Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
In yesterday’s post, I mentioned our visit to the studio of the Welsh artist Meri Wells. That was last July, in the course of a weekend with Clive Hicks-Jenkins (pictured above with Meri) and his partner Peter Wakelin. Continue reading “2013 in photos: A visit to Meri Wells’ studio”
Another beautiful, artistic erasure poetry project: Erasing Infinite, which the creator, poet and Found Poetry Review editor Jenni B. Baker, describes as “A found poetry project erasing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest one page at a time.” I love the presentation. Baker uses Creative Commons-licensed photos onto which she juxtaposes the words of her erasures in the same arrangements in which they appeared in the original text (though oddly, she copyrights the results, which violates the “share alike” [SA] terms of photos so licensed). The poems are usually satisfying as texts in themselves, but gain in effectiveness by their association with images — especially the shorter, more enigmatic poems. I’m also intrigued by her decision to use Tumblr as a home for the project (there’s also a Facebook page and of course a Twitter feed). Check it out.
(Thanks once again to Maureen Doallas for the link.)
If Tom Phillips’ A Humument is the gold standard for artistic erasure poetry, Will Ashford’s new work The Gospel According to Art should be a platinum hit. His erasures are not only image-rich, but use the text in varying ways: often for didactic purpose, but sometimes in more decorative/suggestive ways as well (a rain of “I”s, a swarm of “o”s). If I had a better developed sense of shame, I guess I’d be abashed I’d never heard of Will Ashford until he contacted me yesterday, prompted by a perusal of my Pepys erasures. But I’ve very glad (and flattered) that he did.
There’s a lot of good stuff in the Flash-based portfolio at his main site, too, but I found The Gospel According to Art easier to use at my relatively slow connection speed — and as a fan of the literary charms of the Bible, I was entranced by this re-purposing of the Gospel of Mark. It’s full of wonder, humor and delight. Go have a look.
The photographer dons safety glasses and blue rubber gloves. His friend the other photographer takes his glasses off and sits for his tintype, the back of his head pressing a cup to the wall. In his lap, the tilted reflector like an absent-minded mirror that has forgotten how to hold an image. Meanwhile, the wet plate primed with chemicals slides into the camera and waits for the takeaway, its quick supper of shadows.
Assistants hold a black cloth behind the sitter’s head. The photographer assumes his crouch, a red hood cloaking his moment of intimacy with the camera. Only the bellows and brass eye protrude, like the horse-skull head of a Mari Lwyd without the grin.
To a sitter who has practiced meditation, the enforced and urgent stillness feels familiar.
Then follow the photographer down to the darkroom and watch your face emerge like Lazarus from the murk. Warm colors appear dark and cool colors light, due to the wet plate’s appetite for blues. No negative intercedes.
The details are so fine and the eyes so strange, you startle. You have seen this face before in a gilt frame. Except that your ancestors wore high, starched collars to try and hide the shame of sunburnt necks, and here you are in t-shirt and ball cap, wearing an expression you can’t begin to read.
Click image to see the full-size version.
Clive Hicks-Jenkins made this with letters and images left over from his just-completed animation project for the Mid Wales Chamber Orchestra production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. It is of course the poem generated from one of my recent erasures of Pepys. I told him I thought that conceptually, in relation to the erasure, it’s as if he’s put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Presented this way, it feels much more like a complete poem to me. In place of the white emptiness of erasure, there’s solid black. And Clive’s vibrantly colored majuscule letters don’t shout, but intone.
I was very sorry to learn of the death of Chloe, seen here in 2007 lying on my porch while her master Mike, a contractor who’s married to an aunt of mine, did some work on the living room. Chloe was a good-natured dog, not to mention highly photogenic: this is one of my favorite photos of the porch. I used it in the header of the original Morning Porch blog for more than a year, back when it was still on Tumblr. Even though neither the dog nor that chair typically resided on my front porch, they really helped convey the Appalachian setting.
Last December, the dead elm tree next to the French lilac lost its top in a high wind, and the old concrete dog statue that had stood at point at the edge of the yard for, I’m guessing, at least 60 years was smashed. But when I finally got around to cleaning up the mess a couple of weeks ago, after the last snow melted, I noticed something peculiar: what had been a semi-cheesy, mass-produced piece of garden statuary now resembled a modernist sculpture, which might be called something like Spirit of Dog. It stands on two rusted steel bars, the remnants of the statue’s front legs, still lodged in the mostly buried concrete base.
I could try removing the remnants of white paint for a cleaner look, but then I’d have to keep after the bird shit as well. The next thing you know I’d be pruning the lilac (also badly damaged this winter by a cottontail rabbit, which has girdled several of the largest trunks) and mowing the lawn, and the entire, wild character of the yard would be degraded just to showcase a readymade sculpture. No thanks. I think it’s incumbent on me and anyone who visits to see the impact of time and weather as itself a kind of pruning or whetting. Aging doesn’t diminish, it revises — it makes new. For me, this new/old sculpture might serve as a guide and inspiration for my erasure poetry.
Until recently, I had this quote (which I removed only because it wasn’t clear who actually said it) in the Morning Porch header: “There is another life, but it is in this one.” In a certain, quite literal (concrete!) sense, there was always a sculpture in that dog statue, waiting to get out. Seeing the dead and broken as still in some sense whole, but simply shifted to a new state of being — well, that’s about as mystical as I get these days. For those in mourning for a real dog, I expect it’s completely beside the point, as most afterlife speculation tends to be. Chloe will be missed, and that absence cannot be filled. It’s not even vaguely comparable to the slight disquiet I still feel over the loss of a statue. The “life” of a work of art is complex and interesting in its own way, but it pales beside the wonder — the miracle, really — of a living animal.
For Valentine’s Day, my love designed and knitted me an Atlantic hagfish, A.K.A. slime eel — Myxine glutinosa. Apparently, she was the first on Ravelry to do so. While to the uninitiated this might seem like a less than subtle suggestion that I am a slime-ball and a bottom-feeder, in fact it was a highly romantic gesture, a response to my “Ten Simple Songs” (8-9, if you’re in a hurry). I was initially going to hold off posting that poem until Valentine’s Day, but then I thought, what if she doesn’t like it? Perhaps slime eel references don’t belong in a serious love poem. I guess I needn’t have worried.
Hagfish purposely tie themselves in knots to remove excess mucus. Thankfully, this plush, knitted hagfish is not mucilaginous in the slightest. (See additional photos on the project page at Ravelry.)
I don’t own many works of art, and none that please me quite so much as this. Folks, don’t ever let anyone tell you that poetry doesn’t pay! Also, heed the wise words of Robert Fulghum (often wrongfully attributed to Dr. Seuss):
We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.
Robert Fulghum, True Love
Rick Prelinger, On the Virtues of Preexisting Material:
My partner Megan and I run a research library in San Francisco that we built around our personal book, periodical, and ephemera collections. At some point it got a life of its own and started growing like mushrooms in Mendocino. We joke about how it’s a library full of bad ideas; I characterize it as 98% false consciousness. It’s full of outdated information, extinct procedures, self-serving explanations, ideas that never passed the smell test, and lies. And yet that’s where you find the truth. You can’t judge the past at its best, you need to confront its imperfections. And of course that’s true for the present as well.
[…]
A couple of years ago I was walking down the street with a professor who was telling me how she’d tried to get her Cinema Studies students interested in archives, but they didn’t care. I asked why, and she said “I guess they felt archives were the end of it all, the place where films go to die.” This was a big a-ha moment for me, because I realized we’d all got things completely backwards. I thought, what if we reconceive the archive as a point of origin, as a birthplace for new works and a rebirthing venue for old works? If we think of the archive as an incubation point, suddenly a cloak of bad ideas starts to slip away.
Archives promise the possibility of a return to original, unmediated documents. I think this is part of their attraction to artists—the idea that we can touch and appropriate records without also having to inherit the corrupting crust that they’ve accreted over time. This is an Edenic fantasy, but it can also be a productive point of origin.
Four hammers of Thor,
nested just so, form
a Buddhist swastika with feet.
Steering by the sun,
we run in circles.
A gaze trained to focus
on a pitching horizon
turns to an inward shore.
Breathe like a rower,
in time with the waves.
Legs fold into a knot:
braided serpents.
The fierce brow unknits.
Only the scowl still hints
at the strength of his vow.
The truest viking leaves
everything behind.
Image from Saamiblog, via the Wikipedia Commons. Cf. the Helgö Buddha.
My seven-year-old niece Elanor Bonta was drawing portraits of everyone with a ballpoint pen this afternoon. Here’s mine.
