Palpable Insubstantiality // Paper Elegies

Artist Statement

This project is a meditation on elegy through a process of recycled paper making, and the tactile encounter with material such a process provides. While traditional notions of elegy suggest a somewhat unilateral movement from grief to consolation, using recycled materials to meditate on loss allowed me to work outside of predominant ideas about grief, time, and embodiment. It was important to me to use recycled materials I had amassed following my father’s death. To converse with excess as much as absence. I made paper pulp from my own printed poems, workshop notes, old bills, scraps of paper—material which had accumulated around my father's absence. I then cut up copies of two poems my father sent me before he died, which were in his handwriting, and mixed the fragments of these poems with the paper-pulp. Each new piece of paper holds the trace of his hand—a different configuration of his writing in every sheet. Making these recycled paper-poem-objects was a process which allowed me to collaborate with my father’s writing and voice in a tactile, unpredictable way again. I thought, perhaps, if my father's writing could still find new forms, maybe he could too. (A note on the title: "Palpable Insubstantiality" is a phrase pulled from Anahid Nersessian's essay "Apostrophe: Clouds.")

Bevin O'Connor is a poet and educator from southern California and received her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is currently a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Houston, where she is an Inprint Nina and Michael Zilkha Fellowship recipient. She is the winner of the Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the 2023 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Changes Review, Southern Indiana Review, Third Coast, Bear Review, Annulet, Palette Poetry, Afternoon Visitor, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Bevin has taught writing at the University of Houston, University of Southern California, and University of Iowa. Outside of the university, she facilitates a number of community creative writing workshops, including poetry classes at the Harris County Women's Empowerment Center.