Winston Lê : Notes from the Field : Poetic Summonings

 

 

 

 

There’s some necromancy happening in Vancouver. The Dead Poets Reading Series is a bi-monthly literary event held at Massey Arts Society in Chinatown.  This long-running reading series is a curated seance of living poets performing the poetry of deceased poets as means to pay homage to the poetic lineage the came before. In this unique reading series format, featured living poets share the work of dead poet they’ve long admired. These performances take place on the traditional and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations otherwise known as Vancouver, BC.

If you visit DPRS’ website and read the “about” section, you’ll notice there is sort of meta commentary happening in terms of haunted nature of this reading series and its many revivals throughout the years. Originally conceived by David Zieroth in 2007, DPRS has taken on many different forms through its organizing team and venue spaces. It feels quite fitting that this motif of “resurrection” runs through DPRS own history as an arts organization.

In its current iteration, Massey Arts Society has become the new venue for DPRS. Providing a summoning space for both the living poets and their conjured ghost-poem/poet companions. In a post-pandemic world where arts venues are becoming a scarcity, Massey Arts Society has provided a home for a plethora of Vancouver book launches, literary events, festivals, and workshops.

In July I was fortunate enough to be one of four feature poets at DPRS. Featuring at the DPRS is sort of a hybrid between presentation and performance. Readers are each given a twelve-minute time slot to briefly discuss the biography on their chosen dead poet and then read from their body of work.  The poet I chose was Lyn Hejinian. Hejinian’s work, particularly her famous craft essay on “open texts” have been quite pivotal in my own linguistic experimentations. Hejinian was founding figure of the Language Poetry Movement of the 1970s and influential force in the world of experimental and Avant Garde poetics. Through a variety of techniques such as the “new sentence,” and an embrace of the open text, Hejinian’s work sought to engage the reader in new ways, making them active participants in the process of experimental lyricism, language materiality, and meaning-making.

The readers at DPRS are tasked with providing biographical details of the life of their dead poet, usually before they get into the poems. I found this quite fitting because even though Language writing tends to be anti-confessional and anti-realist, Hejinian’s work doesn’t reject these modes, and instead repeatedly engages with biography or autobiography. Through her work, Hejinian insisted that alternative means of expression are necessary to truly represent both reality and that which is often considered confessional, exploring the relationship between such writing practices and the subjectivity that biographical genres often obscure. Through this sense of a defamiliarization Hejinian’s writing urges us to be attentive to the ways in which meaning is emergent as well as to the constant unfolding of possibility that constitutes our public and private lives.

It was a privilege and honor to represent the late Lyn Hejinian’s poetic body of work at DPRS. Great to take part in one of Vancouver’s longest running literary series. Such a flurry of poetic voices from my fellow readers.

 

 

 

Winston Lê is a Vietnamese-Chinese poet and interdisciplinary artist who resides in Langley, BC. His writing has been featured in Composed: anthology of poetry 2024, periodicities, Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, pagefiftyone, and filling Station. His poetic practice encompasses different modalities concerned with language acquisition, including receptive bilingualism, translingualism, speculative poetics, and asemic writing. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. translanguaging is now curated as part of the special collections at Colby College Libraries and Michigan State University Libraries, respectively. In March 2024, Lê spent a two-week tenure as the poet-in-residence at Studio Faire, an artist residency located in Nèrac, France.

 

Winston Lê : Spatial Contemplations at Studio Faire

 

 

 

 

 

          In March I decided to take a leap of faith and go off the beaten path.

This destination was Studio Faire, an artist residency located in southwestern France in the sleepy, yet vibrant commune of Nérac. Studio Faire is a maison de maître that acts both as contemporary arts space and living quarters for its residents. This mansion was built in the 1800s and still retains its period characteristics.

Julia and Colin were amazing hosts, and I’m grateful for them in letting me into their home and this slice of paradise. I truly admire what they are doing: creating and cultivating a space where artist from different disciplines and walks of life can truly thrive. Faire in French means make. That’s exactly what I got to do during these unencumbered two weeks.

Studio Faire offers a diverse range of studio spaces. My live-in studio was called “The Garden View Room.” It was just as the name suggests. A double bedroom that situates at the back of the house with a view over the garden through two large windows. Every morning, the light would pour in from the south-facing garden. I made good use of this space cultivating it as my own. Julia even provided me with a sizeable corkboard where I would pin clustered mind maps for poem ideas and memos for daily writing goals. 

 

As this residency is a self-directed program, what you want to accomplish during your time is solely up to you and the other residents. The best thing I got out of this residency was devising a routine for writing during my stay. A typical day consisted of a morning of revising draft poems, organizing my current chapbook manuscript, and generating new ideas.

 

There was an armchair in the corner of my room where I sat down to read from passages of random artbooks every morning before I got to writing. Julia and Colin happen to have a small bookcase outside my room. During my stay, I dubbed it the “wee bookshelf” for my Scottish hosts. Combing through the spines of novels, artbooks, and poetry collection, I serendipitously came across a back issue of Room magazine. It seemed a piece of Vancouver found me. Or perhaps I found it?

I’d also changed up my routine by writing in the garden in the backyard. There was so much botanical life sprawling in this garden that made me feel so blissful. It was a good meditative spot to go unwind or if I needed a solitary place in nature to rethink an idea or reapproach my writing methodology.  One morning I was fortunate enough to get a photo of a tree branch shadow reflected across my laptop screen. 

 

 

Time truly felt like it was own. I was able to immerse myself in my writing, while exploring this hidden gem of a town. After I wrote in the morning, I’d go out and about in the afternoon to venture off into Nérac. The most impressive feat of this small town would be the omnipresent character of the long river called the Baïse. It felt like this river followed me wherever I wandered. It sourced through the commune like a pulse. In that moment, embracing the grandeur of where I was, I allowed myself the permission to abandon everything else and just simply exist for my writing.   

 

I relished in my thought-provoking discussions with my fellow resident, Rob Kitsos. Rob was a dance artist who came to Studio Faire to work on his choreographic research on materials and space, Moving Matter. Coincidentally, Rob also hails form Vancouver.

Other than updating each other on the progressions of our projects, we discussed our mutual love with geometric linguistics, ekphrasis methodologies, and interdisciplinary collaboration within the arts. I enjoyed our evening wanderings through town. On one such occasion, we got lost on the way, enamoured by the iridescence of the town at twilight.

At end of our two weeks as a thank you to Julia and Colin, Rob and I decided to perform and present on the work we did during our productive time at Studio Faire. I read ekphrasis poems from my collaboration in progress with botanical artist, Katrina Vera Wong, Frankenflora Morphologues. Rob presented on his research in the form of his choregraphed video he had created in response to the spatiality of Studio Faire. His presentation also included an oral recitation of a found poem I wrote in response to Rob’s ekphrasis methodology of material and space. For the performance, we used the Garage Studio (Rob’s studio) as the venue.

It was a good  venue for our performance as we were both using visuals and audio. As Rob says about the Garage, “It’s a room with tons of history and mystique. It’s a great raw space.”

          All in all, Studio Faire is an amazing experience that allows you to curate a residency experience towards your needs and wants. For me that was balancing my own creative practice, wanderlust, and collaborating ideas with the like-minded individuals who I shared a home with.  I was humbled to be accepted as the first 2024 Poet-in-Residence. I hope to return one day. I know there are exciting developments happening at Studio Faire and I can’t wait to watch its growth as an arts and culture space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winston Lê is a Vietnamese-Chinese poet and interdisciplinary artist who resides in Langley, BC. His writing has been featured in periodicities, Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, pagefiftyone, and filling Station. His poetic practice encompasses different modalities concerned with language acquisition, including receptive bilingualism, poetic dictation, speculative poetics, and asemic writing. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. translanguaging is now curated as part of the special collections at Colby College Libraries and Michigan State University Libraries, respectively.

 

Winston Lê : Three visual poems

 

 

Generating fragmented, yet interdisciplinary postliterate liminal spaces, these visual poems splice together abstract art, typography, asemic writing, and poetic dictation. Amidst the scribed chaos, the subjective reader/viewer hones onto the fragmentalism of redacted writing systems and alphanumerical entanglements to recontextualize mistranslation as a divergent open text to unlock the vastness of neologistic possibility and inquiry through these fractured “errorisms.”

 

 

learned errorisms unlock postliterate rosetta stone

 

 

revenant letterforms

 

 shorthand palimpsest notations

 

 

 

 

 

Winston Lê is a Vietnamese-Chinese poet and interdisciplinary artist who resides in Langley, BC. His writing has been featured in Sparkling Tongue Press, Ekphrasis Magazine, pagefiftyone, and filing Station. His debut chapbook, translanguaging was shortlisted for the 2018 Broken Pencil Zine Awards. translanguaging is now curated as part of the special collections at Colby College Libraries in Maine.