Chelsea Werner-Jatzke

A collaborative botanicollage film poem by participants in the festival workshop, Dreaming Ecosystems, led by poet Mita Mahato and filmmaker Caryn Cline.

A collaborative video poem by participants in the festival workshop, Risograph Animated Poetry Workshop with Zine Hug, set to Dao Strom’s poem “POEM OF POEM TITLES FOR ‘DAYS OF THE WEEK’”. This poem was originally published in Instrument with Traveler’s Ode as a collaborative print book publication + cassette album release of Fonograf Editions and Antiquated Future Records (2020).

An exercise in commitment, this video poem is a collaboration between myself and my husband. Filmed over the course of four very cold months in upstate New York, the footage documents the trails we walked daily during breaks from installing a kitchen and a new well in a 150-year-old country home so that my elderly parents could get out of Manhattan during Covid. These months were a true trial of our relationship and the outcome is my first true love poem, full of the fear, doubt, and hesitation that comes with the willingness to commit to someone, to become family.

Drawing on Roland Barthes, Cameras are clocks for seeing incorporates text fragments from Barthes as stanzas interspersed into personal meditations on landscape photographs taken by my beloved as a teenager. As a curator of Good Symptom (3rd Thing Press, 2023), a serial publication of time-based literature, I have been spending a lot of time with Barthes’s Camera Lucida, the source material for the title of the publication. During this time, I discovered these photographs in my husband’s childhood dresser and was inspired to meditate on how Seattle (the city where we met) and the time that we have spent there (together and apart) has shaped how we experience place, identity, and our relationship.