Post-Apocalyptic Poetry

My project deals with a chaotic post-apocalyptic world in which production of new items ceases and innovation is limited to alterations of what already exists. People are in a sense condemned to explore every aspect of what our culture has created as they struggle to survive. I like the image of opening caverns within our mental images of objects, excavating them for every inch of usable space, and in this way coming to know our culture thoroughly.

What happens to the arts after the apocalypse?
I am interested in the Greek poet Sappho, who lived in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. She seemed like a fitting choice because she comes from a dead civilization, and her poetry already comes to us in fragments.


Her work is mysterious and its meaning has already been remixed and reclaimed for a variety of agendas. I chose a few poems with only one known line, wrote them out on pronto plates, and chopped the plates up into individual words.

The original lines were:

• I would not think to touch the sky with two arms.
• Not one girl, I think, who looks on the light of the sun will ever have wisdom like this.
  
• The doorkeeper’s feet are seven armlengths long, five oxhides for his sandals, ten shoemakers worked on them.
• Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time.
• Sweet mother, I cannot work the loom – I am broken with longing for a boy by slender Aphrodite.
  

I wanted to see what unexpected meanings I could unearth using only the words from five lines from Sappho. I decided that I would only used grammatical structures taken from one the poems, and I used words from the line "I would not think to touch the sky with two arms" to replace corresponding parts of speech in other poems. Using these, I printed new post-apocalyptic poems.


The poems are printed on the insides of book covers that I got from the social work library.


The book covers make an embracing or protecting gesture. They are defensive and I think of them protecting themselves and the pieces of culture they carry against the dangerous post-apocalyptic world until civilization stabilizes.

They can lie flat or stand up.

Here are a couple of poems I printed on paper:


The poems are nonsensical because I want people to have the experience of stretching their minds to invent a story or meaning. I ran with the grunginess that resulted from printing the tiny pronto plates many times, in order to create a contrast to the slick aesthetic of mass-production.

Finally, although the poems were the goal of the project, I also became interested in the pronto plates themselves as aesthetic objects.