Poemboxes
I have created a bunch of poemboxes but so far have published only two:
"Transubstantiation" (created in 2017) appeared in Moonchild Magazine (November 2021, now defunct).
"Nothing Gold" (created in 2018) appeared in Cutbow Quarterly (September 2022).
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If we are lucky, there are moments when it feels like we are living inside of a poem. That these times are fleeting contributes to their beauty, their poignancy. But what if…?
I did not begin making poemboxes as an attempt to capture specific ephemeralities, but so many poems are memories rendered in aspic, or amber, as if an ink against forgetting. What if I could build a poem its own room to inhabit, something between diorama and a personal, contained universe?
So I started making poemboxes in the fall of 2016. "Sculptural interpretations of my poems" is the most succinct way to describe them but really it's about dimensions, which always includes time. Time spent worldbuilding, living in. How a poem’s two dimensions might expand given the chance.
Credit where it's due: I grew up periodically visiting Cornell boxes at the Art Institute, which also houses miniature rooms in its basement. Over decades I spent many hours at that museum but I have no art training, so my poemboxes can be messy.
This is a process. This is discovering as I go. Soaking paper in wine and collecting detritus to intertwine with words and moments as they cool and coalesce into whatever shape I can help them take on, usually involving a box as the idea of containment and what happens when you breach its confines.
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Or: the poemboxes engage with my physical memories, incorporating poignant souvenirs with ephemera from past travels and whatever place I’m living when I make them, like an acorn from the lake house where I quarantined in 2020. Inch-wide breath-thin mica flakes I collected from the desert in the middle of Australia in 1998, branches from my old backyard spray painted gold, a disco-style earring I wore at Burning Man the one year I went after a bad breakup and had a fucking blast. A butterfly that was born and died in the only house I ever owned, a Tibetan bell from a string I bought at my college head shop, quartz collected under a full moon in the Painted Desert on a cross-country road trip in 1996. A leaded crystal prism party favor for guests at my wedding, shreds of my divorce, petrified wood that I’ve had since I was a child, selenite shards from a tower that broke when I was having a rough day, bindis from my most recent trip to India, white rabbit fur from my fishwife’s cut-up coat, so many fragments of photographs I’ve taken, feathers gathered on walks, pictures of outer space and tiny vials of water suspended from threads and and and and this is why I keep ingredient lists for each box I make.
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In November 2017, I taught an assemblage workshop on making poemboxes at Redline, in conjunction with Denver Talks, supported by Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the City & County of Denver, and NEA Big Read. Poemboxes from the class were displayed when Claudia Rankine gave a lecture on her book “Citizen: An American Lyric” on November 15, 2017. You can read a piece I wrote about the class.
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