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.
Source poets.org
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.
