2017 - present
knitted poems created in ongoing performances
Grab Bag is a continuation and finalization of my knitted poetry projects k2tog and The Waste Land, in which I have translated famous poems into knitted pieces and accompanying knitting patterns through live performances. I create these pieces by translating the stressed & unstressed beats of the poems into knit & purl stitches.
In this ongoing performance, I am knitting all 114 of Ezra Pound’s Cantos—a collection of poems which vary widely in their form and language. Pound’s Cantos are a contentious body of work, emblematic of the male Modernist poets—in turns beautifully crafted & formally innovative, and virulently anti-Semitic & culturally appropriative.
Through my translations, I am hoping to rewrite this text, which is still widely and often uncritically taught in universities, into a present and imagined future in which I and others like (and unlike) me are not only included in the canon, but celebrated in all our difference from the exclusionary white male Modernists.
Grab Bag, a name which Pound himself casually gave to the Cantos, seeks to question the exclusivity of different forms of language, the myth of originality and singular genius, the artificial divide between ‘fine arts’ and ‘crafts’, and the politics of wearables and functionality in the realm of fine arts.
Photograph from performance at Casa Del Popolo exhibition, 2019 (Photo: Boris R Thebia)