“Good Shoes Take You To Good Places” and “My Dearest Smoking Room, My Funnel of Silence,” by CR Grimmer & Ailyn Lee

PROCESS NOTE

Ailyn and CR met as fellows at the Vermont Studio Center in Winter 2023. Ailyn was working on an installation and sculpture; CR was working on their poetry manuscript in progress, Sapphic Ekphrastics: Transcriptions for Access. Their friendship began with conversations about how writers often wish to translate their work into other mediums, including visual work, while artists crave language to articulate non-linguistic mediums. The two took a walk to the local bookstore, where Ailyn purchased her first copy of If Not, Winter, which is a translation of Sappho’s existing poems and fragments by Anne Carson. CR and Ailyn’s exchange began with reading the book together as a form of translation – one between disciplines as much as the languages of Greek, Korean, and English. 

Seeing Ailyn’s appreciation of Anne Carson’s translations, CR offered to translate one of Ailyn’s short films, “Good Shoes Take You To Good Places,” into an ekphrastic poem. Over an afternoon in the Vermont Studio Center library, CR watched the film on repeat, describing what they saw in verse. Then, they asked Ailyn to send her favorite Anne Carson translations of Sappho’s poems; CR scanned the English translations for the stress patterns, and on a second afternoon, they revised their ekphrastic poem to match the stress patterns and brackets of Anne Carson’s translations. 

Ailyn, in turn, asked if she could translate one of CR’s poems into her first language, Korean. She selected “My Dearest Smoking Room,” a lesser-known poem from The Lyme Letters, CR’s first poetry book from Texas Tech University Press. While translating the poem into Korean, she also translated her experience into a painting. 

This series shows their exchange, translating across disciplines to love each other’s work and honor art forms and translating languages from minoritized writers and artists. The results are less about perfection – perfect meter, exact language translations, masterpiece paintings – than about the process of interpreting and sharing the perspectives each brings to one another’s work and that of other translations and eras of art and poetry. The work for both of them becomes a way to create outside of the dominant narratives of singular disciplines, individual artist/writer practices, and monolingualism, instead fostering collaboration and exchange grounded reciprocity and care.

CR Grimmer (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Utah State University. Their books include The Lyme Letters (Texas Tech University Press), O–(ezekiel’s wife) (GASHER Journal and Press), and Poetry as Public Scholarship (forthcoming from University of Michigan Press). They created and host teaching series such as The Poetry Vlog (TPV), and have poems and research in in journals such as Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, FENCE Magazine, and The Comparatist. Learn more at crgrimmer.com. 

Ailyn Lee (she/her) is a visual artist based in New York who was born in Seoul, Korea. She uses found objects, wooden furniture, and stone clay as her main mediums. She received her MFA in Fine Arts from The School of Visual Arts (SVA) and her BFA in Illustration at The School of Visual Arts (SVA). She has exhibited her work at various venues in New York and South Korea, including A.I.R. Gallery, Wassaic Project, SVA Chelsea Gallery, SVA Flatiron Gallery, HEREarts Center, Busan International Art Fair, and Insaart Gallery. She has completed residencies at Wassaic Project, ISCP, Kunstraum, and Vermont Studio Center. Learn more at ailynlee.com.