And go here to buy copies!:
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Thursday, July 17, 2008
What I'm working on
Here we are at the wedding, or party, or grocery store, or any other place where one might meet relatively unknown others and dispense knowledge about ones self - and here I am, understanding with some accuracy the confused or incredulous look on the face of the person before me. I am a poet, and right now, yes, that is what I am being paid to do. Write poetry. It is a fucking miracle and it will not go on forever, but for now, in terms of how I make my living, my life consists of writing my first manuscript. In defense of how I can live off of grant money and somehow avoid adopting a slovenly, confused appearance and the propensity to quality-check various snack foods for hours on end, I offer you some of the other things I am currently working on besides the manuscript. Today, let's talk about The Life:
I'm erasing each of the 422 pages of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee by transforming each page into a painting by way of Encaustics (painting with hot, pigmented beeswax). I love it. Having never painted before, it is pretty challenging to grasp the idea of getting only a single brush stroke onto the canvas before the wax hardens on the brush - but it is good to have this extra time to consider what I might be doing wrong.
Erasure is the art of de-selecting much of an original text by erasing, painting over, sewing over, cutting out, or otherwise covering the words you don't need to make an original poem from an exceedingly limited dictionary. In the past, I've just put white-out over the original text like this:
or cut out overlays
like this:
but the thought of creating some sort of visual stimulus outside of the patterns made by the erased and remaining text, well that thought is terrifying.
And I love terror. So when my friend Ariana told me that she and her uncle Bill were going to curate a gallery exhibition of erasures called Less is More at Simon Fraser University Gallery in Vancouver B.C., I immediately suggested to them that I terrify myself in the form of this project (though I didn't put it in quite those words, as they might have passed on my submission). Thing is, I thought I had a year or so to, you know, learn how to paint. With molten wax. Turns out they needed images within 40 days of notifying me that my submission had been accepted for the show. After a month of frantic learning at Gage Academy, I had a few burns and many frustrations. Luckily, the deadline was extended a month, and with the guidance of
my teacher Hamid Zavareei I came up with a few things that will get me started. Here's one:
here's another:
and I only have 413 to go!
I'm erasing each of the 422 pages of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee by transforming each page into a painting by way of Encaustics (painting with hot, pigmented beeswax). I love it. Having never painted before, it is pretty challenging to grasp the idea of getting only a single brush stroke onto the canvas before the wax hardens on the brush - but it is good to have this extra time to consider what I might be doing wrong.
Erasure is the art of de-selecting much of an original text by erasing, painting over, sewing over, cutting out, or otherwise covering the words you don't need to make an original poem from an exceedingly limited dictionary. In the past, I've just put white-out over the original text like this:
or cut out overlays
like this:
but the thought of creating some sort of visual stimulus outside of the patterns made by the erased and remaining text, well that thought is terrifying.
And I love terror. So when my friend Ariana told me that she and her uncle Bill were going to curate a gallery exhibition of erasures called Less is More at Simon Fraser University Gallery in Vancouver B.C., I immediately suggested to them that I terrify myself in the form of this project (though I didn't put it in quite those words, as they might have passed on my submission). Thing is, I thought I had a year or so to, you know, learn how to paint. With molten wax. Turns out they needed images within 40 days of notifying me that my submission had been accepted for the show. After a month of frantic learning at Gage Academy, I had a few burns and many frustrations. Luckily, the deadline was extended a month, and with the guidance of
my teacher Hamid Zavareei I came up with a few things that will get me started. Here's one:
here's another:
and I only have 413 to go!
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