About the Poems - SJL
About the Poems
by Sueyeun Juliette Lee These are from a project called The Distant Collection that I have been working on for roughly three years. Each poem is titled after a different musical chord, a plural sounding that we hear as having a unique, integrated identity. I use the space of these poems to think through my relationship to memory, personal and inherited, distance, and time. For me, the sounding of these chords is a portal into some sort of absolute instantaneity. This possibility depends on the abolition of time as a continuum. I am also interested in how sound works as a force or pressure–consider how a particularly loud sound can force you to step back, or how sand grains reconfigure into various patterns on a drum. I reference various moments from my own life and from history, as well as different sorts of physical structures, the outdoors or spaces I have inhabited, in an effort to express the sort of collapse, pressure, and resonance that I experience as the thinking-through of a single life.