To: Carole
From: Office of Compliance
Date: 1/7/2017-1/8/2017
Subject: Wave & Tidal Generation Devices
We know you’ve lied about the interior being uninhabited—we know you’ve impacted revenue earning production—we know you’ve sacred wounds—we know you’ve been sneezing in the sun—we know you have energy problems—look at this weeping buddha holding its hands with appetite to invest—your actions are recorded—like tusks crossing borders in your file—we believe in the environment generation industry—you will live in the wake of the wind industry—the tide has gone out—you will receive official censure soon—you stole the stone altar—you lay on a bed of seaweed with buddha—you wept like offshore wind farms
Kodi Saylor received her MFA in poetry at New York University where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Lime Hawk and Blue Mesa Review. She currently works at Newman Library at Virginia Tech.
Artist’s Statement from Kodi Saylor
I work in an academic office setting. These poems were written while awash in the kinds of language I write and receive. Language in the office often makes me feel estranged. Erasure & remix played a large role in the creation of these poems which are part of a larger series. As a librarian, I spend a lot of time thinking about information and how people interact with information, and as a poet, I think about how language is and is not information and how humans use information and language as tools of power. “Subject: Pink Abstraction” refers to Pink Abstraction which is a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, but also draws on a list of tools from a book published to teach English to French speakers. For the other poem “Wave & Tidal Generation Devices”, I borrowed the title from a book about alternative energy sources that I bumped into while doing collection development. That poem draws on alternative energy source imagery but also imagery from something called The Power Deck: Cards of Wisdom, which is something I grew up with and still have in my house. Wrapping all these strands together into a memo format creates a drama about labor and gender and how they function within the banality of everyday working life.