artist statement

(something i had to do that i felt like sharing because it actually took a lot of work to come up with...)

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.