I’ve been working on a series of concrete poems as part of my Wampum manuscript. This also includes the “Longhouse” poem that was turned into an installation in 2023.
“Indian Country”
“109 Bermuda”
As mentioned at Poets.org,
“I believe in poetry’s capacity to make and remake the world. I wanted to use the structure of this poem to attempt to build the house my mother and I shared when I was young on Davis Island in Tampa Bay. I drew out the basic shape using the method of contour drawing—in this case, drawing one continuous line—in a graphics program, and, from there, wrote the poem directly onto that path, such that each portion of the house would inspire the lines that formed around it. I wished to go back to that memory and live there, at least on the page.”
– Kenzie Allen, “About this Poem” entry for “109 Bermuda”
About the process
For “109 Bermuda” and “Longhouse,” I designed these to mimic contour drawing, so as part of that, I needed to enact the physical process that entails, of putting one’s pen to paper and drawing the object without lifting the pen off the paper–or in this case, putting the marker to the whiteboard.
Words came into my mind along with it, so that I wrote out the basic anaphora and music (“I build it, I build the house, I build the roof where we looked for stars…”) as a kind of sketch of the voice that would inform the rest of the poem.
Using the whiteboard allowed me to easily alter various lines and placements until I was happy with the overall contour, which I then translated into the graphics program using the pen tool.
With “Indian Country,” I had written the poem as a more typical page poem, in basic quatrains. Much later, after having worked on other poems in this series, I returned to that piece and put the text into my graphics editor, designing the layout as I went along, making each turn represent a kind of internal mini line break.