[special thanks are due to Chris Patton @ Art of Compost, whose rad warping technique I played around with here]
we too
Tag: compost poetry
Steps
This past week has been rough. Here’s a new piece I made just now, “Steps.”
Idk, just needed to make it. Doesn’t quite feel finished yet, will probably revise later.
Found poetry is no different from any other poems I write. It’s the same search for words, for space, for sense, for that thing that feels right.
Circumstances beyond my control.
Fig. 164
Guess what?
Ya girl’s getting published again. (!!!!!)
Remember back a year ago, when I made that portfolio/elegy for my visual poetry class that I was super stoked about? Two of those pieces are being published in Jeopardy Magazine’s 52nd edition this May.
Neat, right? I’m pretty psyched, since this’ll be the first time I’ve ever had visual poems published before. These mean a whole lot to me too.
More cool news: the magazine I work on (I work on a magazine FYI), Occam’s Razor, is about to publish our 6th volume in a few weeks as well. We’ve been working on this guy all year and we’re all so proud of it. I really can’t believe I got the editorial position this time last year. Time flies when you’re copy editing.
More more cool news: I’m presenting on a panel at the Political Science Student Association Conference this Tuesday. I wrote a paper on the relevance of anarcha-feminism for contemporary feminists as evidenced by Mujeres Libres, the group of anarchist women organized during the Spanish Civil War, and I’ll be sharing my research with whoever the heck shows up, I guess. I’m equal parts excited and scared shitless.
More more MORE cool news: I’m presenting that same paper during Scholars Week 2 weeks later. I feel like I’m on a book tour with this thing.
Now if only I could find the time to celebrate it all.
Spring Break & Spryngenol
Hey y’all, it’s been a while. Things really heated up towards the end of this quarter, my busiest yet, so blogging took a backseat. But I come bearing gifts (or gift, singular) after my absence, as usual.
My final project for my poetry seminar. A not-so-blog blog, a response, a dialogue, a politics, a rhizome. Enter Spryngenol.
In it, you’ll find an homage to William Carlos Williams and anarchist manifestos, a struggle between my relationship with Robert Creeley as well as my own dictatorship of the self, something political, something poetical, poetry as personal as political. And flowers. Lots of flowers.
To shuffle through posts, click the link at the bottom of the page that says “take yr meds”. To cheat, click the link below it.
Have fun, and happy spring.
Sticky
NOT
STICKY NO
—
yr the cat
I’ll take my
cheese, thank
you, gruyère
please~~~
Orange
First visual poem in a while. Feels good. Made out of a scrap from an old cut-up poem, a 35mm film print I took with the flash off in my parents’ house when I was 7ish, and a little help from my friends Scanner and Photoshop.
The more I look at it the more I see my own soon-to-be-graduating existential anxiety.
Cheers.
A fuzzy pear
Serials
One of our final projects for my summer class, in addition to creating a blog, was to create a chapbook in which we do some composting.
Not in the traditional sense, but the metaphorical one — taking materials you already have, breaking them down into a nice smelly soil, and watering it until you grow a tomato plant or an apple tree or a lavender bush. Breaking down the old to make new. Something this planet of ours has been doing quietly throughout the ages.
All quarter I’ve been splicing up tweets, Facebook statuses, texts, and even Craigslist personal ads to make poems. It was fun, it felt fresh every time, and I seemed to be fairly successful at executing it so with a nod from my prof I made a nice little chapbook out of them.
Front cover
Epigraph
“Respond”
“Hunt”
“Metaphor For” & “Genius”
Back cover
These are just excerpts from the whole, which contains 10 poems as well as an epigraph (shown) and an introduction, which my scanner decided was unimportant enough to simply not scan at all! But I win this round, thanks to Microsoft Word.
These poems are each made from multiple sources—tweets, status updates, Craigslist casual encounters ads, and text messages.
While most content on social media is discarded as meaningless, trite, and narcissistic, these poems serve to show how such shallow nothings, when spliced together, form a complex, powerful whole that presents us with the gist of all our offhand thoughts and feelings— frustration, loneliness, ennui, and an underlying, though often subtle, sense of humor.
Ten small testaments to the millennial generation and those who struggled before us.
The whole thing is made from a book called Basic Tools of Research which a good friend of mine gave to me because it said “a great reference for English majors” on the front cover. Thanks, Allan — your gag gift ended up becoming the backbone of something arguably more interesting (I hope).
Well, that’s a wrap on my summer course. Between this and my visual poetry class from last quarter, I’ve grown like a weed. I struggle now with making poems that don’t have a major visual element — not out of habit, out of… love? For lack of a better word, it’s love, I guess. It’s something I don’t see myself tiring of, and I can’t say that for most anything else.
K, after all that mush, I’ll leave you with something comical. I’ve mentioned before how my scanner likes to cut things up and send me chunks instead of a whole, and scanning my chapbook was no exception. I’ve been meaning to do something with all of these but for now I’ll just put the chapbook chunks here so you can see what I’m whining about.
Without further ado, my scanner’s debut visual poem:
Compost: it stinks
I’ve been rather absent from this blog, haven’t I? Why was it so much easier to post at least twice a week when I was in the midst of the busiest quarter of my college career than it is when I’ve decreased my hours at work to “just enough to pay the bills, and eat some” and am only taking one class? Chalk it up to needing a distraction, a moment to let loose my narcissism.
Well. While I’m here, I might as well post a few things/say a few things.
The first two are just exercises from class. Little bursts of “whaddya think ‘a THIS” and “I don’t know but I hope you do”s.
Not much to say about this one, as it’s the exact same exercise as one I did last quarter (writing on an unconventional surface, letting the matter matter). I wrote, or rather imprinted, a poem on a gum wrapper last quarter and after my prof accidentally destroyed it, decided to find a more durable surface this time around. The text on the other side, if you were wondering, is instructions to nudging an orchid towards blooming on the same flower spike after the flowers from the first bloom start to fall. I like the gum wrapper one more, but this’ll do.
This one also comes from an exercise I did last quarter: the photocopier poem. I think I had an unfair advantage with this one, seeing as a great deal of my focus last quarter was on using a photocopier to distort my poems. Still, I love this technique. I can’t imagine it ever getting old for me. This one’s made from a scrap of printer paper packaging that I found to be compelling due to what looks like a sun setting on the horizon. Many, many distortions later, I got something I felt right about.
These next two were made with the intention of being sent to workshop, but only one of them made it.
Made this little guy from my Twitter feed, again. Hence why I’m not taking it to workshop. I figured it to be the “safe” choice, and for fear of seeming like a one trick pony I moved on to composting a new source text: texts!
For respect to the sender, I won’t disclose whose texts I made this out of. This time around, I’m not including the source text at the bottom of the page for my classmates to see because I want to know if I did a good enough job with my composting.
Ah, composting. It’s been a struggle, often, to bring something through the entire composting process. We are currently working on a compost blog project (which you can check out here, once I’ve actually begun working on it) and damn if I’m not having the hardest time trying to figure out how to take my intended subject (Kurt Vonnegut novels) through the ringer and end up with a fully composted final product. It’s frustrating, but I’m hoping I’ll work all the kinks out soon enough. Right now, I’ve just got a big smelly pile of peels, eggshells, and half-eaten heads of broccoli and it really, really smells.
In the meantime, I’ve got a toilet to fix. Yeah, the chain thing came off the valve thing so it won’t flush unless I make it flush (fun…) and since I’m a DIY queen already, I’m off to the hardware store to make things right with my own two hands. I guess I oculd let you all know how that works out for me, but I figure you didn’t follow this blog for my plumbing skills (and inevitable toilet humor that ensues, ha).
Until next time.
watchtheFruits 