See the raw video at YouTube before the edited version is posted at Poetry Center Digital Archive
- But then this, and I stopped being in those perceptual truths, of the mind’s eye seeing who was where; this was a kind of luxury of living in knowingness. I gave that up without understanding I had to.... there was not the send-off of which we held each other in the deepness of ourselves.... No. It was a disaster of insufficiency that now I learn is what death does with you, if you watch it take out what it needs. —Prageeta Sharma, from Grief Sequence
- His kindness was authentic—he truly was a good person—but his kindness was also a shield. He needed to be loved, not just by me but by everybody, and if somebody didn’t love him, the musical went dark and he was devastated. I couldn’t protect him when he was alive, and the longer he’s dead the less I try. One thing I learned from Matias, who is Kathy Acker’s executor, is that all attention is good attention. Like Kevin, I need to say yes to everybody who wants a piece of him. —Dodie Bellamy, from "Anniversary"
Dodie Bellamy’s writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation. She was the 2018-19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art’s On Our Mind program, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by an artist’s writing and lifework. Her most recent collection of hybrid essays is When the Sick Rule the World (Semiotext(e), 2015). A 17th-Anniversary editon of Cunt-Ups, her long out-of-print poetry collection, was released by Tender Buttons Press in 2018. Her essay “The Beating of Our Hearts” was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian, she edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997 (Nightboat Books, 2017).Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind, a compendium of essays examining her career and writing, is new this year from Semiotext(e).