Alter / Altar Volume 1

From the Introduction: 

This compilation is an outgrowth of the ‘alter/altar II: sigil, soma, score, salve’ workshop community facilitated by Elæ (Lynne DeSilva-Johnson). We gathered for 6 weeks at Poets House in New York City in the Fall of 2019, in a space dedicated to deconstructing the boundaries of “poetics,” and began to explore, to settle inside the vacillating space between representation of the self and of the observed.  We attempted to develop work that reflected an ethical sense of narrative framing, experimenting with mark, typography, image-making, language(s), code(s), lists, erasures, citations, collage and other creative measures. Our process imitated a palimpsest, layered to reflect a body that living in/against a historic  time and place. We considered and created works that challenged genre, drawing on source texts and media, ephemera, detritus, found language. We made lists, we played with memoir and epistolary form—alongside somatic and social practice. We asked: can we make our work a powerful, political act of radical self- and community-building? Of witness? Can it be an act of healing? YES.

We created a community dedicated to object-making. We exploded the archaic idea that creating work is restricted to a strictly personal account. Instead, we foraged, we used algorithms and chance operations so the work created could be situated within/against/in juxtaposition to/ as alchemical space of transformation and/or as lense through which to evaluate (elevate), mark, and/or transform. We created our own personal shot publications and/or zines alongside many other exciting interdisciplinary and archival projects. We have put our work together here, a collaboration to design an alter/altar publication.

Over our workshop, we invited one another to rid ourselves of preciousness, as well as a stable definition of what constitutes poetry. Together, we invited a process of iterative learning by doing, approaching our lives together with a documentarian’s attention. In the publication, you’ll find this reflected in the multi-medium work: the PowerPoint presentations of Kinsey Cantrell, the collages from Sherese Francis, the chance operations of Marie Hinson, Becca Erwin’s footnote-ridden pages, Christine Scanlon’s use of color, drawing, and collage, and Maddy Durante’s collection of New Jersey turnpike pop ephemera. The result speaks to the collective work of of radical presence and approaching the daily world with equal dedication to documentation and transformation.

Witness here our transformation as we “fly out into a rage and sharpen [our] wings to conquer and disseminate little abcs and big abcs…”

—Kinsey Cantrell, Maddy Durante, Becca Erwin, Sherese Francis, Marie Hinson, Christine Scanlon