Kaia Sand

Kaia Sand’s Statement

As I cull through surveillance files Portland Police kept on over 300 activist groups in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, I jot down sentences and phrases that begin with "she," writing a poem that glimpses some of what the police investigators seemed to fear about women. I am finding these sentences in surveillance records, as well as newspaper articles and materials produced by the activists, and stamping these lines on copper index cards. My form responds to index cards the investigators kept on individual activists, typed and sometimes annotated with a pen. Mine is an alternative indexing project, using the poetic logic of anaphora. Garrick Imatani has built a drawer to encase these cards, so that one might thumb through the cards like pages in a book ...

Kaia Sand is the author of the poetry collections, Remember to Wave (Tinfish Press 2010) and interval (Edge Books 2004), a Small Press Traffic book of the year. Her collection, A Tale of Magicians Who Puffed Up Money that Lost its Puff, is forthcoming with Tinfish Press.  She also moves poetry outside the book and into other contexts such as art spaces, walks, and a magic show, and with Jules Boykoff, co-authored a book on that subject,  Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space (Palm Press 2008). With Garrick Imatani she is creating  The Watcher Files Project, a collaboration that has emerged from their shared artist residency at the City of Portland Archives and Records Center, commissioned by the Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, Oregon.