Concept

Constraint and construction, body as page

Poet and reader inside poem in procession.

I talk about meaning all day long. I don’t feel that language comes out of my body, but rather that I observe and recycle it. Maybe my voice originates in my body, but language is a visitor that changes form all the time. I use my body all day long. I don’t feel that I am my body, but that embodiment is an idea that I observe and recycle. Maybe I originate in my body, but I am a visitor that changes form all the time. Is the idea that emerges from this line of thinking a concept? I think about what I want to do with poetry all day long. Maybe poetry originates in the space around me and I observe and recycle it. Is this a concept?

I engage in the conceptual body practices of yoga and butoh as a way of experimenting with the extraction and recontextualization of the body from public space to a collective space. With the guidance of a teacher, I follow directions while making decisions about how to interpret instructions for my own purposes of discovery and experience. In yoga practice, I enjoy the idea of giving up control of my own body for an entire hour in order to move according to the creative decisions of another. Often with my writing, I set rules for the poem and then let the language move within them. In both instances, something unexpected often happens.

Butoh is a bodily movement practice that emerged in reaction to modern dance. Instead of focusing on the shape that the body should make, the practitioner interprets the teacher’s prompts in their own way. For two hours, we writhe or crawl or walk at various speeds, become trees or reach for their fruit. Fall and die over and over. It is a time away from language, but a time when language is incubating or its elements are transforming into new foundations. What feels most related to my poetry practice is the allowance to go somewhere unexpected framed by an abstraction of ideas about how we think we move in the world. My body is a language that doesn’t always have to make sense.

A major difference between my bodily practices and my composition of poetry is the idea of performance. I’m adamant that I am not a performer. I don’t understand the value of others watching how I move my body. However, I am acutely aware during the process of composition that I want readers to share in the experience of the poem in multiple ways. I am creating prompts for reading as much as I am following the ones that I’ve created. The poem is also a space that I’m creating, a site of experimentation, sometimes messy and sometimes overly rigid, an explosion in explanation of some terrain rendered in language.