“Call it fate, call it luck, call it stupidity, we often (resort to) embrace changes as warmly as we do the surprises we may encounter during our cozier writing activities, where poetry would find us more than we forcefully find them. The same thing happened after our recent collaboration with Nguyen Art Foundation’s Thao Le doing a writing workshop in response to a sculpture work by the artist Linh San, whose practice is finding different forms for poetry. To interact with her work, we guided participants through translating the sculptures back to poetry. Unfortunately, the electric water heater at our storage/my apartment, broke and overnight, flooded the place, washing away most of the words on the poems. To think that would be the death of the exquisite poetic corpses would be too defeatist, but still that was a saddening moment waking up to the poems no longer with words.

(Archives, where would they stay? Would they like to “retire”? And where would they like to retire? Would they consider themselves something “final”, sedentary, or would they like to explore more places, more forms, more shades, more multitudes?) The Exquisite Corpse poems were corpses we sculpted as a collective, that experienced a near-death experience in the water damage. Today, we’re going to revive, resurrect, and write new lives to these corpses…”