Mobile Photography & Art Saturday Poetry – ‘Instrument’ by Dao Strom with Sarah Bichachi
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is entitled ‘Instrument’. “I wrote this poem at the end of 2016. In the wake of the election, the phrase ‘burning-est woken of time’ spoke to a sense of urgency and self-questioning as to what kind of ‘instrument’ I would wish to be, and how. I remember there were a lot of words in the air at the time, rhetoric zinging back and forth on how to fight, resist, right and wrong ways to be, etc.—and maybe in response a part of me was craving a quieter version of myself, to be a conduit and hold channels open without falling prey to (or simply reflecting back) the anxieties around me/us. Playing with ‘-ist’ and ‘-est,’ and the placement of stanzas were further ways for me to contemplate sound and the extremities of language, as well as the slippery ease with which we create hierarchies of meaning by how we configure words” explained Dao Strom.
Dao Strom is the author of several books, including the bilingual poetry/art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, (AJAR Press, 2018) and a hybrid-form memoir We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, accompanied by a song-cycle, East/West (Press Otherwise, 2015). She is the editor of diaCRITICS and lives in Portland, Oregon.
I have matched this image entitled ‘Chocolate Tears’ by Sarah Bichachi – @sarahbichachi with this poem.
You can view and follow her work on Instagram here.
If you would like to be featured in our Saturday Poetry section, please ensure you include the hashtag #theappwhisperer to any images posted to Instagram. This will mean we will be able to consider it.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here.
i have wanted to be a sieve
i have wanted to be an anechoic chamber
and reflect back to you no sound
but for the quiet rush and thrum
of your own nervous blood
i have wanted to be instrument
and not just body to be felt
the cleavage of the world through
but instead to splay the invisible
light waned out through skin
skin and rushes
a bird-wing desire
alight and under {fire}
{i} walked out into the burning-est
woken / of time / am i / acting-vist
enough / as light / in the interim
/ inner of darkness / now entering
/ the machine / in knowing of
cloak & insidious /
of wonder / & plunder /
not to seek / satisfaction in peaks
/ & difficult in climb
/ & / into surrender’s don’ts //
{i} walked out
into the brilliant
wokenest of
time & everything
was trite-ist
‘Chocolate Tears’ ©Sarah Bichachi
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Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
