Tonight May Be by Anna Lee-Popham
Artist Statement
“Tonight May Be” is an interactive piece that explores the dynamics of language as both liberatory and tyrannical. I am interested in how language narrates social spaces, as constant cacophonies and whispers of contexts and subtexts. I am also curious about how understandings of words evolve in nonlinear ways, layering across memory and different situations—at a protest, in the news, by a deceased mother, to a child. I wanted to create an interactive piece that reflects this nonlinear, layered relationship to, and movement through, language. This, for me, is one way to look toward the constant overlap between the political and the intimate.
“Tonight may be”
Tonight may be a night like many others. You may be lonely. You may watch Black Mirror. Or Pose. You are far from alone. Tonight, you may watch out your window at the snow's constant tremors past streetlights. Or you may smell the evening of August, its heavy air of gardenia. You might look at the moon, or the screen, or the streets. Tonight, in a computer's blue light, you might see the language of insurrection opening metal gates. The force of adjectives embedding themselves into greasy rivers, into plastic oceans.
Tonight, don't agree to the violence of verbs; listen in to Dionne Brand. Let language be possible and oblique; let it have boundlessness. Listen, read, write, as Billy-Ray Belcourt says, from a less sovereign place. Hold Adrienne Rich's words as reality: let poetry embolden you out of resignation. Or listen to Pablo Neruda: bring joy over to your side. Every night, you follow routes of language. Tonight, you might navigate these stories in a line. Or you might track these paths into orbits, returning to the same nouns and adjectives as reminders inscribed on the geography of your tongue.
Tonight, what paths, linguistic and always otherwise, do you choose?
Anna Lee-Popham is a writer and editor living in Tkaronto. Anna is an MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Education Creative Writing Certificate, where she was a recipient of the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. She is an editor at HELD Magazine.