PROCESS NOTES
These poems are from 离离草 Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective’s poetry writing workshops in 2023. They were originally written in Chinese using the Exquisite Corpse method, where workshop participants continued after each other’s lines under a tight time limit to co-author collective languages and narratives.
The five poems we have selected here, “Artist in Residence,” “【Uneaten】,” and “Where are the Springs Buried” were written in workshops that engaged with the assemblages of our diasporic imaginations of “home.” Together, we processed the (dis)connections of experiences during summer 2023, when a lot of our community members traveled back to China for the first time in several years since the pandemic. These poems were translated into English by CAO Collective members.
As translators, we put in a lot of work triangulating accuracy to the original text, integrity of the stand-alone English poem, while being aware of power dynamics between Chinese and English. We hope to carve out a space for Chinese expressions that might seem opaque or illegible to English readers. Because these poems were collectively written by six to eight people in workshops, there are many different voices within each poem, as well as conversations between writers. Sometimes, we have to make creative or even imaginative decisions, while other times we take a step back to leave space for multiple interpretations. These collaborative processes rebuild our own lifeworlds and languages that traverse national, geographic, and generational borders.
Therefore, we urge readers to approach these translated poems as intricate conversations, to look for instances of dissonance, care, and play. We would also like to share the form of collective writing and invite the readers to gather a few friends and read these poems together, and write ones of your own.
About the photographs
These photographs were taken in spring and summer 2023, the same time the poems were written. There are photos from CAO Collective workshops, such as Stitching Radical Friendship, where we stitched photos and sticky rice onto a large piece of cloth; Language of Care, where we gathered in a community garden and wrote about what care meant to us; Strings of Touch, where we filmed migrant massage parlor workers play cat’s cradle and talk about their childhood. There are also photos from outreach trips and community dinners.
Some of these photos were taken by CAO members, others by community members using the disposable cameras we provided. As part of our collective art, the photographs here are not only pieces of art, documentation of community happenings, but also a space for conversations, just as the poems are.
CAO_Collective_Tupelo_Cross-Disciplinary_Submission_editedFounded in 2022, Chinese Artists and Organizers (CAO) Collective 离离草 is a Chinese queer feminist art and organizing collective working with performance, text, installation, photography, and video. Our community collective poetry and translations have been published by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Feminist Center for Creative Work, Massachusetts Review, and forthcoming at Scholar and Feminist Online.