julie ezelle patton is a permaculturist, poet, performer, and artist based in Cleveland, Ohio, and New York City.
Julie: (singing) Don’t bother me. Shoo fly. Don’t bother me.
Know that song?
Tess: I do, yeah. That’s a song from my childhood.
Julie: Yeah. Maybe some of it one can look at as a kind of social cohesion-making. And the culture or indoctrination or a bias against flies and their potential function. Like, maybe we’re bothering the fly and the fly is zooming around, zooming and saying, (singing) “Shoo person, don’t bother me. Shoo human don’t bother me.”
Tess: Yeah, maybe something about our increasingly isolated American culture, or something. We just can’t stand to be bothered.
Julie: It’s like a pact with the devil. To change outdoors and the biome and nature and just taking what’s here and saying “it’s enough” for the flip side. And it’s mostly, it’s not generally women historically or people of color historically. Well that’s not quite true, because what constitutes the West has roots and prongs in a lot of bathtubs, some bathtubs of blood. So—any questions?
Tess: I do, I do have questions. One of them is related to nature. You use a lot of plant names, scientific and common plant names in your work, and I’m a gardener by hobby and by profession. So I wanted to ask you if there’s any certain plants that you currently feel drawn to?
Julie: Whatever’s in season. What’s popping up among the growers I know and what I’m planting out there. I love to plant, even when I lived on East Ninth Street in the Village between 1st and A, I tended to always plant borage, and I like the simples a lot. They’re so deep and profound and green. So I tended to have some basic maintenance herbs. It’s always the first thing I do—thyme, sage, mint, oregano, rosemary. That augments foods but also it’s medicinal. And also when I was younger, when I was a child, the cleaning agents used similar plants. They still exist like pine, the pine oils and Pine Sol. They have other stuff but not all these ingredients like the newfangled products that began to appear besides using baking soda or salt or lemon or vinegar. That’s enough. So I like, I guess, utilitarian arts and whatever’s most in relation to my life, my life maintenance and also beauty. And sometimes it’s like the word “chervil.” There’s some in the kitchen because you don’t normally run into it, and either I forget to grow it or it’s finicky but I know I like it because of its name, its rareness and kind of romance with what’s missing but alluded to. So it kind of goes like that. Of course there’s lavender. And thyme, the oil from that is approved in terms of cleansers. They use it—Thymol, I think it’s related to thyme. It was approved as a COVID disinfectant. So you know when I was younger before antibiotics were as common as they are now—did you hear the geese? They flew right there!—Well you got things rubbed on your chest to open up one’s lungs or they were put in vaporizers, and they do purify. And so word associations that go way back, and the kind of romance, whether it’s a romance of a sense of place, or nature, or time, or season—by time I mean era. And then it’s funny because you have correspondences on other continents and other culture, other versions, and so then that brings in another kind of vocabulary. Like you know if you’re on the East Coast you see similar plants on the West Coast but they’re larger? Or it may be a different cultivar or hybrid and it’s similar, and so that place can add other names and words, even the vernacular name, “Serviceberry” is the same as “Shadbush” or “Juneberry” or “Amelanchier” or, you know, it goes like this. And how can you make a poem out of words and sounds that one is attracted to?
Tess: When I was a younger reader I would get very frustrated because I would read plant names that I felt were meant to signal something to me and I didn’t know what was being signaled because I didn’t know about them, so that actually led me to want to know more about them, because if you see an azalea in a poem and you’re like “Well I don’t know what that looks like” and so then it sort of ignited a sort of a curiosity to know more.
Julie: A great uncle of mine had this herb book, and so it was also the visuals, just going through —I collected, for a while, old garden books, and what I realized is that everything that seems new now is just the packaging of the information. That of course there is added information in particulars because of global things bringing things together, but it’s funny, like you can pick up a book from the 1920s and they just took it for granted that people were composting and doing crop rotation and like, George Washington Carver, there is nothing new under the sun in many ways, so that kind of a throwback helps me keep searching and an open mind. I know of course Latin and the Linnaeus labeling of names is a colonial project and problematic, but sometimes where there’s ugliness one can insert one’s own dynamics of beauty, dependent by using it in a different way.
And that flower poem, that’s a crazy poem. I can’t even read it but yet it will call to me because of the density of the language since I’ve reengaged with it all this time, but to read it gives me a kind of anxiety.
Tess: Because there’s just so much in it?
Julie: I don’t know what it is, I don’t remember writing it. I remember writing a flower poem that is very linear, very abstract, broken up, and I remember what caused that poem to shift and change. It’s the sound poem or the performance version of a very different text. So often I’ll have the text with the material that I’m raking over or come back and forth to over time, and I don’t have time to really situate it the way I want. Everything that I’ve ever published is like a gift poem or an occasional poem, or because someone asked and I want to make them happy, so I’ll take material from something and then smoosh it together so it can serve a different purpose and function, and that creates something different with that fodder, but maybe because of that I don’t have a sense of belonging or ownership. It’s more like I’m commenting or displaying language and how it works, and saying, “Look at this, look at these relationships.”When I first sat down it had more to do with spatialization of, say, a garden. I didn’t make it look like that on the page, it wasn’t a concrete poem, but a feeling of not being in a smushed up crazy worded garden like that but one that had a lot of breathing space because that’s how I was on the page, and it was more about concepts and maybe even a little bit more mathematical.
Tess: I wanted to ask you about ephemerality and performance and the way that, I think for a lot of people—especially in the West and in the US—the inherent ephemerality of life is a source of anxiety, but it seems like in your work it’s a source of power. And it also seems like, what you just said about when it comes to putting things on the page, even though that might seem like more of a static existence, the way that you approach it is also sort of ephemeral. Because even though they’re becoming fixed, they’re becoming fixed from a perspective of, “I’m gathering a bunch of different things, and just like, putting them over here.” So does it feel like when you come to the page that there’s still a sort of preservation of that immediacy of performance? And that in some ways it is still temporary?
Julie: Hmm yeah, I think I have an anxiety I’ve had over a long period of time because, I think it was the era in which I was coming of age, it was this big critique of coming capitalism and how it was affecting or beginning to erode another kind of value system in many different ethnic communities that had old school roots, say 19th century living habits or ways of seeing the world, and I think that I realized I have a wide expanse because I grew up with people who were born in the late 1800s. They were my grandparents and elders and because so many of them lived over one hundred—in fact, there’s a cemetery near here and four of them are in there and they’re all over one hundred—so that kind of throwback to a simpler time, to not having this sense of owning individually but owning collectively. And of course it still happens, I was reading an article about all these different immigrants that live in Queens, New York, and how they’re being rented to like it was in the twenties…so anyway that that kind of fly fly away life, and fly by life, or a sense of fugitivity, I think it has other roots that are actually grounded in the real and the practical and the cultural and the historic, too. And it could be fight or flight, I think it’s many things, I think also even if I wasn’t directly engaged with it, when I was at Antioch there were people experimenting with conceptual art. At that time I was doing large abstract paintings and abstraction and I was using big, big, like 12 by 8 paintings and gesture and moving paint around or throwing ink, it’s a practice of surrender and it’s also an active embrace of death. I don’t want to ever not be aware of my mortality. I live my life I think from the end backwards, like projecting as a young child, because I remember encountering death, like when my great-grandmother passed, and I also had a high school friend who drowned when we were on a high school field trip, all kinds of things, having this very subtle sense of life and community, and then suddenly the conflagrations of the Sixties, and fire eating up the neighborhood and what it left, the carcass it left, I realized coming back here [to Cleveland] that that probably shaped a lot of my constant movement because one time I moved nine times in one year in New York. And having a Marie Kondo portable life is what I always wanted to be able to have, a backpacker’s life, very small. I thank New York and tenement life for enforcing that even more, but coming back here to Cleveland where I was born I’m also aware of how few belongings we had as a family. It wasn’t this shopping crisis—that’s why Barbara Krueger has that, “I shop therefore I am”— and stores and lights, I can’t handle grocery stores, so some of it is psychological or fear or anxiety or overwhelm-based because gigantic big schools or gigantic grocery stores—they get bigger as they spread across the country, I remember being in one in L.A. and I felt like I needed a car to ride around in it—and people go to Home Depot, Costcos, all that—it’s the intimacy and working small and remaining small, being small. I admit I confess I did situate myself in Zen Buddhist contexts and I love that spareness and all that suggests letting go, not holding on, and being in the moment.
I never imagined performing in front of people, ever. It’s appalling. It’s ephemeral too because I’d really rather not be, I want to scoot off the stage. So if I have some information or a text on a paper, I never have time enough to engage with it until I’m in front of people, and that’s my writing time because my life is so inverted.
[To her cat] Okay, kitty, you can’t come down that wall, you poor skitty kitty, come here, skitty kitty, skitty kitty.
Every time I would perform I would hear something, so I’d go back into it and it would shift it. Or, I would do a performance and I couldn’t stand what I did, “Oh why, I could have done this” and “Why did I do that?” It would then rearrange everything and so things keep morphing. Maybe it’s some form of insanity, that’s suspect. But you know, I decided to be crazy. I said, “If this society is what’s normal, I don’t want to be normal. If this is normal, I refuse.” And I just have to be considered eccentric and go about my life and be a weirdo, because that’s weird. It’s so weird single-use items, it’s like every bottle I touch. That’s why it’s easy for me not to want to go into a store and buy something, so I make sure I always carry a receptacle and get water somewhere because I’m so horrified to take beauty. I remember the phrase “Walking in beauty,” I want to walk in beauty, this beautiful world, and treasure it, and the world is ephemeral. Everything is transient, that’s the truth. Nothing lasts forever.
Tess: Absolutely. You mentioned performance and how it was never something that you thought that you would do. And I remember in your performance at Temple you talked about an element of costume and how that allows you to create almost like a character self that isn’t quite you, and that makes the performance easier. And you talked about the Fool and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what draws you to the character of the Fool?
Julie: Well, I think I found myself playing the Fool and saying things and talking about things that I thought were kind of obvious in one sense. And then going way way back in time, and I’m like “Oh well, I’m different, I have a different thing about that” and then learning to embrace that out-the-box persona and yet distancing it from my core self. Because the Fool could get away with saying things, truth to power, to the king, and you can undercut that with humor, with antics, with zaniness. So it’s like double speak, some people may get it on different levels so it’s triggering some things, and it allows me to conserve my self, the self that I might seek in meditation, that part that one seeks in stillness while this other stuff swirls around them. And it’s got crazy legs, and so I have a basket of crazy stockings, and happened because as I went on the road—actually, in Philadelphia—with composing instrumentalist Uri Caine, and being in Italy had something, a lot, more than anywhere, because I always found the most amazing hosiery and stockings there. But it was also, I remember in the 60s my dad defining my mom as a beatnik and me associating it with the fact that her legs didn’t look like most people’s legs because she was arty and she’d like knits and knobby things and offbeat things, yarn and thread and textiles. So for me there’s always a kind of wholeism, whatever is emotional, it’s physical, it’s a total package. So it’s all those threads together ending up on my legs. But I think some of it is probably an homage to her. And also, I have decent legs! What can I say, I can stand on them. And they’re funny. And then sometimes people are paying attention to my legs and my hat and not everything in between. I don’t like to wear lipstick while performing, it depends, if I’m far away, yes, but if it’s close up then people see this red thing moving, these red lips moving and so if I don’t want people to concentrate on my mouth, you know, until I get my teeth fixed or something like that, cleaned.
[To her cat, who has jumped onto the desk in front of the camera] Right, bookie? Until I get pointy sharp teeth like you, little skitty kitty. Say hi, skitty kitty.
Tess: What’s your cat’s name?
Julie: This is Toukie.
Tess: Hi, Toukie!
Julie: She’s named after Toukie Smith. [To Toukie] Are you named after Toukie Smith?
Toukie Smith was this, you can look her up, was this amazing long legged model who was the sister of a designer Willie Smith who was one of the first promising black designers. I mean AIDS killed off so many people, so many people, and including my late sister who lived across the street from here. That was some time. Probably the world wouldn’t be this nutty if all those people didn’t die. And then, you know, politics played a role in that, I don’t know how some of these people in power live with themselves. What they’re made of.
[To Toukie] Right, bookie? And they know, the animals know, they feel vibrations. “You worried, Mommy? You humans, you’re all such a mess. We kill, too—birds.” That’s why they can’t go outside, you can’t go outside, bookie, and they become computer cats. And now suddenly they want to piss in porcelain.
Tess: I remember some cats in your performance at Temple, and one of my questions for you was, have you always had an affinity for cats? And what is it that draws you to them?
Julie: Getting them off the street. It’s kind of like feeding the birds or planting with more of what the birds need. Birds and cats are related. But prior to my being aware of that as an adult I just grew up with them in the household. They’re always around, now it seems like they’re everywhere. They’re good companions and they’re highly intellectual and they meditate and they’re beautiful and they’re fun. These cats are pretty acrobatic, they have a lot of toys. They’re pretty independent, she [Toukie] has two sisters, Toukie, Mookie, and Pookie, and their last name all together they’re the Bookies. I don’t know, they told me they were the Bookies. They’re my muse in some way because they have something to do with my vocalizing. When you have to talk to another character, being, species, and communicate without dictionary words, you put yourself into it another way. And I would do that well type of stuff while talking to the kids and I would hear sound patterns, or different registers, or pitches, playing with pitches like when you talk to a kid you raise your voice in a certain way and they have played a very direct role at different stages of introducing me to vocal capacities. It’s been a journey, and also other voices that emerge that I use or I find myself falling into them. Some I didn’t even have, like that kind of growly thing, I can’t make it happen, it just comes at a certain point in performing, but I didn’t have that capacity say five, ten years ago. I don’t even know where it came from. But it does kind of remind me of something I used to do with my baby sister, the one that passed, Lori. She and I shared the same twin bed. Say if I was five and she would have been two, and we would hum ourselves to sleep, like kind of entwined, and we would do this weird humming vibrational pattern, like we were taking off, like some kind of vibrational humming and resonating, to fall asleep. It was some kind of comfort. And I think it returned, and it’s also strange because there was a meditation teacher that used to come from India who used to be at my mom’s house, and when my sister was sick he told me to chant on a mantra, “Om Namah Shivaya,” at 10 o’clock. I could be at a party, I’d stop and do it. And it wasn’t until another time he returned from India and he told me that that was her mantra, one he’d given her ages before, so I say “Oh I was chanting on her mantra.” So when I look back, what’s odd about that is that when she passed, which was unexpected, I had come from New York and come here and gone to the hospital, and we slept there that night because I thought it was not too long before morning to take her home. And then her vitals went weird, and then—this is in January 1991—the doctor came in. I had fallen asleep on her, with my head on her bed, and the nurse—it was like four in the morning—she went and she had a strange look on her face so she came back with the doctor and the doctor said “Your sister has about five more minutes left to live.” Whoa. Anyway at the moment of her passing, I heard a tone. And then from then on, I began to hear sound patterns. I remember when that happened because my mom was at the hospital and I said, “Oh my god,” I said, “Mama, I think Lori gave me her voice.”
And I had to go to a funeral for an amazing person, Robert Graham, this weekend and the person who sang at his funeral, she was fantastic. And I thought I recognized her and then when I got her name I knew it was someone that I knew thirty years ago or however long, that that was a friend of my sisters and her name was Evelyn Wright. And I was complimenting her—it wasn’t a funeral it was a memorial, Robert had passed a year ago and it was actually his birthday May 6th—and then I identified myself by saying, “I’m Julie, I’m Lori’s sister,” and then she started to talk about my sister’s singing voice and how amazing she was.
And this is weird, it was the night she died actually, I had a dream of Miles Davis and he was showing me what I was going to be doing on stage. He said, “You’re going to be performing on stage, you’re going to be working with musicians!” And I said, “No, I’m not.” He said, “Yes you are, you wait and see.” And it was like he was on a skateboard, he was so animated, he was going back and forth saying, “You’re gonna be [on stage].” I said, “No, not me.” I think I am living out her work. Isn’t that crazy?
Tess: Yeah, that’s amazing.
Julie: I think that’s pretty interesting. I think that the core of my artistic sensibility practice or identity is steeped in a listening practice or stillness practice, some form of meditation. Even if I’m not regular, I have so much anxiety it’s a lot for me to sit, but throughout my life I’ve always fallen back on it and it’s just like, the force is with you or the source is within you, and if you get quiet you can tap into it. That’s why a lot of the ways teaching happens in schools and the way it’s shaped in academia was not suitable to me, I like a more mentor relationship and slowed down, more intimate learning experience. But I think that is what was around in the 70s, was a lot of experimental approaches. And then Antioch always was unique because you went away on cooperatives, and the campus was very beautiful because it had a nature preserve called Glenn Helen on it. That was the school for me. And then the woods, I’m a woodsman.
* * *
There’s so many amazing people, and minds and humans, ideas and projects, and it’s like getting high off of them, what people are doing and [what] they think about, getting high off of the imaginations that are around me. So it’s hard for me to say, “This is my work,” because I feel it’s an accumul., I feel like I’ve worked to be empty, or because of the work of working with the idea of emptiness, you get filled up with other stuff that may not be one’s own. So it’s like, you kill your eye, or your ego, and the world caves in you in a way that you’re aware that you’re not separate, you’re not on the earth but of the earth, like walking around and recognizing the self in another through all these different literary patterns, or, you know, it’s always feeding.
* * *
Tess: Lynn Hejenian, who passed last year, was one of the preeminent language poets and I wondered if you would also consider yourself a language poet?
Julie: I think that everything that’s out there, I am. I have an aspect of my work that can fall in almost any of these categories, from documentary poetics to conceptual poet to language poet to sound poet. I fall in the cracks. I tend to orbit around scenes, it’s fun, without really belonging. Maybe growing up with six kids in a house in not a lot of space I learned how to disappear. I noticed my sisters, they’re five girls and one boy, one of them said, “I don’t remember growing up with you,” (laughs) in that small house, right, and so I questioned my existence, even am I here or not? Which spectrum is that between A and Z?
Still growing, still always changing and expanding, you know, I’m a different person. I went to the doctor today and they were looking at my blood platelets and…I learned that every ten days your platelets change…So everything has a time and a schedule, so the corpuscles and the platelets have a school semester. (Laughs) Every ten days, imagine what their exams are like, they have to stand before the platelet conductor. I’m being silly. Do you have another question?
Tess: So you have talked about your love for paper as material, and I know you have worked with and through hair, flowers, and found objects. Are there any materials in addition to language that you currently feel drawn to?
Julie: I feel like being outside in the garden and all the young leaves and seeing what’s out there. And I’d like to grow flowers to make dried flowers, so that I can get back to that, I haven’t done that in maybe ten years. I’d like to press more flowers even if it’s just between pages of books because it’s like, it’s paper! I like wasps nests, I like all that stuff is paper to me. I like spider webs, I don’t take them apart, I like to tear them down. I like…things that are small. I like …this type of paper [holding up a thin, delicate piece of paper], in performances I use paper as my instrument. It’s the fragility, and I think again it’s that sense of staying in touch or practice of the small. And here, like this map here, it’s just all found stuff [showing me a collaged map of the United States]. I made the world fall apart so it’s fine until I started messing with the world map and the American map, so it’s my fault, I have to put it together. And then here’s the Door Man [showing me a collaged figure on the back of a door in her home] he’s made of stuff from the park and library stuff and all kinds of stuff, so this is all landfill.
So other materials, some things just, you know, you find something like that in the street, I don’t know why. I like fish. This [pointing to strings hanging from one another] is just sitting up there, it was shaped like that so I just placed it there and it stayed. That’s a drawing I did in 1979 or so. This [a board on the wall covered in various bird images] all started with letters. Brenda Iijima, the poet, sent me this letter and COVID had just begun, and it had birds. And the poet Ariana Brown sent me this letter and it had two birds, and then she sent me another one.
So as I began to go through the building every time I began to run across bird stuff it just ended up there.
So all this stuff, that’s a piece of burnt toast. [Laughs.]
Over here, I like insects. Wings, that’s a lantern fly. These are my favorites, cicadas. That’s a little bird head. And sometimes the wings, they get desiccated, like what’s left of that cicada, its wings.
So I like a lot of different materials. I think I have a lot in common with Cecilia Vicuña, actually, people don’t know that, but how things just get stuck to each other, so a lot of this stuff is just draped and hanging and it’s not really fixed. This is like my father’s altar, in a way, but it’s also the altar for my two kitties who died, Piki died and Orange Kitty died two years ago, one after another, and that’s their hair. And this was a Covid mask that I stuck on this vase of flowers. So anyway, I like anything.
