Thursday, January 08, 2015

Silicon Beach 2

What is a walking poem? For me, it's an affective maneuver while walking-writing-drawing along the sandy shore of Kailua Beach where I am presently living.

The poem comes to mind, word by word, as I traverse the beach with whatever implement (stick) I happen to find when I first arrive at the shore. The composition's rhythm is initially set by my continuous writing and walking, a rhythm that is further complicated by an intuitive and improvised choreography that includes taking snapshots with my iPhone in hopes the incoming waves do not wash the words away before I can capture them. Sometimes, at high tide, I move further away from the water so that I can maintain my creative momentum. Occasionally, I'll self-consciously reflect on this process by bringing words like momentum into the poem itself.

None of this is as easy as it sounds, especially as my mind is focused on maintaining a subtle coherence while I write the poem in my head and create a series of gestures (drawings) to coincide with my body's movement (projecting the writing's measure from within but also, simultaneously, without).

The final images are just a rudimentary recording of the mind in motion, the body following through on the parameters the conceptual performance has indicated as the constraints for the composition's procedure.





























More walking-poems from the Silicon Beach series:

Silicon Beach 1