The menu

Light appears as a minor theme in this menu-poem, and the fading light of the autumnal season brings a variety of senses to mind, and with it a colorful, artful designs. The meal and wine paring captures these through aroma, temperature variations, mixed textures and flavor combinations that greet you with a serene, elegant scenery of nature. This thanksgiving feast is complemented by seasonally selected foodstuffs that not only taste well-balanced but are also pleasant to think about.

The poetry

Rien n'aura eu lieu
  excepté
    peut-être 
      une constellation
— Stéphane Mallarmé

A constellation is a system with definite boundaries, it is a playful system used for study of our universe, help people orient themselves using the night sky, and many societies believed they demonstrated gods’ way of telling stories. As a system, constellations are a set of organizational containers of stars happening in both space and a given time. And like a constellation, these poetry lanterns are a poetic happening that seeks to create a totalizing environment involving poetry, light, and people.

These poems engage with force. Like a spring acting through compression and release, these lanterns provide the poem an organic function in society. The idea developed as an extension from my poetry collage work. After gluing paper and using various kinds of letterings on thick unbendable boards, I moved to calligraphy, writing out poster sized works on fine art paper. They all look very nice as flat art, but when I curled the paper around it formed a tube. It became a far more exciting object. I added some paperclips to secure it place, then placed a light source at the base, a small display light, and it became a sculptural poetic lantern.

The lantern poem is simple and perceivable both as a whole and in its parts. It is something to be seen and used, but also acts as an object of thought, a play of memorable ideas. Making the words cohere in a given space, how they pull and act on each other through formal simplification, dictates their minimal nature and are illuminated in conjunction with their location, space, and light. Together these lanterns operate as a system, a constellation, not unlike a book, a cohesion of texts to form a whole. They are also a playground, a field of force, that the poet sets up and the reader accepts it in the spirit of play.

The idea was born as the result of the political atmosphere of the past decade, though does not explicitly addresspolitics. Rather, it is in the spirit of incantations and covert instructions for healing the individual, social, political, and spiritual worlds. These lantern poems work with repetition, coded directions from our predecessors, secular prayer,clandestine placards, instagramable interventions, and invitations to witness and guide one another—including the ultimate invitation to gather, both symbolically and literally.  

Spark: On Monday, April 8, 2024, the Village of Kenmore, NY, experienced a total solar eclipse. A solar eclipse happens when the moon crosses between the earth and the sun, resulting in the sun being partially or totally blocked by the moon. In that time, I took many pictures with my iPhone. I paired 14 of them with the poem, Spark.

Poetic Choreography: The Poetic Choreography section consists of ten calligraphy illustrations I made for Wade Stevenson’s forthcoming little book, Fiat Lux. Each piece of calligraphy echoes a line or phrase in Stevenson’s poem.

I hope you enjoy this meal, the menu, the collages, and the poems. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Rockets, Geoffrey