PPW F/W 14: COLEMAN STEVENSON
Each season we give Press Week poets the chance to answer three-to-five questions about their upcoming shows. Read all their bios, and find them live at Disjecta in Portland December 5-6, 2014.
Coleman Stevenson (photo: Sierra Breshears; garments: Gretchen Belle)
PPW: What’s most appealing to you about the format of Poetry Press Week, and why?
COLEMAN STEVENSON: The emphasis on performance. Poetry can be very static, and many readings operate with a similar format and tone. This event pushes writers to give their poems new a kind of energy.
PPW: How does PPW change the relationships and conversations between poets and publishers? Between poets and readers?
CS: It gives readers/publishers a chance to really dwell in the world of the writer for a moment. Certainly that’s possible between the reader and the page, and a poem should create a world on its own without the aid of performance, but sometimes it quickens the bond to have more context. It’s why we love music videos – we can listen to a song alone and appreciate it, even understand it, but the video helps us attach more and really inhabit. It’s the same reason houses for sale are toured full of furniture, full of life. When you move in, you may change it all, but you bought it because you could better understand its potential.
PPW: What’s your relationship to your poems as you prepare them for presentation by others? What kind of lives are they taking on?
CS: Rather than presenting all individual poems, I chose to combine sections from two longer sequential works, creating a new narrative from those previously unrelated pieces. I was surprised by the connections I found. Then as I started to build a show, I felt a strong sense of the uncanny guiding my selections – my revisions, collaborators, my visuals – so that now it seems this whole piece is existing without very much force. Well, I mean without me having to force it. I hope it’s full of force.
PPW: What can a PPW presentation bring to your poems that perhaps you can’t?
CS: A lack of self-doubt? A presenter other than the poet can really focus on the performance, and doesn’t have to find herself second-guessing every word.
It’s also an opportunity to physically manifest the content, which is usually left up to the reader to do based on the poet’s guides on the page. As Jack Spicer stated, “the poem is a collage of the real.” He was discussing “correspondence” of poetic image to physical object, but wishing for more: “I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste…” PPW is the best lemonade stand ever.
PPW: What kind of interaction with your show do you hope for from the audience of readers, publishers, and press?
CS: I hope the audience will experience a sense of a character and will be involved in helping us construct this story.
PPW: What’s a message you’d like to send to your younger or older poet-self? Maybe a reassurance or a reminder you want them to have from this moment?
CS: Always move between working in isolation and working in collaboration with artists in other genres.
For this project, I was lucky to work with an incredibly talented group of people: apparel designer Gretchen Belle, photographer Sierra Breshears, artist and astrologer Julie Savage Lee, sound designer Aspen Farer, visual effects artist Katharina Raven, and poet Brandi Katherine Herrera. Each of these individuals contributed to the visualization of my poems beyond their original focused roles, helping me devise and refine the overall vision for the performance. This piece is evidence of a true collaboration.
dededos
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
snowghoul
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
