping-it-real lane of “the noise of ideas” right there in front of everyone at the dinner table.
TSE
Do you like your new book?
SS
What kind of a question is that?
What kind of a stupid question is that?
Where does such a question come from?
What authors do you know who don’t like their books?
You need to look inside yourself
and figure out what kind of a person
would ask such a question.
Thomas Silence.
No, I was not fast enough to leave my body, set a timer, and take a photograph of the look on both of our faces before responding, “That wasn’t a stupid question. I’ve known a few writers with new books who, after working hard on them, did not like the work when it was published––seems they enjoyed the process but experienced a letdown. You may not like my question, but I know writers who have felt this way.”
Susan Silence.
Those of us who have been reading photographs for as long as (if not longer) than we have been reading books, can easily detect the visual literacy inherit in a page of words, the profile of every curve, all the rings, all the rods, angle variations and triangles, the syllabic anatomy of preindustrial age typography, like a careful line of tadpoles becoming human lettering expressionistic as the prose spleen of a face, akin to the universal alphabet Jan Tschichold designed by replacing eu with oi, w with v, and z with ts. Her face was typography, and she could erase it and rewrite it in a moment. The translation of her expression, the brutal headmaster. It was one of those looks, like Etienne Carjat’s portrait of Baudelaire, that said, “there is no such thing as the other side of history,” nothing lost (visually) but the Icelandic hemisphere in her hair to the knowledge of aging.
Falling out of the embarrassed sky like a beheaded guest lecturer, like the dot above every lowercase “i” in Ohio, like the grand solar minimum of gunfire––a midwife to the births of targeted individuals, wings clipped, my wounded role shadowed by a lonely appetizer of disgrace, a feeling of shame unable to overcome the restaurant’s very selective canopy of gravity. Best to tell the rest of the fallen stress to her in the terms used in her work. The building has five-stories: one containing a lover, one containing a volcano, two containing the wounded, and another containing a murder. Here is what Daedalus, being the benefactor of sagging cheeks, inherited from the EMF meters of mankind: the sniper is merely the last architect of the labyrinth, the necessary indentation at the beginning of our inverted skirmish. The camera was still in my bag. I could have tried to take her photograph but the candlelight, unable to reach the darkly enlightened commas of her lashes, would have made one of her eyes a sunken garden and the other a tar pit. If only she had laughed, there would have been light, but like I said before, “not fast enough.”
Together Silence.
Equator under her tongue such that I might see the two-way universe, the common center, again. Utopian morality be damned, jacket and wrapper, some synesthesia in the mutual standoff. I could see the strange new building, but I could not hear it, only its empire of duets like the consistent correlation between camera-ready asymmetrical couplets, their slightly different lengths unable to agree or disagree with the left margin, each line becoming a horizontal plant, flow and flowering, exposing its own petals (like pages) to binding. Silence, the hollow center prior to carbon, then, eclipsing her own energy, she smiled: rings and the magnetism of moons. At the trim-edge color of her own endpapers, she smiled. First the light of the projector, then the light that enters the theater after the film has ended, then the third light one meets leaving the theater in the daytime, the harsh healing (white then tinted) that arrived when she (without a pore of hesitation) asked if I liked the work of the promising young American filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson. “Yes!” And yes, I took the olive branch, yes, and dove into my behind-the-eyes reels of opinions about his films, even saying which one I thought was his best, the love that punches, and why. You should have been there. A camera in a flowerpot should have been there. A microphone under a shirt or a blouse was probably there. How to best describe how I immediately felt? The words James Agee used when writing about Les Enfant du Paradise in The Nation (1947) come to mind. I felt close to perfection, like a very high form of slum-glamor recovery and surrounded by people who would be very bad criminals if they were not good professors.
“I agree, I agree, I agree” she said as I went on and on and on about the odd merits of Punch-Drunk Love, but being farsighted in one ear, all I heard was, “eye grieve, eye grieve, eye grieve,” then we helped each other exit the cave, unphotographed, opposing intuitions intact.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.