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ecopoeticsatchicago · 7 years ago

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Week 2 Writing Assignment

A clearer image because Tumblr makes it blurry:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JUgDxgwB0qL5DjWVyNBFQwiGenssKSpC/view?usp=sharing

A Wild FLOWER in an UNTHOUGHT ENVIRONMENT

is just as sweet as a rose from the finest gardens .

NOT EVERY place needs to BE exploreD .

unknown things we should Protect From Light .

I took the assignment to “make a text using garbage as archive” more literally than the rest of you, though I did not know that until I logged in to submit these notes. My decision to use actual scraps of my garbage to make an (understandably short) archive poem was influenced by the work of Cecilia Vicuña’s interdisciplinary work and several poets from a class I took last quarter, Technical Seminar in Poetry: The Poem That Forgot It Was a Poem. We read Emily Dickinson, who composed poems from old letters and envelopes, and Susan Howe, who ripped masking tape from historical archive pages (you know that annoying thing where you rip tape off of paper and the text comes off with it?) and layered them together into disjointed poems. After taking a class on unconventional poems and the economy of writing from archive, my first thought upon seeing “garbage as archive” was to literally use garbage as my source, and impose the spatial and linguistic limitations that come with archive poetry upon myself.

I was inspired by Vicuña’s exhibits wherein, as Hannah Chen writes, “trash was defamiliarized into art.” In my reading response I talked about the theme of deconstructing arbitrary barriers we place between categories like space and time; Vicuña seems to extend this to art itself, her work straddling the line between visual art and text. I wanted to emulate this with my piece. It conveys a certain scrappiness reminiscent of Vicuña’s work that is not only linguistic but also visual; the words are different formats and colors and sizes and it looks like trash. But I hope that there is something beautiful about this structural haphazardness, a kind of beauty or purpose that materializes out of dematerialized and “useless” waste.

In terms of the poem’s actual content, I felt very limited by what was written on the things I throw away. I could not compose anything that involved abstract emotions or “deep” themes, because the vocabulary was just not present in my discarded receipts, snack and medicine packages, or math homework. The process emphasized for me how all language is, in a sense, a limited archive; just as there were ideas I couldn’t express because my trash labels didn’t have them, there are always emotions, experiences, etc. the current lexicon cannot capture perfectly. Language is imperfect, and being a writer requires a certain scrappiness, being willing to make do with the words you have.

P.S. A neat touch you might not notice is that the “Protect From Light” was cut from a box, so I chose to keep the top intact so that the words were literally protected from light.

-Bradley Tian

#trash #trashtext #bradleytian

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