Century College, @mkdordiggsy and I will be hanging out with you soon to talk about poems! Thank you to @roygbiv5403 for, you know, only everything ever, but thank you today specifically for making this happen. The event is free and open to the public—more info on the FB event page. See you at 11 today if you can make it! // Image is a repost from @roygbiv5403 of the FB event info, with color headshots of Michael Kleber-Diggs & D. Allen and text that reads: Tuesday, Apr 16, 11 am-1pm Poetry Reading & Craft Talk, Century College, White Bear Lake. // #PoetryReading #CraftTalk #CenturyCollege #MinnesotaPoets #NationalPoetryMonth
Newly dyed with dried herbs and flowers from last year’s garden, the scrim now smells like earth and growing things. It is a sensory record of one queer nonbinary disabled life written in code. It is a slice. It is a sequence of knots repeated hundreds of thousands of times over. It is warm. It is remarkably strong, though it looks fragile. It was nice to nuzzle the scrim in the evening light just now, amidst pain management appointments and PT exercises and taxes and brain fog and fatigue and hurting hips and insomnia and multiple bus trips. Tonight, in the presence of all that, in stillness, I dream into how our two bodies will relate together onstage. Thank you to everyone who has been following the growth of this soft mysterious creature, and me alongside it. // NET/WORK premieres at Q-Stage: New Works May 16-18, tickets in the link on my profile. // #NewWork #Performance #MultidisciplinaryArtist #MultidisciplinaryPoet #TextilesArePoems #KnittingIsWritingIsKnitting
The scrim is off the needles. Four and a half months of knitting, hundreds of thousands of stitches, hundreds of yards of wool yarn. More to do, more to say, but for now, another hour of work and then rest. // Image is a collage of three color video stills of D.’s final hour of knitting the scrim: binding off, folding up the finished scrim on their lap, and holding the small bit of remaining yarn on their lap over the scrim. Images are taken from above on a wood floor; only D.’s lap and hands are visible.
This April snowstorm is seeing me through the final days of knitting the scrim for NET/WORK, my solo performance experiment that premieres at @20percenttheatretc Q-Stage: New Works May 16-18 (Set B) alongside genius creators Keila Anali Saucedo, Taylor Seaberg, and Dua Saleh. More info and tickets via the linktr.ee in my bio. // I first imagined a handknit scrim—to be installed in a performance space and used for projection, movement, and other embodied experiments—last summer when I felt like I‘d lost my place in my work and in the world. I got the materials just after my 32nd birthday and started knitting in December right before reaching the crisis point of a long and deep depression. I wouldn’t be here now without my people, who helped me get care and loved up on me and fed me and got me through appointments and asked hard but necessary questions and made me laugh and chipped away at the shell of isolation I’d holed up in. I started antidepressants/anti-anxiety meds/pain meds for the first time and am pursuing EDS-related care again after a couple years of avoiding doctors. Aside from the practical tasks I needed help with as I tried to recover, it was the time together that I needed most. Just presence. Breathing. Being. An occasional foot pat or cough in the other room to get me out of myself. And when I began to rebuild the scaffolding of my days, the scrim became a presence, too: another confidante, friend, advice-giver, hand on the heart, walk around the block, measure of hours and weeks and months. It’s helped me relearn my body and my mind. Some days even knitting one row is too much, and I’ve had to allow that; others, I stay up half the night knitting and watching reality tv when pain keeps me from sleeping. It helps me, now, to know that I’ll never be able to look at it and tell which rows took me twice as long because new medication gave me the spins or the yarn kept snagging on my wrist brace, and which rows I sped through when I was feeling good. Each stitch holds all of it at once. The scrim is not really made of wool and air, but time accumulated in little stitches.
A SNOWY FRAMEWORK FOR THE TANGIBLE UNIVERSE would love to keep you company in inclement weather, like this April snowstorm we’re having in MN 🌨 If you’re in the Twin Cities, DM me this month to snag a signed copy and skip shipping fees (or I’ll happily ship one to wherever you are for a few bucks extra). Stay safe out there, Midwest friends! // Image is a color photo, taken from above, of A BONY FRAMEWORK FOR THE TANGIBLE UNIVERSE resting on freshly fallen (and still falling) snow next to raspberry brambles. The book has an orange and black cover printed with the title and poet’s name in white. // #ABonyFrameworkForTheTangibleUniverse #FirstBook #QueerPoets #NonBinaryPoets #MultidsciplinaryPoetics #DisabilityPoetics #ThisBookIsMoreExcitedAboutSnowThanIAm #AprilSnowShowersBringMaySuperpowers?
There are seven dictionary erasure poems in A BONY FRAMEWORK FOR THE TANGIBLE UNIVERSE. I often get asked about how they’re made, so I offer you this little animation and process narrative: I first look up a familiar word—body, material, thorn, needle, petal, feather, rust—in my Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary (1943). I photograph the whole definition, then convert that photo to a high-contrast black and white image to isolate the text. From there, I slowly go through and digitally white-out all the words I know I don’t want to use in my poem. The process is visual, verbal, and somatic all at once. I often retrace my steps and make several versions. To know more about my process and how this particular dictionary entered my life, you’ll have to check out the book, which has a whole Process Notes & Ephemera section in the back 🌿 More details and ordering info in the linktr.ee in my bio! And special thanks to @blackwarriorrev (especially @kayleb_rae) for first publishing the lyric essay in which this poem appears. [Video is a 14-second digital animation of black old-fashioned type on a white background. The clip starts with a complete dictionary definition for “needle,” which has a line-drawn illustration of needles in the top right corner. Sections of the passage are erased until a new poem emerges.] #ErasurePoem #MultidisciplinaryPoetics #ArtisticProcess #PoemsBehindTheScenes #ABonyFrameworkForTheTangibleUniverse #QueerDisabledEmbodiment
“Body is not a bloom / but a blooming // performance between naked / twig and tender leaf // they remember / courtyard // branches twisted black / all winter // handfuls of soft cloth spilling / into ready May air // Body ties garlands of fallen petals / back onto the tree // to recover / what they’ve lost” —intro poem from “petal,” a visual lyric essay, in A BONY FRAMEWORK FOR THE TANGIBLE UNIVERSE @the_operating_system 🌸 order via linktr.ee in bio [Image is a color photo of a still life set up in a sunny window: blooming red begonia flowers and leaves snake up the frame, bursting orange ranunculus flowers lean forward from a jar of water, a bleached white deer jaw found on a walk in the woods rests against the flower jar, and behind the foliage is the book, filling up half the frame and striped in morning sun. It has an orange and black cover.] #FirstBook #ABonyFrameworkForTheTangibleUniverse #MultidisciplinaryPoet #QueerPoets #NonbinaryPoets #DisabilityPoetics #BodyGrief #ChronicIllness #QueerDisabledAndPowerful #ReadyForFlowerSeason #EhlersDanlosSyndrome
Dark sparkly sketchy color portrait of me cradled blissfully in a kaleidoscopic nebula of joy with copies of A BONY FRAMEWORK FOR THE TANGIBLE UNIVERSE fanned out on my chest // Thank you to my community for keeping me feeling loved and celebrated as my book has made it to your hands, beds, dining room tables, suitcases, and bathtubs this week. I couldn’t have done any of this without my people. Making a book is hard, y’all. Writing intimately about queer nonbinary disabled embodiment while also trying to live inside of it is true sci-fi. It means so much to have your texts and photos and squeezed hands and phone calls that remind me why I do this work. If you’ve written/are writing/are dreaming/will dream a book into being, I get all the labor and heart that takes and I’m grateful we and our art/word/works get to overlap in time and space. For me, if you can, praise two people you admire today—the first being yourself—even if that praise is just sent wordlessly into the universe. #ABonyFrameworkForTheTangibleUniverse #FirstBook #PoeticEcosystems #PoetryCommunity #QueerFamily #ChosenFamily #EDS #TransDayOfVisibility
