Medium Specificity: Wax Blessing

The assignment:

"Each student will choose an artistic medium (film, photography, drawing, painting, medium, dance, performance, graphic design, poetry, literary narrative, etc.) and produce a work which explores the specific elements unique to that medium--like Brakhage or Daren’s films, Pollock’s paintings, Warhol’s prints, Cage’s music, etc. Artist statements should include a discussion of how this particular work functions as a celebration, commentary or critique of their chosen medium."

Wax Blessing

16 brief poems by Jeffrey Hein

beach

   beach death

   beach windbreaker

   beach skin

   beach cardtable

   nebraska beach

   beach girl

   beach screen



warehouse

   warehouse udder

   warehouse whistle

   warehouse chick

   warehouse bologna

   warehouse birdhouse

   warehouse coolness

   warehouse idiots

   warehouse dust

   warehouse candy



pillow

   pillow table

   pillow cat

   pillow allegiance

   pillows shatter when I rub them



miilk

   milk gold

   milk apartment

   milk silver

   milk silk

   milk polyester

   milk coral

   milk mucus



lip

   lip breath

   lip membrane

   lip informalness

   lip blood

   lip cockroach

   lip sand

   lip mustard

   lip mustache

   Americo

   lip sex

   lip bandaid

   lip Asia



hotel

   hotel ballroom

   hotel gypsy

   hotel amethyst

   hotel gravy

   hotel cockroach

   hotel dumpster

   hotel jellyfish

   hotel fluorescent

   motel pool



Artist's Statement

            When I approached this project, I knew that I wanted to create something that explored the effects of the written word. I love language, and I love the vague tangibility of it when it is written down rather than expressed verbally.

            I was originally inspired by several Twitter accounts. I don’t love everything about Twitter, but I love when writers make the most of it by using it for posts that could not carry the same meaning in the same way on any other platform. Accounts such as @dril and @NotTildaSwinton take advantage of Twitter by tweeting with intentional typos or intentionally obscure formatting.

.DAEHDOG
— Tilda Swinton (@NotTildaSwinton) May 24, 2012

awfully bold of you to fly the Good Year blimp on a year that has been extremely bad thus far
— wint (@dril) July 19, 2014

             Tweets such as this use the textual platform in a remarkable way. They would not have the same effect if someone merely stated “Godhead backwards" or recited @dril’s tweet (his breaking up of Goodyear into two words is not possible in the spoken word).

            As such, a few aspects of these poems reflect unusual formatting, such as the misspelling of milk as miilk in its subheading. However, I wanted to approach text in a way that I had not seen explored elsewhere, so, among other things, I focused my poems on the ways that two separate words can come together and create new images, ideas, feelings, and even meanings. Originally, I approached this project with a focus on connotation, and as such, some of the words I chose are rich with connotative meaning—at least to me (e.g., beach, cockroach, sex). I also used with little connotative meaning (e.g., allegiance, screen). I wanted to have some poems in which the two words are easily associable. For instance, “beach windbreaker” creates a very clear image in my mind of visiting a rocky beach on a cool, windy day. I was interested in how concrete this and other images could become from the mere juxtaposition of two words, even when they say nothing about each other. I also wanted to see what would happen when I connected two very disparate words, such as “milk coral,” which takes two vivid words and causes them to lose a lot of connotative meaning, also as a result of their juxtaposition.

            Although I tried to explore several other aspects of meaning, the final one I want to address is the subversion of expectation. Language is supposed to feel completely true and natural, and when it doesn’t, we can react quite drastically. One way I did this was through flat out lies—such as the subtitle. I intended for each pair of words to be its own poem; with that context, there are clearly more than sixteen poems here. I realized that language is the only way to lie in such a way—visuals and pure sound cannot so easily and completely falsify meaning. I also tried to subvert expectations with non sequiturs, such as “Americo.”

            I realize that this work is perhaps less self-reflexive than McClould’s comic, and, unlike his work, it is more of an exploration than an argument. However, I hope that these poems can be similarly valuable. In creating them, I found humor, delight, disgust, and even new emotional experiences. I hope readers can also find these things, although even if they don't, I am satisfied that it was a valuable process thanks to my own experience.