Small spaces
Tag: visual poetry
in summer
Lately I’ve been working on a collaborative mixed genre/mixed media project with a dear friend and coworker and while it is a giant WIP and I’m certainly not going to post all of my contributions to it here on my Very Public Blog, I might post snippets, like this one. It’s meant to interrupt a larger fictional prose text, but who knows, it could end up being something else entirely. This is my first real long-term collaboration with another writer so I’m still learning the ropes, but if it all works out I think it could be pretty neat.
Listening to The Sun’s Tirade by Isaiah Rashad
Reading Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, The Mountain Poems of Stonehouse translated by Red Pine
Watching The Office, for the millionth time, because it’s a feel-good show and I turn to it whenever I need to
New fruits
… and by less comes more.
Everything in its right place.
Over the years I’ve come to see poetry (and more recently, my visual poetry) as my way of being concise, my method of controlling my words, a fight against my natural habit of stuttering and nervously rambling on. It gives me a power over each word, each letter, each sound, that I don’t feel in speech. And yeah yeah I know I wrote my anarchapoetics manifesto and preached about horizontal organization and free associations but damn, Mussolini was right about this: every anarchist is a baffled dictator.
And yet, it’s the words, it’s the images, that seem to arrange themselves. They move me.
Ok ok. No more of this. My head already hurts from this bug I’ve caught. I’ll worry about my poetics later, when the world ain’t so foggy.
Pruning and cutting
Putting pressure on myself lately to be perfect and “good enough” to get into grad school. This has resulted in an unfriendly wall between what’s in my head and what actually materializes in words and images on the page.
(I hate the term “wr*ter’s bl*ck.” Don’t much believe in it, or at least, don’t want to.)
So anyways, here I am, managed to snag myself a three-day weekend away from shoving bags of nuts and cans of corn on shelves and playing Tetris at the register with people’s groceries, thinking (too) confidently that this hiatus would result in some of my Best Work So Far, and yet, no, I’m just sitting on the floor of my studio apartment, surrounded by scraps of paper, glue sticks, paint, an anatomy book circa 1973 open to a page on the vagina (complete with a picture that, in any other context, would be labelled pornographic. Funny how that works.), amongst other things, while writing a run-on sentence in a blog post.
I’m already boring myself. Fuck, I made this thing I don’t very well like, but here it is anyway, before I pull apart the pieces and try this whole composting process all over again. Maybe next time I’ll grow a better fruit.
we too
[special thanks are due to Chris Patton @ Art of Compost, whose rad warping technique I played around with here]
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.
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.
watchtheFruits 