I conceived of the idea behind FRAME while riding on the Caltrain, heading home from San Francisco. Watching windows passing by in the night, I realized that an unlikely (or at least, somewhat unexpected) comparison might be made between what can be seen through a window and what can be seen through a picture frame. Through a defamiliarized but largely objective presentation of this familiar “frame”, I could raise greater questions about frame as context, and what we choose to put into frames.

So this is the frame for frame. To explain the three major (non-title) portions of the poem: in “a frame” I chose to have the successive frames close tighter around the text in order to highlight the dual ability of context to both constrict and highlight content. Moving into “and what’s in it”, the frames themselves turn into content, conveyed with the white screen – a moment of the poem talking about itself, being a work whose content is about context. Then to construe the words as referring to physical frames, we have a blur of impressionist landscape paintings. The final section, “I am watching windows/ from the train”, is a moment where the harmony of word and image, and the way they bring context to the previous two sections, create resolution. This is the poem’s anchor, solidifying the more abstract character of the previous sections.