??!??

okay....but what is ekphrasis
good question! sounds like a sneeze! what a consonant cluster!

i am always tapping this word, a flight attendant's wing on my shirt,
so i should tell you that, while the term does have semi-specific origins (i.e. poetry about art, poetry in close description),
for me, the ekphrastic mode is a dispositional orientation
which has taken on something of a vocational weight.

this clarity erupted by accident, or it took, like any concentric buildup, a very long time.
at 20, newly disabled, i was alone for many months. i didn't know what it was called,
but i wrote to tamper the propulsive frenzy that came when i consumed certain media,
wrote behind my own back about music (for lotusland, bearded, exclaim!, etc.),
then books (for adroit, prism, the montreal review of books, etc.),
then served as co-reviews editor for the ex-puritan,
was a columnist, columnist, columnist --

at the beginning, i understood something like:
this writing helps me touch something other than just the end of myself.
the world, maybe, or at least the stretch-reach.
as i began to cover live performance, as i sidled into my first poetry readings,
speaking aloud for the first time in weeks, i sensed only in glimpses
other people who understood how strange/special it was to be gathered
for sound. what it was to collect.

so, with new friends, i tried something else: with nadia davoli, playd8s, a video interview series about play;
with others, catch, a collective audio poetry podcast about how things feel;
with jack mosher, oranging, a movement-based theatre production about linguistic isolation and its antidote.

when i moved to the place where the trees stand in the water,
i got the chance, for the first time, to host a gathering for poetry:
manahil bandukwala and conyer clayton’s co-book launch
at glad day books. getting write to their books, their friendship, and then read it TO them,
it became clear to me where ekphrasis, ideally, was actually going:
not circling or crawling over the medium, but surging through. to.
a friend, or the hope of one.

since then, i have hosted workshops, artists talks,
memory island with lily wang, cason sharpe, and anna julia stainsby,
all the birds we hear in trees but never see with sanna wani and elizabeth mudenyo.
i do other things with different names
but this one name, ekphrasis, for me, just pinches down at just the right gathering point,
the cluster of language, medium, language, someone, someone, us.
it's what i am, what i do, where i'm going, where i want to be.