The poem air plant is a procedurally generated text dependent on atmospheric, meteorological, and astronomical conditions on the day it is composed—much as a plant also depends on these conditions.
When read aloud, it is meant to subsist in the air like a living thing: an air plant. By using the numerical values of factors such as humidity, the sun's and earth's magnetic fields, air pressure, and UV index, the poem charts a path across a matrix of word-parts to create a 10-line stanza.
Syntax and rhythm remain constant, while the individual matrix is determined by temperature range, allowing the poem to reflect the plant's overall state of being based on whether it is cold, warm, or hot.
For a performance in 2025 at New Material Books—in conjunction with Sam Haan's artist talk for her show Open Paragraph—I also created limited-edition print instantiations. Each unique card contains one line taken from a specific instance of air plant. I have called these "clippings" to liken them to the clipped-off shoots of a plant, which may then be transplanted elsewhere and begin to acquire their own lives.
View air plant clippings at New Material Books
The second part of this poem, "Aleatoric Commons," generates the air plant's environment by treating listeners as particles of air jumbled together in a gaseous state. Prior to the reading, audience members can write their names on blank business cards. Each card has a number on it, which determines its place on a 5x2 grid also containing a randomized iteration of Emily Dickinson's phrase "butterlies leap from banks of noon, plashless as they swim." I disperse the names across several such grids and then read through them. The audience becomes an air-like collective of language-points.
