Look out for Katy's forthcoming book, Thinking Feelingly, on exploring poetry somatically.
"Re-Creating Eve: Sedgwick's Art and the Practice of Renewal" in Criticism 52:2
"Katherine Hawkins's piece recognizes a certain development or transformation across the span of Sedgwick's career... in the intersection of Sedgwick's art and her increasingly Buddhist-inflected readings of Proust. In carefully layered readings of several examples of Sedgwick's textile and book art, all of which engage Proust's work, Hawkins shows how they explore closed and open systems, body and mind, paranoid and reparative modes, the individual and the supraindividual. Hawkins's take on Sedgwick's tactile turn also illuminates a new approach, inspired by Buddhist teachings of emptiness, to the overcoming of identity. Hawkins goes on to describe what she calls the 'almost indistinguishable attractions to nonidentity and nonbeing' evident in Sedgwick's work as what might differentiate her from Proust."
- Keith Vincent
"Woven Spaces" in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 16:2
This examination of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love is part of a larger project that studies unusual illness narratives to determine how experimentation with form facilitates new ways of understanding bodily crisis. Sedgwick's approach to metastatic breast cancer develops the theoretical concepts from across her oeuvre; A Dialoguelayers theories of nonlinear time, hybrid form, and intersubjective relation within a 17th-century mode of Japanese linked verse called haibun. Close engagement with these historical, formal and theoretical matrices reveal how Sedgwick's interventions in queer theory achieve their most radical expression in her illness narrative, which has not received adequate critical attention as an important extension of her scholarship.
"Yogis Cry Too: A Call to End the 'Good Vibes Only' Culture" in Shut Up and Yoga
"We need to cultivate a collective skepticism about the power of an optimistic outlook to produce immediate personal and societal results. We need to recognize and honor the effort over months and seasons and years and lifetimes required for change.
Yoga. Takes. Time.
Just as blocks in the fascia won't be untangled by one wild night with a TB12 Vibrating Pliability Roller, psychic knots are equally stubborn. The yamas and niyamas, or guidelines for behavior in our relationship to self and world, aren't a quick panacea. They address our behaviors, not our feelings. These teachings do not instruct us to beat our emotions into a fluffy meringue. Instead, by controlling our actions over time, we are lucky to experience an organic deepening, maturation, and settling of the psyche. It's an excruciating practice that produces slow results if we can show up day after day for the deliberate discipline of it."
"We need to cultivate a collective skepticism about the power of an optimistic outlook to produce immediate personal and societal results. We need to recognize and honor the effort over months and seasons and years and lifetimes required for change.
Yoga. Takes. Time.
Just as blocks in the fascia won't be untangled by one wild night with a TB12 Vibrating Pliability Roller, psychic knots are equally stubborn. The yamas and niyamas, or guidelines for behavior in our relationship to self and world, aren't a quick panacea. They address our behaviors, not our feelings. These teachings do not instruct us to beat our emotions into a fluffy meringue. Instead, by controlling our actions over time, we are lucky to experience an organic deepening, maturation, and settling of the psyche. It's an excruciating practice that produces slow results if we can show up day after day for the deliberate discipline of it."
"Owner's Manual for a Burning Life" in Elephant Journal
Setting darkness free to the ether is not a simple detox; it’s a process of fiery transformation.
I’m talking to you from rock bottom.
"Alchemy Girl" in Painted Bride Quarterly #69
"I’m watching Jamie watching blue
on a Tuesday in the Musée Picasso
Her head is cocked like she’s sorry for him
And I want to smack that disenchanted pout
off her head till it straightens out
her head with the perfect little freckles shaken
like salt from the brown doe eyes shaken
like salt like sweat like smoke
smoke like hot on her neck
the neck that makes me hate the shirt
for covering half of it (like birches intertwined, her neck)
the stiff-collared shirt tucked into her jeans...."
"Deeper than Gender" in Elephant Journal
"Nobody knows which aspects of gender are deep-seated mysteries pumping through our gonads, as opposed to behaviors we've adopted over time to thrive or just cope. But identity is shifting and elusive, and figuring it out is like fingering mercury. In the wise words of Princess Leia, the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. Most people go to yoga to drop down below the messiness of identity, to find enough silence to hear the sound of blood in their veins. The stillness when we sit in meditation is a current that flows way down, deeper than gender. Our job as practitioners is to drop down below the churny waters into the deep, still world. Our job as yoga teachers is to offer a way down."
"Nobody knows which aspects of gender are deep-seated mysteries pumping through our gonads, as opposed to behaviors we've adopted over time to thrive or just cope. But identity is shifting and elusive, and figuring it out is like fingering mercury. In the wise words of Princess Leia, the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. Most people go to yoga to drop down below the messiness of identity, to find enough silence to hear the sound of blood in their veins. The stillness when we sit in meditation is a current that flows way down, deeper than gender. Our job as practitioners is to drop down below the churny waters into the deep, still world. Our job as yoga teachers is to offer a way down."
"The Sound, The Silence, and the Experience of Dropping In"
A little sum'n sum'n on growing up Quaker, me and my bro, and the experience of the silent OM.