the word you were looking for by Claire Ledoyen
Claire LeDoyen is originally from the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia. A 2016 graduate from the Pratt Institute Creative Writing program, Claire interned that year at the performance studies publication Emergency Index at Ugly Duckling Presse. Their work has appeared in publications such as the 2015 Book Bloc: Critical Reactions to Racist Policing, “FORCE/FIELDS” by Perennial Press, SLUG MAG and most recently, the Bureau of Complaint and Boreal Zine. They love drinking beers with the boys and are an amateur historian of Jamaican music.
Claire LeDoyen in her own word
"This was my first thinking-feelings around forcefields - bodies within those fields, the page as a field as well. In some of the more spatially designed work, I followed my intuition discovering the words on the page as I wrote them, as if it was an archeological work that was waiting to be unearthed beneath the blank page. “It all” was originally written in a dance studio, documenting the words that came along as I moved freely across the space, how I felt was necessary to dance next. One can interpret this piece somewhat similarly to Tatsumi Hijikata’s choreographical notes in Costume en Face: A Primer of Darkness for Young Boys and Girls published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Two more huge written influences on me are Jeanne Achterberg’s “Imagery in Healing: Shamanism in Modern Medicine” and Bernard Stiegler’s “For A New Critique of Political Economy.” The former showed me the necessity of visualization and psychic awareness, the latter dictated to me how psychic, or tertiary, retention functions within socio-economical fields.
"I trust my intuition highly. These poems exist in a space outside of or maybe inhabiting simultaneously the past, present and future. A space requiring divination. A space for me to comfortably inhabit along with spirits. The words are spirits, or rather bodies, within the field. The words have auras and the pieces themselves have an aura made of up those radiuses. These are the mechanics - bodies of force within the expanse of a field, or the page.
My poetry hero, maybe an anti-hero, I always seem to return to Charles Bukowski. Shrug."