Poetry in Motion: The experimental poetics of Aisha Sasha John

Aisha Sasha John is back with her second collection, THOU, recently published by Toronto press, BookThug. John’s poetry is very much about the body as a physical, mechanical being. In THOU, she looks specifically at the “I” and the “You” and the complicated relationship between them. Publisher Jay MillAr talks a little bit about the collection and John below, then watch John as she puts her poetry in motion.*****

Aisha Sasha John is a poet from Toronto with Caribbean and African roots. She is also a dancer and movement improviser. As a dance improviser, John’s work lies upon a foundation in various Caribbean, Congolese, Ivorian, Ethiopian and Eritrean dances. As a poet, John’s work lies upon movement, both mental and physical, and her work is a marker for being in the world with others.In her debut collection The Shining Material (2011), John explores the “intimate encounter” that takes place at the intersection of self and other selves to create what she calls “the poem as tonic” – part psalm, part declaration, part self-portraiture. In THOU (2014), John continues to explore themes of self, other, and embodiment in two long poems that are physical and demanding. Placing text between the self and the other as a catalyst, John openly declares her self – an ego crying out in the wilderness – and invites readers to experience John’s “language as perpetual subject of enquiry.”John’s work straddles the poetic extremes of experimental and confessional poetry. While intensely confessional in the sense that John never shies away from who she is, a black woman moving and thinking and feeling in this world with this body, these are not poems that tell you what you should think or feel. John’s poems are embodiment: open, inviting, challenging, public, private. They are engaged and experiment with, or even play with, language as a mode of communication, a tool for recording or documenting, but also as breath-sound, something mystical or spiritual. In this way her work contains both Technos and Spiritus, a space in which form and content are uniquely entwined to create powerful work.As a performer of her work, Aisha Sasha John is just as engaged with an embodiment of language than she is in her texts. She is aware of her audience; she knows she is offering something to them, a gift of her self. And she seems to understand that her self is also a gift. She begins each reading with a ritual: she pours some libations for her ancestors. Through this she invokes her lineage, that something that stretches beyond our present time to join the past with her presence as it creates a possible future. It is a lineage of bodies, of thought and emotion and language. It is a gesture that makes the present somehow larger, somehow more present, and embodying this space is Aisha Sasha John herself, reading her work for you. We are all here, John is saying. Let us all share in this moment together. Let us be real, and honest, and alive.*****Aisha Sasha John reading from Thou at the 2014 Spring BookThug launch

(Learn more about the Parliamentary Poet Laureate video series)*****Thank you to BookThug & Aisha Sasha John for sharing THOU with us. If you want to learn more, you can read a review from Quill & Quire here.

Aisha Sasha John reading her poetry as part of Fred Wah’s Poetry Connection video series

(Learn more about the Parliamentary Poet Laureate video series)*****Thank you to BookThug & Aisha Sasha John for sharing THOU with us. If you want to learn more, you can read a review from Quill & Quire here.