Us: An exchange
Community: Part 3
An exchange: Community
This month’s exchange is on the topic of Community, a series of six pieces written over the past three months, poems from Brian Funke, author of Poetry & Process, and Jason McBride, author of Weirdo Poetry. A newsletter will be published daily for six days, exploring different aspects of Community, each publication responding to and building on the prior piece from the collaborating artist. Read along and consider your own community with themes of childhood, friendship, love, broken community, leaving and returning, solitude, nature, searching, parenting, and promises.
I hope you enjoy this collaborative effort on Community.
Community: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6
Us
Brian Funke
These words could not be part of the picture, only a fleeting attempt to frame our masterpiece which has no border, that was the mistake, my words among our words, my words simple words that should have been swallowed as we are inaudibly spoken in the inverse space between each of us. To fill that place with sound that has its own reverberation, to build wooden stools in a place where we are meant to run, to lay claim to liquid that can only slip between our fingers as it is meant to flow forever is to deny a life to what exists alive among us. Let us each return. You bring your sketch and I will bring my pages, there will be his polaroids and her prints and paintings, we can cut these pieces and glue them beautifully back together, stitched in a new way, a new collage, rebirth of what there was before.
Us was written as a reflection on Jason’s poem, Suburban Lost Boys, specifically the line “We all loved each other without having to say it”. There is a challenge that can arrive in community when words are used to define what exists naturally in the community. There is certainly a necessity of language between people, but I believe labels often create limitations in the potential of community, or at their worst are used to prevent necessary growth and evolution.
The theme of collage art was prompted by Jason’s beautiful art that he pairs with his haiku throughout WeirdoPoetry. You’ll get additional flavors of this art in a future edition of An exchange: Community, publishing again tomorrow.
Thank you for reading! Please leave a comment about what strikes you, speaks to you, or stirs in you while you read. Perhaps reflect on the question, have you been part of a community that thrived, then faltered?
Part 4 of Community is coming tomorrow! Until then…
May you be brave in returning.
Brian
This such a beautiful poem! It brings up new images for me every time I read it.
"...labels often create limitations in the potential of community...."
Why is it the easiest thing--and also the hardest thing in the world--to be together in community without the need to over-explain, structure, and control? If you can find yourself in a group of kind folks who can pull it off, it is blissful. I used to be part of a group of parents. We would meet at a local park all day with absolutely no agenda. Our kids would play while we relaxed nearby. A lot of the parents were writers and artists. We just hung out and sketched or talked or knitted. It was very relaxed and sort of tribal. The only requirement to be part of the group: kindness. In fact, the group couldn’t even define itself-- we called ourselves “a fluid possibility.” The ideas that came from that group were endlessly creative. One 10 year-old girl organized a big group of other kids to put on full Shakespeare plays every summer. Bands formed and still exist. When kind, creative people get together, something great is bound to happen.