What are you working on?
I honestly feel like I am “being worked by” certain projects more than I am “working on” anything.
One example is a long term project that just won’t release it’s hold on me called What Grows at the Gates of Death. This is an exploration of the Shoah (or Holocaust) through photographs, poetry, ancestry, and dreams. My 2017 trip to Poland and Auschwitz, inspired mainly by a series of Shoah dreams and nightmares, as well as my ancestral connections to Poland, opened up a world of questions, fascination, pain, and exploration. But right before I left on that trip someone gave me an article claiming there was no poetry left to be written about the Holocaust – it had all already been said and any further attempts to say more were self-serving. I was open to that as I embarked on my trip, but my own experience quickly made me realize that the Holocaust is an infinity of interweaving stories that will never be fully unraveled or rewoven. We are also still living within the legacy of that history, which ripples through our societies in myriad ways, conscious and unconscious. As long as that is true, as long as we remember what happened there and engage with it, there will be more poetry to be written about it.
So I have been slowly letting my own writing and reflections from that experience through me – though often they force their way out. It has been a lot to digest. A lot to grieve. And I would not be able to do this work without the grief tending circle I have been co-creating with my community which, along with poetry, is how I approach feeling and healing.
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