Where the Ghost Cloud Meets the Lake

Liam CU and Maya Björnson read bio Liam is a poet and student living in Stockholm. Maya is an artist and poet who most often lives in Philadelphia.

The work you are about to encounter is the result of a decade-long creative partnership between Liam CU, a poet and student living in Stockholm, and Maya Björnson, an artist and poet who most often lives in Philadelphia. In 2016, by chance, they sat next to each other in a class called Poetry & Science and were partnered for a project. Their first collaboration led to a web-Residency with the Organism for Poetic Research, which culminated in their cabinet of curiosities style project a Way Past, released in 2019.

In March of 2024 they were Inhabitants at Sisters Hope Home in Copenhagen, Denmark where they took on the poetic aliases Ghost Cloud (Maya) and Lake (Liam). It was also over the course of this residency that Liam introduced Maya to the “Manoa Method,”¹ a process that futurists use to generate visions for the future that surprise you and everyone else. Naturally, they decided to find out what would happen if you tried to create a poem using this method as an arrangement of language with which one can produce more language.

The Manoa Method is a four part process that utilizes diagrammatic structures to help expand thought through association and juxtaposition. Part one starts with seeds of change (social, environmental, technological, political) and imagines them as transformative forces interacting to create a novel organizing logic for a future world. In this case, the ‘world’ being produced is a poem and so rather than forces or concepts, the seeds are individual words. Step I: Seeds was completed with the help of editor Mary Zhou, and seed-words were narrowed down to stem, foam, deference, and salmon, chosen for their simultaneous beauty, capacity, challenge, and playfulness.

Presented here is Part II: Wheels. This step uses a radial wheel structure to map the implications, or “ impacts,” of the chosen seeds. Visioners expand outward from center, identifying primary, secondary, and tertiary impacts of their seeds in the world. For example, one primary impact of a universal car ban in a major city might be an improvement of air quality, with a secondary impact being distant mountains emerging from invisibility in the clear air. In the case of Where the Ghost Cloud Meets the Lake, Part II: Wheels, each instance of branching out becomes an opportunity to linguistically explore the multitudinous, textured, and interpretive meaning of each seed-word.

Lastly, a note on Source. This project was submitted in response to a call seeking works that complicated the idea of a single point of origin. At first, we thought the poem’s experimental framework was most relevant to the pitch—not only is the source of the methodology atypical (a future visioning exercise), but the method’s structure takes seed-words (sources) and uses a wheel diagram to bloom language around them before commingling them back into a single poem through a cross-impact matrix, as will be revealed in Part III: Matrices.

Upon reflection, what speaks most to Source is the nature of the Poetry Partnership itself. Poetry-writing is ordinarily a solo endeavor. It is an intensely personal process that does not easily lend itself to collaborative working. To write poetry is vulnerable—to write it with someone else is extraordinarily baring. As Maya and Liam put it, the process of writing together is akin to alchemy: they begin with two discrete voices and are transformed through the apparatus (or the process) of the Poem. Individuality is transmutated through the push-pass foldlooping back-and-forth of language until they find themselves— past the weave and through the weft of the page— different.