OR BETTER FOR VERSE
Poems (in-progress)

Rabindranāth Tagore (1861-1941). I have too much and nothing to say to him all at once. A poem is perhaps a befitting response to such paradox, so I’d like to fill my letter to him with poems, or at least with a few words, sounds and images placed into a poetic field of relations; a field that he threw open to my boyhood days. Over time that field has led me into temples, courts, ponds and archives across the rim of the Indian Ocean. Within these sites are various fragments: dilapidated documents, discontinued rituals, disused monuments and lingering songs that together speak to me of the complex historical and contemporary processes at play in dancing a dance.

Born of field notes and sound recordings, of quite still and moving images, of documented and hearsay anecdotes, and of dancers dancing dances, these poems are an essay at stringing these complexities into terse little things; terse, because the temple pond has gone dry. Dance asks poetry: would you be my liquid archive?

PS: the poems acquiesce