In the studio today I made dust prints on teacups. This involves sifting wood ash on my table surface and scribbling through it then pressing/rolling the cups into the words on the table. I work from a specific text, a poem that I have recently read or one written by my mother and found in my archive of her words. The process feels like a mix of a meditation on a poem and a form of time travel that allows me to visit the mind of my mother. Whether it’s a poem about walking in Greenwich Village on a Sunday or her worries about what her children would do with her collection of books, when I get going with the transcription it’s as if the words come so fast I cannot stop for spelling; sometimes the words come out as squiggles or straight lines or like the bitter sweet vines that tangle with the milkweed. The more I dig in my mother’s work and play with asemic text I think the line between poems and drawing is very thin.
“I’m working as fast as I can I can’t stop to use periods / sometimes I draw straight lines on the page because the words are too slow.”
-C. K. Williams, from Yours, in “Poems 1963-1983,” Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988