sunsetcento

[sunsetcento]

[sunsetcento]

Poet in Digital Residence Diary 7.12.19

I shared one of my centos with some friends who I trust for their aesthetic and tehnical opinions. From the discussion that ensued comes these final notes on my making:

the medium of PowerPoint can seem amateurish, but I don’t want to hide the cheesy medium

the contrast against the subject is important

never obscure the process

ugliness is often the point

[sunsetcento]

Video submission by Fiona Cheng, the basis for my first ‘cento txt’.

[sunsetcento]

Soundtrack to cento making. Cello is as close a sound to the sun setting I’ve come across yet.

[sunsetcento]

Poet in Digital Residence Diary 5.12.19

Again working on centos and thinking about working on them by turns. Since my proposal I have had to narrow the scope of the project in relation to the number and style of submissions; the constraints on my creative life and my opportunity to explore this deeply in my current context. I suppose the results will be small rather than narrow; maybe not as uncomfortable or challenging for me as I’d like, nor perhaps as incisive for the viewer. There are so many perspectives to take on sunset, but I am keeping in mind the communal aspects of its experience as shared by those who submitted. 

In my piecing the text fragments together, there have been certain themes emerging: those of freedom, of release and relief, of contemplation and dreaming, of exploration and of love. By altering the order of lines but changing as little of the words as possible, I have created eight short text centos using something (but not all) of all text contributions, including photo captions. 

When it comes to their presentation, after some thought and experimenting with other apps and considering my deadline for the project, nothing made me more comfortable than to return to my clunky yet beloved tool for digital poetry: Powerpoint. I have talked and written much about using this app as a creative tool, despite there being many more sophisticated options. It is not out of my comfort zone but I find myself focusing less on making the centos seem like they are not being presented on Powerpoint than highlighting that they are. Including some of the more garish effects and obvious signs of process (such as uncropped fields) for the cento I am currently working on seems not only to signify the medium but carve out an obvious track between the natural beauty of sunset, the way it has been interpreted by contributors and the way I have pieced these interpretations together. 

Sunset is glorious (like a certain type of poetry); Powerpoint is not. This tension between subject and medium is what I am trying to emphasise as editor/curator rather than sole author/artist.

[sunsetcento]

Poet in Digital Residence Diary 3.12.19

While making centos, and considering all the fragments from various angles (sunset muted; greyed; fragmented, even somewhat ugly!), I’d like to give a thankful shout out to all who submitted:

Aziz Imitaz Bijith Reghu Jessica Miley Tania Cass Fiona Cheng Vishal Katariina Karlsson Päivi Hänninen Juhana Henrikki Harju Petri Turunen Maija Sulku Päivi Setälä

[sunsetcento]

Progress note 29.11.19: Sunset Cento is feminine.

[sunsetcento]

Poet in Digital Residence Diary 28.11.19

I have been spending most of my time teaching lately and, as always, it requires self-reflexive praxis--such a dirty, apparently hipster-tainted word these days, but for me still very much aligned to Bruno Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In terms of teaching, I would not be a passable educator if I didn’t speak to students about and from my experience and frame it with the theory that accords to it, and make sense of my experiences with references to theory, ideas and concepts, particularly in regards to social issues.

I advise students to take note of their process during the making of their creative works and I am doing this for Sunset Cento, not because I feel process makes for riveting reading, but because it’s good for me to be aware of how I work, what I set out to do, what I alter and why, and how my project develops. Whether or not this is useful for others to refer to is another matter and not one I particularly want to dwell on.

Having gathered all the fragmentary impressions of sunset submitted so far, I am going to start with the words (my original comfort zone, even as I later started with digital media poetry). You could call them my frame, though a permeable one that will doubtless shift with the medium and the other elements of the cento -- predominantly photographs, a visual collage and a video.

Nokturno’s editor in chief Virpi Vairinen and I have been carrying out an email conversation for many months now: in one email we discussed my optimism surrounding the open call for creative fragments and the results. While the aim of Sunset Cento is far-reaching, perhaps the participants are not so much and are rather bound by the networks we form within the vast sphere of the online community--something that carries on from how we interact socially and professionally in more limited, non-virtual spaces. 

Virpi pointed out that it ‘may also reflect the current digital environment and the fragmented internet culture where it´s indeed surprisingly difficult at times not only to reach people but also to compete with all the other forms of publishing and participating.’

The reach for Sunset Cento has been, I gather from those who’ve submitted so far, mainly across Nokturno’s network and my own. For the purposes of the cento, in which works will be broken down into parts and built up into new ways, the geographic/cultural origins of the fragments don’t have so much bearing, though diversity always signifies complexity. In this instance, the richness may well just come from the deconstruction, addition, reconstruction.

[sunsetcento]

#word Cento in progress, with acknowledgments to Jessica Miley and Bijith Reghu.

[sunsetcento]

Poet in Digital Residence Diary 22.11.19

Sunset/poetry on my mind, always on my mind (even travelling from Hyderabad to Delhi and back again). What I want is a continuous scroll of sunset, bursts of it, hyperbole and gracenote. Thank you to all who’ve submitted so far to the project. It’s been a pleasure to receive submissions and study them to work out how they may work in cento form.

As with all collaborations, this project needs passion. Commitment from me and interest from you. Alas, as Eva Hoffman points out in her brilliant and incisive How to Be Bored, a text I go back to again and again as it deals with our lives in a digital era, we are busy. We have desires that are not satiated, often forgotten, in the hyperactivity of our lives and the time of information inundation. We think/say/txt what we mean to do but sometimes this gets waylaid, twisted around, abandoned. There are really too many things to read, make, see, rush off to. 

Sunset has been for a long time my way to step back away from my digital life and reset the frame of my eyes, brain and soul. It comes everyday, with variations in timing according to the season and my location, to remind me that life is beyond my screen/s. In forming my digital poetry project around the physical experience of sunset, I didn’t want to pollute it but give anyone participating or viewing Sunset Cento a reminder that balance between the realms in our lives is possible and maybe even desirable.

Poetry doesn’t exist in a vacuum but its composition often does: this project is no different, even as it reaches out its open call to all you busy people. I envisage one response but the reality is different and this too, will form part of my cento.

[sunsetcento]

Poet in Digital Residence Diary 14.11.19

Early this morning, around 1 AM (IST), I had the urge to write a poem. I was sleepless and overwrought -- am sure you know how I feel when I write that I had some emotion brewing in me that I felt should come out, yet I couldn’t articulate it; didn’t have the words; although Kaveh Akbar’s ‘I won’t lie this plague of gratitude’ has been running through my head for days and still is, I knew I couldn’t top it; I wanted to write something like that, or make something like that, but not quite that; it was in the field of my feeling; wanting to be more content and yes, grateful, than what I am; the idea of learning how to love one at a time arrests me. At this, I have failed. 

It’s crass of me now to link an insomniac morning, the dead of night if you like, with no sun to be seen or remembered, to this project, but they’re not unconnected. There’s a whisper of continuity in my tired thoughts today. 

The poems I will be making are not about me, not sourced from inside myself -- this is my shift in focus from my practice of solo-authored text poetry (excluding influences). What I find is that digital poetry needs painstaking composition and can’t just be blurted out in a ragged draft of confessional blather. This I comprehend at a regular hour, but this morning, from too much of a self-centric position. Akbar’s poem I wanted entirely, not in fragments, not to grow something from. My recollection of it, even in pleasure at Akbar’s words, was an indulgence in envy. 

I return now at 5 PM (IST), about fifty minutes before sunset in Hyderabad, to the relief of late afternoon, when everything seems more manageable to me, even though no progress has perhaps been made (that’s worthwhile too). Concepts are clarified: I am not the focus. I have made another call out to people for their sunset fragments. This is a community project and my plague of gratitude concentrates on having such a community to reach towards -- a community that responds generously, as fulsome as the light before the sun sets.

From about May this year, I was planning for this residency and knew that come the northern hemisphere’s fall, it I would be living in a country not my home. I hurriedly transcribed excerpts from The Milkman by Anna Burns (London: Faber & Faber, 2018), knowing that I would be leaving my copy behind me. Burns’ last question does indeed make me wonder how unsettling sunset might be; or to what part of it (and part of this project), we might respond to, capture, compass, understand. Attempting to make sense of the subject through others’ interpretations is surely one part of this, even if the contexts keep changing and a conclusion is never met. Night follows sunset, but the earth, like perspective, keeps rotating.

‘ ...I wasn't confident that sunset  was acceptable as a topic to mention to anybody’ (p46).  

Sunset in Begumpet, Hyderabad (submitted by Vishal).

‘It wasn't just sunsets I didn't understand. I didn't understand stars or moons or breezes or dew or flowers or the weather or the avidity some people took -- older people took -- in what time they were going to bed at, and what time the following day they were going to get up at, also what Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature it was outside, and what Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature it was inside...Same too, with sunsets because it was not being labelled a beyond-the-pale young person and maybe-boyfriend, who was young himself -- only two years older than me -- shouldn’t be understanding and appreciating either, what nobody our age would be odd enough to notice was there. Faced with his behaviour, and with this skyscape in front of me, and with the expectation I was supposed to observe it, witness it, attend in some way and have an appropriate reaction to it, I stood beside him and looked and nodded even though I didn’t understand what it was I was looking and nodding at’ (p75).

Sunset in Manila, Philippines

‘...but two sunsets in a week when before that there hadn't been any sunsets -- that must mean something. Question was, was it a safe something or a threatening something? What was it, really, I was responding to here?’ (p77)

Sunset in Adelaide, Australia

[sunsetcento]

A tentative beginning. With making centos comes great responsibility. The process of selection is based on preference, the formatting on a thousand similar magazine spreads. This is very simple poetry. More to come.

Acknowledgments to Juhana Henrikki Harju, Petri Turunen and Maija Sulku for their contributions.

[sunsetcento]

Poet in Digital Residence Diary 10.11.19

In one of those symbiotic moments of life imitating art (not so rare but also not so common, with increasing disconnects between the two), I found myself this week talking to my students about visual art based research, meaning and authority, particularly concerning pre-existing images that are adopted to serve research goals.

On the topic of the form of the cento, roughly defined as a creative work constituted from parts of other creative works (usually text poetry), the issue of ownership and authority is topical -- especially as I start to download submissions so far and begin to get my head around how I might combine them to form digital mixed-media poetry centos.

My first aim with sunset cento was to emphasise community experience of a common, global natural event. In seeking to ask the public for submissions and for individual permission to combine these submissions, I am attempting to challenge the idea of ownership; of sole authority over the produced texts. My role is to edit (curate, if you like), and the power of selection is mine -- yet I can’t create anything but from the ‘found’ fragments people choose to send me. Sunset Cento will be authored -- in the sense of a verb, but not in the sense of a noun (singular).

Decentralisation of authority over Sunset Cento’s potential works places it in an expansive realm of relevance to and impact on multiple cultures and societies, not the least the digital community involved in submission, hosting, curation and viewing in different degrees throughout the project. As an exercise in bricolage (Levi Strauss), Sunset Cento will assemble various fragmentary interpretations of sunset without establishing new definitions of either of its clauses -- rather, encourage new meanings through its way of de/constructing.

There will be no Author but this doesn’t discount the truth/s of what is about to transpire in production as I start to find intersections and harmonies between the initial submissions.

[sunsetcento]

Poet in Digital Residence Diary 6.11.19

Why sunset? Why cento? I missed sunset tonight, incidentally. I went to a pay-as-you-go swimming pool and lapped up and down until just after 5pm. I was walking the backstreets of Madhapur, Hyderabad, guided by my phone’s unreliable mapping system for about half and hour after that. With the onslaught of quitting time traffic in the heart of the city, it took me another half an hour to cross the main road. More time was spent trying to find transport (any transport!) to get me wet-haired and coughing from the particle-laden air back home, where I set about writing this, my first diary entry for my digital residence with Nokturno. I forgot to pay attention to the sunset, though I knew it must have happened around me at some point.

Why sunset? Why cento? Last year, from the end of July until May of this year, there wouldn’t have been many missed sunsets in my life. I wasn’t living in the urban centre of a so-deemed developing country, for one thing, though this shouldn’t matter anyway: sunset still happens, we are assured, whether we take notice of it or not. Post-trauma, sunset became a ritual way of getting me out of the house, walking, breathing, meditating. It was indeed a time of emergency. Can I tell you that sunset healed me? No, I can’t. But it became that thing lesser to ritual: it became a habit. A distraction. An ever-changing source of beauty in my quiet suburban life of temporary suffering. A person I don’t even like anymore makes a point of doing the same thing, of watching the sunset every evening from his spot on earth, as a way of staying mindful. Or maybe just as something to do that makes him appear interesting. That’s cynical, yet sunset requires dedication.

Why sunset? Why cento? Sunset gets taken for granted, often; so do the communities around us. G. K. Chesterton called it long before the digital era: the boldest and bravest act doesn’t involve circumnavigating the globe but hopping over the fence that separates us from our neighbour. With all the connectivity literally available at our fingertips, we are nevertheless driven apart by the idea that community can be conjured and shucked off at whim. Are we dealing with real people or simply avatars? 

Why sunset? Why cento? OK, Trent Parke, with your 100 sunsets; OK, Dobson & McGlynn, unbinding the boundaries of social an affective networks by/through technology.

Why sunset? Why cento? Sunset can become a habit for anyone who freely chooses to engage with it. It’s happens every evening, after all. What I am interested in in collecting a thousand (or less) disparate fragments (after Carole Maso) and putting them together as well I can in mixed-media centos. I am doing this because I believe in the beauty of varied interpretations of a shared topic, the idea of poetic collaboration around the globe, of embarking on projects with breath. Please send what you will--small capturings from where you are, sent to where I am, to be combined with other details from other places and people. Thus it begins.