Lisa Jarnot’s Sea Lyrics is the perfect way to kick off this project
–April 11, 2014 note to self
If any single motif or symbol in the I Ching has most come to represent the I Ching in my own mind, it is that of the well (hexagram 48).
–Richard Berengarten, Postscript to Changing, July 15, 2014
Though I’ve been working on this project on and off since around 2015, I didn’t begin to arrive at the form it has begun to take until around 2016, and it wasn’t until 2017 that, with the help of creative coder Luis Morales-Navarro, that the idea of a ceaselessly changing digital poem based on explorations of Shanghai by way of its vast, expanding Metro system really came together.
And it wasn’t until quite recently that, with the help of a 2022 NYU Digital Humanities Seed Grant and site development help from Shanghai-based Get Together, that I’ve been able to begin to bring various pieces together to the point where, roughly a decade after having first conceived of an anti-travel guide and eight years after first venturing out into the city on an algorithmic walk with the intention of writing some kind of Oulipian verse in response, the project is ready to be shared.
A Sea Lyric
“Sea Lyric,” published first in the May 2016 edition of The Brooklyn Rail, and then again in the 2017 inaugural issue of Alluvium, takes its cue directly from New York-based poet Lisa Jarnot’s 1996 prose poem sequence Sea Lyrics.
Jarnot wrote her Sea Lyrics while spending time in San Francisco, looking out — both literally and figuratively — across the Pacific with the American continental mass stretching out behind her to the Atlantic, the sentences of her prose poems gathering and flowing through the lyric “I” yet at the same time dissolving the egoistic “I” in a rapidly changing swirl of phenomenal perceptions, descriptions, and reflections that seem to simultaneously gather a bit of everything into the poems around a still hurricane eye of near-nothingness. Here’s an example of one of Jarnot’s Sea Lyrics:
I am this Santa Ana wind and we are bowlers, we are at the haircut man, I have divulged so little of the avocado dawn, I am waiting to buy coffee near the docks upon the square, I am all the hot dogs and the roof of city hall, I am hardly standing in the kamikaze rain, I am of the new year sober now, I am inside of all the horoscopes at once, I am the rainy part of early fall expecting to go back across the bridges, I am near the greenish plantains down the street, I am the subtler angles of the sunlight from the surface of the moon, I am here to yet predict the dawn, I am getting better like the oceans on the sidestreet, I am surrounded by water, I am walking sideways near the church in Watsonville upon the orange line at Lammas Tide.
An Anti-Travel Guide
By 2015, I’d been living in Shanghai for the better part of a decade, and after a stint working as a travel guide editor I had become obsessed with the idea of how to write about travel