Instax Winter
I put together a poem with some photographs in a short chapbook called Instax Winter. I'll mail you a copy for $2.50, or you can see a PDF of it here. I wrote it both to cope with and to celebrate the harshness of this winter here in Chicago. It's been protracted and cruel, this season, and it's wormed its way into everything I try to write.
There's a gap between how that first big snow felt when I took the pictures in the chapbook, sticking them in my coat pocket as they ejected from the camera to keep them dry, and how it feels to see snow on my street every morning, built up in crunchy drifts of filth. It shifted from a sparkly wonder to a gray nuisance. I like writing into these sorts of gaps: trying to put something into words that untangles memories and distinctions into just the right details.
I'd like to be a person whose mood is independent of the weather, but I feel like a cartoonish grey cloud is glowering over me in my puffy down jacket and snow boots these days. I'd like to be someone who makes things and puts them into the world without obsessive doubts of their worth, but I can't say it's happened yet, as much as I try to trick myself into it with small projects like this chapbook. These are some more gaps.
In the tiny notebook I carry everywhere, I wrote a note: "Try to externalize the dangerous but legible things—things you can speak but they catch in your throat. Playground of the interior." I am trying to make poems that are good playgrounds for ideas and images. In this chapbook I played with a form arbitrarily self-imposed: it started out with a promise that I'd write a 47-syllable poem for someone in return for a donation to Ag47. Then I liked the challenge and the clunky not-quite-meter of it, so I strung along some more stanzas, and I liked those too.
I'm still figuring out why I like things I write, or don't. I keep coming back to that idea of making things that feel dangerous but legible. There's a creepy frisson I guess I'm seeking. I don't know that it transfers off the page. And I hope the text and pictures play well beside each other. They're both about this season and some moments in it.
There are 36 copies of Instax Winter. One of these days, I might enter a fugue state induced by wearing too many pairs of wool tights at once, and burn them just to make a dent in the ice. Anything is possible. Anyway, you can buy one. I'd love to hear what you think of it.
Cheers,
Erin