This semester, I’ve been a frequent commuter for work, and have often felt myself at a loss for focus, struggling to let go of frenzied thoughts between where I’ve been and where I’m going. Spying Shange’s poem, “What Do You Believe A Poem Shd Do?,” as a part of the MTA’s Arts for Transit collection hit me like a wave of present. It, quite literally, ‘stopped me in my tracks.’ Seeing, reading and experiencing the poem in transit reminded me of the beauty in mundane rituals, like travel and movement. To me, the poem seems to celebrate leaning in to the challenge of letting go of haphazard thoughts and committing to the experience and gestures of the present moment. Read More
The Well Told Story
While talking to Professor Glover in my vision for my digital project, she gave me the term “interactive poetry book” as a descriptor. This helped me to conceptualize a digital space that pairs image and poetry in the same way that The Sweet Flypaper of Life and The Sweet Breath of Life does.
I did some browsing on the internet for sites that replicate the kind of effect I would like my digital space to have and I came across http://whiteboard.is/work/. I think this site works because it is user friendly and the transitions between images as I scroll are very smooth. Read More
Archive Find! – Ndikko Journal Entry
I’ve been getting very caught up in so much academic jargon, so for my archive task I wanted to go back to the original roots of my interest — Shange herself.
I had seen this journal entry earlier last fall, but at that point I quickly moved on because I was searching for a piece of Shange within the archive that resonated with my project. Stumbling upon this journal entry again reminds me that within all our projects and all our research the chief task we carry is to fulfill the occupation of storyteller. We must weave together distant echoes, pure evidence, slang from generations back, and art from magazines present to create a narrative we can visually depict. Read More