Stephanie Goehring, Untitled

American, b. 1984, playing from Austin, TX, USA

Stephanie Goehring is co-author, with Jeff Griffin, of the poetry chapbook I Miss You Very Much (Slim Princess Holdings, 2011/13) and author of the poetry chapbook This Room Has a Ghost (dancing girl press, 2010). She is also a visual artist and can be found online here.

Thoughts on the Telephone Process

I found myself thinking a lot about how to not impose a narrative, or at least too constrictive a narrative, because I knew someone else would have to translate my poem into another medium and to me it seemed it would perhaps be more difficult to take words and translate both those words and whatever the original Telephone message was into another medium than the opposite task (which, of course, was the task I was dealing with). The process overall surprised me in the sense that as much as I enjoyed seeing someone's art and having the chance to translate it into a poem, I think I had more fun simply playing the game (thinking about what the original message was; thinking about how that message manifested in the art I was translating; thinking about the unidentified person who made the art I was translating; thinking about all of the people all over the world who had, were having, or would have this same experience; thinking about the people who would participate in the game simply by viewing its results; thinking about how those viewers would feel in that moment and how those feelings would or would not relate to the original message).