Saturday, April 2, 2022

Terri Witek : The Chairs of Ottawa

 from Report from the Earl Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl’s social media posts of abandoned chairs on the street (see also ‘bishop’s throne,' see also ‘cathedral’) are one of the lovely, quiet mysteries of the feed.   Someone has discarded a repeatable shape in fabric or bent metal.  A passerby snaps them, slips them into our day and moves on.  Are these chairs portraits? Or, more intriguingly, trail markers? Do they signal a way to move through a city, hhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ?

The chairs are interesting in themselves, now that Amanda has passed them (on).  They are half-bodies and headless.  Maybe they smell of others’ backsides or sport a crescent where pomaded hair touched.  But these are photos, cenotaphs of a moment, and we walk elsewhere in other weathers.  Plus these chairs are on their way out in every sense. Maybe there’s a suggestion in their not-craig’s-list poses that the chairs could be adopted.  But mostly they are too far gone. And how would someone walking manage to carry that awkward shape the many unseen blocks toward home?

Sometimes Amanda’s feed drops offer tangled chairs; these recall her posts about sex. Mixed chair multiples suggest that, and also something about ruined architecture and discarded monuments.  Half-thoughts only. That the chairs are mostly alone, though, does seem to say something about the day of the walker, who also seems alone.  Is this, as Amanda says of solo sex, not a walk but “a wank”? The chairs are calming and a little sad.   Maybe someone will come by soon with a sled or a wagon.

Or maybe the chairs liked being shifted solo or together away from their offices or hotels or apartments….who knows  the  dream lives of objects?  Maybe Amanda Earl’s photos of abandoned chairs dropped into our media streets/streams say let go now: let’s get out from under this.   Why stop, then, at each of their strange, erratic appearances between shoutouts and faces and pet deaths and ads ?  Ahhhhh.  Thanks, Amanda.  For a minute your chairs give us back the less-seen side of our bodies, our cities, our wandering thoughts.  Let’s bend a little and rest there.  Hello, Ottawa.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Terri Witek is the author of 7 books of poetry: her newest collections include The Rattle Egg (2021) and the chapbook W / \ S H: INITIAL CONTACT (with Amaranth Borsuk, 2021). Recent work has been featured in two new international anthologies: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and in the WAAVe Global Anthology of women’s asemic writing and visual poetry (forthcoming). Her many collaborations with artists and writers have been featured in performances, museum shows, and gallery exhibitions. Witek teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes, and their work together is represented by The Liminal in Valencia, Spain. terriwitek.com