What comes together to make a wave
Hello!
Thank you for humouring me last week by accepting my depressing sudoku exegesis into your brain. This week I’m going to share two more poems, both titled What comes together to make a wave, which is also a prompt I’m using in certain areas of this project. I wrote the poems to see if the prompt “works”. I think it does, but also at this point it’d be too late to change it. We love a high-stakes poetry moment!
Before I share my own poems, I’ll tell you a bit about how the phrase, “What comes together to make a wave” will be used in the work. If you remember a few newsletters ago, I shared a long poem called, A word reverberates and hangs loosely. This poem is going to be an integral part of the performance, acting as both a narrator and commentator of the scene, to varying degrees of clarity. Since the project is all about communication and overlapping speech, I thought it appropriate to get another poet in the mix so that our poems can be in dialogue with one another. I enlisted the help of camera goddess, writer and friend, Ariana Molly to write a poem in response to my poem and make a video in response to the prompt “what comes together to make a wave”. When we talked about the project she asked me if the video could be sexual (along the lines of waves of pleasure) and I said sure, but no penetraysh. My thinking was that once penetraysh gets involved, the whole thing becomes about a hole and this project is not about a hole, insofar as anything can be not about a hole. I’m stoked to see what Ariana comes up with and if you looked at her site and thought, “how can I get more of this?” you can buy tix to the virtual screening of her new film, VAIN, happening tonight! All proceeds will be donated to humanitarian aid in Ukraine.
I am also using the prompt as part of a digital engagement strategy that includes this newsletter (are you feeling digitally engaged????). If there is one thing in this world I generally give zero fucks about, it is engaging digitally. I don’t mean that in some Luddite, cottage-core nonsense way. I love technology and I’m on instagram approximately 33 hours a day. It’s just that to purposefully (keyword) engage digitally, one must think of their audience, and to think of your audience, one must have some sort of grasp on how they might be perceived by other people and I simply don’t have that. Trying to think about how my work might look to other people makes me feel like my head is filled with bees. So until I figure that out, all I can do is try to be 100% authentic at all times, hope for the best and focus on things other than trying to be digitally engaging. One quick lil problem though: doing this project means I’m contractually obligated to engage with digital engagement and “grow” as a “person” or whatever.
With the gentle guidance of my mentors and help from another camera goddess, artist and friend Maria Simmons, I came up with a digital engagement idea that doesn’t seem as though it will fill me with bees. I’m going to make to hire someone to make a chatbot that asks you, “what comes together to make a wave?” and then you and the chatbot can write a dialogue poem together. Then, all the poems will get archived into a readable collection that will make it so we can finally figure out a) what comes together to make a wave? and b) if can I do a digital engagement without feeling icky? I feel weird and about half full of bees whenever I do this newsletter, so so far the answer to the second question is no. Perhaps the bot will change that! Who knows?! Also, if you want a paid gig coding the chatbot and creating the archive, please get in touch.
Poems below ;)
je t’aime!
*sits a little too close to you on the subway in a way that might be flirty or might just be a consequence of the car being full. You choose to believe it’s flirty.*