Lisa Andrews & Maggie Wang
26 Connections: Declarations on Our Kind
Lisa…
It’s always tricky to know how to start a project when the theme is so broad, but I think that’s where 26’s response to the Bloomsbury Festival helped. We both discovered that we love to write about nature creatively but that in our day-to-day work, we both have to work to quite specific parameters – you in law and me in corporate reporting. That quickly led us to talk about the UN Declaration of Human Rights and what if we could enshrine acts of human kindness in their own set of principles.
The other wonderful thing about 26 is that it’s all about using constraints to unlock unexpected connections and creative avenues, so I personally loved your suggestion to create a shared Google doc, write alternate principles but hide the majority of what we’d written from one another to see where it took us. I don’t know about you, but when I eventually downloaded the final document, I was so struck by that sense of connection between the principles despite only responding to a handful of words. For me that connection is most striking between my line ‘May each heart accept a lover’s right to be unknowable’ and yours ‘If by chance, you should leave your heart unguarded, do not worry, no one will carry away its secrets.’
You also suggested we then turn the principles into a poem and structure it in a format where people can see that the words in black are the ones you and I were responding to. What did you make of the process overall?
Maggie…
In my experience, written poetry, unlike the performing arts, tends to be a solitary pursuit, and I really enjoyed getting to write this poem collaboratively with you. Hiding most of the text as we wrote the poem—everything except the last word or several words of each line—took away my usual concerns about whether my work “makes sense”. I felt that it gave me more freedom to write in response to the immediately preceding text and to the document we worked from—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a foundational document of the contemporary world order with contested meanings and histories.
The process of writing this poem, like the process of writing and reading poetry in general, was also a wonderful exercise in self-control. Before we started, we didn’t discuss general issues like the themes of the poem, apart from our agreement to base it on the UDHR, let alone detailed issues like point of view, verb tense, capitalization, and punctuation. I’m sure that our different backgrounds also led us to read the UDHR in different ways. And we wrote the poem over several months, going back and forth about once a week. But somehow the result “works”.
The poems are being displayed as part of the 26 Connections exhibition during the Bloomsbury Festival and until mid-November. The exhibition features interpretations of the poetry by artists from the Lettering Arts Trust. The exhibition is free at the Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC1E 7BT