After the blur of a week spent in Chicago for AWP, I am grateful for days like today. I am the only one home except for Johnny & Baby, the dog and cat we are watching for the week. I started my morning with a glass of orange juice by the fireplace (where Johnny decided he'd like to sit too and so only left me with a sliver).

I've been working on a few collages lately. Some on found paper like the one below, others in Photoshop and Illustrator. It's interesting collaging digitally because it frees up the hand even more than "traditional" collage and allows you to play with many possibilities at once. I find I can work longer and more steadily this way, maybe just because I am so used to sitting in front of a computer. However, the choosing of materials and even the source of some images still involves the hand, so it's never a completely automated process, and I wouldn't want it to be.

Writing wise, I almost never compose my poems on the computer screen, and do not type them until further in the revision stage. This is partly out of stubbornness but also because part of what I so enjoy about writing is the physical act; the scratch of the pencil on paper, the thick atmosphere of pauses and thought.



This collage has been sitting in my studio for a few weeks now. If anyone out there has some suggestions for how to resolve it, I would love to hear them. I think something is happening in the top half, but the bottom needs more working.

I will leave you with some pictures of Johnny and Baby and I will get to making.

art/work

In my language encoding lab class, we often performed or read our work, which was a mixture of computer code and poetry (and the lines between the two). Sometimes a performance would consist mostly of a person clicking words on a screen or hunched, typing while we watched on. The act of work became art, and certainly this is even more true when it comes to the place where an artist works. Even missing the actual act, the evidence of creation is compelling.

Memphis artist, Hamlett Dobbins has a website full of interesting paintings and other works, but I am most interested in his studio shots. He seems to update it regularly and we are allowed glimpses of his working life. Books piled on a bench, changing sketchbook pages, the shifting and rearranging of the studio's contents.





(all images from hamlettdobbins.com)

I suppose part of it is thinking that if we can observe someone else's creative process, we might unlike the key to creativity itself. If nothing else, it inspires and causes us to examine our own actions.

An interview with Zachary Schomburg in the Oregon Live. It's always nice to hear a poet talk about his or her work and what inspired it. I really like was ZS says about writing itself:

The poems I write are the poems I most want to read. Ultimately, I'm a slow and inspired and confused reader while I write. It's the best kind of reading I think, writing is.

I think part of my difficulty is that I am not always sure which poems I really want to read. So I've been doing more actual reading and less of the reading-writing. Things are slowly surfacing, coming to light. Still, there is a lack of definition in my sight, waiting for things to come into clearer focus. The same is true for my visual art right now, but working in one way often illuminates the other.

For now, it is okay.

Check out dear camera magazine for your reading and visual pleasure (and check back in some weeks to see some of my artwork in the mix).

Currently: substitute teaching, wintering, creating. More updates soon.