On the Unity of Assemblage and Poem

In Split Mask and UnfurlFlowerring, the mask came first. A weltanschauung grew around it, accoutrements, fabrics, a ‘look’ enmeshed with the theme, and I felt a nascent poem emerging. When I write an afterpoem to perform in an assemblage, mask, persona, it is always about the topic that the ensemble is presenting, and there is also reference to my being inside the guise, what it’s like to be the hidden self inside the poem being performed. This double subjectivity, then. The doppelgänger being the everyday self, and the masked poet performing the spirit, the message.

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