Lloyd Marbet strove for decades to limit the damage of nuclear technology, attending hearings, placing ballot measures before the voters, and, when other routes shut down, placing his body on the line in acts of civil disobedience. Marbet recalls how when he first moved to Portland in 1970, he got involved in the anti-war movement, having recently returned from serving in Vietnam himself. He sold the Willamette Bridge newspaper in front of the old Orpheum theater, documented in these slides that police investigators stored in scrapbooks they kept on activists. Marbet recalls how a motorcycle police officer told him he’d throw him in jail unless he stopped selling the newspaper

Lloyd Marbet decided that hearings were a good place to share his concerns about nuclear technology, so he started showing up to the Trojan hearings in 1972. He had no idea that the police were surveilling him at these hearings. An important part of the Watcher Files project is to hear what some of the people surveilled have to say back to the files, so that their voices enter the records. Marbet talks back to the certainty voiced in the document that he possessed the components for a bomb

Scan down the list of groups the police investigators listed for surveillance, and you’ll discover the following groups with the word “women” or “feminist” in the title. Then there are other files—Mom’s Garage supported women who wished to be auto mechanics. Lavinia Press was the innovative newspaper associated with Women’s Night Watch. The featured image in this report actually comes from the police investigator’s extensive photographic surveillance of the People’s Army Jamboree—a coalition of groups coalesced in protest to then-President Richard Nixon’s 1970 visit to Portland. What becomes clear in the pile-up of these files is that these investigators feared women organizing

As I encountered the preponderance of surveillance on women, I began to think about how to write about the collective whole while addressing the extraordinary diversity of women. My poetic material–language—is socially made: all my words are words I’ve heard or read (except the occasional neologism!) Sometimes I emphasize this fact more through collage, and I’m employing that technique in what I’m still referring to as my “she-poem”