BORDERS kiLL

Justen Ahren

Dear Justen,

Tell us something about your first artistic attempts…did you start with photography, poetry or music?
 
I began with narrative and music. From an early age, 6 or 7, I was aware of an ongoing inner story I was telling and the power of this had in coloring my experiences. It was a parallel life to what was going on. For instance, my family moved around a lot and I often found myself in new situations, new environments. I would be writing in my head, ‘We are moving today. It is raining. We are going to live in a big house by a creek.” 
 
This narrative was a way to process and make sense of things, and also a way to control the situation, providing emotional distance. I could invent myself as a character. And I survived a tenuous childhood in this way. 
 
I employed music similarly. I sang about what was happening, in real time, and later wrote the songs down and kept them in a folder under my bed.  

Currently you are Martha Vineyard’s Poet Laureate. What does that entail?

As Poet Laureate I’m like a poetry ambassador. My only duty is to write a poem for the annual town meeting in April. Unofficially, I try to expose people to poetry and make it feel relevant to their lives. I teach workshops, organize readings and invite the public to try writing poems or at least a line or two. 
 
What do you see as a constant and reoccurring source of inspiration?

Existence. What is this? The big questions: Why am I here? Who am I? Is there a God? To find answers to these in the seasons, in concrete things, the vibrations of nouns, objects, and to decipher how these mean, how they are being, keeps me fascinated. 
 
Also, memory, of people and the places I have been. What resides in me as memory, as residue of the past is a universe upon a universe. 

How can you explain your love of poetry? 
 
Poetry is necessary utterance. It’s the necessary breaking of silence when moved by an event or emotion. It is as close as I can come to expressing silence. 
I love poetry’s economy and music, and I love how I can dream in its air. It’s a room, much smaller than a novel’s, large enough for one’s breath. And I love that in poems I can hear the song and the cry of a human being. It is authentic in an inauthentic world.
 
Do you have poets whose work has had a great influence on your life? 
 
W.S. Merwin, Jane Kenyon, Galway Kinnell, James Wright

Every November, you organize and lead a Writing Workshop in Italy. What is your overreaching goal for this project?

My goal is to encourage people to write the way they dream about. I help establish a writing practice, break the silence of the page and tap into their creative abundance. This is my service. I’ve met so many people who struggle to write, as I have. They are frustrated and aren’t sure how to do this (write).

             A Machine For Remembering

This poem will begin momentarily

above the skyline of the city
an orange-yellow flash,

shattering glass, I lift my lips from
my lover’s navel, inhale her
 
wet, morning scent, black oily smoke,
alarms and sirens. 
 
These things happen at once.
Not far from one another
 
they happen and no actors are be used
in the bombings, or the television
 
recapping of causalities. The scores of Sunday’s
games glide across the screen. 
 
When I lift my eyes again
and gaze over the plain of her
 
the Dow Jones is up 1%,
and translucent spheres swarm her
shoulders, her head, her breasts
in each sphere something
 
I’ve witnessed in real life
or through a screen
 
a girl carrying an ember on a leaf
through the gray drizzle of dawn

a boy shitting in rubble
a dog sniffing and eating it
 
snow rocking down through a halo of streetlight
onto the black avenue of a woman’s hair.
 
And there are more and more spheres
I can’t stop seeing

a man pass his daughter through barbed wire
a child’s limp body turned in the surf
 
spheres filled with nights of bombings
the ash trees along the river
 
strewn with clothes and plastic chairs
an apartment building
 
whose façade is blown off
in which a family can be seen
 
watching television, a boy on television
writing his name with a sparkler. 
 
He doesn’t know the bombs his country spends
in other places, he does not know
 
I lay with my lover, frightened electricity
flickering in the wires of me.  

* * *

What are some of the most poignant moments you’ve experienced throughout this experience year after year? 
 
The process of convening a community of writers, and creating a safe space in which people can go deep and express what is within them is always poignant. It is a reminder that all of us have so much material buried within we could spend life times mining it. To help writers find their stories and their voices is very rewarding. Italy, with its long shadows of history, serves as the perfect setting.
 
One of your photo projects is titled The Real People? What made you work on this project and the choice of title for it?
 
The Real People is what the Nimiipuu or Nez Perce, the Native Americans who inhabit parts of Idaho and Oregon, call themselves. Last year, while traveling in this area, I learned about their war with the U.S. Army in 1877, which drove them from their traditional lands. I decided then to follow and photograph the route of their flight from Idaho through Wyoming and Montana.  
 
I wanted to capture the memories of the land, what remained if you will, what the light witnessed, the rivers, the prairies, and snow.
 
Where do you find The Real People and what’s the most valuable lesson to learn from that fact? 
 
We are all vessels of story. We are born into the middle of epics—family, community, nation, era—and immediately we are assigned a role, and assume a place within the story. It is up to us to question the story and our role, interrogate what we’ve inherited, and step outside the arc to make sense of it for ourselves. 
 
The Real People is not a qualitative title. It speaks to witness—the people who were here, as we are now, engaged in making meaning of this life.
 
How do you feel about social media and art? 
 
It’s a great vehicle for delivery, a way creators can easily reach audiences they could not reach before. It’s a place to find and build community around your work and the work of artists you love. What appears on social media may not be taken as seriously as what appears in traditional media (though this is correcting daily), and the whole culture of social media is becoming another storefront through which we are sold. Yet, the possibilities for engagement and community are still being realized. I love the immediacy of the platform. You can engage an audience in your process and even inspire them to be involved in the process, to be integral to the making through input, feedback, patronage and other support.  It’s fascinating.
 
What are the questions you’re trying to find answers to through your art at this time in your career? 
 
How can we get back to what we belonged to and to where we belong? My next collection, A Machine For Remembering, takes up these questions. The experience of exile is a universal human condition. 
 
Even if we haven’t been exiled from a country, we are exiled from our past, from loved ones who have died, from our Source, that is, from the assurance of knowing where we come from and why we are here.    
 
Are there any upcoming events that feature your work that you’d like to share with us?
 
Shanti Arts Press will publish A Machine For Remembering in January 2019. Also, my work currently is on exhibit at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, through June 2019.

My new collection of music, After The War for the Valley, will be released in January as well and will be available for download on iTunes too. Then, I was awarded a fellowship to create a multimedia performance on refugee and immigrant experiences in Europe using projections, poetry and music. I will be traveling this winter generating new material for this project and posting the work in process on Instagram and Facebook as well as on justenahren.com