During the fall of 2015, I worked in an artist residency at Largo das Artes in Rio de Janeiro, and I would often stop to talk with Carlos, a man who sold kitchen tools from a streetside stand outside my studio in Rio de Janeiro. One day, while I examined his potato masher, he noticed my embroidered poem stretched over a hoop and sticking out of my bag. He urged me to meet Marcia.
Marcia Rodrigues Braga crocheted bikinis in the stand next to Carlos, where she also sold hats and bags. I returned to meet Marcia, and she pulled out a long golden needle. This was her method of embroidery, a beautiful method of pushing the needle through the fabric, creating stitches on one side and loops on the other. She insisted I practice, and gifted me with the needle.

The golden needle was the first of many gifts.

Often I would see Carlos alone, watching both their stands, and he would suggest that there would be a particular reason for me to return and see Marcia. Indeed, at night, at home, Marcia embroidered me a golden petaled, purple centered flower on yellow cloth. When she presented it to me, she suggested I embroider a poem on it. A poem!

I wrote that poem, embroidering it on a large cloth, pale purple on cream Brazillian cotton. When I presented it to Marcia, people gathered on the street to read it, nodding in appreciation that she was the recipient of an ode.
That was in December, and a few days later, the day I was flying home, I stopped by to say my farewells to Marcia. This time, she had made me a scarf, concerned that I was leaving the summer of Rio for the winter of Oregon. Indeed, the morning was cold when the plane landed in Portland, and the scarf kept me warm.

Marcia Embroidered Me the Sun

One November day, I stopped to talk with Carlos, a man who sold kitchen tools from a streetside stand outside my studio in Rio de Janeiro. As I looked at his potato masher, he noticed the embroidered poem, stretched over a hoop and sticking out of my bag. He urged me to meet Marcia.

Marcia Rodrigues Braga crocheted bikinis in the stand next to Carlos, where she also sold hats and bags. I returned to meet Marcia, and she pulled out a long golden needle. This was her method of embroidery, a beautiful method of pushing the needle through the fabric, creating stitches on one side and loops on the other. She insisted I practice, and gifted me with the needle.

The golden needle was the first of many gifts. Often I would see Carlos alone, watching both their stands, and he would suggest that there would be a particular reason for me to return and see Marcia. Indeed, at night, at home, Marcia embroidered me a golden petaled, purple centered flower on yellow cloth. When she presented it to me, she suggested I embroider a poem on it. A poem.

I wrote that poem, embroidering it on a large cloth, pale purple on cream Brazillian cotton. When I presented it to Marcia, people gathered on the street to read it, nodding in appreciation that she was the recipient of an ode.

That was in December, and a few days later, the day I was flying home, I stopped by to say my farewells to Marcia. This time, she had made me a scarf, concerned that I was leaving the summer of Rio for the winter of Oregon. I wore that scarf home.

Odes for Strangers as Friends

Odes to other people are acknowledgements, celebrations, efforts to see each other. I have an ongoing ode that I create through conversations with people, one line for each person that incorporates their line. I started this by inhabiting my exhibit at the Cascade Gallery in January and February of 2015.

solo & artist-team

“The Day is Bright with Burning Fossils,” White Gallery, Portland State University, May 5-May 26, 2017

“Moth Flame Desire.” Cascade Gallery. Portland Community College. January-February 2016.

New work from The Watcher Files Project, Portland State University, Portland, OR (1800 SW 6th Avenue, Portland, OR, 97201 – ground floor) Jan. 17-April 9, 2015

Passing it On. Multnomah County Library, North Portland Branch. November-December 2014.

City of Portland Archives and Records Center. October-May, 2014.

group

“Expanded Readings.” Sheppard Gallery. University Nevada, Reno. February-March 2017.

Moth, Flame, Desire. Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro. October & November 2015.

PDX Contemporary Window Project. May 2015.

Beyond the Fury (dropcloth poem). Dusie Poetry Group Exhibit. Brown University Library. Providence, Rhode Island. May 2015.

Air the Fire: A Poem Triptych. Window Project (solo). PDX Contemporary Art. May 2015.

She had her Own Reason for Participating. Handmade/ Homemade” Group Exhibit. Pace University. Mortola Library (Pleasantville campus) March 2015. Birnbaum Library, New York City, April 2015.

Exhibition of Kaia Sand’s poetry notebooks. Glyph Cafe, Portland. Jan.2015.

The Watcher Files Project included in Antena Exhibition, The Blaffer Gallery, curated by Jen Hofer, JP Pluecker, & Amy Powell. Jan. 14-May 10, 2014.

“Beyond the Fury” included in Object Poems, 23 Gallery, Portland, Curated by David Abel, Nov 4-26, 2011.

permanent collections

Air the Fire. City of Portland.

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  watch the premiere performance of the title work

  
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  Kaia Sand’s work always interests me: her inventories, interventions, recordings, dispatches, her mixing memos into songs, her soundings and measurements and exposés. These are lived poems, necessary and urgent and I learn from them. She is to be honored, read, shared, and given our undivided attention.

  —Carolyn Forché, Author Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2004) Editor, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W. W. Norton, 1993)

While in residency at Largo das Artes in Rio de Janeiro, funded by the Regional Arts and Culture Council, I investigated corporeal decay, fire, and power, stemming fro research into global warming and ever-more-extreme means of extracting oil. I drew from a range of influences in Brazil- from the artists Leonilson and Arthur Bispo do Rosário to the popular and public poetry practices of “literatura de cordel” in the northeast of Brazil as well as “pixação”, the poetry painted on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. I wrote about this for the Poetry Project Newsletter.

I exhibited this work at Largo das Artes in October and November 2015, at the Cascade Art Gallery at Portland Community College in January and February 2016, and then Portland State University’s White Gallery in April 2017. I am now expanding the manuscripts to a set of 12.

I am constructing “She Had Her Own Reason” out of hundreds of sentences I encounter in the Watcher Files that begin with the word she. Eventually, this will comprise a drawer of copper cards, a poetic alternative to the meticulous index cards the police investigators kept on activists.

The following is the excerpt of She Had Her Own Reasons that I read on OPB’s Think Out Loud Thursday, Oct 24.

She had her own reason for participating

She also went to night school

She always gets kidded about being a female mechanic at the auto parts shop

She emerged as a major figure in the feminist movement

She is believed to be a Lesbian

She knows of no New York political figures to whom she would have been writing at the age of 17

She couldn’t imagine sitting behind a desk all day

She is still learning

She nurtures her children by trying to save the world from nuclear extinction

She pleaded guilty to the charge strictly on the advice of her court-appointed attorney

She says, I think I was socialized into a more traditional job

She suffered a concussion

She thought it was just a friendly visit

She thought she had something better

She used to be resorts editor for Golf Digest Magazine

She was a co-founder of Portland Women Strike for Peace

She was always hunched over the machine

She was beaten regularly for at least four years

She was disappointed by the fact she helped them form their structure, and then they wouldn’t allow her to become a member

She was feeling so damned tired

She became shop chairman of her union

She was one of 13 women who fasted 37 days on behalf of the ERA

She worked as a writer

She works as a bartender

She would never be convinced

She’s had a few humorous incidents

She’s only as rich as the poorest of the poor

She’s studying art history, painting, self defense, and Aikido

-Kaia Sand

source: Police Investigative Files, City of Portland Archives

Teaching link: http://kaiasand.net/hammer-a-poem/

Remember to Wave is an inexpert investigation, a pedestrian inquiry. I mapped & remapped a walk near the Expo Center in North Portland as both composition and participatory performance, leading walks of up to 40 people between 2008 and 2010. I was interested in reading this space through this exercise & sustained attention, research & conversation, opening up inquiry. What I immediately noticed became a part of the work, from the Expo Center trade shows to the Roller Derby matches that drew me to the space in the first place.

But the project was also about being attuned to aspects of the geography more difficult to read, what I came to call the the elsewhere & erstwhile, emphasizing the connective thinking of poetry. Reading that space for the erstwhile meant reading it for the history of incarceration of Japanese Americans that happened in World War II. In May 1942 over 3000 people were imprisoned in the Expo Center, what was called the Portland Assembly Center, living in spaces built over animal stalls in this building.

And an erstwhile reading of the space also coaxes up the history of Vanport City, which was built in the floodplain land surrounding the Expo Center when people were imprisoned there, and which housed over 40,000 people who built the ships to fight the war.

And after the war, Vanport housed people who returned from that war–GIs, but also, significantly, some of the people who were first imprisoned in the Portland Assembly Center and then imprisoned inland, and upon release, ended up living in that same area where they were forcibly held, but that land continued to prove repellent, because the city was destroyed in 1948 by a flood.

In this project, context becomes textual, creating constraints and possibilities. Existing signs, such as ones that announce the toxicity of the slough water, become a part of the poetry. Traffic drowns out conversation on a stretch of the walk along Marine Drive, so this led me bring the book back into that space, laying down haiku written in the Tule Lake internment camp, one of the internment camps people were sent from the Portland Assembly Center. Portable Demand Storage Units create situational rhymes.

They are monuments to possessions in a context where Japanese Americans were ordered to only bring what possessions they could carry, and they were stripped of that possibility of storage. And, in a context where people were forced off the land by flooding, the fact that PODS have been turned into makeshift disaster shelters creates another situational rhyme.

Participation mattered in many ways, from the conversations I had with people as we walked to a the more structured participation of the mud slough ode. At the beginning of the walk I distribute a pamphlet with a section for walkers to write down observations (this is now part of the book by Tinfish Press. This culminated in the Mud Slough Ode, on an outcropping of a rock amphitheater along the mud slough off the Columbia River. I choreograph this impromptu poem by gesturing to people to say words and phrases.

A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff. Performed December 1, 2011.

A New Ending for the Trump Administration. Performed at Powell’s on Hawthorne, Portland, Feb 2017

Some of us take up so much space for our shelter. Some, so little. We dwell in a landscape of foreclosed houses, those shells of shelter, and also, shelter-less people.

My investigation zeroed on the financial speculation that puffed around the housing foreclosures. Its complexity and obscurity are its power. Thus, I doggedly read, focusing less on the over-aspiring homeowner or even the real estate flipper, and more on the leveraging that was so extreme, it could collapse the economy.

Seems like a good subject for poetry. I am interested in a poetic practice that insists on inexpert inquiry, gathering ideas and ways of knowing to open a space for more collaborative inquiry. While I read, I embroidered a poem, line by line, on an 8-foot-dropcloth. I also wrote a magic show, A Tale of Money that Lost its Puff, in collaboration with magician and whistler Mitch Hider, and Jules Boykoff.

During autumn 2010, I held two Econ Salon. The first, in a studio in the Goldsmith Building in Portland’s Old Town, featured poetry readings by Jules Boykoff, Allison Cobb, and me; music by Cynthia Nelson, an economics talk by Robin Hahnel.

I hosted the second and larger Econ Salon in the Field Work art space in SW Portland. This Econ Salon featured A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff; as well as the video installation collaboration between Jen Coleman, Andrea Murray, Kristen Sheeran and me titled It’s a Wonderful Time to Buy; a talk by Ibrahim Mubarak on organizing houseless and formerly houseless people through Right2Survive; and a talk by Angela Martin on organizing people around debt. Art Installations included a Dollhouse Squat created by Right2Survive; Matta-Clark Park Series by David Buuck, and “Sheltered” by Jennifer Hardacker. I created several poetry objects, including the dropcloth poem, “Beware the Fury of the Financier,” and a small poem-structure, “A Shelter for Some Poems.”

Some aspects of the Happy Valley Project exceeded the Econ Salons. I routinely set out a sandwich poem in Old Town, pen hanging, and passersby added lines. I also created a chapbook, the roof of locked shields, as well as a broadside of the dropcloth poem, for the dusie kollektiv and a newspaper article for Street Roots on the class-action lawsuits against the Bear Stearns/JP Morgan Chase.

During the fall of 2008–when the heft of the financial, and thus, economic crisis sank in–I wanted to better understand what was going on, and I wondered if cultural forms might contribute to this understanding. So I launched the first econ salon with Alicia Cohen at the Clinton Corner Café, interested in how the conventional poetic reading venue of the candle-lit bistro might reframe economics lectures & q&as, which were, in this case, led by economists Kristen Sheeran & Robin Hahnel. Later that fall, I hosted a subsequent econ salons at an Alliance for Democracy meeting. I also wanted to see how poems and other cultural projects might add to the conversation, so Jules read his poem “Das Greenspan” at this and several subsequent Econ Salons.

Tiny arctic ice is an experiment in recasting. Rather than drafting this poem toward a final draft, I write as an act of recasting, again and again, to slow down my attention and consider how context itself might matter to the poem.

I wrote the first version of the poem in 2007 when I built a book out of a teabag for the Dusie Kollektiv (at that time, the world’s population was 6.6 billion; I update this number as I recast the poem). I recast it through performance in 2009 at Caberet Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, curated by Susana Gardener, when Swiss poet Katherin Schaeppi helped me translate lines into Swiss and jot them onto paper airplanes. Jessi Wahnetah and Stella Gockenbach launched the planes into audience, who then read the lines aloud.

In a similar action, I wrapped lines around flowers from the adjacent farmer’s market, and handed these to audience members who then read lines, when I performed at St. Johns Bookseller’s Market Day series in 2009. Other recast versions have appeared as a broadside created by Mel Nichols for the Ruthless Grip series, in the journal Capitalism, Nature Socialism, and in the Pacific Poetry Project anthology. Jim Dine recast the text for one of his books in his Hot Dreams series.

By staying with this poem and accruing details about contemporary conditions, from global warming to labor to global trade, I hope to learn something. Meaning through accretion.

publication history
2007 teabag poem created for Dusie Kollektiv
2008 Jacket Magazine
2009 paper airplane performance at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich for DA du DA sie
2009 flower giveaway performance at Market Day Poetry Series, St. Johns Book Store, Portland, Oregon
2010 Capitalism, Nature, Socialism
2012 Financial Times newspaper accordion performance, Hi Zero poetry reading in Brighton, UK
2013 E-Waste performance at Ecopoetics Conferences at Berkeley
2013 Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (anthology by Ooligan Press)
2016 A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff (poetry collection, Tinfish Press 2016)

I collaborated with Lynn Grannan on a project leading discussions and writing projects about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Through a collaboration between Oregon Nikkei Endowment, Sisters of the Road, Street Roots, and Transition Projects, Inc, we worked with students, as well as poets who are homeless, and who voiced connections to the themes of displacement, marginalization and discrimination. Because most of the participants had not experienced the persecution of internment first-hand, we grappled with the question Ariel Dorfmann raises in his poem, “Vocabulary”:

But how can I tell their story if I was not there?

During our writing workshops, Lynn Grannan discussed Nikkei history, including World War II incarceration. I led the students in reflective writing. Sometimes poems emerged in the workshop, such as Leo Rhodes’ poem in conversation with Lawson’s Inada’s “Remembering Gila.”

A major strategy I used was to form group poems through repetition. Fourth grade students from Riverdale Elementary wrote various statements to the prompts “I now know” and “I hope.” I then collaged these lines into a long poem. Students from Forest Grove Community School, Japanese American Citizens League Unite People youth group and Pacific University wrote poems as well. Some of the students wrote about their ancestors’ experiences of World War II incarceration.

We turned the poems from all the participants into banners designed by Malia Acohido. The banners were displayed on the Portland waterfront during the rededication of the Japanese American Historical Plaza during the summer of 2011. The banners now hang inside the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center.

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  the book began as a walk...

  

  “reviews & articles”

  “The Oregonian (BT Shaw).
  “Street Roots (Carmel Bentley).
  “Oregon Humanities (Lucy Burningham).
  “Spoon River Review (Ryan Clark).

  “Honolulu Weekly (Adrienne LaFranc).

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  “Woooo weee!—this book is really something! It’s both “too much” and the “total package,” and then some—sort of like an “All You Can Eat” site—a “smelter”—in a rock-alcove below petroglyphs. “Sand” plus “Wave” plus “Tinfish”—that’s the cool combo, combined with Vision, Heart, Smarts, Reach, Diligence, Direction, and good doses of downhome, downright Whimsy!”–Lawson Fusao Inada”In this profound and threaded mapping, Sand composes “an ode of accretion”—a song of our ruins made visible.”–Craig Santos Perez

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  Reviews

  First Book Blow Out Publishers Weekly

  Review by Dan Pinkerton, Smartish Pace

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• “Sand is a necessary poet, and bracingly new.”–Carolyn Forché

  “This work is a love of possibility and the humanity that goes there, with the collectively-driven conviction “it is now we must begin / to gather.”–Heather Fuller

  “Whether readers approach this book for its vibrant language, its formal variety, or its political content, they will come away admiring interval for the wit and care that shaped each phrase.” — Dan Pinkerton, “Smartish Pace”