collage

Bowietry

collage, Collage, found text, My Creative Work, Uncategorized

It's kind of how I feelTo skim milk foreigner

Try some Bowietry on for size: To skim milk foreigner, determinedly selling his wares and It’s kind of how I feel: a foreign body. I made these collage poems awhile back from images and text related to all things Bowie. The images are layered screen shots I took of Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth. The text is from a few sources: Sean Boyle’s video essay The Sonic Landscapes of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Graham Fuller’s essay The Man Who Fell to Earth: Loving the Alien, and this awesome conspiracy theory essay by Peter-R. Koenig The Laughing Gnostic — David Bowie and the Occult. 

I hope you like ’em.

Note: I initially meant ‘whale’ and not ‘wale’ in To skim, but discovered that ‘wale’ means a plank running along the side of a wooden ship. It’s not the plank one jumps off of when caught and killed by pirates. It also can’t really make songs and rarely interacts with whales. Definitely not whale songs. But let’s pretend all these things. Also, laziness is a thing.

 

For Mercy

cento poem, collage, My Creative Work

UPDATE (6/15/15): This piece is forthcoming in the online edition of the 2015 Best American Experimental Writing Anthology. I will post links when it comes out! 🙂

I suppose I am on a role with making things for pleasure this weekend! 🙂

Today, I was wandering around down town instead of heading home from a friend’s house and decided to check out the Seattle Public Library. If you haven’t been, it’s pretty amazing, so you should definitely go the next time you’re in town. I found my way to the art section and picked up a book called Prints & Drawings – A Pictorial History by Gottefried Lindemann. As the title reveals, it goes through the history of graphic art from the late Middle Ages to America in the Twentieth Century. I had such a positive response to the prints in the book that I ended up becoming a member of the library to check it out (and steal the prints for my own work! 🙂 ). While flipping through the book at home, I came across the print I used for my piece above, For Mercy. It is a German print from the Dürer Period which I believe is named after Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) from the Renaissance Period. As you can see from the piece, the print is by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (1484-1530) and is called Profile Portrait of a (Bernese) Woman. 

Now, a little backstory for the found text:

Prior to grad school, I had been working with the text The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams – Volume II 1939-1962 and making blackout poems with various pages of the book. (Blackout poems are when you take an existing text, whether it be a newspaper or page in a book or page in a magazine etc., choose words from the text in the order they appear on the page, and then blackout everything else. Here is a link to Austin Kleon’s archive of blackout poems for examples.  http://austinkleon.com/category/newspaper-blackout-poems/ ) I can post some of the ones I have made later. When I came upon the Deutsch portrait, I decided to flip through WCW’s book and make a blackout poem inspired by the picture. After making one version, I realized it would be WAY cooler to make a collage instead, and used an exacto-knife to cut out the words and letters from the page. For reference, I used page 75 which included the end of the poem The Rose, and the full poems Rumba! Rumba! and A Plea For Mercy. 

I hope you guys like it. Let me know what you think of it in the comment section. 🙂

Colorado Springs

collage, My Creative Work

IMG_7808.JPG

Made this little doodad today. I took the picture last Summer when my brother and I went backpacking in Castle Rock (Northern California). A friend met up with us at our camp and we make a Coors Light Beer-amid. (A pyramid made out of beers for all of you who don’t have fun with your alcoholic beverages). I bought the tiny frame at a Goodwill a few months back. Today, I fit the picture to the frame and pasted the words on there with computer paper and an Elmer’s glue stick. The hidden meaning behind the collage? Coors Light tastes like piss. 🙂

Blind Eyes Could Blaze Like Meteors

collage, My Creative Work

Blind Eyes Could Blaze Like Meteors pg 1Blind Eyes Could Blaze Like Meteors pg 2

Blind Eyes Could Blaze Like Meteors is a collage and cento poem. See below for the works I used for the cento. The poem carries the length of both images, starting with ‘Blind Eyes Could Blaze Like Marries and ending with ‘How soon succeeding eyes begin.’

FYI: A cento poem is a poem that takes lines from other pieces of work to make a new work of its own. To see an example, other than my own, look up Wolf Cento by Simone Muench

The two images I used are ‘Pastoral’ by Leonora Carrington and ‘Jupiter und Io’ by Antonio Allegri. This content of the poem takes place in a mead or field at dusk, so I used ‘Pastoral’ to reflect the setting and time of day. Also, the colors of the image are very dark and diluted so this helps dramatize the disparity of the poem.  ‘Jupiter und Io’ depicts Jupiter (a Greek God) as a dark cloud caressing the nymph, Io. I researched this painting online and discovered that Io is one of Jupiter’s many loves who has been seduced by him. Since the speaker of my poem has come across a woman who is desperate for his love, I felt that the voices of the characters in my poem reflect the intent of the characters in the painting.

Lines of poem taken from the following poems:

Do Not Go Gentle into that Goodnight by Dylan Thomas

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats

Anecdote of the Jar by Wallace Stevens

To See A World… by William Blake

The Song of Wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats

Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Colleridge

An Anundrel Tomb by Philip Larkin

Daddy by Sylvia Plath

Stop all the Clocks, Cut off the Telephone by W.H. Auden

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas

Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson