Traveler’s Ode

Dao Strom

i've
memorized

every
promise

that was
gave

on that
night

we  were
told

we'd have
to go
                                                &
had better
learn
to

travel
light

across
a                    sea

that would
disappear

once
we'd reached
its

other
shore

&

there
we'd

wear
our hearts

inside
no longer

easy
for us

to find

for we
could not
yet be

beings

of
light

&

we

were
no longer

men

like
the ones
who
walked

before
innocent

of
wrong        or right

Father oh
now i know
why

you
moved

so far away

But your
poor mother

she
waited

for your
return

till her last
day

Feature Date

Series

Selected By

Share This Poem

Print This Poem

Black-and-white headshot of Dao Strom

Dao Strom is an artist who works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of the poetry-art collection, Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020), winner of the 2022 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and its musical companion, Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020). Other works include a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a hybrid-form memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Her work has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, NEA, and others. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Read more information by visiting www.daostrom.com

Cover of Instrument

Portland, Oregon

167 pages long, Dao Strom’s Instrument is an experiment in multimodal poetics—inhabiting a synergistic blend of poetry, music, and visual art: the artist’s three forms of “voice”. Born in Vietnam and leaving the country at the age of two for Northern California, Strom’s life and work speaks to fragmentation—of/within selves, histories, cultures, groups of people, and places—yet within this configuring lies her art’s fluid mastery. Combining color photography, personal biography and gripping, restless poetry, Instrument represents a unique melding of literature and art. The poems are augmented by an album, Traveler’s Ode, of ambient and folk-tinged songs featuring ethereal assemblages of sung-poetry, vocal layering, spare guitar, piano, and field recordings. Traveler’s Ode is a collaborative release between Fonograf Ed. and Antiquated Future.

Instrument continues the author’s virtuosic exploration of identity, selfhood and refusal–of stasis, of forgetting, of falsity. The book furthers creative and historical material Strom first explored in her books You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else and We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People while simultaneously exploring new directions, modes and fragments.

Poetry Daily Depends on You

With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.