Love is the Reason by Amanda Earl
Artist Statements, A Wisdom Body Series
Today I still care about exploration, musicality, imagery, writing the inner truths of a woman and ageing, the joys of being alive, unwillingness to be pigeon-holed.
March 29, 2006
“In my poems, I want to tell the inner truths. The poems I write have to reflect that.
I have synesthesia, the blending of the senses. In my case it’s colour and sound. When I hear sounds, particularly names, my brain associates colour. This is also apparent in my poetry. Some people read my poems and feel that I arbitrarily associate colour with words, but it’s not arbitrary for me, it is as natural as breathing, and when I remove the colour from my poem, it feels like something is missing. It’s not in everything I write, but in some stuff.
I have music in my brain. I don’t memorize lyrics, I memorize sound, tunes. I can create melody from white noise, like the hum of a vacuum cleaner. I hear rhythms all around me and I want my poems to reflect the musicality of language.
My favourite poets remain Gwendolyn MacEwan and Sylvia Plath, even though I respect and like many other more contemporary poets. What I like about their writing is really the imagery. I don’t necessarily understand every thing they wrote about, and especially not upon first reading, but the images move into my bones and linger. I want my poems to be highly imagistic, to linger with people, to get into their brains on a more subconscious level than prose does. My educational background is in French literature and linguistics, and I adore 19th century French poets like Baudelaire and Rimbaud for their symbolism.
I’m a sensualist and a hedonist who celebrates life and the joy of being alive. I want to write about that and also the pain of being alive and being different and alienated from conventional society. I want to incorporate the concrete, the senses in my poem. I need to communicate the rush I feel about living, even breathing in and out every day. I want to translate a moment, one small moment, not about anything important. I still feel that nature has a lot to do with my state of mind and I want my poems to reflect moments in nature that affect me.
I love words and want to get carried away to a state of bliss when I write, sometimes to escape from anything real. This is paradoxical to my saying I’m a truth teller. I am also full of paradox. I don’t like to be pinned down or labeled. I don’t like to do things the same way twice. There are some poets I’ve read who seem to do that, and I find it dull. I just want to learn, to explore, to play, to seek.
I’m rebellious. I want to challenge things, to break things, sometimes to shock, to say something vital.
I’m passionate and my writing needs to reflect that too. It can’t be full of abstracts or lack emotion. It can’t be impersonal or neutral. It’s personal, wild, unpredictable, and multi-coloured and it’s feminine. I’m a woman going through all those things that females go through and I want to write about that. Right now I’m obsessed with aging. I feel like a wise goddess on the one hand and an annoyingly rebellious teenager on the other. So I’m still writing out my angst. I guess to a certain extent, my poetry is still a bit like journaling for me, venting and articulating feelings of frustrating. It makes for god-awful poetry at times, but it helps. Maybe it would help others too.
statement
because what i have to say
is personal, female
i am a childless mother
eye, I, aiiee
all of me
red the colour of my (un)
blooming
and the monthly motherlies un(done)
told to write with less
e mo ti on
to transcend our self/ves
i say one woman does = women
& the universal
not to turn away from
wor(l)ds in common
//
This was my first poetic statement, written in 2006 for my first workshop with Ottawa writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan. I balked at the idea of writing a poetic statement about my work. What surprises me about the one I wrote 15 years ago is how everything I wrote back then still resonates and moves me to want to write.
Today I still care about exploration, musicality, imagery, writing the inner truths of a woman and ageing, the joys of being alive, unwillingness to be pigeon-holed. Writing that statement led me to seek out other writers with such underpinnings in their work and led to the creation of new work because it made me think about what resonated for me, what I engaged with, and kind of set up a poetry alarm or life alarm so that, amidst the buzz of everyday life, it would go off for truth-telling: ding!; women’s inner truths: ding!; musicality: ding!
In 2006, I had already been sharing my work publicly and taking poetry workshops for six years. I had also begun to run a local literary website and started to realize the importance of community in my writing and how the support of others could help me and how I could help and support others.
Now I write statements for individual projects. The most recent statement which I’ve used for grant applications is for Welcome to Upper Zyognia. “It will be a collection of poems based on an imaginary Utopia I created when I needed to escape from reality. It is part of the Zygonian galaxy with other planets such as Greater and Lesser and Lower Zygonia. Upper Zygonia has been a refuge during times of pain, while waiting for surgeries, medical appointments, and other circumstances out of my control.
In 2020, there seems to have been a renaissance in both the writing and reading of speculative poetry and fiction. As a distraction from the pandemic, I began to draw the world of Upper Zygonia and to share these drawings on social media. I found myself discussing the world and wanting to write about it.
The speculative literature arena has always been a home for those who don’t fit into the mainstream. This work will be written for fellow kindred misfits. It will deal with concerns of pain, trauma, tragedy and grief by approaching them sideways. Sachiko Murakami said on a recent episode of the Small Machine Talks, a podcast I host through AngelHousePress, that she tells poetry workshop students when they are having trouble tackling a difficult subject directly to approach it through another means. In my case, an imaginary world.
The work will be queer and feminist with ideals of social justice, equality and care. My aim is to create an empathetic refuge for those who do not fit in, a work where we recognize each other and find comfort.
Welcome to Upper Zygonia will use a variety of techniques that interrogate traditional narrative and other structures of dominant cultures. It will address the idea of the uncertain body.
The work will be inspired by utopias. During this pandemic I have spent a lot of time thinking about what a world free of poverty, hunger, war, economic and social disparities would look like. We are witnessing the effects of injustices caused by long term structural systems of capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. In my anxiety, I began creating a refuge for those who have been harmed by these systems.
Welcome to Upper Zygonia will address the difficulty of language articulation through the use of metaphors relating to language, through companion drawings which include asemic writing: mark making in the form of invented alphabetics.”
Today love, exploration, whimsy, and connection are my overriding considerations for my work, which includes not only my own writing but the curation, editing and publishing I do as well.
LOVE
I want to read widely to ensure my influences are beyond the white male literary canon by reading BIPOC, women, 2SLGBTQ, mad, crip, neurodiverse, D/deaf and disabled writing. I want to ensure my practices are ethical and caring. I don’t believe that the creation of art is without responsibilities to act as a good human, to address my colonialist instincts as a white settler to appropriate and feel entitled to all I survey. I am learning how to be more mindful of these issues and to respond to them in my work.
EXPLORATION
I begin any creative activity with a question, a curiosity I need to satisfy. the more I explore, the more I learn, the more interesting and engaging my work will be.
WHIMSY
My imagination is limitless. My brain combines unlike elements and likes to play.
CONNECTION TO KINDRED MISFITS
I write so that other kindred misfits do not feel alone.
BIOGRAPHY
Amanda Earl (she/her) is a Canadian pansexual polyamorous feminist who writes poetry and prose, makes visual poetry, edits, and publishes others from her 19th floor apartment in Ottawa, Ontario. Earl is grateful for funding received from the City of Ottawa.
She’s the author of Kiki (Chaudiere Books, 2014, now with Invisible Publishing), Coming Together Presents Amanda Earl (Coming Together, 2014) and A World of Yes (Devil House, 2015), and over 30 chapbooks. Her most recent chapbook is Matthew (Knife Fork Book, 2021). For Electric Garden, Earl received the Tree Press Chapbook Award in 2017 and in 2014, she was inducted into the VERSeOttawa Hall of Honour.
Earl is the managing editor of Bywords.ca, the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021) and the fallen angel of AngelHousePress. Her visual poetry has been exhibited in Brazil, Canada, India, Italy, Russia, Sweden, UK and USA. More information is available at AmandaEarl.com or connect on Twitter @KikiFolle.
