| The word stanza in Italian means "little room" or "stopping place." I started thinking about stanzas as locations to explore the relationship between reader and poet, body and space, sound and body, space and sound, language and location. How do we (or can we) locate ourselves using language or sound? How does language locate "you" and "I"? Is it possible to meet you in these little rooms? And if we do meet, are we only embracing a ghost?;The book's design is meant to explore this relationship as a shared space. Just as the stanzas create a textual depth in which reader and poet interact, the lines that accompany the poems create a structural depth in and through the pages. Reader and poet both sound this depth and in doing so approach each other.;These rooms, and the book itself, are haunted by "you," guests who can never truly inhabit the space, can only move through it. The poem and the book cleave us/together. We are separated by the same structure that joins us, just as walls separate and join us.;The bars that punctuate the poems appear as walls or impediments. They separate and join numbers of potential phrases, passages that shift and occupy your eye moving through the lines like a body moves through a room. I want this process of impeded reading to "infold" you, to constrain you at the same time it expands the room around you. The architectural lines accompanying the poems and the window in the book's center constrain and confine the reader but at the same time expand the book's interior outward into "this" room. These attempts to contain the reader while opening the space for him or her betray my anxiety: I want you to feel free but I need you to stay here. |
