Tag: ai-weiwei

477: “It Helps Us Hope” (Ai Weiwei)

                “I think that it doesn’t matter whether poetry is good or bad… / …as long as it helps us hope.” -Ai Weiwei, Elettra Stamboulis, and Gianluca Costantini, Zodiac: A Graphic Memoir

                I want to write poetry the same way I step into the rain. Feeling raindrops scattering. Touched by a sky that whirls and swirls, vast and near, and chuckling along with the wind and the trees and neighbors who are chuckling, too. Which is to say: I want to write poetry the same way I garden, watering seeds, watching shoots grow, noticing shadows and sunlight and moisture. I want to write poetry the same way I cook for you: here, I made this, for us, a little snack. Which is to say: I want to step out into the rain and garden and cook like writing poetry, these little practices of hope.
                I’m less and less interested in good art. In evaluating. (I’m less and less clear about what “good art” means, too, but the question doesn’t draw me). Ai Weiwei and his co-authors put words to this delight of recognizing instead what art can do. My professor played our class a song that one of her colleagues wrote in response to my professor’s poem, posted on facebook. That’s how they became friends, this colleague and my professor. Another time I helped a friend make signs for a community garden: tomatoes, garlic, so volunteers who were planting and visitors who were harvesting could navigate the bursting leaves. Last weekend my partner and I went to the library and drew pieces for a community art project: on one wooden puzzle piece she drew an open door. On another I drew friends beneath a tree. These pieces sit next to kindergarteners’ pieces and neighbors’ pieces and elders’ pieces and strangers’ pieces and librarians’, and the library grows a little more into a place where maybe we meet.

by Azlan

451: “As Long As It Helps Us Hope” (Weiwei & Stamboulis)

                “I think that it doesn’t matter whether poetry is good or bad… / …as long as it helps us hope.”
                -Ai Weiwei and Elettra Stamboulis, Zodiac, p. 154

                Sometimes I sit and listen to the resonance between experiences. Between these three, for example: 1) When I taught high school poetry in the twenty-teens, one of my favorite practices to do with a class was “short order poetry. Each student asks another for a poem (“about the first day of school,” “about a cracked windshield”). Then in ten-ish minutes each writer makes a poem to give back to the asker. This practice positions poetry as community, a gift between friends. The time limit can also help me stop worrying about “how good” the poem is and focus on putting lines together. 2) Some years after those classes, a mentor and I started talking about a teaching moment when you let go of worrying “how good” your classes are, recognize students’ work and interest as so much larger than you, and focus on offering what you can and supporting your students’ work how they ask you to. After that moment, paradoxically, our classes felt “better”—but something else had shifted, too. 3) During the worst years of feeling farther and farther away from my writing, writing felt more and more like a place where I had to perform expertise and less and less like the reach toward community that made me want to write. In the middle of those years I started writing flash fiction. Tiny paragraph- or page-long stories that touched one moment of connection, movement, need, loss. Writing those came to feel—well, like walking down to the beach every day to splash my face with the water. Or like letting the ocean wash its face with me.The practice helped me start finding my way back toward what I love in writing.
                When I finished reading Zodiac, I sat for a while, listening to the resonance between Ai Weiwei’s thoughts and so many of my (shared) experiences and relationships. I think the sitting—the quiet—was a way to turn towards and understand how the question “how good is this?” gets planted almost everywhere around me. And recognizing that planting is also a chance to stop planting, to focus instead, perhaps, on the ground the question grows in. The ground of what we’re doing, together. Of how what we’re doing together weaves our lived experience. How that doing makes it easier (or harder) to hope actively, playfully, courageously, communally.

by Azlan