This video poem starts with Bianca Stone miming a poem by Ruth Stone, her grandmother. We can make the claim that this gesture indicates the resonance Bianca feels towards Ruth's poem. We could also call this is a meme, and what's being copied stays relevant because it changes forms. What's being copied here is the constancy of the human condition. Ruth Stone's poem ends with the line: "I cannot live without you, oh brief and inconceivable other." And then we're brought to Bianca's reality: writing poems on typewriters, drinking wine, and the line to start it all: "This is your love speaking." We're introduced to collaged images of Bianca's landscapes, her situations, and the people she surrounds herself with. The line "But this is also your life made / with your clumsy hands -- " indicates that it's not fate that brings us to the place we inhabit, rather it's that we choose to exist in certain ways. Bianca writes that the dead "want to be remembered correctly." But it's too daunting to remember ourselves correctly. Instead we change to stay in synch with a projected version of ourselves. So then we see the change of clothes -- the white tank-topped Bianca changes to a Star Trek personage -- after we hear the lines: "There is the clear image / of someone beside you who looks just like you / but can get bluebottle flies to land on her finger." We understand who we are by observing who we are with, or more effectively, by recognizing who we would like to become. You can preserve the past by recreating it, and by outsourcing yourself to a new persona.
Bianca Stone is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You Beautiful Mutant (Factory Hollow Press) and I Saw The Devil With HIs Needlework (Argos Books 2012). She is also illustrator of Antigonick, a collaboration with Anne Carson (New Directions). Her poems have appeared in such magazines as Best American Poetry 2011, Conduit, and Tin House. She lives in Brooklyn.