Wednesday Investigations [2.10]: Maya Weeks
Discussed: poems, parataxis, pollution, photos of seaweed
Last year, in an edition of this newsletter, I mentioned a concise but deeply interesting album—Maya Weeks’ Tethers. At the time, I gave it high praise but short shrift:
To give Tethers its proper due would really require a whole separate installment of this newsletter: for now, suffice it to say it is a very short and very potent album made by a marine geographer, consisting primarily of recordings made at two locations on the California coast paired with [poems] reflecting gnomically on capitalism and disaster. If that sounds like it might be your thing, I promise it will be worth your sixteen minutes!
That “whole separate installment” is now here. I interviewed Weeks on November 3.
JPB: I wanted to start with Tethers. It's how I came to your work in the first place and it's the piece of your output that I know the best. I say this in the best possible way, but it’s an odd record–equal parts field recording, poetry, and synthesizer improvisations. There’s also some singing! So I was wondering if you could talk a little about the genesis of the album. Did one of those “parts” come first? Did they all develop concurrently? How did you decide that the different parts went together?
MW: I think it was a few different things. One is that it was important to me to make something site-specific (well, to two sites, Cayucos and Bodega Bay, where I was researching plastic pollution). Another is that Full Spectrum is very open to, as you call them, odd records, so I felt like I had a lot of room.
I had never made a record before. I had made recordings with synthesizers, and I had played some music as a child/young adult, but making Tethers was an experience of learning what it felt like to think/make in four dimensions. For a while I had been frustrated with poetry limiting me to three dimensions, at least in writing. I can do four dimensions when I perform but not on the page, and music was a way to expand that. I got to work with time and space in a way that I couldn't on the page.
It's largely a lyrical album with some sounds for structure—I liked getting to build the structures.
And shoutout to Andrew [Weathers], who co-produced it with me, and whose expertise I leaned on heavily. Andrew and I would email tracks back and forth and I'd be sending him songs like, “I have this, but I want to add something that keeps the rhythm in a more durable way,” and he would do it and it would be exactly what I had imagined. We talked a lot about my vision prior to making the record and I really felt our shared understanding of it come through. That was an amazing experience of collaboration.
Did these poems exist on the page before they were recorded?
Yes. I had written the text as part of a book of poetry for my dissertation research in geography on plastic pollution, gender, and political economy, and then I needed language for the record, so I worked with what I had.
That's Hold Fast?
Yep. Hold Fast is a book about—as all of my projects are, haha—working with what you have, and also trying to dream bigger. It’s also a book about seaweeds, and about plastic pollution, and gender, and late capitalism, and trying to make and maintain good relationships.
But Hold Fast is gentler. Prior to Hold Fast and Tethers I was making a lot of very overtly political work. Then something changed, around 2021, where I wanted to make softer work. I wanted to make work that still had the same values but wasn't necessarily screaming about them, more embodying them. This shifted even more dramatically in 2022; I started writing the softest poems I've ever written! I'm working on a collection of what I'm calling love poems now (although they're not all dealing with romantic love—a lot of it is love of place), Fishing Poem.
Do you think you'll publish Hold Fast outside of the context of the dissertation? I know you have one published chapbook, How to Be on the Outside of Every Inside/How to Be Inside Every Outside.
Yes, I definitely want to. I've published most of Hold Fast in magazines but I really want to put it out as an object with a shape, you know what I mean?
Yeah, more and more I've been coming back to the idea of materiality as an important part of a book. I think about “objects with shapes” a lot.
Yeah. I think the materiality is the defining feature of a book. Otherwise why not just perform? (I say “just perform” as someone who loves performance—not in a dismissive way.)
I wanted to look a little closer at the structure of how these poems are made. They’re comprised largely of phrases, which don’t coordinate with one another along the lines of prose development, or follow one another in the way that meter might demand. But they still cohere with the others around them, at least to my ear. I hesitate to use too much technical terminology, but I’d say that they develop paratactically. They have their own associative logic.
The individual phrases, though, seem like an interesting mix. There are pronouncements, and bits of what might be conversation, and things that seem like they might have originally been tweets, and chunks of specialized technical language. Where do these phrases come from? Are they selected from the ambience of your relationships or your reading? Are they overheard on the train? On the beach? Or do they just come from the Imagination? What's the logic of selection that's at work?
OK, so now I get to be kind of woo and say that it's mostly an intuitive thing.
Like, I don't think too much about it, which is really different from how I used to write poetry. Most of the lines are words that show up in my head, in a diaristic approach. Me thinking thoughts to myself, feeling like poetry is a way to talk to the world. Every once in a while there’s something someone said to me precisely, and in that case there's either direct attribution or a quote. People who I have quoted or learned a lot from are noted in the book’s acknowledgements following a conversation with them about my adding what I have learned from them to this project; this is something important I’ve learned about anticolonial feminist practice from scholars like Sara Ahmed and Max Liboiron.
Some stuff is phrases I read in like scientific papers—like "intertidal whelks"—that I really liked for its specificity and, often, embedded contrast. But you asked about the composition process, and that’s the part where it's like no brain, just vibes—mostly based on feeling and sound. And I think that's a large part of why this work makes sense in an auditory way. Like, there is rhyme and reason behind why something went in the poem “Barnacle” rather than in the poem “Niche Oceanographers,” and some of that reasoning is topical, but a lot of it is procedural. Like, this is the piece that I was working on at the time, so the words went in there.
At Mills I studied with both Juliana Spahr and Stephen Ratcliffe, and I feel really at home in durational practices. While I was writing Hold Fast I was also doing photographic documentation for my dissertation research. I was photographing places where I knew there was microplastic and nanoplastic pollution, but the pollution mostly wasn’t visible as the pieces of plastic are too small to be perceived by the naked eye, and mostly the pictures are of seaweeds. This is how I wound up with thousands of seaweed photos taken over the course of a few years [laughter]. I guess where I'm going with this is that the poetry is another medium of this same practice, this same archive.
OK so... you got your MFA at Mills, is that right?
Yup. That is where I met Andrew, and where I took a synth class (on a MOOG from the 1960s!) and took my first ever ballet class, as well as a bazillion poetry classes, since that's what I was doing my MFA in.
I was gonna ask if that was where you started to get into experimental music. Mills, of course, is—or was—home to the Center for Contemporary Music (CCM), and there’s a long list of important experimental musicians who have taught at Mils or have a long association with Mills, Pauline Oliveros perhaps most famously.
Yes! I got to go to a workshop with Pauline Oliveros. About a hundred of us laid on the floor in a giant circle and hummed all together. Truly transformative experience. I also had the great pleasure of taking an introduction to electronic music course with Maggi Payne, which is literally the hardest class I've ever taken.
Wow. What was on the syllabus?
That class with Maggi Payne was phenomenal. Maggi is just a genius. The way she talked about sound blew my mind. Totally transformative. It wasn't the syllabus that made it hard, but rather the approach. It really challenged me to think outside of any structures that I was used to thinking in as well as to think about sound in ways that I couldn't visualize (I tend to have pretty visual experiences of sound, which I use a lot in my composition processes). The class bent my brain, made tons of room for experimentation, and introduced me to, yes, some of the formative people of electronic music. But I was also kind of primed for that. Despite growing up in a small rural town I had been into weirdo music since my teens, and I was studying avant garde poetry so experimental artworks were something I was definitely interested in.
We weren't memorizing stuff for that class. We went to class, Maggi lectured, answered questions, told us about whatever relevant physics for the sound, and we listened to each others’ work we had made in lab.
I think the assignments were something like making music with the skills we were learning that week. I remember that Shanna Sordahl was my TA and I would ask her for so much help. I’d be running down the hallway trying to find her like, “I lost my sound!” Or I'd have an idea, and a thought about how I could execute it, and I just could not make it happen. It was so humbling. I ended up making all these recordings and not being satisfied with any of them. It was amazing even though it was super challenging for me. It helped that my creative confidence was high because I was learning a lot about trusting myself as an artist during my MFA. So making these recordings that sucked was frustrating but not destroying my self-esteem [laughs].
For what it's worth I'm reading this book length interview with Eliane Radigue and she also talks about, like, "a cord would come unhooked somewhere and everything I'd been making would disappear."
I love Eliane Radigue so much. Is the interview online? I would love to read it! Or just in book form?
Just in book form as far as I know. It's a career retrospective!
Gorgeous, I'll look for it. Thanks.
It also contains an essay she wrote called "The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal," which seems like it might be up your alley.
That sounds super lovely.
So you mentioned growing up in a rural town. Was that in California?
Yes! Rural coastal California.
I wondered if it was near the ocean. I feel like oceans in general and the Pacific in particular loom large in your work.
Yes. My relationship with the Central Coast of California has shaped so much of who I am. I grew up in a really small beach town right between Los Angeles and San Francisco. It’s an economy that has been largely built around on agriculture, and tourism, and state parks, and a prison. Since my county is zoned rural there are just certain resources that it’s not eligible for. Growing up, it felt like being so out of touch with contemporary culture in a lot of ways, especially anything cutting edge. Whatever was happening at, say, LACMA in Los Angeles was not happening in Cayucos.
All this to say, there was not a lot do or consume growing up here. My friends and family and I did a lot of making our own fun, and a lot of that involved time at the beach, largely because it was free. My social time in my youth revolved around surfing, bonfires and potlucks at the beach, DIY concerts in the woods, et cetera. All of my friends from here are super creative and resourceful. My life’s organization around being in or close to water decreased substantially for me for about fifteen years as I pursued my career, but I moved back in 2020 and my social life is shaped more like that again and it feels so good.
I read your essay about decolonizing surfing, an extremely interesting read.
Oh! Thanks.
As an East Coast resident, who grew up spending time on the Jersey Shore and Cape Cod, the ocean near and dear to my heart is the Atlantic. (I have done field recordings of the Pacific, though.) I don’t want to start an East Coast / West Coast beef here but I wondered if you had an impression of the Atlantic or Atlantic coastal culture that you wanted to share.
I know next to nothing about the Atlantic on the east coast! I've been to Maine and was truly blown away by the coast there: the big granite rocks, the extreme tides, the seaweeds. It reminded me of the west coast of Sweden, where I lived as an exchange student for my last year of high school. Which makes sense [laughs]—it’s the same ocean.
The thing that seems nice about the Atlantic is the warmer water than here for much of the year! We get all the cold water coming down the coast from Alaska. I do love it, but sometimes I want to be able to swim for more than ten minutes in just a swimsuit or whatever [laughter].
Is there anything you’d like to recommend that people check out? Have you been reading anything interesting lately? Any recent albums that have been inspirational?
OK, yes. I have been listening to a ton of Charli XCX. I've been on this Charli XCX bender for like three years, lol. So if you need a serotonin boost, I really recommend her 2019 album Charli.
I'm really stoked on this chapbook of poetry called Awabi, by Mandy-Suzanne Wong. It's prose poetry about the ama ocean divers of Japan, and really moving.
And I'm completely obsessed with my friend Rhiannon Inman-Simpson's paintings. Abstract, saturated, and watery—Rhiannon also spends a lot of time in water.
Oh, and I'll throw some scholarship in the mix for good measure. I think all the time about Eve Tuck's “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities,” in which she writes about the violence so many Indigenous and otherwise marginalized communities have undergone, and argues for modes of research that prioritize desire (e.g. researching for what you want in the world) and well-being rather than just looking at problems. Reading this really helped me change how I conceptualize and explain my research and the rest of my work in the world.
Thanks for all these! Finally, I have heard that you’re beginning to offer formal consulting services to people who want to integrate artistic practice, scientific practice, and feminist politics. Can you say a few words about that before we sign off?
Sure, thank you! For a few years now people have been asking me for advice on both integrating artistic approaches into their natural science teaching and research as well as on taking feminist—and often feminist environmental justice—approaches to science teaching and research. I’ve now provided dozens of hours of advising, designed syllabi, given invited lectures, held meetings with tenured faculty, and more. I’ve also spent this past year working at the intersection of science and policy, and a lot of my work has included adding feminist environmental justice lenses to the materials that are aiding contemporary scientific decision-making throughout California. At the risk of sounding like an absolute cheeseball, I’m really passionate about doing and facilitating liberatory socio-ecological work across a variety of mediums! I’ve seen how much people and organizations benefit from my niche skill set and the work brings me joy, so I’m making room in my working life to offer that. I’ll start in the new year, and anyone who’s interested in working with me is welcome to contact me to be informed when I open my books.
Tethers is available from Full Spectrum Records, home of odd records that are worth your time.
After this interview, I spent some time thinking about Mills College. The topic is one that weighs heavily on me: as some of you may know, Mills went through a turbulent few years, briefly considered pivoting to an identity as a non-degree-granting research institute, and finally ended up as an asset in the globe-straddling university system that Northeastern University—my employer—is in the process of building. I harbor significant doubts, as do others, about whether Northeastern has any interest in preserving Mills’ unique intellectual culture (or its status as a haven for women, queers, and trans people), or whether they simply perceived it as a West Coast asset that they could snap up at a bargain price.
This concerns me especially given Mills’ traditional role as an intellectual home for experimental musicians. When Maya and I discuss Pauline Oliveros and Maggi Payne above, we’re only scratching the surface. Even a perfunctory investigation into the topic of musicians who have taught at Mills or have enjoyed some other long association with Mills turns up a laundry list of other important names—Morton Subotnick, Zeena Parkins, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, Terry Riley, and John Cage among them. Mills is home to the first Buchla synthesizer, commissioned by Subotnick and Ramon Sender for what was then the San Francisco Tape Music Center—which eventually became Mills’ Center for Contemporary Music. The CCM still exists, thank goodness, though whether Northeastern understands the value of the CCM as a historical institution is, from my perspective at least, deeply unclear. One unpromising sign: according to this petition from the Mills MFA Collective, the MFA program in Electronic Music no longer exists, nor does the Master’s in Music Composition. (Nor, for that matter, does the creative writing MFA.)
This book, The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde, looks like an interesting guide to the context which gave birth to the CCM. Plus I love the cover:
And finally, Quantum Listening, a new book of Pauline Oliveros’ writings, is available from the intriguing weirdos over at Ignota.
—JPB, writing from Dedham, MA, in the week ending Wednesday, November 8