Catalogue of a Loss

Abstract

Catalogue of a Loss is a collection of sixty-two prose poems written within the past year and half. The work is printed on 4x6 cards. Each poem may be read individually from a single card or the poems can be read in sequences. Each poem maps to at least one prescribed sequence that is visually indicated on the card(s). In the case that the poem maps to multiple sequences that poem is reprinted so that each subset it belongs to may be individually represented. Within this document, I've provided re-printings of the cards along with four of the larger possible sequences I have framed for the reader (indicated by red / violet / cyan/ gold). There are no duplicates within this set therefore the described cross-referencing in which a single poem maps to multiple sequences is not represented. The reader is encouraged to make what he will of the sequences: my intention is that the relationships suggested by the proposed reading-sequences do not establish a single structure designed to constrain the reader but offer, instead, multiple structures that will inspire new relationships of the reader's own making. The work is a memoir-of-sorts. I began working on this piece in January 2011 knowing that I would write about my father who died in January 2007-ten years after he first began experiencing symptoms of dementia. In that time I took off the Fall semester and lived in San Francisco. Writing this work caused my own re-examination on life with my parents, life at MIT and life out in the world. The work examines my life at an intimate distance. Even the colors that I used to encode the poems are taken from our family portrait. The card-form emulates exactly how I was remembering my past: connections were formed and then blurred; random details were vivid and unforgettable while others completely disappeared. The resulting work explores the lines between art and life, between art-making and life-making, between past and present, between solitude and loneliness, between intellectual exile and the comforts of home, between "family" self and "independent" self. In the sixty-seven cards represented within this document are the past five years of my life.