last semester i was required to write a ‘poetic statement’ paragraph for one of my poetry workshops, and i think i ended up with something that i’m happy enough with to post below:
My work attempts to realize a fantasy that art, fungus-like, could rot from within the very language and culture which has served for centuries as the obedient servant of totality and death. For my poetic practice, the potential of poetry is the non-total and incomplete deployment of every other medium. without a formal generic core, freed from the original or origin of poetry, poems have the ability to partially exist in a multitude of mediums simultaneously, to act in the liminal space between forms. this access to the void, to the in-between space, is a key component of my process, which tries to combine ritual, research, metafiction, sound art, visual art, and traditional-adjacent verse forms into collages of imaginary ruins and archives from nowhen. what i mean here by “archive” and “ruin” are descriptions of my own experience as a queer/trans person in encounter with history—a frustrated desire at the way in which queer/trans history exists in incomplete scraps, halfway knowledges, the truth pointed towards but never spoken; my work attempts to recreate this desire, to indwell with its fundamental perversion and decay, in an expression of the necropastoral’s concept of the “strange meeting”, wherein the dead can convene with the dead in polyvocal and occult proliferations of non-meaning and literary decay. this decay is fundamental to my process—i write primarily through erasure, though the creation of fragments and lacunae, through the vengeful re-appropriation of cis/het history.