Monday, December 17, 2007
artist statement
DeLana Dameron
Artist Statement
Lyric narratives. while in the midst of several larger projects, I find my aesthetic leans towards a hybrid of lyrical and narrative poetry. I gather these two terms to describe my service to poetry and its musicality – lyric for the ways in which it can work as a song with lines one can dance to, and narrative for the varied stories I am compelled to tell. I explore these concepts through words placed for their rhythmic cadences and how they unfold accordion-like line-by-line, unfolding a story. Most often in these lyric narratives I situate myself or an imagined persona in medias res. I seek immediacy. I want past events present and visceral, tangible. I want the language to be music on my reader’s tongue. To that degree, my influences are multi-genre, multi-cultural, multi-generational, multi-aesthetical.
I engage poetry as an artistic archival tool. As a historian, I know the importance of art as an artifact when monuments are gone and bodies have decayed. I think of the classical poets, of the pre-classical poets, of Virgil and Homer and the anonymous composer of Beowulf, and how these poems work to serve several purposes. From these works we are able to gather cultural, historical, personal and political information about the author and the culture being written about or – if it is not his/her own – her perspective on it. I write with the past present and future in mind. I write cognizant that each word is at once a statement, a testament, a music chord, a relic.
It would be a difficult thing to identify one single poet (or even a limited few) as representative of the aesthetic(s) with which I’m currently working. I turn to poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Taha Mahmoud Ali, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dunya Mikhail or even Brian Turner when I am considering poetic portrayals of war/political struggle in first-person narrative poetry. They are especially relevant when thinking of my treatment of poetry on Palestine which manifests itself in persona poems – imagined first-person narratives of people living in the occupied territories. Because my experience is limited and I am unable to cull my material from embodied memories, I turn to poets like Elizabeth Alexander, Evie Shockley, Kwame Dawes or Tyehimba Jess and their ability to interpret historical and archived information from cultures with which they are unfamiliar or are removed from by the passing of time. I consider their successful translation of this information into imaginative, immediate and believable works of art while still staying true to the underlying historical narrative.
Additionally, resisting the urge to say my writing belongs to one specific aesthetic, I’d say it is still a work in progress, working against this idea of writing for a specific audience, or for a specific school of thought. Though I am a part of larger movements and institutions of specific groups that are oftentimes mis- or unrepresented in the literary realm, I do not seek to write merely to the audiences with which I most closely identify. However, my writing has been nurtured in these writing communities from the moment I brought my work into the public sphere. Most times I am the youngest in a circle of elders faced with the constant attempt to pick up the baton they place down. While my writing communities in the educational setting have been majority white-led, my communities outside have been collectives created for the shared identities of writers of the African diaspora. I find this tension evident in the production of my work, leading to important and interesting changes within my work, in the subject matter I pursue and choosing an angle, in my presentation and form and in the conversations I create as an artist.
Too, my educational background has markedly shaped my leanings as an artist. My interests in history, specifically Third World and Non-Western are apparent and ever-present is what I feel my responsibility to bear witness to the historical narratives I discover by working it through, translating it into poetry. This is not to say I do not engage in the personal – though I find at times less confessional. I include those aspects only when I am exploring other people – so I speak of myself in relation to my influences be they cultural, historical, and familial and insert myself as a character going through the actions of the poem, through the discovery that is the poem itself.
Ultimately, I write with the knowledge that these words will outlive my breath. However, I write wishing these words will exist as breath, as music in ears. My poems, I believe, are meant to be read to the self, aloud, to be heard and sung. In my heart they are personal and universal artifacts, documenting a moment in this timeline of existing, and if they serve their several purposes, they will have a story to tell tomorrow and tomorrow after.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
definition of space
on spaces: i find that i compartmentalize almost everything, with little or no cross-over. letting people into these sequestered kingdoms is where it gets hard and difficult, sometimes painful. it's like this: here is my apartment. here is my room, only i can inhabit it. here is my heart, it is mine. maybe this, too, is a commentary on sharing? my work is compartmentalized, also. my work life and my living life are separate. my room is for sleeping. my apartment is for living. i must find other spaces to write, to engage the creative space, the working space. rarely will i bring papers home to grade. rarely will i write a poem (or intend to write a poem, though sometimes a poem demands to be written where ever i am) in my house, in my room, on my bed. my computer never enters my room. that is in my living space.
my friends, too, i find are compartmentalized: here are my writer friends. here are my crazy i-want-to-go-out-and-act-ridiculous friends. here are my now-its-time-to-think-deeply friends. rarely is there cross over. birthdays and special event gatherings are always difficult this way, and i generally find myself celebrating in different spaces with different people, wearing different hats.
and if i'm to be brutally honest with myself, that goes into relationships, too. even if there is an extreme interest in someone, i shy away from them if i know we know a lot of the same people, if i know that i will be unable to keep those lives separate and compartmentalized, or if there is a grey line between friendship and lover. perhaps i'm speaking too much, now. but this is part of the dealing, right? admitting the problems, putting them out into the open. "hi my name is delana, and i'm a compartmentalizer."
outside of relationships, and thinking of myself academically, i worked hard to keep things separate. i majored in history, and saved my poetic writings for outside the academy. my writing life and my life as a student were different. currently, they're the same as i'm enrolled in an mfa program, and my job as a student, too, is to be a writer, and i find myself in extreme discomfort, trying to negotiate this grey area. so i run. did i mention i'm a runner? not only literally (although i dont feel safe running in big urban areas, so i instead wander aimlessly around nyc, getting in miles, watching each section change as i walk through them) but figuratively as well. i run away from things, sometimes, instead of dealing with them upfront. either i run or i kill/end. so. i'm leaving my mfa program for a number of reasons, but sometimes i wonder if it's because of this imbalance, this failure to find a balance? how so long i kept things separate (and equal?), and when they converge it brings up all new problems and issues that i sometimes rather not deal with...and i find that when i do deal with them, they become bigger problems, and things grow at an exponential rate that all i can do is watch them blow up in my face, and hope to salvage something when the dust settles.
i dont know what will be left of me after december, to be honest. i'm tired. i'm exhausted. i'm hurt and aching, and i find myself compartmentalizing/sectioning off myself from people, and running away, and ending things. burning bridges. but, what's done is done, right? what is said is out in the open and can not be taken back. what's been tried has failed.
i dont know where all of this is going or where it meant to go when i started. just thinking through my past few days/weeks, and thinking about the friendships i might have ended, the opportunities i might have killed, the chances for spaces and people to blend together i kept from happening, and sometimes i wonder if it would be different if i didnt try so hard to keep things apart. if i did listen to my heart that says "i'm lonely". or my hand that says "it's cold" and doesnt reach out to another for warmth. i dont know. i'm still working through it...trying to see where my different spaces can start to intersect.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
ladies wear red?
Saturday, November 24, 2007
thinking about the body
looking back, looking forward
it's cold here, in the city. i've got on many layers. i'm about to step out and see what the holidays look like in nyc. maybe i'll write some poems.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
thinking
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
i'm closer to knowing
© delana dameron
I am closer to knowing
after Phillip Levine
I kneel in my porcelain tub, thigh-
deep in water, to wash the weeks worth
of clothes that piled up in the center
of my floor. I can’t say I know anymore
now what work is, but I’m closer
to knowing sacrifices my grandmother made,
a domestic in those grandiose white houses
on the
families that paid others to do their work.
I can’t say how she did it – scrubbing
the filth from the clothes by hand,
how she spent hours rubbing her knuckles
together – as I am now – to get the friction
needed, the friction and simplicity I took
for granted in those large metal contraptions
of detergents and softeners to rinse clean
our daily sweat and dirt. growing up
will do this, I suppose, when you run
prematurely away from safekeeping
and you find yourself on a Saturday night
forced to forfeit amenities I never once,
before now, had to pay for and cannot now
afford. working up a sweat, my hands
softened and rubbed raw at once, smelling
of downy, wringing the privilege from too many
pairs of jeans, I am thankful for this
meditation in the bathtub, this homage
to the woman who, decades back,
did the same – and I suppose, work is not
doing things out of affordability, but
doing the back-bending labor for a dime,
for three children and an absent husband.
work is not holding your own intimates
between your fingers, but a stranger’s,
plunging them down below the suds,
and picking them up to the light to see
how much more is required of you
before you are done.
Monday, November 12, 2007
change is my one constant
i'll leave you with a reading list of some poetry books i'm dipping into here and there
ross gay, against which
aracelis girmay, teeth
patricia smith, teahouse of the almighty
philip levine, what work is
cyrus cassells, the mud actor
sherry fairchok, the palace of ashes
lydia melvin, south of here
dunya mikhail, the war works hard
and my novel by elias khoury, gate of the sun (about palestine, of course. yes, i'm back on writing about palestine, and with a most-keen eye that i never had before)
more more tomorrow.
best, lana.
(i'll also explain the blog title.)