winter break after three months of college coursework in Maine always ends with a return to California. It’s not necessarily momentous, as I made it sound, but routine; however, it is a comfort. 

And yet, home, as routine as it is, as commonplace as it is, seems a concept powerful enough to move people to tears, together, and even to violence. It is a theme of brokenhearted poetry, a backdrop of festivity and collaboration, a site of family and loss, and its absence becomes a reason for war. Specifically, a particular point of entry into this vast array of moments that the concept of home becomes a part of is that of poetics, whether this looks like music or other adjacent art-making practices.

Immediately both distinct and indissoluble, ‘home’ and ‘house’ surface as two players in the scene of this investigation into the relationship between home and poetics, the central question being, what can they do together? In what ways, through poetics, can home be wielded to illustrate an emotional reality of an individual, a group, a people, a moment? Oh yeah, and what is a home?