Poems Featured in New Album
In a rather special turn of events, I've found myself publishing poetry.
Since 2018 I've been exploring creative writing as a mode of defining a conceptual term "poetic methods". In this conceptual method I'm attempting to understand poetry not only as written of spoken language but as a verb—poetry as something to do.
In another sense, poetry is a sensibility from which to create. A foundational position. In a "poetic method", the poet [thinking about James Baldwin's definition of a poet] creates knowing that everything the poet produces, or every action made, must maintain a poetic voice. So, in all of this, written poetry is not so far removed from my photographs, design work, or sculptures. Whatever it is that I create, I work from a position of knowing that my product is a poem. There is a great sensitivity in all of this.
Being collaborators not only artistically but domestically, Yin Xiao and I create work from a shared understanding of poetic sensibilities. This lends to a total freedom in production—there is no editorial process, only feedback from peer to peer. It was also very fascinating to find inspiration in the poetry of Long Yiu. Although I have yet to acquire the Chinese language, I was taking queues from his recordings and sloppy translations from Google. His work provided hints.
Being a very prolific writer, he was also able to complete all six poems in a matter of days whereas my process spanned months. With his poems being complete long before I even began writing, I was also able to use Long Yiu's meters as a structure fro my own writing; where he wrote five character lines, I also give myself a limit of five english words.
In the design process, I also matched the styles of the poems. what I find most brilliant about the Chinese language, from an aesthetic perspective, is just how condensed is the written form. Like in the example above, each line of is exactly the same amount of words or characters. My English writings are noticeably wider and take up a larger area of the page.
Whatever it is that I create, I work from a position of knowing that my product is a poem. There is a great sensitivity in all of this.
It has been an amazing process working on this project and collaborating artistically with my now betrothed soon to be husband. I anticipate more to come. While writing this now, the sound of his guqin accompanies my keyboard tapping as he plays in the other room. And this is the kind of thing that defines our life outside of the ordinary, banal modes of life in the domestic realms. We work seamlessly together.
