About a month ago, I splurged and bought a cutting plotter — it cuts and scores shapes one has designed in Illustrator. I’ve wanted to make a few pop-up books, but all the hand-cutting has been a big deterrent.
I’ve spent the past several weeks learning the foibles of the machine. My first “pop-up” was a simple papercut to illustrate one of my haiku — that’s it to the left.
Over the winter and spring, I’ve continued to play with a variation on the Turkish Map Fold. Many of my haiku are about my walks around town and my neighborhood, so for this one I designed a book that unfolds to reveal an imaginary map of my early morning ramblings, walking my (also imaginary) dog. Ten original haiku trace the path, narrating the journey. I’ve called it “I Started Early, Took the Dog…” See the pictures below. I’ve made an edition of 35 — available in my shop here. See all my posts on the Turkish Map Fold here.
April is National Poetry Month — lots of ideas on how to celebrate here. And April 17th is National Haiku Poetry Day. I enjoyed looking at the haiku contest winners and comments from previous celebrations.
Last week I went to the opening of a show called “Odes & Offerings” at the Community Gallery here in Santa Fe. Our current Poet Laureate had selected 36 poems by local poets, then artists applied to make a piece using a line or phrase from one of the poems as inspiration. Many of the artists incorporated the text of the phrase into their finished piece, and it was quite wonderful to see a gallery so full of words!
One of the pieces I particularly admired was by Joy Campbell, a sculpture that had small books in it. Turns out I had run across Joy’s work a few months ago at another gallery here (one with a small side room labelled “book arts!”) She makes altered books, and they are quite wonderful. You can see many of them here. And below is the piece I saw at the opening, The Yellowwood Tree, from poem by Lauren Camp. On her blog, Lauren says “Joy told me, ‘Your lines Decades ago, she planted the book of life and added daily to its chapters and Now, the many pages of her story grow around her are the words that inspired me to do the art piece.’”
Yesterday Polish poet Wisława Szymborska died (you can read the obituary here). I bought my first letterpress to print several of her poems and last night I re-read some of her poetry. (I think the best translation into English is this one.)
My current favorite is A Word on Statistics, which starts out
Out of every hundred people,
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.
Ready to help,
if it doesn’t take long:
forty-nine.
Read the entire poem here.
My friend Sharon sent me a link to pictures of Francisca Prieto’s The Antibook, described as a “non-conventional book of Nicanor Parra’s ‘AntiPoems’. It is a visual expression of his ‘Anti’ idea–opposing conventions. The essence of the book was analysed and its components abstracted in order to re-define the conventional form of a typical book.”
This kept me busy for an hour, looking up “antipoetry” (defined by Wikipedia “as an art movement that attempts to break away from the normal conventions of poetry… and sought to reject the belief that verse holds any mystical power. The poems have been described as prose-like, irreverent, and illuminating the problems of human existence.”)
The movement was founded by Chiliean poet Nicanor Parra. To get an idea of his poetry, here is one from his book Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great
Stop Racking your brains
nobody reads poetry nowadays
it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad.
See more poems and other writing here.