"I lean into that restlessness by assembling the poem, the multiform poem, as it locates its wholeness spreading to more than one place—a verse, an essay, a book, a performance, a video, a sound."

Carolina Ebeid is a multimedia poet and author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior (2106) and the chapbook Dauerwunder: a brief record of facts (2023). Her work has been supported by the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, Bread Loaf, CantoMundo, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. A longtime editor, she helps edit poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the online zine Visible Binary. From 2023-2025 she is the Bonderman Assistant Professor of poetry at Brown University.

"SHE GOT LOVE:
A Circle of Spells for Ana Mendieta"

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS:

"Voice Becoming Artifact"

"Wound Studies"

Artist Reflection

However a work begins for me, whether with a phrase, a rhythm, a moving image in the mind, a concept, the glossing of a single word, it takes root in the pages of a notebook. What a porous surface that ends up being, holes or openings, fits and starts that make possible the development of a poem. So hybrid by nature, the notebook; I find a certain “notebook energy” propelling (or vexing) my poems into being. I lean into that restlessness by assembling the poem, the multiform poem, as it locates its wholeness spreading to more than one place—a verse, an essay, a book, a performance, a video, a sound.  

For example, “She Got Love: a circle of spells for Ana Mendieta” started as notes on a butcher paper scroll. These were lines, drawings, rings of words in Spanish and English. I wanted to write about the letter O, its origin as the Phoenician pictograph of the eye, how it squints out of the word no, how that word relates to the life and work of Mendieta, how there was no “eye witness” at her horrific and untimely death. Every morning I returned to the scroll-writing; cross-legged on the floor, it became a ritual, along with chants and meditations. This lends me an understanding of what performance space might be. I wanted to make something at once analog and digital. I made stop motion animation sketches, I recorded a dance, collected videos from my phone, I curved the lines into circles, semicircles, slivers that took on the circular motions of the scroll-paper itself. “Say something about the method of composition itself,” says Walter Benjamin, “how everything one is thinking at a specific moment in time must at all costs be incorporated into the project then at hand.” We are grateful to Keith Waldrop for his translation.