I write to you from my new and temporary home, from a room with a large south facing window and generous concrete balcony on a sparsely verdant street in the hot pavement depths of Toronto’s West End. I write to you with such gratitude for being able to write today, for the life I get to live and have to live, because truly there is no other choice.
I’m back in Toronto for longer than expected. Thanks to a few gigs researching and workshopping, I get to be here until the end of October and am am spending the bulk of it writing between workshop design, research consultations, and reading.
Today I want to share with you a poem. It’s called The Image of All Matter and I wrote it this Spring in response to the photograms of friend and mentor Danielle Goshay. Danielle and I met in 2022 when I approached her for mentorship in experimental and abstract photography, and since then we’ve grown a beautiful friendship and creative partnership. Danielle’s from the Rust Belt US, like me, and that common origin is a special connection in itself.
Danielle’s photograms are a kind of cameraless photography where she uses household materials like soap, oil, salt, as well as smoke and fire to create abstract images directly onto photo paper. Seeing her process evolve over the past two years has revealed a balance between the careful craft and unexpected randomness ripe with possibility. Having witnessed her at work in the darkroom, it’s so clear to me that her growing body of work is as intensely mystical as much as conceptually invigorating.
I approached Peripheral Review with the idea of writing around Danielle’s photograms and was very pleased when the editors embraced my interset in writing poem-cum-art criticism. I love ekphrasis — literature in response to visual art. The moment I realized I had a future as a poet was when I won an award for the poem I wrote in response to Nathan Eugene Carson’s exhibition at the Power Plant Gallery in 2021. Ekphrasis is one of my literary home.
This kind of writing is about inspiration as much as relation. By writing in response, I open a conversation between another artist’s work and my own, between our two minds, and between the work and the world. It’s similar to how I approach poetics of place — writing with rather than about. What Ursula Le Guin calls subjectifying, in contrast to subjecting, requires “a great reach outward of the mind and the imagination.” Which reminds me of Anne Carson’s theory about reaching for something that will always evade capture: an idea, a lover, a word, the world.
That’s all to say that I am pleased to share with you the ekphrastic poem Image of All Matter, which you may read here in the Peripheral Review and listen along to my audio recording in this post.
Thanks to Danielle for the inspiration, to PR for the trust and time, and my pal Talia Golland for the editing help.
What I’m reading now . . .
No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body by Asiya Wadud
The title says it all. Corporeal, geographical, conceptual — Wadud’s collection of poems locates the body in the world in all its abject fullness, terrible splendor, layers of memory. “I have trouble with I / I am the valley I am the hill I am a ravine / I am gaping I am foxglove / I am both / nightshade / and / mourning.”
If you’re in Toronto this month, catch me around town —
⟡ Friday 13 September, 6-8PM, at the vernissage of Lucas LaRochelle’s Sometimes I forget what feeling felt like because I was never there when it happened. Lucas has been hard at work transforming inputs from their project Queering the Map into fever dream allegory of the queer hivemind through a process they call “disassociative worldmaking.” It’s a special treat to have Lucas in Toronto; don’t miss this opportunity to enter their world!
⟡ Friday 20 September with UKAI Projects at The Bridge (379 Adelaide West) for an AI Salon and launch of the publication Poetics of Synthetic Language. I’ll be reading a poem I wrote, as a gesture toward breaking the artifical-natural binary, using an algorithm that connects the idea of map and poem and pulls apart langauge via abstraction.
⟡ The evening of Saturday 21 September at the opening of Eunice Luk’s solo show Sympoeisis at YYZ Artists’ Outlet. Eunice invited me to write the text for this exhibition, in which she plays around the idea of creating with the materials she uses and working with objects as creative counterparts through a reparative process of ecologial consciousness <3
The Image of All Matter