Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

Jane Shi: Forms That Free Us, Keep Us Alive: A Craft Jam Session

Saturday, June 24, 2023, 1 – 3 PM PDT

Centre A (Zoom)

Register HERE

When writing against inheritances of civility, what forms and techniques do we find and what forms find us? In this craft jam session, Jane Shi will discuss poems from contemporary poets that reimagine relation through kinship, care networks, dangerous solidarities, grief, and confronting everyday violence. She will share lessons from her creative process and lead an activity where participants play with voice, form, shape, and audience. 

 

wander, wander

After EggPlantEgg 

 

Behind this silver world

How does a blimp bloom? 

How does a father’s three older sisters find the tough to smile? 

If we’re all a blimp for love 

 

(Dare someone to love me) 

 

I’ve decided to be a kind of fishing hook

My one end holds the sharp of another’s beginning 

 

Missing you in the silence, I’m candle-filled stupor 

Missing you, banging on the glass door panes of cartilage and admissions

           -only museums 

 

The lie is I’m glad you know who scooped up a quarter and dime of my life 

If you could follow me to the courthouse to an Antarctica cracked with skyscrapers

Carry each wrinkle like dignity is a butterfly 

O dream of coming true in the morning 

                               O you,           aren’t admission  

 

You will remember me saying I am gonna get married to me someday

I’ll live to a hundred and eighty and I’ll be happy-happy

When I was hungry, I visited 

 

you through the world. The future will slap   

 

kick, wander around the field, looking

              for you, looking for you 

looking for you 

 

Liner Note 

Within EggPlantEgg’s lyricism and 80s guitar are soliloquies of stumbling in the dark at 3am for a glass of water.

That glimmer, an unlikely reflection that keeps a spirit—holding/letting go the storying of bad trouble. 

How we might wait for each other on the other side of silver, the convexness of crisp meridian. 

The Saturn Return autistic burnout of our eyebrows, gentries stuffing pockets with heartlessness. Like hooves. Like guitar strings. 

Your ghost month altar lined with a red tote bag. Flashing the tiled earth with solidarity with forever. Open blue pill bottle candle holder. Rock from your maybe-date. Coffee Candy. Everyone’s Favourite.

Or, say yes to open shelves. Or baby’s eyelash. Or palliative uncaring. Chorus. Chorus. Chorus. That trembling glass. 

– 

Jane Shi is the author of the chapbook Leaving Chang’e on Read (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022). Her poem “before you were born” won The Capilano Review’s 2022 In(ter)ventions in the Archive Contest. Her other writing appears in Disability Visibility Blog, The Offing, and Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press), among others.

Photo of Jane Shi, courtesy of the speaker.


Accessibility: The gallery is wheelchair and walker accessible. If you have specific accessibility needs, please contact us at (604) 683-8326 or [email protected]. As the workshop will take place in the format of a Zoom Webinar, audio transcripts will be available upon request.

Centre A is situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. We honour, respect, and give thanks to our hosts.