#ricky novaes

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Final Project / Poem

Link to final project: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SxlPnpXSqLwqWm9TwJrBxTPoBmKrfu44ngI4Iym11Cw/edit?usp=sharing

This poem is intended to be a chapbook, so I’ll present a physical manifestation in class.

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Week 7 Poem

*** not presenting this week

Link to audio recording (best with headphones): https://soundcloud.com/user-300815560/wasted-instructions-but-youre-in-a-bathroom-at-a-party-5918-128-pm/s-pjxKi

Score: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FgV8GK8qVTWjXE_uVo1NmhN3gp85ZodOIVfLNhBi4mA

Working Notes:

The readings this week led me to think about how meaning changes when language is distorted and received in a specific context. My performance/reading is of a poem I wrote, “Wasted Instructions,” but modeled after a series of YouTube videos (this one in particular: https://youtu.be/JuX9QQ09598) by allyson m. All of her work includes taking popular songs and distorting them to match a certain setting, usually with the theme of alienation, outside-looking-in, or solitude. Inspired by the strange atmosphere that she infuses into songs I like, I recorded my voice coming from a different room, behind a closed door, as if I were reading to an audience that the listener isn’t part of. In the poem, I riff on the concept of “waste” (as trash, as remorse, as entropy), and installing the “but you’re in a bathroom at a party” element invites other meanings (“wasted” at a party). I found this exercise useful in practicing worldbuilding and sound-editing. The quality of the audio isn’t great, and I think the performance would be better with a live party in the background. Experimenting with space and sound was new to me but I want to continue developing it.

- Ricky

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Week 6 Writing Assignment

Poem: https://soundcloud.com/user-300815560/nye-at-die-electric-rave/s-aEqyJ

Working Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kVS5psmRmVghDdfBMbUF3UbxoLWzZZo8qAvKz1GCJL0/edit?usp=sharing

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Untitled document

today,

Time is on your side so take an extra minute

(hourglass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

and do something nice for a friend.

Take it

splash splash, thud thud

looking-for is a backwards reach

B: freshly squeezed

E: calor and

RS: golden forgotten

T: reaching to me

Take it

tear of a heal

Everythings’s a three

without U

Everythings’s for me

a spot for me a spot from me a spot for me a spot

myself and i have no others

curled and bent

hanging and spent

ceasless hue loses color (calor)

no ribbon withstands the present

what time to make things better

out of sight out of Take it

would you look at Take it

the cracks begin to Take it

the cracks begin to Take it

reach is a wanting to want

Take it

coldly boiling

Take it

to the

Take it

top

Easy

. . . . . . . . . . . .)

No additional text

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Working Notes

The trash in the bin next to my bed was full of remnants, scraps from things I used, things I used that had become useless, and leftover things that never were put to use. Thinking about trash led me to think of trash in various modes: the trash of overheard conversations, the trash of digital text, the trash of coincidence sound. In this poem, I combine my trash scraps and trash thoughts to reflect on ephemerality, and specifically the feeling that I too will become trash.

I originally set out writing in a stream-of-consciousness style by looking at my trash and trying to listen to it, filtering my own thought through what was in front of me. Using what I wrote from this process as notes, I rearranged and added until I could construct some kind of a voice in the poem. The italics are meant to insert a phantom multivocality, a dialogue as if the trash is speaking to the speaker. Capitalization is sparse and meant to emphasize certain letters or words.

My goal was to create an unsettling tone in order to address the existential fear of becoming trash. The italicized words are each related to some element of trash, though I don’t think that is very clear in the poem. The hyperbolic ellipse is meant to symbolize an hourglass, as well as wrap the poem into a dreamlike bubble. I think the tone is clear in the poem, but the overall voice is vague.

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Vicuña Wreading Response

Do the weaving threads have an origin? an end? I think the answer is no, or that origin and end are the same. Sabor a Mí embodies connectedness, holding on to the idea that “everything is a circle” (14), as do the quipus.

And this connectedness is as defiant as the revolutionary process that Vicuña is concerned with. Love, or a want for love, becomes embedded in each object photographed and written about. Forgetting, losing, existing beyond (out of reach) are threats to the love explored throughout Sabor. As objects of love, Vicuña boldly defies the erasure happening at the hands of state authority. These objects and their connected relationships produce multiple voices that speak — about communism, country, revolution, loss, and finding. The goal seems to be persistence, through “finding of a language” (71). Though there is a literal revolutionary process at stake between the self and the external structures acting on it, another revolution exists in the process of the poet nailing down and cementing the language of existence in a specific moment.

Vicuña’s art speaks to me about what it means to write poetry. Just as the quipus weaving place with memory and symbol, her art seems focused on what it means to exist and what it means to do something with that existence. In her interviews, she asks “what is poetry to you?” The responses initially hover around formalities, authors and written works, but then gravitate towards larger ideals, of internal reflection and ritualistic practice and expression. A focus on weaving, on bringing together, reveals a metapoetic quality to her work. More than expression, her art dwells upon what is means to express.

Ricky