 "How do we articulate these feelings and this new way of experiencing the world so that we can communicate it?" When I read Tanja Softić's essay, I realized that my experience being a foreigner in the U.S. may actually be beneficial for the first time. That was really surprising when I thought about it. Often people talk about the disadvantages of being an Asian women or immigrant in the U.S.
"These days, we have all become immigrants: we can clearly see the destruction of life on the planet that is our home, by the forces that seem overwhelming." Indeed, in this dramatically evolving society -- tremendous technological developments & our short attention span with longer life span -- how we find who we are and how do we adapt new methods into our old habits to create a better society? Immigrants who experience multiple cultural backgrounds have experience with this process, because for them, adapting to American life means they have built new life methods onto their comfortable, familiar foundations. In other words, immigrants are really ready for this future normal. Therefore, I understand why Softić introduces Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (American anthropologist) and Lebbeus Woods (American architect) the way they did. Tsing sees human community as a fungal network, and Woods observes how we make homes by adding new material to distorted buildings after wars. Artists often find an idea from unrelated things. Artists are scholars, like Isaac Newton who compared a falling apple with the moon and crafted the theory of gravity. Softić is masterful at connecting those dots -- disintegration of her native country of Yugoslavia, Japanese-washi-paper, Covid-19, American social issues, chicken foot in a street drain -- to create her visual masterpieces.  "A Sound Like a Mighty Rushing Wind 2020" etching, photopolymer etching, chiyogami and digital print collage 16"x 47" 41 cm x 104 cm Tanja Softić Landscapes for the Last Century My visual art work combines the media of printmaking, drawing, photography and collage. I started writing poetry in my mid-forties. I should probably say “again and, this time, in English” because I used to write it in my youth, in Serbo-Croatian. Depending on who you talk to, this language is now called Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian or Montenegrin—I choose to stick to the nomenclature of my school days. An immigrant to the United States from Bosnia and Herzegovina, I have been working with the ideas of memory and migration for about twenty years. When I came to US in 1989 for what I thought was a three-year graduate program, I came from the country called Yugoslavia. So, while I am fascinated by questions of cultural identity or cultural belonging on an intellectual level, I have a personal experience of what Edward Said called the contrapuntal reality of an exile: I have transitioned through three citizenships in addition to one period of being a citizen of no country. In both my new and old homelands, outdated notions of national and ethnic identity and belonging continue to shape the politics and the society. Unlike many people affected by the current pandemic, by storms, fires and crop failures due to climate change, by capitalist boom and bust economies, I have had a privilege of having the safe, creative haven to process the events, record my thoughts and make work that is informed by the situation. Perhaps this privilege is not something that I would have noted some decades ago, but I am acutely aware of it now, and I am grateful for that awareness and sobered by it. Thinking about death, survival and their meaning in the larger cultural and ecological contexts and witnessing what may be the first death throes of the neoliberal world order, I have been working on Plague Diary, an ongoing series of collages on small sheets of kozo paper. The shapes I kept coming back to either embodied nature's ever-adapting ways of insuring survival, or cartoony visualizations of disaster.  "Excerpts from Plague Diary 2020" collage, photopolymer etching, digital print, ink, pencil 7.5" x 7.5" 19x19 cm These days, we have all become immigrants: we can clearly see the destruction of life on the planet that is our home, by the forces that seem overwhelming. Each action we take and every contemplation of the natural world is tinged with sense of loss of our world as we know it and knowledge of how much we are losing every day to the climate change. How many autumns do we have left to observe the splendor of of turning leaves? How many species will disappear this year? How long before homes of millions of people and the territories of entire nations become submerged under rising waters? There is a sense of anger, despair and even helplessness in the face of inaction of world leaders. How do we articulate these feelings and this new way of experiencing the world so that we can communicate it? And how do we turn them into something actually useful, a new, creative way of looking at and reorganizing the world? Dreaming of the perfect past and simpler world is tempting, but it is fanciful: exactly whose simple past are we talking about? It is also useless. What if we learned to think about the loss not with nostalgia and mimicry, but aiming to understand the forces that shaped the culture and society then, in order to understand the inertia and fear that prevents us from seeing the value of alternative views or solutions to existential problems we are facing? The processes used for creating images for Plague Diary and my larger works on paper, involve material labors of walking, collecting, repairing, cutting, transforming and connecting, generally speaking. Specifically, I travel, hike and explore memory sites in order to create photographic material, I create photopolymer etchings from my photographs, I collect biological illustration, elevation maps, things like visualizations of meteorological data or geophysical forces, I cut and reassemble photographs and found images into collage works that are then further developed in drawing, print and collage. Almost always, I work on Washi--Japanese paper-- because it will hold the most delicate drypoint or aquatint mark as well as the densest mezzotint. In drawing, I use it for its versatility and its strength. Because of the length of the fiber, Japanese paper will endure the handling and folding that would turn any Western paper into a pulp.  Plague Diary 2020 The processes themselves, the physicality of paper and drawing media, writing poetry, the visual sources I use all inform these works. While my poetic text is not obviously embedded into images, there is a vital connection, a symbiotic relationship between them: either the images generate poetry or the poem-writing provides insights that guides me in developing visual works. Night Blooms series of collage prints, for example, has been developed at the same time as some of my “Sarajevo poems”, such as Sarajevo Parataxis. Photographs of memory places interact with other elements (parts of old prints, traffic signage, photographs of mushrooms) in a visual, semiotic and lyrical ways: The city has a color in a way  "Night Blooms: Sky 2019" photogravure, aquatint, chine-collé, digital print 12"x24"/ 31x62 cm I aim to create landscapes for 21st century, include the loss, displacement and impermanence, but include hope as well. The works are unsettled and without the center because they investigate the world without center, without solid ground, without permanence in the lives of increasing part of humanity. My graphic interventions on top of the larger backgrounds are a conversation with that reality, they are investigations of our priorities and they contemplate new ways of living, valuing and thinking in this new, rapidly changing world. My visual work is also informed by the artist book formats I have observed and created, multi-channel video installations and other strategies to disrupt and alter the expected narrative. It is built as a result of digging into my own archives of photographs of mushrooms, invasive plants, memory places in Sarajevo and elsewhere, illustrations, decorative patterns, diagrams, maps, medical illustrations, microscopic imagery etc. Ultimately, this new work comes from what has been the impetus behind much of my art and writing: what is it that emerges as fertile, as full of possibility when we look back at life and culture that has been lost. How can we recognize seeds of renewal in the midst of unfolding disaster? For a couple of years, I have been working with images of mushrooms and invasive plants, incorporating them into my work as signifiers of the strangeness and interconnectedness of life and unexpected growth in unlikely places, as well as metaphors for displacement, migration, and assimilation.  A “collage staging wall” in Tanja Softić's studio Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, raises questions and offers ideas about sustainable life in the precarity of the Anthropocene through many distinct ways of looking at a species of mushroom, tricholoma matsutake: its biological symbiotic relationships, its role in processes of reforestation after disasters or logging, its vast underground fungal network, the communities and fringe economies it makes through foraging, trade, and global supply chains.(i) If I had to describe Tsing’s book in the ways one would describe a painting, I would call it a brilliant collage that plays with the notions of perspective that reveal not just deep mastery of it but also the need to escape perspective’s dictates and enter other means of envisioning pictorial space and what it is supposed to hold: “Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily, there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes—the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations.”(ii) Another of my influences is the late visionary architect and artist Lebbeus Woods. In his book War and Architecture,(iii) he uses the term “scab structures” to refer to additive repairs to a broken building that call attention to war trauma and serve a distinct purpose, enabling new forms of habitation while witnessing the processes of destruction and repair. In terms strikingly similar to Tsing’s, Woods not only offers critique of capitalist architectural and urban planning practices that are based on the concealment of trauma and brokenness but also offers a vision of the more complex, more collaborative world in the aftermath of war or a natural disaster. “Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no “sacred and primordial site.” Both Tsing and Woods visualize a habitable, sustainable communal world where brokenness is acknowledged, openly mourned, and woven into the landscape. We build upon the past, they acknowledge, but they warn us that nostalgia, sentimentality, ideas of “innocence” of past cultures and societies are slippery grounds to build upon. Preservation of memory without resorting to outdating solutions and concepts is possible: attention, as Simone Weil has said, is a form of prayer. And I would add, is the beginning of understanding, conversation and action. As an artist, I am hearing both Tsing and Woods inviting me to practice attentive, creative openness to a shifting terrain and its surprises—not unlike the kind of awareness one would need to forage for mushrooms, cross the sea to uncertainty in a flimsy boat, or set up home in the ruins. That is where the hope is. And that is how I hope to create the landscapes and portraits of precarious world-- decentered, polyphonic, surprising. If we listen, carefully, to the stories of migrants, exiles, and refugees, not only for the sake of exercising our compassion but in order to learn ways of coping and rapidly evolving by witnessing the unthinkable. Popular culture is replete with figures of tough lone survivors in a postapocalyptic world, with a gun and a supply of food cans. Actual survival on the Earth will call for much more complex thinking and actions. In this work, I reach back into my visual archives, I try and listen to the present and envision the possibilities in the future. Notes: (i.) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). (ii.) Ibid., 282. (iii.) Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture, trans. A. Wagner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 1. Tanja Softic´ works in the media of print, drawing, photography and poetic text. A recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant, Soros Foundation Grant and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is currently working on a series of works of paper that examine migration and entropy, both in nature and in the human society.
Her work has been exhibited and collected by museums, libraries and galleries worldwide, including the Library of Congress, National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Department of State Art in Embassies Program. She completed print projects at Flying Horse Press, Tamarind Institute and Anderson Ranch Print Studio. Her work was published in Southern Review, Hourglass Magazine and a number of academic publications. She teaches printmaking and the art of the book at University of Richmond. Poets are hard trainers (Period)
It can be more relatable to observe athletes at the 2021 Tokyo Olympic & Paralympic Games; instead, poets are, perhaps, like Auguste Rodin's The Thinker. Poets reach the limit of ones capacity - - write, erase, re-organize, destroy, create again, and then the final product - - though the products may not be well received by audiences. They may be overlooked or invisible. I do not think that it is an ideal environment for our creative selves, it is one that may lead to self-doubt and wrong impressions about our creations. However, the process is part of poetic progress. In other words, we - - poets - - have to find the optimal balance between our perception of our work and its reception. Ina Cariño, Kylie Gellatly, & Mary Ruefle (her essay is shared by Gellatly later in this article) have similar sutras for this. I think I’ve finally made peace with the fact that things take time, and that time takes time, too. - - Cariño You haven’t even begun. You must pause first, the way one must always pause before a great endeavor, if only to take a good breath. - - Ruefle When I reviewed Gellatly's book at RHINO Reviews, I was immediately curious as to why she adapted found poetry with art, and why she chose that original source, The Arctic Diary of Russell Williams Porter. I was not expecting such vivid details.  From "The Fever Poems" by Kylie Gellatly The Fever Poems by Kylie Gellatly The Fever Poems is the result of a myriad of circumstances; including but not limited to a head injury, a bad case of hives, the (then new) Covid-19, and a big move. I am tedious when telling the story behind this book, as it feels romantic in a way that I feel timid taking credit for. Maybe that is the nature of found poetry. Trying to tell the story of how this book happened is like trying to scoop a pile of shapeless things, or oozy goo blobs, into my arms and then try to carry them some distance and make an eloquent hand-off. What shape would you give to a head injury, hives, the pandemic, lockdown, packing up an apartment, the protests, isolation, the feeling that all I have is everything I have and is everything I will lose. How to contain this: The Fever Poems was a towel to clean up a spill, or a vessel—the kind of vessel that a towel becomes when it is entirely saturated. I had been working on a collection of poems and had just discovered the through-line, that the poems were about grief of self, or past selves. Then came the breath, the pause, the prescription: no screens, rest your brain, your eyes. Then, a physical enactment of the grief that I had recognized, under the circumstance of not knowing whether I would be able to restore my brain function to what it was before. The head trauma I was recovering from was one that had, at first, subtly hindered my ability to comprehend what I was reading, but under pressure, led to trouble with comprehension in both reading and writing. I was prescribed a month of rest and given strict parameters around what my brain could handle. I mostly just wrote letters to keep in touch and found so much creativity in this communication, which asked for something to be made in order for it to be said. I was drawing and collaging and writing a lot of letters, long letters, to various people; carrying on these disjointed conversations over gaps of time and distance.  From "The Fever Poems" by Kylie Gellatly I think of Mary Ruefle’s essay “Pause”, in which she says, “You must pause first, the way one must always pause before a great endeavor, if only to take a good breath.” The choice to use The Arctic Diary of Russell Williams Porter started with reason and turned into another. At first, it was simply that I was preparing for a move, cleaning out my books, and questioning whether I would take this book to another new place with me. My collection of arctic literature had once been very enthusiastic but, by this time, Porter’s diary was the only one left. I had carried it around for years for sentimental reasons and for a very dear inscription inside. I thought, it can only come with me if I make it into something else. So I tore out the inscription and started pulling the book apart. My obsession with arctic literature was an antidote for a steady depression and had presented itself to me as a form of escape that bred optimism toward endurance, stamina, and unlivable conditions. The nature of this use became poignantly clear to me as the nature of its escapism and toxic kind of endurance pointed at a lot of the shame I had been carrying. The book became a symbol for a fixed narrative, something I had been keeping my fragmented selves inside of, on ice. In retrospect, the best way I can think of the creation of The Fever Poems is as a month-long play in which I enacted an homage to the grief I was holding inside me for every person I had been in my life and a deconstruction of the walls that I held around each of them. Instead of leaving a pile of rubble, these collage poems are mosaics, made in a fit of compassion, that create a myth all its own, starring a fluid “we” and “I” — sourced from the context of Porter either speaking for himself or on behalf of his crew — to meld into a single, whole, and present form. Creating one poem every day for a month suspended judgement, doubt, and question long enough for a trust in myself and my voice to grow.  Kylie Gellatly is a visual poet and the author of The Fever Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2021). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant Magazine, GASHER, Literary North, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. Kylie is the Book Reviews Editor for Green Mountains Review, Editor-in-Chief of Mount Holyoke Review, and is a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College.
I often receive two questions:
To be honest with my audiences, I am annoyed by these questions because the answer to the first question is always, "yes," and the answer to the second question is always, "Leaning a craft takes time". When I read Ananda Lima's essay, I understood why they asked me these questions. Creating new approaches to poetry (even though there are many historical examples, like Brazilian Concrete poetry) can be lonely. Finding a graphic & visual poetry tribe can be trying, as if you are cutting through a bamboo forest to find treasure. I again realize how important it is to connect with communities and share knowledge about graphic & visual poetry at the Working On Gallery. Some poets may just be apprehensive to step into unfamiliar territory. Now, if they ask me these questions, I say, "Yes. Come join us!" However, drawing & collaging art do not create a good graphic / visual poem. Borrowing Lima's word, "intuitive", is a part of the process - - you develop a feel for what works in your vision, your decisions are made with more confidence - - though, the intuitive ability comes after studying text poems. It is a long journey, but exciting. I found a new tribe member today.  What am I doing here? Brief notes on being invited to hang out with graphic poets, and maybe line breaks By Ananda Lima As a poet, so much of the knowledge I have of my poems-in-progress or finished poems is intuitive. A knowing about whether something feels right, if it is doing what it should be doing, that is, ironically, apart from anything verbal. But a knowledge that is very much real. It might be only much later, often after the poem has been finished for a while, that a more verbal understanding might come. When asked to talk about a poem in an interview, discussing it with an editor, or talking to a friend, a verbal explanation might arise. An editor might wonder if a word should be shifted or cut, and only then, I develop a verbal understanding of why a specific word is part of the structure that holds what is underneath the poem, a structure that might not be entirely visible when skimming the verbal surface. Or a friend might make a connection that I had not expressed verbally, even to myself, but that I knew in some pre-verbal way was there. It's fun when I see those things come out in words. It can be illuminating. It can create new connections and generate new verbal or intuitive knowledge. It can make me feel understood. But it is always partial, tentative, not corresponding exactly to that non-verbal knowledge. This too can be satisfying/good news: if the poem can be paraphrased exactly, then it probably is not doing all it could do as a poem. A good poem, as a good story according to Flannery O’connor, should resist paraphrase.  Me, trying to figure out all how to describe my own poems and why I was invited to hang out with a talented group of graphic poets In a similar way, when Jennifer Sperry Steinorth asked me to join an event with a group of graphic poets and visual artists, including herself and Naoko Fujimoto, my membership in the group felt but intuitively right. This was despite the differences in the type of work members of the group were doing: there was brilliant and fascinating art that literalized and reinvented erasure while undoing a literal historical erasure, poems as transsensorial translation; a visual and sensory richness with mediums that included paint, white-out, lace, embroidery, and more, as well as words.  Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s work (Her Read) Whereas I was had been keeping myself busy writing mostly good old regular text poems:  Mother/land cover (painting by Paula Langstein) and excerpt from poem from the collection (Though often these were poems where the visual played an important role.)  Ananda Lima, “Hart Chart,” part of Amblyopia Despite the contrast between the visual and medium complexity of the group and mine, I was only intimidated in the usual ways (ie, speaking alongside amazing people whose work you are very impressed by). But I did feel that I belonged with the group. Though I couldn’t initially verbalize why. In preparation for the event, I went searching for that verbal knowledge, trying to understand my feeling of belonging in the group. It wasn’t just that I was, separately, a photographer, as well as a poet.  Ananda Lima, Photographs Or that I sometimes put photography and poetry together.  Proofs of Vigil (forthcoming), currently open in Ananda Lima's computer It wasn’t just that I had been interested in the friction that words and visual objects create in the page for a long time.  Photographs of early teenage diaries in the 90s It wasn’t that as a child I was introduced to Brazilian Concrete poetry alongside sonnets and ballads and thought of them collectively as just regular poetry:  Décio Pignatari ("Beba Coca Cola") (Or that somehow concrete poetry for me is emotionally entangled with concrete concrete, as in cement, the concrete of the Brazilian modernist architecture from the 1960s and today. Or that geometric, intentionally graphic or brutalist concrete structures around the world transport me to a time and place that only exists inside me, bringing me home.  Ananda Lima, Photographs of Brasília Or maybe all of that was part of it, but there was something else, more fundamental. I felt connected to the work of those graphic poets in a more abstract way, which is less dependent on a specific medium or specific biographical events. I started thinking about the poem I would discuss with the group, “Amblyopia”:  Despite reading it out loud in different ways in the drafting process, when it came to reading the finished poem, I just knew what to do. Again, that knowledge was fully present, but purely intuitive. I read the solid left side of the poem out loud, as I would any poem. But I only read the first two lines or so on the right side, letting the rest fade away into silence. That way of reading felt very right. It was both part of how the poem was saying what it wanted to say and what the poem was saying. And seeing that how and that what intertwined is what I want to see in a poem. As it often happens when thinking about poetry, all of this lead me to to line breaks, a fundamental feature of poetry (maybe even prose poems, in their opposition to the line). The line break is an additional meaning making element which interacts significantly and meaningfully with the verbal, but is not itself verbal. It can be combined to reinforce or be in tension with verbal language, a wrestling for breath between break and syntax.  Erica Sánchez (“Amá”), Ocean Vuong (“Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong”) Yesenia Montilla (“Imagining Him Running at the Sight of Deer”) Somehow the line break and that intuition about how to read “Amblyopia,” more than those explicitly visual art factors I mentioned before, were at the heart of why I felt I belonged with that group of graphic poems. Something about how the sound and the visual presence of text in the page sometimes reinforced each other, sometimes were in tension with each other and created meaning from their interaction. In graphic poetry, there is often a verbal component, words that have a stronger intrinsical link to sound, that can be read verbally without appeal for description. And there is the visual and/or tactile component, which “speaks” non-verbally. The poems are made of the two components working together to create something that cannot be simply replaced with description. In other words, graphic poetry is poetry. And it is poetry that makes that non-paraphrasable quality of poetry, fittingly, more visible. Verbalizing this, I am beginning to understand why graphic poetry, concrete poetry always felt to me, deliciously, a little meta, a little ars poetica, and very boldly poetry, even when the subject matter is not poetry or the poem itself. So the reason I felt I belonged there had less to do with the fact that I was also a visual artist, and much to do with the fact that I was simply a poet. A poet that cannot and does not always want to explain her poems. It had everything to do with that non-verbal factor that is essential to poetry, and a poem’s resistance to paraphrase. And there I felt right at home.  Ananda Lima’s poetry collection Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press) is the winner of the Hudson Prize. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks (Amblyopia, Bull City Press, and Translation, Paper Nautilus), a fiction chapbook (Tropicália, Newfound), and a poetry and photography chapbook (Vigil, Get Fresh Books). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark. You may also like reading:
 Lea Graham in Quintay, Chile (credit: Mark Spitzer) I am so pleased to present Lea Graham's craft essay about her translation process for my anniversary month. The Working On Gallery turned one year old, and there is no better way to celebrate it than with her astonishing biographical essay. I had goosebumps the whole time reading it. This is why I started the gallery. This gallery is personal in the sense that it allows authors to share their creative processes, some created from years of intimate self discovery, culminating in the choices that define dreams and careers. Graham is a translator who currently works with a Chilean poet, Sergio Coddou. I translate Japanese waka-poems because I am seeking threads of my heritage through ancient words - - the use of language, images, and sounds - - If I study these poems, I feel the spaces between between my body (where I physically exist) and soul (where I belong) fill out. For me, waka-poems build my creative identity. My roaming soul (to borrowing some of Graham's translated words) is still out there. Time seems to crawl when I try to articulate what it seeks, or why it roams. But when the moment is right, it is beautifully answered. As if Coddou's wife said, “That word… it has a little bit of soil in it.”  Cerro del Plomo mountains (credit: Renato Warnken) It Has a Little Bit of Soil in It: Reflections on Translation & Place By Lea Graham Translation is intimate work. As with any significant relationship, there’s risk and routine. There’s something secretive about it too, as if you, the translator, have discovered what no one else has before. I often feel that I’m falling into the poem as I’m translating. The intensity of investigation into individual words, phrases or idioms; the searching into word histories, and the exploration of the poet’s life and concerns creates a familiarity, a camaraderie, an empathy. Like any intimacy, it slows the world down. When I first started translating poetry I was in graduate school in Chicago, living in the largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood of Pilsen on the Near West Side. The details of the living room in the apartment I worked from are vividly recalled: the honey-brown Mission-style desk (scored in a fancy North Side yard sale), a large red hibiscus flowering in one of the tall windows and a honey locust peering in from another. Both looked out onto 21st Place and Damen where I lived for nearly a decade and where later in the day I would hear the jingle of the elote man’s cart and then, the ice cream truck’s “Turkey in the Straw” as evening slipped into night. The ceilings were high, giving the room a sense of amplitude; various Spanish, English and etymological dictionaries lay in a half-moon around my computer and on the floor around my feet. Each morning two crows valentined each other—one from the roof of the house across the street, the other up in the tree. It took me a few weeks to realize that as I worked, they were having their daily coffee klatch.  Cerro del Plomo from the street in Santiago, Chile (credit: Sergio Coddou) My first project those years ago was in translating poems by the Chilean poet, Gabriela Mistral. My professor, upon learning that I was working in Spanish, said “Oh, you must translate Mistral.” She said it with such conviction but also in a tone that suggested I would continue to be the undereducated rube she thought I already was if I didn’t. What I learned from her that semester was the kind of teacher I did not want to become. Each class she made caustic remarks about all we didn’t know or would pointedly ask one of the older and more fluent graduate students to read our work out loud, not so subtly implying that she couldn’t bear to hear our pronunciation. Still, the lessons and experience of translating Mistral more than made up for the condescension. Gabriela Mistral was a poet and an educator who championed the rights of women, children and the poor before becoming a diplomat for Chile. She was a fierce advocate of democracy and education in her own country and throughout Latin America which is why so many schools still bear her name. All this appealed to me. I had spent a few years living in Spanish-speaking communities where, in one of my jobs, I worked as an advocate for Central American refugees. Weekly, I drove my clients to the Immigration Office in Paterson, New Jersey, stood in line, petty-bribing the guards with sticks of gum, a smile, and my whiteness, trying to get my clients moved up further in line. I still remember the negotiation process when we finally got to the counter: there I was in my ripped-at-the-knee-jeans, just out of undergraduate and my first time in the Northeast; my clients, mostly young or middle-aged Salvadoran or Nicaraguan men, all silent and anxious next to me. I could feel both their fear and faith as we negotiated their green cards in an exchange that was almost always rude and sometimes blatantly hostile. We always managed to get it done. Afterwards, I could feel the relief in their more relaxed postures as they insisted upon taking me to lunch at the nearby Salvadoran restaurant. That was where they would tell me details of their families back in San Salvador, Santa Ana, Managua or Esquipulas—of blackouts and nightly curfews, of the missing and the not knowing, of the last phone call they had with their mother, their brother, a niece. Those moments across a table where we shared plates of pupusas de queso y revuelta, tables covered in red and white plastic coverings, a picture of El Salvador up on the mostly bare wall, the low hum of conversation and small clatter back in the kitchen.  The Ozark Mountains, Northwest Arkansas (credit: Lea Graham) Despite these experiences and my philosophical connection to Mistral’s life’s work, I had never been to Chile. I had no sense of the breath-catching rise of the Cerro del Plomo from the streets of Santiago, the endemic flora that appears in her work—plants that couldn’t travel elsewhere because of the specific and confining terrain, or the Gainsboro to Spanish grays and Egyptian to azurite blues of the ocean off the Valparaiso coast that now, years and travels later, remain as some of the most mysterious and dreamy seascapes of my life. What I did understand was her loss of place and the identity that went with it. Mistral’s losses—both that of her lover and a beloved nephew by suicide, along with her name change from Lucila Godoy Alcayaga to her pseudonym (drawn from the names of two favorite poets; the Italian, Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Provencal, Frèdèric Mistral) were romantic to me at the time. But it wasn’t the kind of romance that made anything transcendent. Her pain for those she had lost, including a version of herself, were commensurate with her success as a poet, teacher and diplomat. Her poems were not salvation narratives; rather, they were fully immersed in both their anguish and their resoluteness in poetry-making itself. When I reflect now, I realize that the intimacy I felt that seemed so personal to me at the time was actually created through the poems’ specific locus and their energizing abstractions. It was the sense that all serious readers feel when they read good work: that the poet’s plight is your own. My own series of displacements in childhood began with my parents’ divorce in 1970s Northwest Arkansas when divorce was taboo at worst, and shameful at best. After relocating from a comfortable home in a small town to my maternal grandparents’ chicken and dairy farm, we moved to the nearby university town where we continued to change schools every two years. When my mother remarried, the displacement took on new characteristics in which my brothers and I learned in various ways that we were not valued, that we were burdens. It was this emotional displacement that complicated the geographical changes. It still translates all these years later like one loss blending into another. Alongside my early education of place, the graduate courses I took a decade later, with some notable exceptions, didn’t recognize me or my background. To paraphrase the poet Lucille Clifton, I had “windows” into other worlds through reading, but few “mirrors” in my education to recognize my own experience. The Southern towns and farm-scapes from where my language had grown and in which meaning and lyric were layered for me were dismissed as culturally impoverished. I sensed a dishonoring of my original places in the very place where I was learning to intensely read and write, a place where I was learning to teach other young people with even more invisible backgrounds than my own. Even with the privilege of whiteness and a certain kind of middle-classness, my lack of “mirrors” kept me from seeing myself as a serious writer and academic. But while I felt alone in my longing, I sucked it up, flattened my accent and embraced the urban North. My translation of the poem “Balada de Mi Nombre” (“Ballad of My Name”), stands out for me in its ability to inhabit both loneliness, the condition of being alone, and lonesomeness, that interior isolation that one feels no matter who they are with: My own name that I've lost, In this opening, the name has been lost to the speaker but still continues to live on in memory and the natural, sensory world. As the poem continues, we see the name personified; it is its own agent out in a familiar and beloved world to the speaker but apart from her. She, in turn, is a stranger to it: If without me, or if carrying away my youth, I love this poem for the way in which we see how profound the speaker’s isolation is. While the name is “lost” to her, it still lives on in this familiar world and fails to recognize the person who was, once upon a time, intimate with it. The speaker’s anguish at having others “tell” her that it walks “along the precipice of [her] mountain/ late in the afternoon” calls up deep loss and the pain of having to hear about it from others even as it still traverses the places that the speaker calls her own. The name has abandoned her without having abandoned the places she loves and the people she knows. The final line: “without my body and my soul roaming” can be read as both the name walking without her body and soul, but also as if “my soul roaming” is intrinsic to the name so that the name and her soul are companions, both lost to her.  Sergio Coddou Years, jobs and a few geographies later, I found myself translating poems for an anthology of contemporary Chilean poets and this question of identity raised its head in a different way. I worked all through that fall and winter with a native-speaking colleague at my institution. Irma and I would often meet in her office filled with brilliant-colored wooden animals, Day of the Dead figures, crosses and wall hangings from Latin America and Spain—color exploding from every wall and shelf so that you couldn’t help but feel a little more joyful no matter what kind of day you were having. We would happily haggle over words in the poems we were working on until one day when I was struggling to translate a small, spare poem that contained the word “alma.” Unlike the nature of Mistral’s spiritual work, this poem was far more bodily and overtly sensual. We struggled over whether I should go with “soul” or “spirit” or “essence.” We questioned how to render “soul” into the English language when it has become a word that means everything from religion to philosophy to personality to food to music? It’s a word that in meaning so much has lost its flavor. It was a conversation and translation dilemma that lingered long after the anthology was published. In working on that anthology, what caught my imagination most was the work of the poet Sergio Coddou, and his poem “Soy un Hotel” (“I Am a Hotel”). It was a poem that felt like a homecoming as I translated: I am a hotel decked out to receive your laments with a room especially accommodated to shuck myself in your presence and you make of me sublime popcorn with the fire of your glance. There was a shock of joy in translating the word “desgranarme” (to shell) when I finally landed on the word “shucked.” It was a word from my childhood that was fun to say—even before I learned what it rhymed with. The softness of the “sh” along with the hard “ck” sound had such satisfaction. But just as much, it was the connection to home—shucking corn with its satisfying sough and ripping sound along with the curious and maddening silks that we had to pick off for our grandmother so she could boil the sunny husks. While the poem was an early love poem to Coddou’s wife Rosario, it also had such a wonderful sense of place in its language and conceit. It was so beautifully raw and imaginatively romantic that I sent Coddou a message to see if he would let me publish my translations of his work in literary journals. When he told me he liked how I had rendered his work into English, especially the sound, it began an ongoing conversation. Then one winter night a few years after our initial email exchange, Coddou and his family were visiting Manhattan, and they invited me to dinner. I arrived at their Airbnb on the Upper East Side with a backpack full of cookies for the kids and a bottle of wine for him and Rosario. It was one of those New York City nights that smelled of snow. We had dinner in the spacious and warm apartment with their four children, who were clearly accustomed to their parents’ friends at dinner as evidenced by their courtesy and friendly ease. Dinner was followed by one of those conversations—full of art and poetry, Chilean politics and family history—which I relaxed into, never wanting it to end. Rosario told me that when he showed her that poem—the same poem that I had been so taken with—that’s when she knew “he was serious” about her.  Sergio Coddou and Rosario Navarro Our conversation continued as I told them about the process of translating the poems for the Chilean anthology those years before and, specifically, the struggle over the word “alma.” I told them about the dilemma of the English and how to go with “soul” was to invite religious or heavily philosophical baggage, while “essence” suggested the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. So how could I do justice to the translation? The moment became especially vivid when Rosario touched her pointer finger to her tongue, marked the air with it, and said, “That word… it has a little bit of soil in it.” She explained that the word is connected to the land, to a specific place. It was one of those moments that stunned me in its brilliance. Why hadn’t I thought of that? After all, the word’s etymology came in part from the Arabic “al-ma,” meaning “on the water.” Her insight had concretized the word, turning it beyond the religious or the psyche and into locus—the place where things happen. It was a moment in which I had the profound glimpse at how embedded our language is in our place of origin. What she knew couldn’t be fully discovered in a book, but it felt deeply and intuitively accurate. There we were around a warmly lit table, the leftover dishes pushed to one side, the wine half-gone, several stories above the city where anything anyone might imagine was whirling around us like the snow that would come in the early hours of morning. In that extraordinary conflation of conversation, revelation, people and place, an intimate moment had occurred, a moment within a night that felt like my best experiences of translating. The most brilliant moments come unexpectedly and indirectly. I learned that while I wanted to be faithful to the original language of the poet, I discovered that what was really after and what I found was the spirit or genius loci within the poem’s stanzas and spaces. Lea Graham is the author of two poetry collections, From the Hotel Vernon (Salmon Press, 2019) and Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011); a fine press book, Murmurations (Hot Tomato Press, 2020), and three chapbooks, Spell to Spell (above/ground Press, 2018), This End of the World: Notes to Robert Kroetsch (Apt. 9 Press, 2016) and Calendar Girls (above/ground Press, 2006). She is the editor of the forthcoming anthology of critical essays: From the Word to the Place: The Work of Michael Anania (MadHat Press, 2021). She is an associate professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, NY and a native of Northwest Arkansas. You may also like reading Dust in the Sunlight: Translating Light by Steven Teref and Maja Teref.  Working On Gallery, Summer 2020 - Summer 2021 I just cannot believe that my gallery, "Working On Gallery", is turning a year old! There were so many wonderful guests who talked about their crafts & writing processes from Summer 2020 - Summer 2021. Now, I have a list of new guests. They are all amazing poets, writers, translators, and editors. I am so excited to read and learn from their essays. Ananda Lima Chloe Martinez Hasanthika Sirisena Jamia Weir Josh O'Neil Kylie Gellatly Lea Graham Tanja Softić  Moreover, one of RHINO Poetry's popular segments, RHINO Poetry *graphic* Review, will be out in September. This issue will be our third anniversary of *graphic* edition. All reviewers are experienced poets who also work with visual elements in their publications. It is going to be another phenomenal issue. Featured reviewers are: Aaron Caycedo-Kimura Anthony Madrid Chloe Martinez Crystal Simone Smith David Morgan O’Connor Frances Cannon Ina Cariño Jennifer Steinorth Kelly Cressio-Moeller Meg Reynolds Rodney Gomez Tricia Lopez * I will also have lectures and live reading events. The current (on-going) event is a 3D virtual graphic poetry exhibition at Kunstmatrix. Thanks to Tupelo Press, admission is free for all audiences. A 3D virtual graphic poetry exhibition will be held until May 22, 2022 at Kunstmatrix. Thanks to Tupelo Press, admission is free for all audiences.
This is the sample video what the 3D virtual exhibition will look like. There, you may learn about each piece closely along with process essays. All graphic poems were photo-recorded by a famous photographer, Jim Gipe, with his team. Their team also preserves historical art (paintings, drawings, & old photos). Their amazing projects involve scanning & stitching together files of artwork at the Eric Carle Museum. They also work with the Mark Shaw Photographic Archive leading to the publication of the film scans in Charmed by Audrey – Life on the set of Sabrina. (Sabrina and My Fair Lady are my father and my favorite movies all time) More over, they work with many museums & magazines. It is amazing how they took pictures of graphic poems and Tupelo Press created their first visual adaptation poetry collection. In this video, I am reading "Protest Against", which was originally published in North American Review. Poetry Editor Rachel Morgan & Managing Editor Jeremy Schraffenberger at North American Review discussed the graphic poem in Final Thursday Press.
Jacob Valenti created this promotion video. It is great because you can compare the original poem with graphic poem. Valenti filled in the words that I removed for the graphic poem. And my electric piano...(I know, I know that my dazzling smile might hurt your eyes.) It came from a dumpster. It was upside down on top of trash, and the electrical cord was missing. When I found it, I was like, "Who the hell throws a piano away like that!" I needed to rescue it. I practiced with it for a long time, and recently donated it to a Bulgarian family. Their grandfather and daughter played the piano. Now I have (drum rolls, please) a brand new beautiful, Yamaha! My friends asked me, "Did you find it in the dumpster?" This Yamaha is a little too heavy for me to carry from the dumpster. All craft essays are SUPER inspirational. I am really thankful that they supported this project. 本当にありがとう。A new collection of essays is coming soon!
 I have never had this many stars, even I was in an elementary school. This is the strangest feeling to describe - - I was already looking forward to the next summer when the last one ended. But once I am in the sun again, I feel like, "Oh, summer" - - then my eyes soak in the sunshine and I slowly feel, "Oh, that was what I was waiting for so long!" This delayed realization is exactly how I feel about "GLYPH: Graphic Poetry = Trans. Sensory". The book was officially released from Tupelo Press on June 1st. It is now available from independent book stores, and will be available soon from Amazon and large distributors by the end of June. About one week has passed since the book came out. Pre-order and exclusive poets, writers, and artists received them, and shared the kindest words with me. 本当にありがとう。  Tupelo Press Twitter @tupelopress When I received boxes of my books in the end of May, I was unexpectedly calm. I was chilling with it as if it was just another day - - but not. I know that it is hard to publish a book. It takes a tremendous amount of time & effort after trying, failing, learning, and fighting with my ego. Many, MANY people are involved from day one of GLYPH: Graphic Poetry = Trans. Sensory Project. They supported me in difficult times and when I was discouraged by rejections. They also shared my happiest moments with me. When I hold the book, this is not the end. Like a wedding ceremony, the commitment starts now. I will own this project and support the poetry & graphic/visual poetry communities with my experience and gained knowledge. 
This is a photo I created, but the KUNSTMATRIX is fun to explore.
One cool announcement: Tupelo Press set up an online exhibition at the KUNSTMATRIX. Please visit whenever you have a chance. 2020 - 2021 is a blooming season of graphic & visual poetry collections. * Rodney Gomez, Geographic Tongue (2020, Pleiades Press) Sarah J. Sloat, Hotel Almighty (2020, Sarabande Books) Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry by 36 women in 21 countries, Edited by Amanda Earl (2021, Timglaset, Sweden) Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's Her Read: A Graphic Poem (2021, Texas A&M University Press) Meg Reynolds, A Comic Year (Forthcoming, Finishing Line Press) * These collections were a part of this exciting graphic & visual poetry season. I was honored to know them and learn their crafting processes in the Working On Gallery. I am also aware that there are many stunning domestic and international collections that I have yet to be introduced. I am thrilled to meet more writers & artists though my lifetime. Jennifer Sperry Steinorth's Her Read: A Graphic Poem (Texas A&M University Press) just released in June. I recommend read this collection because this is a new type of erasure, visual, & graphic poetry. For more details, I wrote a review for the forthcoming RHINO Poetry Reviews. Steinorth shared the following craft essay of the making of her newest book along with her new erasure collections using Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. When I saw her Frankenstein erasure collection, it immediately reminded me of a theater play by Lookingglass in Chicago. Steinorth's color choices, textures, and mysterious, yet romantic art styles are like a performing art. Steinorth wrote, "I offer my erasure—rendered in ink and charcoal, thinking of the birth pains my monster necessitated through the voice of Mary Shelley, in what I imagine may as easily apply to her literary labors." Yes! That's it. Her process IS a performing art. I have been thinking about the future of visual & graphic poetry - - will it be tied together with films and theater plays? - - this notion is reinforced every day when I watch Netflix series of live action dramas based on comic books. The serial nature of the stories, along with the extended pacing shows a way more suited for the source material than film in some regards, and that flexibility may contribute to poetry adaptations. But I am still not sure that some short films & performance arts successfully adapt visual & graphic poems. When I observe their use of language, line-breaks, and other poetic elements, I feel like the visual aspects have more weight than the language portions. As a poet, I would like to see more word interactions. I am so lucky to see poets like Steinorth, Reynolds, Sloat, and Gomez challenging their mediums to find new ways to make use of such a great pool of poetry source material.  Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, "Mine the Dead", Visual / Graphic Erasure Poem Page 42-43  Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, "Mine the Dead", Visual / Graphic Erasure Poem Page 44-45 Mining the Dead: On the Making of Her Read, a Graphic Poem Craft Essay by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth In the summer of 2016—in the heat of that election—I set out on a project that would occupy much of my next four years: the poetic and visual erasure of The Meaning of Art by Herbert Read (Faber & Faber, 1931). I’d longed to try an extended erasure and finding myself too enraged to otherwise write, it seemed as good a time as any. I was immediately attracted to the physicality of the book—a red, mid-century, cloth bound text with the title and author’s name stamped in black modernist font, all caps. But while I was attracted to the body of the text, the title chafed. What hubris to unironically title a book The Meaning of Art—as if a single volume by one man could so deliver. And lo, in what turned out to be a survey of art from pre-history to the modern age, not a single female artist appeared—save one—and she not until the third edition in 1951. So from the voice of the male critic discussing male bodies of work, I began to excavate a first person female lyric. At times the excavation seemed literal—as tediously laborious as I imagine archeological digs might be. And the correction fluid I used to elevate the chosen words hardened to a veneer of stone that made the visible text appear freshly unearthed. And as I worked I sometimes envisioned women buried by station, gender, race, earth, time clawing through the rubble to gasp, clear their throats and speak. Once my undertaking seemed to have legs, I committed myself to deconstructing the entire text---all two-hundred sixty-six pages—including seventy black and white illustrations. But 266 pages was too long for my finished project. So I devised ways of conveying text from multiple pages into a single image. Windows could be cut between pages; multiples could be stitched together. Pages that weren’t pulling their weight could be amputated. As I neared the end and considered how to draw my book to a close, it occurred to me that I—we—the speakers and I—needed more control over the materials to articulate what remained to be said. Rather than continue to restrict myself to words in the order they appeared in the source text, I remove pages from the book and mined them for parts. I had done something similar with the six page catalogue of illustrations that appears in the fore word, surgically removing the names of all the artists and arranging them on a single page. In the Apologia to Her Read, I mention the years devoted to its creation were also riddled with chronic, debilitating physical pain. I worked from a standing desk because I could not sit in a chair. I would later be diagnosed with Celiac and Crohn’s diseases. The surgeries required to compose the late pages of the book were exceedingly tedious. I rested when I could no longer see; the pages I mined for parts became delicate—perforated (like my intenstines)—a kind of lace work. I affectionately referred to them as my “Frankenstein pages”. I felt like the Doctor hunched over my would-be creation. Like Frankenstein’s, my creature was made of recycled parts, and I dug the association with Mary Shelley—a woman shaped by numerous tragedies particular to women of her time. Not Mary the Virgin mother whose image is second only to Jesus in the Western cannon, but Mary, mother of a most beloved monster. The rhyming actions I perceived while manipulating the artifact gave rise to the appearance of Mary Shelley alongside the Virgin in the final pages of Her Read. And as I considered how I might approach a craft essay on the making of Her Read, I returned to Mary’s monstrous tale more particularly— zooming in on Chapter 3—the passages that chronicle the doctor’s art and the monster’s coming-to-be. I offer my erasure—rendered in ink and charcoal, thinking of the birth pains my monster necessitated through the voice of Mary Shelley, in what I imagine may as easily apply to her literary labors.  Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, "Mine the Dead", Visual / Graphic Erasure Poem Page 46-47  Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, "Mine the Dead", Visual / Graphic Erasure Poem Page 48-49  Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, "Mine the Dead", Visual / Graphic Erasure Poem Page 50-51 Bibliography: Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus. Garden City, New York: Halcyon House, 1949. Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s books include Her Read A Graphic Poem (2021) and A Wake with Nine Shades (2019), both from Texas Review Press. A poet, educator, interdisciplinary artist, and licensed builder, she has received grants from Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Community of Writers, and the MFA for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Recent poetry has appeared in Black Warrior, Cincinnati Review, Michigan Quarterly, Missouri Review, Pleiades, Plume, Rhino, TriQuarterly and elsewhere. Connect at jennifersperrysteinorth.com    Photo by Angela Narciso Torres RHINO Poetry Reviews' Editor, Angela Narciso Torres, posted the newest promotion video by Tupelo Press. This video has SO MANY HEATBEATS! "Making GLYPH" is created & edited by dearest Jacob Valenti, who gathered an enormous volume of my short videos and photos to tie together beautifully. My book, "GLYPH Graphic Poetry = Trans. Sensory", will be released on June 1st, 2021. I want you to "Trans. Sensorise"!  As of 05/29/2021, 6K Views!! Arigato!   Ina Cariño I am not saying this because of the Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month, but are we - - Cariño, Fujimoto, or other Asian decedents - - living with certain expectations? When I read their following craft essay, "never good enough" strikes me. Being "perfect" is a curse of being an Asian, I wonder. I got to know Cariño's poems and art though #RHINOArt2Art. Then soon after, they won the 2021 Alice James Award for their manuscript Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. I am really looking forward to reading the manuscript. It is definitely an exciting time for them, but it was not easy getting there. I know - - I am not Cariño - - but I feel the common moya-moya, which is like a haze covering a main core. I am about to reach it, but some doubtful emotion blocks me out. I started practicing the piano when I was four years old, and I had no doubt that I would became a pianist. During my teenage years, I had numerous concerts and competitions to prove my potential, but I ultimately failed. I realized that my skill had never achieved a professional level. But what kind of professional levels was I talking about? Like the International Chopin Piano Competition? This mindset was dangerous, and I do not know when it was seeded. It might be a part of me through Japanese society, education system, and culture around me. And I think that I expected success, much like I tried to learn perfect English when I came here, to America. My mind was changed when I was a finalist for the Kundiman Poetry Prize in 2015. That year, Jeffrey Levine (Tupelo Press) was the final decision maker. He told me, "Naoko, you have plenty of time". Yes. I - - we - - have plenty of time. Things that we learn co-exist through our art. Deep gratitude to Cariño.  Art by Ina Cariño Taking Time by Ina Cariño When I was an undergraduate, I pursued, at different stages, degrees in music performance, visual art, and English literature. I started playing the violin when I was eleven—too old to really amount to anything in the world of classical music. But I was stubborn, and somehow passed the audition for a small but relatively well-known school of music. My Belarusian violin teacher warned me quite seriously that, though it wasn’t a conservatory, it would most likely be rough. And it was. It seemed I was never good enough, and performing in front of my peers gave me anxiety for the first time since I’d started playing. In fact, I think I got worse over time. A year and a half in, I switched to visual art. But I’m a failed art major too—after one semester of lugging art supplies around campus and barely passing my introductory-level drawing classes, I hopped right back to music. Eventually I would receive my bachelor’s degree in English, with a minor in music performance. It took me about eight years to finish college.  Art by Ina Cariño I come from a family of creatives. Growing up, my sisters and I took piano and painting lessons and sang in our school choirs. We were encouraged to read and write. I was kind of a sickly kid, and spent a lot of time indoors, so I guess I’m predisposed to creative activities—but looking back, I never really finished anything. I always stopped halfway. I mostly rode on being naturally good at things, which only keeps going if you put in the time and effort. Grad school was different, maybe because I was older and less concerned with the anxieties I had in my early twenties. The two-year MFA program I attended was a magical space for me. Because writing is at first a mostly solitary act, I felt I could take my time and breathe while drafting a poem. I didn’t have to perform for anyone in abstract ways. And though workshop could sometimes be rough, I never once felt crushed after a critique. At the end of my time at the program, my adviser told me that my thesis—the bones of my first poetry manuscript—was “ready.” Some are, he said, and some aren’t. Ordering the poems in my manuscript was a bit like writing a longer poem. At first, I (embarrassingly) ordered them in chronological order from the speaker’s point of view. My adviser laughed and told me to take stock: what motifs, images, forms, and emotional cores did each poem have, and what was heightened or muffled when one poem followed another? I spent so many nights in my last semester shuffling my poems, reading and rereading them. I read them out loud, over and over. So much time, creating this body of work. I had to finish, and I did. Finally, I’d seen something that I’d created through until the end. After grad school, I worked your typical after-grad-school job as a barista for about a year. When the pandemic hit, I made the decision to quit because I would make more money on unemployment. Those were hazy months. Between taking part in Black Lives Matter protests and spending more time in my apartment with my cat than I’d ever done before, I’d been sending out my manuscript everywhere, and was a finalist a couple of times for first book prizes. But really, I was losing hope for my writing; my manuscript was rejected over and over again.  Art by Ina Cariño Unemployment didn’t last forever. Currently, I’m a technical writer for a loan and mortgage company. I work remotely Monday through Friday, from 8 to 5, with an hour lunch. Every workday has been a struggle. I don’t feel like writing after work, and, like others, I felt so isolated during quarantine. One day in March this past year, during my lunch hour, I got a call from a press to which I’d submitted my manuscript, and they told me that I’d won their book prize. It had been two years since I graduated from my program. I know that for many, it takes even longer. Of course, I was thrilled. Still, right now, I feel so far away from the poems from my thesis, and so far away from any poems that I’ll write in the future. I’m kind of in limbo, floating back and forth between almost writing and not writing at all. And I think that’s okay. In the past I’d wondered if it was too late to go back to art, to music. And I think it’s not. And we still have so much time in isolation, even as the new CDC mask guidelines have been announced. I’ve been drawing more. I’ve been trying my hand at watercolor, something I’ve always been terrible at. I picked the guitar back up, when I’d only dabbled in playing it in the past. And sometimes I worry that I’m not really a poet, which is a fear that many poets probably have. Every day is a struggle, each moment shifting and changing in ways that can sometimes make things seem more uncertain. And I’ll never be a violin virtuoso, or an artist with solo shows. But I think I’ve finally made peace with the fact that things take time, and that time takes time, too. Ina Cariño holds an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Apogee, Wildness, Waxwing, New England Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Ina is a Kundiman fellow, a Best of the Net finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for their manuscript Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In December of 2019, Ina founded a poetry series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community.
 I am still collecting craft essays from poets, writers, and translators. I would also like to share my journey of releasing my newest book, "GLYPH: Graphic Poetry = Trans. Sensory" (Tupelo Press, 2021) in the Working On Gallery. The book will be nationally available on June 1st. GLYPH: GRAPHIC POETRY=TRANS. SENSORY by Naoko Fujimoto $21.95 All color Weight 0.5 lbs Dimensions 8.5 × 11 in Sample Page My first GLYPH journey was with DJ Daphne from the Poetry Show at Radio Boise. We talked about graphic poems, creative processes, and Japanese culture. Her warm, welcoming tone guided me beautifully. It was like a girl's talk. I really enjoyed having a conversation with her. As many people know, I am super not good at calculating time zones. I almost made a huge mistake (again), but I was fifteen minutes early, so I was playing the piano to pass the time. So I did not realize that she was there! The show was recorded on a peaceful afternoon. You may like listening to my 100% authentic NAOKO voice. "The Poetry Show!" airs from 5-5:30 p.m. MT (7-7:30 p.m. CT) Every Sunday The Radio Boise streaming service It is a really exciting time for Aaron Caycedo-Kimura. His debut collection, Ubasute, is a gorgeous chapbook. I am going to talk about his chapbook in RHINO Reviews (forthcoming). His full-length book will be available in 2022. He shared his new project, Aizome postcards. It is a strange coincidence, but my grandmother had practiced Aizome, Kusaki-zome, & Shibori for a long time. I still have some her works with me, so I just opened up my old suitcase thinking of her. Now, her Alzheimer's condition is worsening, and she was just moved to a hospital. Aizome blue is different from any other blue. It is dark, slightly brighter than the bottom of ocean. It is a blue mixed with both sunshine and shadow. It is the color of Japanese everyday life. Caycedo-Kimura's paintings captured it. When I was in elementary school, I tried Aizome-Sibori with my grandmother. Even though I wore gloves, I ended up died blue from the head to toe. I had blue spots on my cheeks all afternoon. My sister had a flower pattern and she succeeded. Mine was an incomplete mess with blue and white dots on a cloth. I feel close to my Japanese identity with Caycedo-Kimura's works today. ありがとう。  Aaron Caycedo-Kimura Craft Essay by Aaron Caycedo-Kimura Every year from December through January, I participate in an exhibit at the Chester Gallery in Chester, Connecticut, now owned and operated by artist Nancy Pinney. The exhibit is called the Postcard Show, a magical gathering of pieces that are 4” x 6” or smaller from about sixty local and regional artists. Inspired by Sol Lewitt, who had much of his framing done at the gallery and was an early contributor to the show, the former owners Jack and Sosse Baker came up with the idea more than twenty years ago, just because they liked postcards. The work ranges from watercolors to oils, from photographs to collages, from multi-media to the three-dimensional. Over the years, I’ve painted still lifes, landscapes, and buildingscapes in oil for this show. Since many of my still lifes sold in 2018 and 2019, I decided to make them again for the 2020 holiday season, but I wanted to try something a little different. In May of 2020, I started following the Instagram account of a boutique in Tokyo called Blue & White (@blueandwhite_japan) at the recommendation of writer Mari L’Esperance, author of the poetry collection The Darkened Temple. The store, which collects and sells blue and white crafts, is one of her favorites. The clothing and textile items in their inventory are all aizome products (indigo-dyed). They also collect old handmade tools and furnishings, which appeal to my rustic tastes. After following the account for a while, I thought it might be interesting to paint the postcard still lifes monochromatically in aizome blue. At the same time, I felt it was a bit risky. Part of the appeal of my previous still lifes was the handling of temperature—the degree of warmth and coolness in colors and their interrelationships—to create harmony, atmosphere, and depth. I had some experience years ago painting monochromatic figures and portraits, and so I knew that without a full palette of colors, including yellow in particular, one had to rely just on tonality to make a compelling image.  Aaron Caycedo-Kimura My first challenge was getting the right hue. I drove to the art store and bought a 200 ml tube of “indigo,” thinking that would be the easiest solution. I started by painting a white Chinese soup spoon. I like to paint from life whenever I can and used one that belonged to my mother. For paper, I used Wallis Archival Sanded Paper (museum grade), which is hard on the brushes—I use inexpensive ones that I buy every year—but I like the way it holds the paint. On finishing the painting, I loved the color; however, it wasn’t as blue as I thought aizome products usually are. It was grayer. So I mixed it with ultramarine and a bit of cerulean. I painted the spoon again, almost an exact copy of the first image just to compare. Satisfied with the new blue, I painted a series of fourteen postcards, the first five for the gallery and then an extra nine to sell from my studio. To test whether or not people would respond well to them, I started posting the first ones on my social media accounts starting in November. I still wasn’t certain the general public would “warm” to the them because of their lack of temperature. Many times I find that what I like isn’t necessarily what everyone else does. To my delight, they were well received. I think blue is just an appealing color. The most challenging aspects of painting these were making the relationships of light and dark accurate, or at least convincing, and also choosing objects that would give the paintings nice ranges of lights and darks. I usually block out a painting first by starting with the lightest tone then working my way down to the darkest, keeping in mind that the highlight will be pure white and needs to pop, even when it’s on a white object. The relationship between a white object and its highlight is greater than one might think. I tried different objects and combinations of objects, trying to keep the tonality dynamic. Generally, I found that white objects worked the best, standing out to the eye like an actor onstage in the spotlight. There were a couple of exceptions where I chose as the main object something dark, accented with a smaller, lighter object or objects. These seemed to work well, too. One special outcome of this endeavor is that many poets and other writers I know now own some of these postcards. I love the thought of these paintings in their homes as they create their own work, keeping them company, and maybe inspiring them in some way. I'm currently working on some larger monochromatic “aizome paintings” with the hope that they will be equally successful.  Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of Ubasute, which won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, and the author of the full-length collection Common Grace, forthcoming from Beacon Press in Fall 2022. His poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, DMQ Review, Tule Review, Louisiana Literature, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. He is also the author and illustrator of Text, Don’t Call: An Illustrated Guide to the Introverted Life (TarcherPerigee, 2017).
 Love this book cover-art. I translate:
They are two types of translations; however, the both are utilized by Steven & Maja Teref mentioned in their craft essay. [A]s translators, it is our job to move the “data” and “information” of the source text to help the reader make sense or gain “knowledge” about a text, and we hope that by anchoring the music of the text in fixed English syntax, we have generated a blueprint for the reader to understand and enjoy it. That beautifully explains what translators do with their works. For my two translation works:
The translators build a bridge from the original written text to the readers who may live in a different time & place. Steven & Maja Teref have been perfecting their translation method together as a married couple. They translate from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian to English. It is a bit north of Croatia, but it was in Czechia that Kelcey Parker Ervick found inspiration for her book. It is a biographical collage (mixed with texts, footnotes, fragments, and images) entitled "The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová: A Biographical Collage". In today's craft essays, there are some original languages, and they remind me of texts from Parker Ervick's book. She also joined the graphic poetry audio exhibition. Craft Essays by Collaborated Artists in the Working On Gallery: Gail Goepfert x Patrice Boyer Claeys
Onetime, I asked Steven & Maja Teref how they find words? They immediately said, "Like when we do dishes?" I remembered that I thought about how romantic it is to search for one exact word after dinner, doing dishes, and wiping off plates together. It was just an envious moment for artists who have each other to achieve the same goal; in addition, the chores are also done. Two birds with one stone! I could image them working together, as if on an assembly line - - dirty plates into soapy water, brush, rinse, & wipe with a dried towel (with yellow & dark green flower prints of course) - - in smooth motions, they found a particular word for their particular poetic line. So, I would like to ask you today to read the following craft essay while imaging them at their dining table.  Dust in the Sunlight: Translating Light by Steven Teref and Maja Teref Literary translation is the seeking of a text’s light. The more difficult the text, the more difficult to see its light. Imagine a sunshaft through a skylight window, the soft heat stirring the air. In the updraft, dust motes clot the light. Imagine this dustlight as the difficult parts of a text. The more difficult the text, the more backscatter. To translate a text is to translate its light. Each writer we choose to translate comes with challenges, but our end goal remains the same: the reader has to see the writer. The most difficult writer by far for us has been our latest project: translating MID (pronounced “mead”), the nom de guerre of Mita Dimitrijević, the most enigmatic character of a group of 1920s Yugoslav avant-gardists who referred to themselves as zenithists. He is such an obscure figure that when Belgrade, Serbia recently mounted an exhibition this year in celebration of the hundred-year anniversary of the short-lived movement, MID’s presence was conspicuously absent. MID would seem to be the backscatter of zenithism. For context, zenithism was a unique literary and art movement in the crowded field of 1920s avant-garde Europe on numerous fronts because it was a cross-genre movement on two levels: it synthesized the various separate avant-garde tendencies into one aesthetic, and it embraced hybrid writing as a central tenet of its poetics. From the word-packed panels (like action-packed film frames) of Ljubomir Micić’s Your Hundred Gods Be Damned to the Dada-leaps of Marijan Mikac’s poetry in Effect on Defect to the cinematic jump-cut landscape of Yvan Goll’s long poem Paris Burns to the tragi-comic expressionist-proto-surrealist novel of Poljanski’s 77 Suicides, each zenithist scattered the light. And then there is MID. MID was so ahead of his time that his time is yet to come. His omission at the zenithism retrospective this year confirms it. MID published two books with the zenithists: The Sexual Equilibrium of Money (1925) and The Metaphysics of Nothing (1926) before seeming to drop off the face of the earth. We have translated the former, a work as innovative in 2021 as it was when first published. What makes MID so difficult to translate, what makes his work so buried in dustmurk is the density of his metaphoric language and the allusions worming through his work.  Yes, his work flips from prose to verse and from Dada to surrealism, but that’s child’s play for him. For a text punctuated, at times, by nearly empty pages, Sexual Equilibrium of Money is a dense work. Its alternation of word-bursting pages and ellipsis-strafed pages makes the work a dynamic feast as much for the eyes as for the mind. On its surface, it seems as if each page follows its own set of rules independent of the other pages. Is the work fiction? Poetry? A philosophical treatise? A collage? Found text? Is it even about money? Yes, all of the above. It is as much about economics as it is about Yugoslav identity, European politics, Kantian philosophy, the opposing natures of God and Jesus, the nature of nothing. Added to the mix were editorial errors such as cited text missing closing quotation marks. This isn’t to say that the book doesn’t have structure. The book is formally split between the verso and recto pages. The unnumbered verso pages generally repeat the word “KEY,” but the word degrades as the book progresses. The recto pages, their page count in descending order, can very loosely be chunked into four sections:
This is not a well-established theorized structure, since there has yet to be much literary criticism on MID, but this helped us understand how to approach MID’s esoteric text. The allusions are more times than not uncited or intentionally mis-cited. For instance, MID inserts a German translation of Hamlet’s famous line, “To be, or not to be” and attributes it to Schopenhauer! It must be noted that the verso pages begin with the declaration: “STEAL FREELY!” MID did this with aplomb. For all of the seemingly random quotes and concepts, the book is anchored in numerous refrains, such as Kant’s “thing-in-itself” and the word nothing. We workshopped an excerpt of an early draft of our translation at a Third Coast Translators Collective workshop (TCTC), but our fellow translators were daunted and perplexed by what we thought was a comprehensible first draft. Despite our best efforts at the time, all they saw were the “dust motes” or what Toni Morrison would call “data” and “information,” but the reading of the text for them remained largely hindered by the lack of rhythm and structure of the English language. The feedback was insightful and unanimous—keep the strangeness, the oddity, but the connective tissue needs to be familiar; keep the Hegelian/Kantian diction but adhere to English syntax. We were still far from Laurence Perrine’s “cone of light” or the ability to have the reader cull some knowledge from the text. Not surprisingly, since Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian has a developed case system, it has an incredibly flexible word order, something that English, with its sparse case system, doesn’t have, which accounts for its dependency on fixed word order. To help the reader see what we saw meant that we needed to tame the word order and expand the “cone of light” so that the light can contain or encompass the dust motes within its shaft. To backtrack a little to elucidate our process, doing the “trot” (or “gloss”) of MID’s text, felt more like taming a wild horse, or translating the first, literal draft. Although this project was not our first rodeo, translating MID seemed impossible at first: tackling a hybrid text which reads like prose poetry written in finance jargon with Hegelian and Kantian reasoning and sentence structure, printed on invoice banking paper with pagination in descending order and with the refrain of difficult-to-translate, opposites, necessitated, first and foremost, a slow, close-reading and, more than anything else, thorough reading comprehension. As we hacked and combed through the text, we often thought of Toni Morrison’s essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” in which she cautions us all to be aware of the progression of understanding from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. We felt at times palpably stuck on data interpretation of recurring opposites, namely the pairing in the phrase lice i naličje, so much so that Morrison’s information stage didn’t even seem in the offing. In our pursuit of clarity and light, the genealogy of lice (face, front, obverse) and naličje (back, reverse) took us from “reverse and obverse,” and “heads and tails” to “front and back,” “face and back,” “outside in and inside out,” “overt and covert,” “seen and unseen,” “visible and invisible,” or “recto and verso,” but through this journey, we began to gain some knowledge on how to think about his dust-thick work by trying to live in MID’s head. It became clear MID was satirizing the deceptively balanced yet hopelessly elusive, unjust Kafkaesque world of finance. The absurdity of his refrains started to sing for us, and we began to laugh with him. Yes, he was playing with the reader, much like a master Dadaist, but there was a logic underpinning his argument, as arcane as it was, so we also had to follow his clues. One allusive sentence in particular stood out: “Arius of Alexandria preached that the first perfect creation was dead matter (+), a ‘thing-in-itself:’ a WORD created from NOTHING: an eternal, self-important, UNCREATED divinity (–).” Up to the TCTC workshop, we had been only able to see the dust and not the light of the text. But for all of MID’s dust, he leaves hints of light. The dichotomy is not the front and back of a bill but the dual nature of nothing. Arius argued that Jesus had a distinct corporeal beginning and end that could be seen—he came from nothing and was therefore not eternal. Whereas God, without beginning and without end, cannot be seen and is eternal. This idea of being seen or not seen, coupled with numerous quotes with the word nothing, seemed central to understanding the work as a whole. The Sexual Equilibrium of Money is not a religious treatise, but the religious conceit serves as one of many conceits driving MID’s exploration on the nature of currency. In fact, the book, like its companion, is an early example of conceptual writing. If there was a single key to unlocking the cryptic secrets of Sexual Equilibrium, this sentence seemed as likely a candidate. If nothing else, it allowed us to find a way to make sense of the recurring references to “thing-in-itself” and “nothing” in relation to lice i naličje. As a result, we eventually landed on the “seen and unseen” as perhaps the best solution. Part of what makes translating MID so difficult is that there has yet to be extensive scholarship on his work. Working with Columbia University scholar Aleksandar Bošković, we’ve been able to decode many of MID’s allusions and make sense of his logic, and as a result, untangle his syntax into recognizable English-language sentence structures. The Sexual Equilibrium of Money will appear in the forthcoming Zenithism (1921–1927): A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology on Academic Studies Press in 2022. To return, once again, to Morrison’s essay which we have applied to translation, as translators, it is our job to move the “data” and “information” of the source text to help the reader make sense or gain “knowledge” about a text, and we hope that by anchoring the music of the text in fixed English syntax, we have generated a blueprint for the reader to understand and enjoy it. And as for Morrison’s explanation of “wisdom,” it is our hope that our reader’s experience of MID’s text will better illuminate the world around them having read this translation. Maja Teref and Steven Teref translate from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. Their books include Novica Tadić's Assembly and Ana Ristović's Directions for Use, the latter of which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Best Translated Book Award, and the National Translation Award.
Maja is a past president of Illinois TESOL. She teaches English at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools where she is also the faculty advisor for Ouroboros Review, a student-run literary translation journal. Steven's other books include Foreign Object, Pleasure Objects Teaser, and The Authentic Counterfeit. He is currently coediting with Aleksandar Bošković Zenithism: A Yugoslav Avant-Garde Anthology (1921–1927) (Academic Studies Press, 2022).  "Cherokee Road Kill" (Dr. Cicero Books) Some people have never done collaborated works. When I watched reality TV shows like Project Runway, candidates sometimes did not get along in their group projects. So did some writing classes that I took in the past. Do collaborated projects give us a headache? Often, we as artists are so focus on our individual achievements that we cling to what we've already established. I've done it. But through the experience, I think that only individual success means less than we think in the long run. Our individual creativity shines when we have multiple unique creations around us. If our community is boring, our own art might be boring too. Through 2020 and 2021, I witnessed multiple collaborative works between poetry & art. I asked about their creative processes, and one thing that I noticed was that they were light as a feather, in contrast to unsuccessful collaborations feeling heavy and incoherent. Craft Essays by Collaborated Artists in the Working On Gallery: Gail Goepfert x Patrice Boyer Claeys
 From "Cherokee Road Kill", Drawing By Kyoko Miyabe The successful collaborative works were rigid as a whole presentation, and I could feel trust and respect from the final products. It is so hard to find the best match for a collaborated work. But how exciting it is when you find a great teammate in your creative process! Today's guests, Celia Bland & Kyoko Miyabe, intermingled their creative approaches when they collaborated on Cherokee Road Kill & one broadside together. In the following video, I read "Brave" from Cherokee Road Kill. Bland kindly gifted me a signed copy. Thank you so much. I actually wanted to read "Trail of Tears", but my website did not have the capacity for a long record. It is a 6 page-poem, each page has a paired drawing on the side. I think that the poem truly highlighted both a collaboration of Bland's words and Miyabe's images. If you are interested in seeing the beautiful work, find out!  From "Cherokee Road Kill", Drawing By Kyoko Miyabe Sight itself is a picture. By Celia Bland My mother is an artist and even now, in her 80s, she paints every day. When she runs out of blank canvases, she begins painting over paintings. For her, the act, the practice, matters more than any objectified goal. Watching my mother as she opens her birthday presents -- the way she feels of the silky ribbon, lifts the deep pink of the birthday card to her face as if she would taste its color, smooths the wrapping to absorb texture and even sound through her finger tips – it’s almost too private to watch such a sensual dialogue with the world. Growing up with someone who creates beautiful things has made me greedy for beauty. My most recent poems, which take the form of scripts for a TV series about Andrew Jackson and the Seminole leader, Osceola, were spawned by memories of my childhood in Florida where my mother was an art professor. Shut-in, cut off, here in the Hudson Valley of New York, since March, I was reading about Mar-a-Lago and the pro-Trump regattas, about the absurd, tragic response of the Florida governor to Covid-19 and the death tallies, and I began thinking about the Seminole Wars that resulted from a very Florida-style land grab in the 1830s. President Andrew Jackson’s (illegal) proclamation that the Seminoles be “removed” from their lands in central Florida to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi, followed the removal of the Cherokee from the Carolinas and Georgia (an event underlying and influencing the poems in my last collection, Cherokee Road Kill). I was also remembering the three-dimensional “feel” of Florida. Black Palmetto roaches as big as your palms. Thunderstorms. The wind whipping moss-bedecked trees and spined palmettos until they tossed and twisted like grieving women. The sand that scalded your feet, and yet was cool and damp immediately beneath the sun-blistered surface. And the people who sat telling stories on themselves – their mistakes and foolishness, the world’s ridiculousness. Failure. That's what I wanted to write about. But not in the first-person. Almost as a listener who laughs wryly, bitterly. “Shooting Script: Brazen Jackson, Season One, Ep. 1-13” was the result. Kyoko, who collaborated with me on Cherokee Road Kill (Dr. Cicero Books), was kind enough to create drawings that could accompany these poems. Her work, like her conversation, is hyper-articulate. What she expresses in these drawings, as it relates to my poetry, is a parallel force: "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower," to quote Dylan Thomas. What she draws (literally?) from the poetry is not the action of the poem but the impetus of the poem. I find a correlative in Robert Rauschenberg’s work with Merce Cunningham. Rauschenberg related less to Cunningham’s choreography than to the revolutionary energy – the curving, tensile, spiraling propulsion -- he brought to dance. The yes’s and no’s as decisions are made each literal minute of music, noise, movement, and language. Rauschenberg’s backdrops, props, and costumes complicate and complement these aesthetic decisions. You see thinking in their work together. I find in Kyoko’s clarity of line the singular hand of an artist who creates life in her drawings. The evidence of decisions – so many! so infinitesimal! – is in every directive of the line. The slight bleed of ink on fine grained paper is heartbreaking. Her work leaps away from Phillip Guston’s organic shapes, infusing them with femininity. Rather than the heavy boots, factory chimneys, and hooded figures of his canvases, we find epidermal layers taking on the curling force of pistils, hairs, and sockets. Here is the dynamism of curving lines, resting and interdependent. Hairy tendrils of stem, sharp-bladed leaves, curves of hip and knuckle, bumper and mushroom cap. I recognize the thrusts and torques of poetic lines. Here is the anarchic “Shooting Script” -- its gallows humor, cultural naming, bitter vitality, critique, and tragedy. All of which will, I hope, prompt readers to ask: when the mediums are so different, the images so different, the languages of the lines so different -- what could possibly connect poem with image, image with poem? What are we seeing? What ideas are incited, provoked, and solicited here? You got me. Between Kyoko’s work and my own I find a frictive conversation. A sly enticement to look and listen. Our collaboration takes the form of a reiterative question that remains stubbornly and tearfully open to all comers. In closing, allow me to mention that our most recent collaboration is a broadside of new images and poetry published by Green Kill Gallery in Kingston, NY. If anyone would be interested in a pdf of the broadside, please write to: 229greenkill {at} greenkill.org.  From "Cherokee Road Kill", Drawing By Kyoko Miyabe By Kyoko Miyabe When Celia approached me about a project to create drawings for her latest poems, I was excited about being able to collaborate with her again. What soon dawned on me though was that this project entailed a new approach. For Cherokee Road Kill, I selected some of the poems’ detailed elements that stood out to me -- such as a rooster, a green skirt, and “a whiskery catfish god” -- and created drawings of them. The images grew out of my vicarious engagement with the landscape and the inhabitants of the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina as recounted by the speakers in Celia’s poems. Perhaps this engagement was similar to how we become involved with places and characters in books, sometimes to the point where they can seem as real as, if not more real than, our immediate world, no matter how distant or unfamiliar they may actually be. Plus, while I did not know Louise -- to whom Cherokee Road Kill, I felt at the time, was ultimately dedicated -- I might have thought that I could maybe be permitted to take part in this elegy as another woman, as another private individual. However, this time with “Shooting Script: Brazen Jackson, Season One, Ep. 1-13,” I recognized the need not only to learn more about the poems’ main figure, Osceola, but also to find a way to approach their larger, more public, historical subject -- one that I felt I did not, and therefore could not be allowed to, share in as someone from a different heritage. The last paragraph in Jonathan Blunk's excellent review of Cherokee Road Kill (The Georgia Review, Summer 2018) offers an insight into this subject, and what is at the core of Celia’s poetry: Bland’s stubborn honesty reminds me of D. H. Lawrence and an essay of his that first appeared nearly a century ago, “The Spirit of Place.” Lawrence argues for the “great reality” of this idea that everywhere on earth has a distinctive and enduring spirit of place. Writing about America and its literature, Lawrence doubts whether we as a people can overcome the legacy of slavery and the genocide of native inhabitants driven from their homelands. This fundamental savagery—and the uncertainty we face as a country—are present throughout Cherokee Road Kill. By honoring a community blighted by this inheritance, Bland has given us a lyrical portrait of a neglected but essential American place. Celia’s latest poems address this "fundamental savagery" underlying the history of the United States in a manner that encapsulates the textures of American culture, both in its enduring and contemporary form. The entry point I was seeking emerged when I read Patricia Riles Wickman’s Osceola’s Legacy (The University of Alabama Press, 2006). In the preface to the revised edition of this book, Wickman writes: To be sure, a main objective of my researches since the initial publication of the book has been to gain a fuller understanding of the cultural, social, and historical context of the man and to locate his missing head. This latter aspect of his story has a high cultural and spiritual value to the Seminole people, and especially the Florida Seminoles, with whom I lived and worked for all the years that the first edition of this book was in publication. It is, consequently, they who have my deepest appreciation for their willingness to share of themselves and of their rich and fascinating universe. It is their belief that the spirit of a deceased person passes out of the physical body through the head in order to make its journey westward, across the Milky Way, to the realm of all the spirits. If the head does not remain connected to the corpus, therefore, the confused spirit may remain too close to the living and can become malevolent, at worst, or a wanderer, at least. (p.xiv) This paragraph immediately made me think of Noh drama, which often retells stories of ghostly spirits unable to completely leave this world because of strong lingering emotions, whether it be sorrow, rage, regret or resentment. I then thought of the image of the old pine tree painted on the back panel of the Noh stage. This image became the starting point for the set of drawings accompanying “Shooting Script: Brazen Jackson, Season One, Ep. 1-13.” These drawings do not directly engage with, but rather, exist in parallel to Celia’s poems. Like the painted old pine tree standing at the back of the Noh stage, they bear witness to the retelling of a tragedy that embodies the “enduring spirit of place.”  Celia Bland’s third collection of poetry, Cherokee Road Kill (Dr. Cicero), featured drawings by Kyoko Miyabe. Recent work has appeared in Plume, Witness, Copper Nickel, Southern Humanities Review, and the anthology Native Voices: Indigenous American Poets (Tupelo Press). With Martha Collins she co-edited Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (University of Michigan).  Kyoko Miyabe received her Ph.D. in English Literature at Cambridge University, U.K. She is the Chair of the Humanities and Science Department at School of Visual Arts, New York. As a practicing artist, she has exhibited in galleries and art institutions in New York and Philadelphia, including Woodmere Art Museum, Jeffrey Leder Gallery, Stevenson Library at Bard College, New York Hall of Science, and Philomathean Society Gallery at University of Pennsylvania. A selection of her pen-and-ink drawings was published in Celia Bland’s collection of poetry, Cherokee Road Kill (Dr. Cicero Books, 2018). Along with Mariko Aratani, she is the co-translator of By the Shore of Lake Michigan, ed. Nancy Matsumoto (UCLA Asian American Studies Press, forthcoming), a book of tanka poetry by Tomiko and Ryokuyō Matsumoto.
 I sketched a portrait after a couple of first Zoom meetings in April 2020 A good friend of my mother's gave me a gift, which was a porcelain decoration with a lot of flowers. Her note said, "It reminded me of you when you were a little girl." Since March 2020, I have been decorating and drawing flowers more often. Flowers have the power to heal when I feel like a burden.  I think that this portrait will be done soon. (April, 2021) More from WORKING ON Gallery: New guests for "Working on Gallery" are lined up. I am SUPER excited to share their essays in this website. But I would also like to share my new writing project! I am taking Writing 2 at the Second City. Sunday was my first class, and I am truly excited to know all the fellow writers from all over the United States. For the next couple of weeks, I will share my progress and comedy writing here between my guests' craft essays. I learned about parody from the first class. One example skit was "Manson" from The Ben Stiller Show. This is a parody of a famous story of "Lassie Come-Home", but the main character (dog) was replaced by Charles Milles Manson (criminal). The similarity between Lassie and Charles Manson are both characters could not communicate. Lassie barked and Charlie Manson spoke nonsense. So, the parody is like Replace something to keep the original content.
Using similar ideas are better than adding random scenes, ideas, and characters. Though, the surprise nonsense may work occasionally. In the class, we experienced several exercises. One group session was to create a parody pitch from familiar TV shows, movies, commercials, etc. My team chose Harry Potter. In this Harry Potter's universe, they did not use brooms, instead, they flied with Rumbas (the electric vacuumed cleaner). Also they had a new professor, Marie Kondo, who tidied up their houses using her "spark joy" methods. In the end, Professor Snape was categorized as an unnecessary object, because he was not "spark joy". This was a quick 10-minute group session. The teacher's feed back was "needs a bigger twist!" Example: The setting did not have to be in the magical school. It can switch to an office, hospital, or any unexpected place. I got it! I am so excited to write 3 - 4 pages for my assignment. It will be so fun to think about it this week. During the warm-up, we made quick tabloid headlines and online click-bait lines. So each writer shouted a word, and the next person created a sentence with each spelling.
For example, as my turn, I need to say a headline using STICK. S - - Stinky T - - tea I - - is C - - cooking K - -Kookyly Now, I so wished that I could have said tentacles for T. Everyone was so quick to think! I had been living in a slow pace, so I am glad that my brain will be spinning faster as it goes. Some exercises are perfect for my little Japanese students (minus the tentacles). The visual poetry anthology, Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, is edited by Amanda Earl. I interviewed her last February. Joakim Norling of Timglaset Editions and she launched their IndieGoGo campaign to raise 4500 Euros in 30 days to publish Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry. TIMGLASET will publish Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, a 250-page, full-colour book featuring visual poetry from 36 women in 21 countries. The following creators contribute visual poetry to Judith: Firyal Al-Adhamy Rosaire Appel Erica Baum Jessica Bebenek Mez Breeze Kimberly Campanello Iris Colomb Susan Connolly Judith Copithorne Kate Daudy Paula Damm Lenora de Barros Johanna Drucker Amanda Earl CC Elian Cinzia Farina Mara Patricia Hernandez Tasneem F. Inam Effie Jessop Satu Kaikkonen Dona Mayoora Kerri Pullo Viviane Rombaldi Seppey Astra Papachristodoulu Mado Reznik Karen Sandhu Petra Schulze-Wollgast Ines Seidel Kate Siklosi Lina Stern Stephanie Strickland Hiromi Suzuki Ankie van Dijk Seet van Hout Terri Witek Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Audra Wolowiec The term ‘visual poetry’ within the book is a global term used for all work that integrates elements of language with another medium or engages with the graphical elements of text and mark making. All craft essays are SUPER inspirational. I am really thankful that they supported this project. 本当にありがとう。
Recently, I received an email. "I do not have Origami Papers. Should I buy them?" My answer is that you can use any paper around you. Creating graphic poems can be a sustainable and reasonable project! Of course, if you have the budget to purchase authentic papers, you may. So, this is a good time to show how I chose material and created graphic art for a RHINO Poetry social media post. I also wrote about materials for my graphic poems. You may refer to this article. I became a Translation Initiative Editor at RHINO Poetry. One of my jobs is to spread the word that RHINO Poetry likes reading translation submissions though social media and emails. Instagram and Facebook are particularly good with colorful & cheerful notifications.  I misspelled "Translation". No spell check in graphic art... You may see all paper material from the picture above; anniversary cards, birthday cards, and Godiva's Birthday Cake Truffles' bags. They were all from my birthday gift! I used these papers because they were spring-like, pastel colors. It is bright & energetic. In addition, the cup cake has two meanings.
For this project, I did not buy any new materials. It was fun to think of how I could adapt these materials into my graphic advertisement. Much like challenging oneself to cook a meal with just the ingredients in their refrigerator at the time.  Click the Cup Cake to See Submission Guideline! #RHINOArt2Art's submission is open and we had the first editorial meeting. One thing I realize is poets are seemingly more open to visual explorations of their medium - - i.e. poetry formats: erasure, Golden Shovel, centos (see the previous craft essay) - - than before. Graphic / visual adaptations are not only fun for creators, but they also push their way of thinking about the poems they read and what potential lies in various creative approaches. We do not have a clear rule for visual adaptations like Golden Shovel and centos do. Visual adaptations have more varieties of final products like erasure techniques. But I believe that sharing my process notes may be useful to our community as a springboard to thinking visually, and making more exciting graphic adaptations. The rules for the Golden Shovel: (From Writer's Digest)
As you may or may not know, #RHINO Art2Art is an initiative to pair poems in RHINO Poetry's archive with graphic art, with a view to highlighting poets of color, and to draw more attention to our beautiful archive, thanks to our tireless interns. Between July and August 2020, I had a test-run for this project. I created three adaptations and recruited a handful of poets who were interested in creating various examples before the open submission. The following is my adaptation of Nate Marshall's "buying new shoes".  "buying new shoes" by Nate Marshall - Graphic by Naoko Fujimoto buying new shoes When I read this poem for the first time, I saw many possibilities for images from Marshall's words, such as Nikes boxed, hundred plus, under his arm like a briefcase... This is a short poem, but it is full of striking imagery about a young male who wants expensive shoes. I also thought that the way the poems are arranged on the pages are of significant beauty. I could separate words and images to create a new visual adaptation; however, I did not want to disturb the line-breaks. The poem has a certain cadence. If you read it aloud, it is obvious. Therefore, I decided to keep all the words and play with the shape of its body, the iconic Nike box and shoe cut-out. The white dots represent the shoes that the speaker could not own. Meditating with Marshall's poem was a pleasant time for me. Though this poem is short, Marshall's work left a strong impression on me. It was his super poetic power. I always feel anxiety when sharing visual adaptations of a poet's work to them. But later, I heard from José Olivarez that he and Marshall had a long discussion about the line-breaks. You have no idea how much I was thrilled when I learned of that.  Click & Find Out! In early 2020, I heard comments from poets and writers - - "My lectures were canceled", "No conferences" - - "I cannot write", "No motivation" - - "Because of the pandemic, we do not have to write", "Welcome to slow days...", or "Zoomed-out!" I personally complained that my residency at the Writer's Room at the Betsy was canceled with other trips and events that I was looking forward to for months. We all knew that the pandemic became more serious and heartbroken through time. I started hearing of friends' extended families in the east coast passed away, including my publishers' family members. Though, one thing really cheering me up was exchanging photos between close poets. Occasionally, I received texts, (my phone never rang), and Gail Goepfert was one of them. I took pictures of tulips, grilled cheese sandwiches, and some silly, ordinary things. I was delighted to see that Goepfert and her friend, Patrice Boyer Claeys, created their collaboration photo - poetry book. It was colorful and cheerful, but more importantly it was a friendship collaboration. Their pure creative process cleansed me. "Wanna play tag?" "Sure!" Like these children's conversations - - it sounded so light, but also complicated to have these friends once we were all grown up; especially, both were in the same poetry profession. For me, I always had doubts, "Is this work necessary?" "Do they laugh at me for whatever reason?" before I shared my ideas with my fellow poets. While it is physically impossible to make honey from the sun, poets and artists can use that inspiration to fuel creative endeavors. Goepfert and Claeys used 2020 as an opportunity to create something together.  The Making of Honey from the Sun by Patrice Boyer Claeys & Gail Goepfert Patrice Speaks: In the spring of 2020, Gail and I had just wrapped up our first chapbook collaboration about the pandemic. True to my relaxed fashion, I declared myself free to take a breather from the exertions of poetry. Gail, ever the encourager/task-master, had other ideas. She suggested I turn my attention to food, a subject I am passionate about. With a laugh, I told her to “get out of my hair,” but as we went our separate ways, her nagging voice rang in my ear. I am an avid writer of centos, with thousands of lines collected from many poets. Scanning my notebooks, I found a quote by D. H. Lawrence that intrigued me, “Every fruit has its secret.” What could these secrets possibly be? I was certain the cento form, with its fresh associative surprises, would help me discover them. Almost like using a Ouija board, making centos moves me into unexpected areas of thought and imagination. I began creating short centos about individual fruits—blueberries, alpine strawberries, grapefruit, kiwi, peaches. Writing had never been such fun! The poems were coming together almost without effort, and—amid a pandemic—the results gave me unadulterated joy. After sharing early poems with Gail, she said she would like to collaborate by trying her hand at graphic poems, but an early attempt with peaches left her uninspired and unconvinced of this collaborative plan. At a backyard gathering of our writing group, Plumb Line Poets, one of the members said, “If you photograph the fruit, you could make a perfect book for the coffee table, a kitchen store, or gift shop.”  Gail Speaks: When the idea surfaced of collaboration on a book where my part was photography, I was all in. I like new projects, things to keep my inventive mind from becoming creaky with disuse. And I have made books with travel photographs before; that aspect was not that daunting, but Patrice and I were both novices to “food photography.” Our journey with fruit is probably best experienced in the video of The Making of Honey from the Sun. What I knew as an avid amateur photographer was that light and background and layout and framing all mattered. The plan was to figure out what would be aesthetically pleasing and characterize Patrice’s poems, which we read aloud before each setup; the reading served as inspiration and motivation for the shot. We purchased bags and bags of fruit and used every surface we could find—front porch slate, cutting boards, tablecloths taped with duct tape to smooth wrinkles, copper-topped table, credenza, a burled wood side table, kitchen countertop, deck railing and so much more. We plated or bowled with whatever we had in our homes--dessert plates that were my mother’s, Patrice’s china and mine, a random log from the fireplace, the bottom of her grown daughters’ Barbie barrel, a cheery tablecloth from Goodwill my sister had given me, and all manner of linens we gave a test run to see what delighted our eyes. Patrice’s kitchen skills energized the arrangements with a hedgehog of mangoes, spiraled orange peels, draped grapes, and strawberries tucked neatly into a wreath of juniper cuttings. Because it was summer and I loved the idea of integrating natural elements, we plucked petals, chopped branches off trees, and picked native grasses. We were both always thinking about props. There were many reshoots and shuffling of props and fruit for a new pose. I wanted the light and the presentation to be as good as it could be. I am sure Patrice lost patience with my “eye.” We had many laughs as she used an umbrella, a beach towel, and her own shirt to block the light and give us what we needed. It was important that we both gave the thumbs up to all twenty-three photos and the front and back covers. Some days we spent six to eight hours to pull together three or four shots. It was both more exhausting and exhilarating than we expected. Ultimately, it was one of the most fun photo challenges I’ve attempted.  Gail and Patrice Speak: The poems offer an unusual twist to how we view everyday fruits, but we realize the coupling of the poems with the colorful, quirky photographs doubled the pleasure and caught people’s attention. The photos give people a door into the poems. We found that the combination of visuals with words has a broad appeal to both poets and people who do not have poetic leanings. Just as some wines pair well with certain foods, our book was a happy pairing of words and images, poet and photographer.  Gail Goepfert, an associate editor at RHINO Poetry, is a Midwest poet, teacher, and photographer. Her first chapbook, A Mind on Pain, appeared in 2015, first book, Tapping Roots, from Aldrich Press in 2018. and Get Up Said the World was released in May 2020 from Červená Barva Press. Forthcoming books are Self-Portrait with Thorns from Glass Lyre Press and a collaboration with Patrice Boyer Claeys, This Hard Business of Living from Seven Kitchens. Recent publications include One Art, Rogue Agent, The Examined Life Journal, The Night Heron Barks, and The Inflectionist Review.
Patrice Boyer Claeys graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Manchester, U.K., and completed a Certificate in Poetry from University of Chicago. Her first collection, Lovely Daughter of the Shattering, was published by Kelsay Books in 2019, followed by The Machinery of Grace (2020). She collaborated with Gail Goepfert on a photography/poetry book, Honey from the Sun (2020), and on a poetry chapbook, This Hard Business of Living, due from Seven Kitchens Press in 2021. Recent work appears in The Night Heron Barks, SWWIM, *82 Review, little somethings press, Zone 3, Inflectionist Review and Relief: A Journal of Art and Faith.  Words & Illustrated by Scoot Swain People asked me how an artist adapts the true meaning of an original poem and what the original poet thinks about the adaptation; mainly because of the current #RHINOArt2Art Submission Guideline. I have my own thoughts, but I wanted to explore this question with Gretchen Primack and Scoot Swain. Primack's poems were adapted into video poems, visual poems, and a graphic book review by various artists. She talked about the adapted works in the past article. I saw Swain's works at The Indianapolis Review (Issue 14: Fall 2020: The Visual Poetry Issue) for the first time. The Editor In Chief, Natalie Solmer, beautifully curated the issue, and there are so many current leading visual poets such as Sarah Sloat, Meg Reynolds, and David Dodd Lee. Solmer also discussed what she is looking for in her submissions in this article. It is the happiest feeling to share works with my respected, fellow visual poets. Swain added illustrations to Abby Johnson's poems, which were "16 Questions that Might Lead to Love" in the issue. My favorite thing about their illustrations are how relaxed the line-strokes are. The comic poem was clearly a good result of teamwork - - the illustrations and words flowed, and the two elements were fluently welded together - - that was my first impression of their poetry comic. Then, when I read the following article, I was like, "I knew it!" Swain and Johnson were indeed good colleagues. There was clear proof in the illustration.  Words & Illustrated by Scoot Swain By Scoot Swain Abby Johnson and I worked together on 16 Questions that Might Lead to Love. She brought the poem into one of our classes in Paige Lewis’s workshop and I just fell apart after reading it. No huge surprise there--Abby is without question my favorite poet. After that class, I reached out to her and asked if she minded if I illustrated it, and we went from there, communicating through email. It took me about a month total to get all of the drawings’ last drafts together, but the entire process couldn’t have gone any smoother. I went line by line, writing each one in sharpie on a piece of Bristol paper and leaving myself plenty of room to draw. That was the most relaxing part of the process--a great opportunity to just sit and listen to music and take in the poem at a much slower pace. For anyone who wants to try their hand at a similar project, I recommend buying some notecards for first drafts so you don’t waste as much Bristol paper as I did (I’m not very good with scissors). Once all that was done I got drawing, which you probably guessed took the longest.  Words & Illustrated by Scoot Swain The biggest no-no in poetry comics is drawing the exact same images already evoked by the piece’s language. You can’t illustrate “The Red Wheelbarrow'' by just slapping a red wheelbarrow on the page. Doing so takes away from both the words and drawings, makes the comic feel flat and predictable by taking away any tension between the two forces. Instead, I like to focus on the unseen--what absences can a line imply? What was here that we’re just barely too late to see? Something’s missing. What? The idea of absence makes 16 Questions into the piece it is--empty rooms, unopened doors, abandoned swingsets. When adapting poems into poetry comics, I’ve found that every image comes from the poem, even if it wasn’t in the piece to begin with. Or maybe it’s just that I love drawing people who look incredibly forlorn. Maybe a little bit of both. I should say that my favorite part of making the comic was working with Abby. She’s one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and if she were to ask me, I’d illustrate every poem she showed me. I’m surprised every conversation I have with her doesn’t just start with me shouting “COLLAB BRO?” I recommend throwing on some headphones and just listening to her read the poem on its own. It’s such a thoughtful and interesting piece, and the fact that I got to give it some of the life it gave me and make it into something new was one of my greatest joys of 2020. I also recommend reading all of Abby’s other work, which you can find at Ghost City Press, Requited Journal, and the Indianapolis Review. If I had to boil down my experience from drawing 16 Questions and working with Abby, it’s that you should take every opportunity you get to make art with your friends. Working with Abby made me feel far less lonely in a year defined by isolation and uncertainty. If you get the chance and find the inspiration, I recommend making something new with your loved ones. You’ll be proud of what you make, I’m positive.  Scoot Swain is an Indianapolis-based poet and illustrator, currently pursuing an MFA in poetry from Butler University. A poetry editor for Turnpike Magazine, their work has appeared in The Indianapolis Review and The Broken Plate. They love comics, Dungeons and Dragons, and bugs. Find more of their art and words on Twitter and Instagram, @scootswain
I have been thinking "What is Poetry?". There are so many creative diversities in the poetry field. Visual/graphic poetry is one of them. I think that there are more unique aspects, not only between written & visual elements, but also reading performances & exhibitions. For example, Joseph Cornell's boxes, Anselm Kiefer' concreates, and Renee Gladman's prose drawings have stronger visual aspects in their own poetic structures. Moreover, Douglas Kearney supports his poems with an energetic performance. I agree with RHINO editor, Daniel Suarez, when he said that "Poetry is an oral tradition", so performance is definitely a big part of poetic study. Today's guest, Nancy Botkin, was my first creative writing professor in my second semester as an exchange student. For every class, I had a new writing assignment from poetry, prose, fiction, and play, which was challenging, but really exciting because I could express myself while fellow students provided feedback. I was not a dead, quiet Japanese student in the class. She used "The Poet's Companion - A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry" as a textbook and focused on the chapter of image (she also talked about it more in the following craft essay). I remembered my first realization of "image" - - I was watching a movie, "Finding Neverland", with Thai students. Many dreamy scenes were shown in the movie. That's it! That meant image - - creative writing assignments became more stimulating once I learned how images affected my emotions. Now, she is becoming a poetic pack rat, collecting curious crumbs, gluing them in rectangles, and selling the collections. That is an amazing career after teaching poetry for twenty nine years.  Nancy Botkin's Etsy Store, BoxesByNancy The Past Has a Future By Nancy Botkin There is a particular kind of person who loves the thrill of the hunt, loves to rummage through the old and discarded, and, for the sake of argument, we’ll call her an artist. A twisted piece of metal, a broken doll, a rusty wire, an odd-shaped piece of wood, and she says, “Is this salvageable? What will rise from these ashes?” Artists, I’ve learned, love what’s damaged and then go about remaking, reordering, or outright fixing, or by situating an object (or a word) in another context, they allow it to lean toward perfection. Making art is loving ruin and then honoring the wreckage. There’s nothing better than an old wood box that smells old. I close my eyes and begin to see the possibilities. Should it be stained, painted, or just wiped clean? And what will go inside this empty space? A poem, too, is at first a blank space. Clear a space, we say, when we want to begin something, open up our schedule, or before we set another plate at the table. I run my hand over white paper or turn a box on its side as if to anoint it with a special power. I have a plan for this, I say, but the plan remains open in order to protect mystery and accident. I close my eyes and begin to see the possibilities. For those of us who are lyric poets, the past is fertile territory. The proverbial she has a past, that we hear in fiction or film (often said in hushed tones), conjures up both romance and fear. Things, too, call up the past. Poets fire up the time machine and journey back to the house, the father, the woods, or that summer. “Remember those?” I hear people whisper at estate sales. “My grandfather had a pipe just like that” or “My mother used that same mixer!” Accustomed as we are to the products and conveniences of our time, the items of the past leave us in awe, breathless. Artists pluck them off the shelf, toss them into the present’s shopping cart, and roll them forward; the past always has a future. So, art makes the impermanent, permanent, or it freezes time—not exactly original ideas.  "London" by Nancy Botkin Joseph Cornell, the originator of assemblage art, nourished his extravagant inner life by juxtaposing images (and vice versa) in his collages and box creations. Cornell loved ephemera and ordinary things, squirreling away postcards, lace, photostats, glasses, toys, and shells in marked boxes in his cramped basement. In a biography of Cornell, Deborah Solomon says “his objects offered a promise of immortality by virtue of their simple staying power” (48). We think of permanence after reading a well-known poem or when we view any notable work of art. What lasts is image, and perhaps a poet’s most useful tool is the image whereby the ordinary is imbued with significance. Nouns, I used to say to my creative writing students. Things. (“No ideas but in things,” Williams instructed.) Comb through your work and replace abstractions with the concrete, I would say over and over like a mantra. There’s a scene in the movie, Ordinary People, where Mary Tyler Moore squats down to retrieve a broken plate, and after surveying the damage, she says, “I can fix this.” Her world is crumbling around her, and she’s failing as a wife and mother, but she’s hoping the plate can be made whole. Perhaps my impulse toward art is a similar one. By shutting out a chaotic world where the “fix” will never be possible, I turn to art to assuage anxiety and to make myself whole. I sit in the chair or stand at the art table putting this here, moving that there, and taking that out. Rethink. Reorder. Remix. I look at my own basement and its clutter, a thousand objects stored away. I hold in my hand a glass bead or a metal key. I turn a word or a phrase over and over in my mind and I am rooted. Words and things move through me and extend beyond myself. Art is life’s elegant bypass; it weaves and circles around and back, returning me safely to the heart of it. NOTE Solomon, Deborah. Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997.  Nancy Botkin retired from Indiana University South Bend in 2019 where she taught first-year writing and creative writing for 29 years. Her latest full-length collection of poems, The Next Infinity, is available from Broadstone Books. Her assemblages can be viewed and purchased on Etsy (BoxesByNancy). |
