Spell Drive, An Elegy

Each poem in this collection exists in a crisis-state of loss that asks the classic question (but through novel forms): can you successfully mutate language and material to write of/for/to the dead? Some of these poems attempt at an answer by ekphrastically responding to modern dance performances, going so far as to adopt the dance notation with which they were choreographed (Motif notation). The interplay between glyph and word allows me to approach letter, which shifts into curiosities around genetic code. Are our deaths inscribed into our bodies as we contort into the demands of aliveness in the womb? By melding lyric poetry, language poetry, and hybrid forms, I arrive back at the phrase that initiated the project: “spell drive,” a term I came upon while reading a dance notation book which means “a movement that radiates a quality of fascination.” Perhaps alive is just a fascinating movement and death is a radiation, unbodied yet fantastically choreographed.