Ten and One Left is a 64-page series of 11 line poems taken and collaged from my old LiveJournals from 2001 to 2004. This book constitutes two years of my MFA studies at Otis College of Art and Design and is the practice component of my MFA thesis from 2008.
girard_-_tenandoneleft
Download OTIS MFA Thesis
Ten and One Left is viewable in its entirety as a downloadable PDF. It offers a look into my collage process:
https://www.chrisgirard.com/assets/pdfs/girard_-_tenandoneleft.pdf
Eleven-Line Poems
Ten and One Left, the series of eleven-line poems, is collaged from my old LiveJournals. These LiveJournal usernames are quietness and qu, and were used from 2001 to 2004. Like the nonsensical or cryptic tags that are often embedded into blog posts, I reposted the poems onto social reviewing websites including Yelp. As a result, the poem lived on Yelp for eight and a half years until it was deleted by Yelp admins in 2016.
Symbol of Eleven
As part of my MFA thesis at Otis College of Art and Design, a baby Ars Poetica of mine details my philosophy about the eleven line poems. I explored the meaning of eleven. While eleven is imperfect in its quantity, 11 (two ones) is perfect at face value.
Eleven is a symbol for the imperfect and yet is a very symmetrical number that has a symbolic relationship with the exterior like an outsider (like Eleven from Stranger Things) and the spectacle of a crowd. The number eleven is derived from the old English word Endleofan. It literally means ten and one left or the base of one plus a second element.
While the poems are subservient to a number of lines, they explore obstruction. The obstructiveness repurposes the former poems by the illustration and change of a public text’s exposure. The texts which inspire the set of poems are read by a plural audience to experience a feeling of homogenized familiarity. The feeling of disconnection resounds in the subsequent poem. And it evokes a thought or emotion set in false pretenses. The struggle is to make ephemeral texts durable by collaging a lyrical cadence of paradoxes.
