Artist’s Statement
Almost every aspect of an inherited language comes from disregarded experiences: the physicality of the word blurt when someone first blurted the word, or the referential physicality of a word like “stunned” and “stunning” are lost when we encounter them pinned in a lexicon.
We dispatch and receive every word with the speed of clichés, and it’s poetry’s job to slow us down. It makes the familiar strange again, and brings us back to our bodies, to the sensorial, asemantic experience through which we perceive the world, without judgement, without certainty.
In the 1980s, one woman “felt something” in the presence of the elephants, and began looking into the possibility of physical realities beyond our senses. She learned that elephants communicate using a subsonic frequency that humans can’t hear, and that they have been singing all along.
We observe that honeybees dance, beetles play, and ladybugs eat their young. There is so much that I will never understand.
But to be transfixed by the flagrant presence of it all is to be imperfectly human in the physical world.
Bio & CV
Born in California, reared on the wrong side of the tracks, Ren has settled on the western coast of Norway. She has published six full-length poetry collections, over a dozen books of translations, and her playtexts have been performed in Canada, Norway, and the United States. Ren’s own work has been translated into eight languages.
