In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 259.
One of my writing obsessions is finding new vehicles for memory and mourning. I like to play at the threshold of ode and elegy with the objective of finding new pathways to say “I miss this person/place/time so much, I need to express this in every form available and those we haven’t thought of yet.” In “Reconceptualising Poetry as a Multimodal Genre,” scholars Denise Newfield and Raphael d’Abdon define the term multimodal as “[an]...approach center[ed] upon acknowledging the full range of meaning-making resources in human life—written, visual…sonic, and spatial” in which no one mode is regarded over the next. They go on to describe the process as “synaesthetic…representation and communication,” which allows us to make meaning across a range of contexts and dimensions. Inspired by ephemera and artifacts from personal family archives, I wrote my first poetry collection as an exercise in multimodality, a way to exponentially express love and longing through poetry, collage, and other media.
In terms of poetry, I’m particularly drawn to the way form can add a kaleidoscopic function to a text allowing for new perspectives with every turn. In addition to including erasure poems, sonnets, and haibun, I wanted to create a form that could act as a constraint, as well as a site of recognition and collectivity. Because music is one way I connect with those I’ve lost, I created a playlist form called “grooves” as a kind of invitation to commune with memory within a familiar space and atmosphere. Each title begins with a song that sets the mood for a glimpse into a particular scene, followed by lines that mimic song titles from an album’s playlist. I liken the process to asking both the subject and the reader to meet me in between the lines of the music and the memories evoked.
In addition to a collection of forms, mixed media collage allows for even more layers. Like poems that create patchworks of time periods and family narratives, collage allows me to engage with the remnants and relics of lost relatives. Several of the collages in Cord Swell feature fragments of my grandmother’s handwriting. The writing appears alongside a photograph of her in a cap and gown, as well as in another piece featuring her daughter, my mother. In this way, collage acts as an occasion for generations and timelines to touch and overlap.
Many of my poems also correspond to another modality that is not physically present in the book. When the manuscript was still in its nascent stages, I completed a video project for which I asked my mother and sisters to record themselves speaking about their memories of home. The recordings were used as voice-overs for photos of our neighborhood, combined with segments of 8mm home videos my grandfather took from 1960 to 1985. Some of the memories mentioned in the film made their way back into the book as answers in a series of poems that imagine interviews between different ancestors. I appreciate how this layer of modality mirrors the context between those who have gone on and the living. Though they may not be physically present, those we love are still out there somewhere, reimagined, renewed, and reanimated. You can find the video project “Home” in Obsidian’s Black Listening series.
Whether you’re already a multidisciplinary artist or just eager to try something new, I encourage writers to consider how combining different modalities in your work can further expand your possibilities for ancestral dialogue and complementary interpretations and meanings. In what ways could including a picture or personal artifact (a voice recording, a found note) enhance or expand the world of a poem beyond the page?
brittny ray crowell (she/her/hers) is an assistant professor of English at Clark Atlanta University. A recipient of a Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize, her poems have appeared in Split Lip, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Her work as a librettist has been featured at the Ohio State University and the Cartography Project.
image credit: Logan Voss