Over the past week I’ve photographed some of my collages and put them on website for sale. Here are a few of them:
Category: Poetry
Poetry Van
A 4th of July tradition here in Santa Fe is Pancakes on the Plaza, a local fundraiser put on by the United Way. In addition to breakfast, there are craft tables and a vintage car show. This year I remembered to take a picture of the Poetry in Motion truck, which the owner, Illan Shamir, calls a “Magnetic Movable Ice Cream Truck.” I usually stop to watch people compose a poem or just a sentence, usually singly but sometimes with a friend. There’s an article about the truck here and his facebook page here.
Poetry Tights
Landays
A “landay” is a 2-line, 22 syllable poem, a “folk couplet…an oral and often anonymous scrap of song created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than twenty million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.” My friend Suzanne has a book of them, translated into English, called I Am the Beggar of the World, compiled by Eliza Griswold. They are sometimes funny but most often heart-wrenching snippets of life in a male-dominated war-torn country. Below are a few from the book. Griswold’s introduction to the form (with many more examples) is here and there’s a review on Slate here.
How much simpler can love be?
Let’s get engaged now. Text me.
When sisters sit together, they always praise their brothers.
When brothers sit together, they sell their sisters to others.
You sold me to an old man, father.
May God destroy your home, I was your daughter.
Poem in Your Pocket Day
Today is Poem in Your Pocket Day, where people keep a poem with them and share it with others throughout the day. Here’s the one I’m sharing, a haiku that will be part of my 2015 calendar and describes the what I see outside my studio this morning:
Spring wind—
The plum tree
rains flowers.
Sacred Poems
April is poetry month and I’ve been looking at artist’s books with a poetry theme. Carole Kunstadt has a series called “Sacred Poems” where she says
The primary element used in this series is paper: the pages are taken from a Parish Psalmody dated 1844 and 1849. These pages of psalms are manipulated and recombined, resulting in a presentation that evokes an ecumenical offering – poems of praise and gratitude. The disintegrating pages suggest the temporal quality of our lives and the vulnerability of memory and history. In working with this aged text, embracing its inherent qualities while transforming the book’s pages, the paper itself gains significance through the process and merges with a new intent.
Here are a few of her books, and you can see them all here.
