||| salvage poetry project : ABOUT |||

     In my mind, the concept of salvage poetry seems pretty easy to understand, but I realize that this might not be the case for everyone else. In the broadest sense, salvage poetry is the term I use to describe poetry made using words exclusively sourced from a pre-existing text. The term “salvage poetry” is itself not that important. I use it to describe this recent output of poems, but I've taken up similar endeavors in the past without using this taxonomy.

     JJJJJerome Ellis’ poems, such as those from their book, Aster of Ceremonies, are good examples of what other approaches to this type of externally sourced poetry can look like. The text I have the strongest memory of Ellis taking from was a wanted ad for an escaped enslaved person which noted that the man stuttered. Ellis visited my undergraduate university in my senior year, which is where I first encountered their work. I got to hear their poetry both performed live and in recording via video. Then as now I find their work striking and beautiful.

     Compared to Ellis’ methodology, I tend towards a more algorithmic and conservative approach (I use these words with specific working definitions). By algorithmic, I mean that I tend to systematize the composition process. I find the intervention of an algorithm lets me elide artistic indecision, therefore streamlining the artistic process. Put in other words, since I struggle with choice paralysis, invented rules help me start working in that they limit my potential working area (and thus limit the directions I could potentially pursue). I sense this is still abstract, so let me give an example. One of the algorithms I used in this salvage poetry project was for selecting which pages I would pull from. The motivation here was as follows: even though I knew which texts I would be interpolating into poems (i.e., the pdfs from my traumatic class), I didn't know where in those texts I wanted to pull from. I didn't want to use the full text for any of them since they were each relatively long. An algorthmic approach let me circumvent this swamping indecision since it decided which pages I pulled from. My algorithm for this election process was as follows: 1) I generated a number from 1 to the length of the pdf – this would indicate how many pages I would pull from; 2) I generated a number from 1 to the number generated in part “1)” – this would indicate which page I would pull words from; 3) repeat step “2)” until the number of selected pages equalled the number generated in part “1)”. For example, if I had some X document which was 8 pages long; in part 1) I generate a number between 1-8 (in this example, say O generated the number 4); in part 2) I generate a number between 1-4 (in this example say I generated the number 3); I now repeat part “2” until I have generated a total of 4 numbers: e.g., “3,4,1,3.” (If not otherwise clear this total includes the number originally generated in part “2)” ). Which the pages selected, I go through each page and use a second (similar) algorithm to select which paragraphs from that page I will pull from. I skip explaining the second algorithm here since I intend (at some undetermined point in the future) to make a video tutorial covering these topics in more details.

     By conservative, I mean that I generally like to take the words as they are written on the page (i.e., I don't add or subtract any letters). That said, I don’t always adhere to this principle (e.g., periodically I make a noun plural or a verb past tense to maintain verbe tense agreement). While some of the spelling changes result of artistic intention, there are alsos cases where the corruption stems from that the words I read on the page magically are not the same as the words that are apparently written on the page. I preserve these reading errors (if they can be called that) since they reflect what the text looked like (to me) when I encountered it. In general, though, I try to retain the original spelling. My motive for doing so is similar to why I like working with an algorithmic selection process -- it offers a self-imposed restriction that folds neatly into a framework for artistic choice. While rules aren't required for poems written using outside texts, they help me keep myself locked in. While executive functioning concerns are relavent, the reason I'm most compelled to observe this rule is that it offers me an excuse to willfully abuse the English language. By not adding or subtracting letters, meaning making requires new channels to spring forth. One of my favorite avenues this rule offers me is that I seek to make meaning by using nouns as verbs, verbs as nounds, and/or really any part of speech as another part of speech. For example, say a paragraph I'm pulling words from uses the word "caps" in the context of, "Time had five pen caps." Given a plural noun like this, I like to search for ways I can get away with using it as a verb. For instance, I might pulls words from the paragraph to write a new sentence that reads, "Tim caps off another year with a smiling face." In essence, I conceive of this practice as a form of play and as a mode of gameifying the English language. With it, Poetry writing becomes (in part) a matching excercise maybe akin to something like "Go Fish." The bigger I can twist a word's meaning, the more fun I have -- sometimes that may even mean forging a new meaning for a word or excavating an obscure alternate definition. It puts a new face to the cultural addage of saying something's "out of context." (yeah, duh, it was boring sitting there all by itself, all contextualized and the like)

     The name comes from two places. The easiest to explain is that the methodology resembles the meaning of the word, “salvage,” in some sense or another; I take some text that I have a troubled relation to and I attempt to salvage beauty from it (from my pain). Salvage in this sense is a reflective process. The second motive for using the word is to allude to an artifact of fan knowledge production in the FNAF community. When the treasers for FNAF 3 were initially being released (which conspicuously featured an unamed new character), fans jumped at the bit to try and figure out the identity of this strange and shadowy new character. While authorial intervention eventually settled the topic by revealing the character's name to be "Springtrap", the name that had previously been the most popular was "Salvage" (for reasons I won't get into here; absent that, here's a video with more info). Three games later (in FFPS), the premise of (a) "salvage" returned and was again entangled with the character previously known as "Springtrap" (now listed in the credits as "William Afton"). That is, in between each night/day of gameplay in FFPS, the player completes a so-called "salvage mini-game," where they play a tape recorder, complete a clip board evaluation, and administer period shocks to the night's subject -- one of four animatronics apparently found in the dump in the back alley. While this context may seem obscure or random, it nevertheless informed my poetry. At the basest level, it's because I got back into FNAF (theory videos) as a survival mechanism to cope with the trauma of my class (a theme paralleled by the stated motive of this project). At the looser, thematic leve, it's because this word, in the FNAF context (speaking here of FNAF as both community AND text), intersects with trauma, the regurgitation of pain, and the caveat-ed pursuit of beauty.

     The motivations for presenting the poems in video form are as follows: I just came off of a streak of making videos and was therfore prefigured to think through ideas in video terms (e.g., I often found myself thinking, how could i present this idea via video?), I wanted to make an artifact more perceptively perceivable than the previous set of poems I had made in this style (of taking the words from elsewhere), I wanted to emphasize the spoken and aspirant qualities of my writing, I wanted to be able to show my work, so to speak, for where I was getting my words from, and that I'd seen some of JJJJJerome Ellis' videos working through their poems using visual evidence and found the resultant text to be visually and sensorially compelling. To paraphrase the second stated motivation: I wanted to know more accurately what level of engagement my work was getting (a metric theoretical readable via a video's view count). My intentions with the third stated motivation didn't fully pan out how I envisioned due to some production limitations (call it laziness I guess) on my part, but the motivation had still been there at the beginning (and even through till the end, despite the outcome). Cognizant of the motivation to make a video and thus present my poems in spoken form, I would send them to friends in voice messages as I went along. The oral space informed the content and the form. Part of the desire behind the fourth stated motivation was that I was proud of some of the ways I mutilated my texts (I thought some were clever, in other words), and, in this tune, I wanted a bit to show off.

     Although I knew that I wanted to do video, I didn't know from the jump how I wanted to do video, and I think some of my output stumbled because of this.

     When I started composing the poems and I had at the back of my mind this notion that they would later become videos, I sensed that with the chance to use video, I somehow wanted to impart additional visuality to what I was saying. This was because at the same time as the poems were about being spoken and about mutilating language and playing with conventions, I was also intent on exploring ideas through evocative or obtuse terms, if possible. When I was writing the poems, I often felt I was able to imagine what was going on but speculated that said images might not inherently translate to others; especially because, even for myself, they were so fleeting and oneiric. I was aiming for a peculiar temporality in most of my poems (in part because of the sliding temporal nature generated by the intervening algorithm); and it was hard to put that in concrete terms. I coudln't shake the feeling that supplying only the text would not be enough. These desires laid in remission until, at the last moment (when gearing up to start work on the last video), my technology problems suddenly became acute and I was forced to abandom the idea of supplying evidence to what I was saying. I think this ended up being a helpful disaster, as now I had no choice but to pursue other means of visuality. What I ended up with was essentially was I had been envisioning from the beginning (albeit tied up in the same-old, periodic malefactions that come as growing pains when trying something new).

     While the previous section explained some general thoughts behind the visuality of my videos, I'd like to speak a bit more to how the visuality for the fourth video ended up the way it did. In simple terms, it comes down to one of the same reasons as to why this project is called "salvage poetry project" -- it too is an allusion to survival tactics I developed to make it through the pain of this awful class. Whereas "salvage" points to the coping I took up outside of class, the art style in this video is meant to resemble the coping strategies I relied on to get through the class -- namely, drawing little guys in my notes. (Here is a link to what some of those drawings looked like). While it's true that drawing noodly guys was a survival mechanism, naming it in those terms alone isn't that helpful to make sense of the utility or meaning making these actions provided. Folded into the fact of survival include such phenomena as my fascination with faces (pareidolia), my tendency to want to draw images and shapes into ways outside of those I've been taught were "correct" (i.e., perspective, proportion, anatomy, etc.) or those resembling hegemonic norms, my idle inertia which makes nothing into something (apophenia, generative hallucinations) or which transforms legibility into an other legibility, and my physiological relation to images of bodies mutating (body horror, transgression of the flesh, mutability of form, or human being, of skin, of species, of gender). Jonni Peppers I think is probably a sublimated influence on where my lines end up going. (Oh, also, I wanted to loosley emulate early YouTube notepad tutorials with the beginning and crunchy visuals)

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