Celebration at Ahmedabad - India
"I leave my body and enter the world created in language. The present the body exists within can be left behind."
"The most recent additions to my series come from research into astronomy and narratives on how matter from space led to the formation of Earth."
"I believe a lot of what needs to change is our overall thinking about why nature is important and what is the best way for us to relate to it."
"Carrying out a literary project that extends beyond borders and cultures is rewarding just as it is challenging."
"I wanted to capture visually the synthesis between, for example, a rare astronomical event, a homeschooled unit on astronomy, and a canto from Purgatorio in which Virgil teaches Dante about the stars. In return, the visual experiments gave me new points of entry into my written work."
"Asemics is not thought of as the gesture of writing by all those who practice it, but because I come to it as a writer, a poet, I have thought of asemics as a way to keep my hand in the practice of writing."
"MR: Who is your ideal audience? Who are you making this for mmp: Black femme survivors, including myself."
"I was coming out of a health crisis, and during the class discovered my signature sumi ink on vintage paper pieces, which Lauren described as “impossibly elegant."
"Photo-graphy, however it's done, follows its name. Light is first and essential to understand in order to produce the image, the desired effects, that one wants to capture."
"The word is the foundation of my work."
So, in one sentence? " Uncomics is an artistic and research field where traditional comics end but formal characteristics of comics intersect with the wider arts"
"My work seeks to contact experiences of life&death&life. It is an answer, in language, to loss, and although it uses art as an expanded field, it is poetry that gives it all its movements, and light."
"Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the entire process was getting started. Even after I had fully committed and decided to begin writing a story, any story, I had brought forth a list of reasons and excuses why it would not be done."
"I was writing nonfiction before the pandemic but stopped to focus on worrying and am only now returning to a semi-regular writing process. My visual art practice—now mostly in black and white— has expanded the way I perceive the world and I’m hoping this shift will inform my writing."
"What does interest me is how a poet, an artist, or a water witcher tunes their body to their craft. Writing a poem, like looking for underground water, is feeling for something you can’t see"
"...I go through weeks or months of input input input input, voraciously reading and exposing myself to ideas..."
"But first we circle, select, gather, leave behind pieces."
"I deeply believe that movement, form, and structure hold the power to change systems and people and that theatre is an essential tool in imagining and creating such change."
"By the time I got home to Chicago, I was more curious about the Radium Girls than JDC. I didn’t have any intention of writing poems about them."
Instagram TV - Poetry & Cooking
Roasted Pears with Walnuts, Dried Fruits, Blue cheese, and Honey
"Dreaming of the perfect past and simpler world is tempting, but it is fanciful: exactly whose simple past are we talking about?"
"I was prescribed a month of rest and given strict parameters around what my brain could handle."
"In other words, graphic poetry is poetry. And it is poetry that makes that non-paraphrasable quality of poetry, fittingly, more visible."
“That word… it has a little bit of soil in it.”
"So from the voice of the male critic discussing male bodies of work, I began to excavate a first person female lyric."
"I worry that I’m not really a poet, which is a fear that many poets probably have."
"My first challenge was getting the right hue. I drove to the art store and bought a 200 ml tube of indigo."
"Literary translation is the seeking of a text’s light. The more difficult the text, the more difficult to see its light."
"Between Kyoko’s work and my own I find a frictive conversation. A sly enticement to look and listen."
"The images grew out of my vicarious engagement with the landscape and the inhabitants of the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina as recounted by the speakers in Celia’s poems."
"Just as some wines pair well with certain foods, our book was a happy pairing of words and images, poet and photographer."
"The biggest no-no in poetry comics is drawing the exact same images already evoked by the piece’s language."
"Words and things move through me and extend beyond myself."
"I think visual poetry is an exploration and engagement with the possibilities of language, by both those who wish to celebrate it and those who wish to corrupt it for their own purposes."
"Visual poetry makes a record of time moving in many directions because it too moves in many directions."
"If a piece of writing hasn’t been triple translated by an artist, has it been read?"
"[M]y hunger to create, and my interdisciplinary, hybrid inclinations often produce more obstacles than successes. I am lost in a labyrinth of my own design. On the bright side: I am never bored."
"I didn't want to write a "traditional" sort of essay. So, I started taking notes as if I were creating a frontexto, and indeed, three frontextos came out of that process."
"Blackout poetry sometimes involves literally blacking out unwanted words with a sharpie. But the poet can also white them out, or blue them out with a colored pencil."
"[I]n the middle of this pandemic, I started making and stab-binding handmade books using mostly recycled materials:"
"As an editor and a reader, I want to encounter something that demands an answer from me, that brings me into the details of its world, invites me to take part in the moments of its life."
"The art submissions have turned out to be the most thrilling thing for me, and connected me back to my own love of visual art."
"A do-it-yourself ethic was characteristic of these zines, which were often comprised of hand-made art and collaged images."
"At night we gathered at hotel bars and toasted the event ironically, hubristically, as co-conspirators: Uncanny Valley AWP. Last-Chance Saloon AWP. Zombie Apocalypse AWP."
"Visual poetry is a new thing for me and so the collection shows efforts of newness."
"I believe that sharing my process notes may be useful to our community as a springboard to thinking visually, and making more exciting graphic adaptations."
