Innas Tsuroiya's ekphrastic poem "Transverse Line, 1923" has been paired with a garment from Karl Lagerfeld's 2014-15 CHANEL collection. Throughout his career, Lagerfeld was inspired by the German Expressionist aesthetics of Alexej von Jawlensky, Lyonel Feininger, and Wassily Kandinsky. In his 1926 Bauhaus treatise, Point and Line to Plane, Kandinsky looks to music and dance to theorize structural tensions between the point (the "smallest form" and how it relates to the plane), the line (that which occurs when a point is in motion), and the plane itself (the angles and characteristics of an artwork's surface). Kandinsky claims "[The point] begins its life as an independent being and its subordination transforms itself into an inner- purposeful one. This is the world of painting." Like the intersecting lines and floating elements of Kandinsky's Transverse Line, Tsuroiya's dynamic poem of "logographs" and "devotional geometry" references its own intersection of order and chaos, mirroring Lagerfeld's restless fascination with a garment's fluidity. Or "independent being."
— Paul Cunningham, Editor
Transverse Line, 1923
Eclipsed by the chrome, outlaw
through marks, crisscross
without applesauce, only
pure logographs, predecessor
to that which is Logos, devotional
geometry, gravity, grace,
energy shooting out of matter
out of inventory of heathers,
a state of agitation so composed,
so composite, so about time
a Kandinsky killed me
Innas Tsuroiya is a writer living in Indonesia who works across poetry, criticism, translation, fiction, and divination. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Poetry Wales, e-flux Criticism, C Magazine, TANK, Michigan Quarterly Review, Protean Magazine, Guernica, among others.
