Introduction / Rachel Levitsky
IN SPRING 2016, I taught a workshop for the Poetry Project called Prose, Prose! Many of the workshop participants were also visual artists. With one of the workshop participants, Suzanne Goldenberg, it turned out I shared a long history of early ’90s NYC queer and radical street activism, although we didn’t recall having ever met before. We kept in touch (as I did with many of the workshop participants), and the two of us met at my home in December 2017, where she modeled a drawing practice for me. I then offered her a methodology for writing prose poems that would be auto-editing, since editing/revising was a process that was proving to be continuously and profoundly anti-intuitive to her. Suzanne was on her way to Mexico, so I suggested that she write one daily and that each one be called “Against Travel.” I had myself been wanting to write a book called Against Travel, so I decided to also follow the exercise/prompt.
For me the word “against” in the phrase is not merely oppositional; rather it evokes a general ambivalence about travel, the against of rubbing up on an object, a kind of disavowing frottage.