Artist Statement
As an independent fellow, my experience with COUNTERCLOCK has provided me with the invaluable space and time to explore an interdisciplinary project I plan to continue working on even after the collective’s end. This project, of which my pieces are excerpts, is a fragmentary long-form poem called Joan Awaiting Trial. Told through the voice of Joan of Arc while in prison waiting to be tried for (among other things) witchcraft and crossdressing by the English, the poem explores Joan’s captive mindset and circumstances, but also often reaches outside that specific historical context to include modern and/or fictional elements. Historical records indicate that while Joan was in prison, she stopped receiving the visions (which she believed to be Saint Catherine and the Archangel Michael) that had been guiding her during the war; I was interested in exploring both the experience of having divine encounters and the experience of their loss. As Joan contemplates her transition from peasant girl to God’s chosen hero to abandoned political prisoner, her relation to time, language, and logic become fragmented and nonlinear. Her experiences are, in essence, incommunicable—not in the least because the real and historical Joan could not read or write. And yet, she still attempts to communicate them to us, through both language and image.
While working on Joan Awaiting Trial, I have relied on translated court transcripts of the English officials’ questioning of Joan, Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, and a variety of other inspirations, some of which have little or nothing to do with Joan of Arc. The pieces quote the Bible and Twin Peaks; riff on Frank O’Hara and medieval paintings of the Archangel Michael; reference bombs as often as church bells. By working with such a wide variety of inspirations, I hope to evoke in the reader the same effect of slipping in and out of time and space as Joan is experiencing. One original element that might be important to note is Portia, Joan’s childhood friend and interlocutor in the excerpt of the same name; Portia is totally fictionalized, so readers shouldn’t worry about trying to hunt her down in a historical record.
I would like to thank my mentors and cohort mates from the bottom of my heart for pushing me to make Joan Awaiting Trial as good as I could make it; through my conversations with them, what began as an exercise in writing persona poems became something much deeper and more personal. Over the course of my COUNTERCLOCK experience, I moved from trying to put distance between myself as a writer and Joan as a character to embracing and exploring the places where my own voice and Joan’s merged. That movement, along with many others that bettered the poem, was completely due to the amazing feedback I received over the course of the summer.
COUNTERCLOCK has been an amazing experience for me, and I am so grateful for the opportunities it has provided. Thank you to everyone involved for helping me develop this project, which I am so passionate about—I hope you all enjoy Joan Awaiting Trial.