What is the significance of this work to you?

In the early months of 2020, I began working on a digitally-mediated, poetic project called SPACE ROCK. One of the first pieces that took shape was “smokedark vacuum.” Broadly speaking, SPACE ROCK is an exploration of faithstuff prompted by conversations with my partner, who is deeply rooted in a defined, god-based faith. I, on the other hand, am not. Being in this multi-year, inter-belief relationship has, for the first time in my life, made me think about myself as an “unbeliever,” which is a word that doesn’t taste right in my mouth. There’s an implied vacancy or void that doesn’t square with what I feel inside. SPACE ROCK, in many ways, has emerged from my attempts to sketch the contours of this “non-void.” It has also become a collaborative project with contributions from nearly thirty friends and loved ones. 

Within the context of SPACE ROCK, “smokedark vacuum” serves as a compass and a celebration. It has been a way for me to identify some of the tethers that keep me grounded and hopeful as we hurtle through the cosmic vacuum and contend with the horror(s) of our societal garbagefire(s). It has also allowed me to reflect on the power/potential of writing/translation to create/strengthen/expand community. This poem is about naming that power/potential and sharing my full-throated gratitude for the people in my life who have allowed me to experience it firsthand. 

What is the significance of the form you chose for this work?

“smokedark vacuum” is an audio/visual poem that incorporates text, music, and a constellation of hyperlinks which connect to photos, videos, digital downloads, and webpages. Given the poem’s thematic focus on interconnection, it felt important to me that the formal elements allowed for—and encouraged!—connection across media and genre. For instance, the very first line of the poem links to an audio file that accompanies the text, and a line further down links to an interactive “clickbait sonnet” that I wrote this spring. I wanted the poem to be an open invitation to swirl.  

In addition to exploring hybridity at a formal level, I was interested in using “smokedark vacuum” to disrupt the boundary between authorship and translation. Specifically, I included a sequence of binary code taken from a poem called “Blog” by the Mexican poet Yaxkin Melchy. I’ve been translating the book this sequence comes from (El nuevo mundo I [The new world I]), and it has been fun to plant “seeds” of Yaxkin’s work in my own, watching to see what grows. In this case, I started with his short binary sequence, decoded it into Spanish, translated that Spanish phrase into English, and then “retranslated” the English into binary code. Additionally, I treated the binary sequences as musical scores, and recorded two complementary versions to provide an auditory experience of reading—not just skimming over –but actually reading and listening to the binary code. Experimentation like this has been a nourishing way for me to engage more deeply with Yaxkin’s poetics while moving beyond the traditional binary of author/translator.

What was the process for creating this work?

This poem has been a slow burner. It started with a written draft of the text followed by subsequent modifications, massages, and re-imaginings over more than half a year. At the same time as I was writing the early versions of “smokedark vacuum,” I was translating the poem “Blog” by Yaxkin Melchy, which I mentioned above. What I love about the binary sequence in his poem is that it takes a phrase that could be read easily by us humans and “translates” it into a language that is easy for computers, but not for us. Thus, the (human) reader is forced to either skip over the section, treating it as simply a visual marker of “computer language,” or slow down entirely to decode it, thus revealing the book/mirror message within. In this way, our normal speed/pace of reading is fundamentally disrupted. 

As I was translating Yaxkin’s binary sequence into its “English” equivalent, I began to think about other ways to encourage the reader to slow down and “read” rather than skip over the sequence. This is when I decided to treat the binary code as a score and record two musical versions (with the English and Spanish in harmony). I thought that listening would create another “slow” way to “read” the binary code – an additional layer of translation. During this recording process, I decided to plant Yaxkin’s sequence into my own poem, since he is someone who embodies the community-rooted, access-prioritized poetics that I wanted to celebrate in “smokedark vacuum.”  

After all of this initial drafting and “transplanting,” I finally began to experiment with the full-length audio version of “smokedark vacuum.” Tinkering around on my partner’s laptop, I tried to create a sonic texture that was in conversation with the visual presentation of the poem. On screen, there is white text against a mostly dark background with some smears of light appearing several stanzas in. The photo itself is of light streaming in through a bedroom window. But at the scale it appears on screen, it mimics a cosmic backdrop for the letters/stars. This mixed sensation of insomnious, late-night light and telescopic star spattering was what I hoped to capture in the final audio recording. We’ll see if it translates ☺

Ryan Greene is a translator, poet, and bookmaker from Phoenix, Arizona. He’s the instigator behind F*%K IF I KNOW//BOOKS, and he’s translated work by Claudina Domingo, Elena Salamanca, Ana Belén López, Giancarlo Huapaya, and Yaxkin Melchy, among others. His translations have found a home in places like Asymptote, Tripwire, and The Revolution (Relaunch). His translations of selected poems by Ana Belén López appear in the bilingual chapbook rojo si pudiera ser rojo // red if it could be red (Anomalous Press, 2019). Since 2018, he has facilitated the Cardboard House Press Cartonera Collective bookmaking workshops at Palabras Bilingual Bookstore.