ARTIST STATEMENT: DS CHAPMAN

My poetry takes advantage of a variety of techniques—blending, layering, filtering, cut-up, collage, erasure—to imitate the material properties of water and glass, straining towards an experience of simultaneity and the illegible. Like water, I try to soak and saturate each poem, drenching them with content until the information itself transforms; and like glass I try to embed multiple simultaneous visual planes in a single field, creating parallel readings and parallel worlds—the image on the far side of the glass, the pane itself, and the reflections of the near side. The source material comes from my personal world and from the internet, repurposing, corrupting, and distorting meme culture, social media, and advertising/branding to first acknowledge and then to abandon the escalating excesses of visual and textual information under capitalism. Each poem is the result of an iterative process of organic discovery, the productive sibling of “playing on your phone,” and a medium of intimate expression—bright, noisy spaces where I explore my own relationships with whiteness, queerness, and the Anthropocene, open to interpretation and subject to change.

SOUND SCRAPER

SLEEP CYCLE

WASHUP

MF

DS Chapman is a queer poet whose work can be found in Posit, BARNHOUSE, Figure 1, Soft Cartel, and elsewhere. ig: @ds_chapman