In Memory of Stacy Doris

As many of you know, the writer Stacy Doris died on February 1st. In mourning for her (though I did not know her personally), I give you here some excerpts (sans the diagrams included in this book) from Doris's Cheerleaders Guide to the World: Council Book published by Roof Books  in 2006.

photo courtesy of Alan Bernheimer

Let them snake lolling
under and quick to strike
reconciled: the people and the cars.

Has its own players but they're
composite due to what keeps
forgotten as if improvised
makeshift like artistry and that
were unending. So even if the filed
has a story: it's infinite a language
of freedom in drivel or as
Laugh1ing M1rrors cries: invent.



We cheerleaders are a bra
for the team: support support
as if girls
could be citizens
we mouth the tunes
of bellicose stasis
because time only seems
to advance and we won't


let it.
We're puppets since words
sing through us from wherever not
ours into everyone we're screwed

or on a pulse give me
an A


Figures explain lives
that's why cheering counts.
Democracy's based on
numbers so invisible
the sky ever clean

in Democracy time isn't
there but the filed synchronizes
bodies and pools them
humming in blood into one
model alone. 

                            (18-21)



Doris prefaces her book with this:

Concentrating on my life's work about Money-Love-Writing (how they're the same fault) which involves Ancient Greek and Arabic metrics, I got to thinking of Pindar as a cheerleader so I started writing this which I thought would be part of that but it isn't really. Plus living here now in the West which means going to Central America to swim as often as possible, I started considering Mesoamerican time and its ballgames which bring me to our own.

N0t Righ+ N0w is based on the name of one of the grandfathers and fathers of the four great houses of the Lord Quiches in the Popol Vuh. I cast them as football triplets.

The leader is Laugh1ng M1rrors Puk1ng, short for Love Money Poetry.

I rearranged the word "culture" to "cultrue" and "field," filled," "filed" are interchangeable.
There are a few variations on "leadership" as well.

The team and its town are known roughly as Twisted or Deception High. So's everyplace here.

The text in general is a sort of sandwich-translation read-through of four books: Popol Vuh, Paterson, Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the Secret Autobiographies of Jigme Lingpa.



You can hear Stacy reading her work here.