Tylyn K. Johnson
Foreword The process of creating this project was one that centered around playing with language and allowing the page to become a playground in the same way that the canvas is the playground of the painter, or the eld is for the athlete. When I approached this project, I didn’t want it to be just a chapbook that you read and maybe reread, but eventually forget how you interacted with it. I wanted my chapbook to be something you can experience beyond what you read, but with what you can possibly create inside and in between the pages I’ve shared with you today. When I was workshopping some of the poems for this project, I was focused on experimenting and playing with my own approach to poetry-writing, seeing how I am already using language and discovering how I may learn to use it. And I think in that process of playing with my own writing style, I found myself exploring di erent aspects of my own perspective, aesthetic, and experience. This is something that I think may ring particularly well with other Black and/or Queer [and/or other marginalized] artists, who often nd themselves shoehorned into very speci c topics and themes, and so I wanted to explicitly explore that multi-faceted sense of artistry within me, and to be able to loosely connect those things together without having to make my poems bleed each other to be in a shared space. The themes I sought to explore in the poetry of the chapbook are best described by the subtitle of this project “The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Deathly.” I wanted to make this space one where I could interact with the many facets of my experience, especially one that is Black and Queer and creative and wall ower and the many other facets of what it means to be human. And in exploring these broad, interweaving themes in this chapbook, I also wanted to make the broader chapbook experience one that allowed my audience to interject themselves onto the page in ways beyond even my own imagining. No art is made in a vacuum, and even if I may never get to experience the art someone creates from atop my own work, I want to know a reality in which such a practice is well-loved and cherished by those who make art from my own.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 5 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
