Knot
Concrete Poem
by Zoë Brigley
Author's Note
Knot is designed to be printed out and made into a box/cube by cutting out the shape, folding along the squares’ dividing lines and gluing the flaps. It was created in response to an open house at the Kawsay Ukhunchay Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Art and Cultural Artifact Research Collection at the Ohio State University. Curator, Prof. Michelle Wibbelsman, and poet, Victor Eudoro Vimos Vimos, inspired my poetry class and I to create our own versions of calabazas / mates tallados or etched story gourds that appear throughout the Andes. Prof. Wibbelsman explains “Story gourds depict specific events … The tactile, sonorous, organic nature of the gourd prompts us to ‘read’ the piece using multiple senses. The spherical shape … invites us to turn the piece in our hands and presents us with a non-linear narrative structure that, in contrast to Western narratives, has no clear beginning, middle, or end. Etched story gourds depict clear delimitations of space and activity … divided into … distinct spatial-temporal zones.”
About the Author
Zoë Brigley is the author of three PBS Recommended books of poetry in the UK published by Bloodaxe, most recently Hand & Skull. She won an Eric Gregory Award for the best British poets under 30, was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize for the best international writers under 40, and was Forward Prize commended.
She has published poems and stories in Australian Book Review, Chicago Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Poetry Ireland Review, Orion, Poetry Review, PN Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Copper Nickel, and Waxwing.
She is the editor of one of the UK’s leading poetry magazines, Poetry Wales, and she is a poetry editor for Seren Books. With Kristian Evans, she founded MODRON: Writing on the Ecological Crisis.