Shin Yu Pai's Animated Work Outside the Book Form

Shin Yu Pai was featured at The Stranger last week, before presenting an animated poem—her largest project to date as Redmond, Washington's poet laureate—for the Redmond Lights festival, which took place on Saturday, December 2. "There's lots to see at this thing, but Pai's collaboration with Seattle designer Michael Barakat isn't to be missed," wrote Rich Smith. More:

Barkat animated a poem that Pai wrote about Redmond's efforts to revitalize the city's tree canopy, and they're going to project it onto the backside of City Hall, which will be visible from the tree-lighting ceremony. In the animation, words jump out from the poem and morph into trees, fall when the trees fall, and reflect the action of the poem in other ways. The video will play on a loop throughout the evening, so everyone will get a chance to see it.

The poem itself, which is called "heyday," condenses Redmond's history with logging and milling into a few lines before focusing on how Redmond's revitalization effort starts a chain reaction that benefits the city in social and ecological ways: "memory a series of concentric rings; / one thousand acres to be brought / into active trust — the city of tree / stewards recover a watershed, / cultivate urban vegetation, / extend the forest canopy / to change the temperature."

Pai's talk of changing the temperature in that last line resonates with the extra-heated political environment in the U.S. right now, so I called her up to ask if she was thinking of politics as she was writing the poem. "I was talking quite literally about environmental impact," she said. "But it does suggest larger social change, temperament as well as temperature, I'd say."

I was also extremely excited by the phrase "brought into active trust," a bit of bureaucratic language that Pai's poem charges with multivalent meaning, so I asked her to talk about what the phrase meant for her. "Sometimes we think of a trust as dormant resources, and this usage plays with that notion," she said. "This active trust is an agreement between a people and its land. You have to cultivate and maintain it. Paired with this idea of social change—it's aspirational, certainly, but it's active. That idea actually informed the decision to animate the poem, because the animation literally activates the language."

Read more about Pai's work outside the book form at The Stranger.