Poem: "Sonnet i" at Vermont Studio Center

It's not often I get to share a poem in a gallery setting but during my residency at Vermont Studio Center, writers -- as well as artists -- were invited to submit a piece for an informal group show. Which made me wonder how I might transform a poem into an objet d'art in its own right. Having read from Infinity Standing Up during our artist presentations the week before, I recalled the lovely YouTube recordings that actor Kelly Costigan had done of a handful of those collected sonnets, especially her whispered version of "Sonnet i." I liked how she'd made the sound of that poem appropriately small given the poem's subject matter, and thought it would be fun to make the physical space occupied by the poem small as well. So I came up with this idea of printing the text so tiny that you could only read it with a magnifying glass. You can see how the poem was displayed on a pedestal at the VSC gallery above or read the poem without a magnifying glass below.

Sonnet i 

i’ve become so small since seeing you or 

more like from how little you see me now  

and how not seeing you makes me feel for 

you see i see myself more now in how 

i am perceived than how i came to be  

this way and how wee our we has become 

and how that came to pass this me not me 

no me myself and I the total sum 

a some less thing or a thing less same than  

i would want it but it is what it is 

and what it is isn’t and you’re not and 

i can’t and we were but we aren’t this 

thing that i miss that never truly was 

but i wish wishing made it so because 

"Sonnet i" was first published in the Blue Nib in 2017 then included in my poetry collection Infinity Standing Up in 2019.