 I am so excited to introduce Lúcia Leão's second curation. Her previous article was with Angela Quinto. In this article, Leão chose visual poetry projects by a Brazilian artist/poet, Marcelo Sahea, along with a Brazilian poet, Dirceu Villa. INTRODUCING MARCELLO SAHEALúcia Leão - Guest Editor  "Linguagene" (2022) gel, marker, graphite, fabric marker, and dermatograph pencil on unbleached cotton 70 x 70cm Marcelo Sahea When Naoko Fujimoto invited me to select guests to her gallery, I thought of Brazilian artists and replicated Fujimoto’s gesture. I invited Dirceu Villa, a Brazilian poet who lives in São Paulo, to be part of the project. He helped me find and contact visual poets in Brazil. Marcelo Sahea is the second artist. The three of us are introducing to you in this vibrant collective space that Fujimoto’s Working on Gallery opens to us. Poet, essayist, translator, performer, composer, visual and sound artist, Marcello Sahea was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1971. He has published four books: Carne Viva, Leve, Nada a Dizer, and Objeto Intersemiótico, and the albums Pletórax and Preparando Meu Próximo Erro. He works with video art, and has participated in digital art shows, exhibitions of sound poetry, visual poetry, and video poetry in Brazil and in several countries. Marcello has performed his work in Brazil, Mexico, and Spain. Dirceu Villa (1975) is a Brazilian author of seven books of poetry, the latest of which is ciência nova (2022). His work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Rattapallax (USA), Alforja (Mexico), alba Londres (UK), Neue Rundschau (Germany), Retendre la corde vocale (France) and Atelier (Italy). He has translated Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Mairéad Byrne, and Jean Cocteau into Portuguese. INFINITE DEMANDEssay by Marcelo Sahea  "Moby Dick – chapter 1" (2021) Nanquim (indian Ink) and marker over Canson 15 x 21cm Marcelo Sahea Ana Hatherly used to say: What distinguishes an individual is the singularity of voice, even on the sacred level. Immersed in uncertainties, I say this image−of a distinction−is not limited only to speech, to the tongue, or even to the oral cavity. The movements hands and feet make in their errant paths, their exuberance, the economic strokes full of tension, reluctant, nimble, temporary, or surreptitious emulate this orality of mine on the surface of a support, be it a sheet of paper, a white canvas or the space that surrounds me. “Making” is the only possibility, and this axiom continually resonates in my creative process in the attempt at condensing errors into calligraphy.  "raiva/beleza" (2022) – “anger/beauty” acrylic paint, gel, glue, salt, and sawdust on paper 29,7 x 42cm Marcelo Sahea In one of the essays in my book Objeto Intersemiótico - escritos sobre poesia expandida [Intersemiotic Object – Texts about Expanded Poetry, not available in English], I say that to err is to walk, not to wander aimlessly, but to wander not at random (In Portuguese, the expression for “at random” is “a esmo,” and the verb “esmar”, from Latin “aestimare,” means “to judge, calculate.”) At times, the unexpected (the novelty, the new) reveals itself in my work in an asymmetrical weaving imposed by the laborious repetition of verses, sentences, neologisms, vocabulary fragmentation, etc. Sometimes, materials and tools affect each other, through fortuitous textures, accidental collages, created by the attempt at blurring the limits of coherence or only the variability of procedures.  "The Death of Metaphor" (2022) acrylic, spray, gel, marker, and dermatograph pencil on unbleached cotton 70 x 70 cm Marcelo Sahea I see my conversation with visual arts as a corollary of my work with the word. The word is the foundation of my work. I started to make poetry professionally when I was 15, combining verses, painting, and drawing. With the advent of the internet, I migrated to what has conventionally been called “digital poetry”—poetry made with the computer—and that is where I have stayed for at least 20 years. Today I revisit the guiding principles for my work in a circular process, practicing what I now also consider “digital poetry,” but one made with my fingers, with my own digits, my own fingerprints. Repetition and chance are substantial concepts that permeate the way I have been inhabiting the condition of a poet, since I was nine years old. Perhaps today, with these works, I am looking for another condition, one that leads me to unknown or untraveled paths. After all, as René Char said, “Each act is virgin, even the repeated ones.” Porto Alegre - RS Brazil / March 2023  "parto/porta" (2003-2022) – “childbirth/door” dermatograph pencil, Nanquim (indian Ink), and acrylic paste on paper 29,7 x 42 cm - [“parto” also means “I leave”] Marcelo Sahea Essay by Dirceu Villa Marcello Sahea is one of the very few in Brazil who are developing a work that is both poetry and visual arts, and a work that becomes increasingly complex. He is constantly incorporating new layers to his practice. In the beginning, Brazilian concrete poetry was a fundamental reference, but now Marcello’s art has become so unique that it would be difficult to establish its driving forces without tracing a huge map of connections between word, image, and sound. In its graphic inventiveness, one could see Edgard Braga (1897-1985) as a magnetic part of that field, but also, in its vortex, we would definitely find Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988): the mixture of a raw, fierce take on the materials gets combined with the sophistication of its language, its ductile fluidity, and an almost infinite variation of possibilities.  "ostra/astro" (2022) - “oyster/star” dermatograph pencil, Nanquim (indian Ink), gel, and bitumen on paper 29,7 x 42cm Marcelo Sahea Marcello’s remarkable material approach to the making of such poetry that is visual arts is not his only strong suit: his vocal performance is as complex as his usage of the image, tending to a musical creation that borrows instrumental interventions from percussion and digital soundscapes and takes them to a vivid operation inside the words themselves. The same can be said of his awareness of design and patterning. The polysemic nature of his distortions of words has, admittedly, a source in James Joyce (1882-1941), and, in this sense, it can evoke numerous meanings by tweaking two or more words into a new fertile one. In the works presented here, the verbovisual entanglement is at full display, but it is also interesting to keep in mind all his wonderful, singular ways of making (here a very precise word) poetry.  Marcello Sahea’s salt, sand, and sawdust are spread out and glued in ways that can help the reader become the poet−get closer, squint their eyes, and notice the texture. The work with illegibility and small letters is part of this move to promote interaction and engagement. Besides being a poet and visual artist, Marcello is also a body therapist. “The body is a hiding place. The body hides me.” After experimenting with feet calligraffiti and noticing his feet were learning to write, he went back to using his hands for the pieces with calligraphy. Marcello wants the unlearning, to be surprised by what he creates. With the distortion of a single letter a new body is visually born. He defines himself as a follower of Joan Brossa, the Catalan poet and graphic artist. Many of his works are homages to Brossa. In his art, Marcello often plays with shadows, with visual echoes of the lines that compose words and sentences. In some of his pieces, there are spaces between words big enough to allow the significance of letters to be stretched out from their usual arrangement. There are extensions and breaks in the images. A new time for fruition is produced. Marcello can be described as a man of few words if we consider part of his work presented here. Or of many, if we also consider his poetry performed and sung into magic through verbal rituals of repetition, and repetition, and expansion. (Some of his performances can be found here) Growing up, Marcello had the presence of the word-sound, of music, very near. His father was a songwriter and a poet who collected vinyl records. It was through him that Marcello came to know Caetano Veloso’s album “Araçá Azul,” which awakened in him the desire to explore more deeply the experimental nature of words, of the word performed. This continuous research is taking him back now, again, to his own body as an instrument. Guest Editors:
Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, and elsewhere. It is also included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing. Lúcia holds a master’s degree in Brazilian literature (UERJ–RJ, Brazil) and a master’s degree in print journalism (University of Miami–FL, USA). She is a book reviewer for RHINO literary magazine, a volunteer copyeditor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and a board member for TCLA, a non-profit organization based in West Palm Beach, Florida. She has been living in South Florida for 30 years.  I visited a house where the Ogura waka-poetry anthology was selected in the 12th century. The Enri-an Temple (厭離庵) is located in the Arashiyama area of western Kyoto. Thanks to my mother who had the guts to look for it, while I was giving up. We got lost in an isolated bamboo field looking for this hidden house. There was nothing around us (and it was super cold), and one local man passing through with a truck full of traditional Japanese gardening tools even asked, "Do you really want to visit there?" My mother and I finally visited and spiritually said "hello" to two incredible poets, Rensyō and Fujiwara no Sadaie. In my translation workshop, I often mention that the original waka poems were written on thick paper for dividers, sliding doors, and windows. Rensyō asked Fujiwara no Sadaie to decorate his house, which is the origin of the anthology. This is not the original house, but there are definitely remnants of antient spirits here. I was so thrilled to actually orient myself and breath in the atmosphere around! I have been translating waka poems from the Japanese anthology Ogura Hyakunin Isshu ( 小倉百人一首 ), which is more simply referred to as Hyakuninisshu , meaning One Hundred Poets, One Waka Poem Each. It is a work of great literary-historical significance, and remains one of the most widely read and translated Japanese texts today. More about Hyakun Isshu Process:
 Art by Allan Haverholm, from "When the last story is told" (2015) I have been curating RHINO Poetry's *graphic* book reviews. This is a big annual celebration for RHINO and many people are looking forward to "reading" the reviews.
In case you do not know about our graphic reviews, our contributors introduce and review books with words & images. They are not traditional book reviews because our readers have to participate by analyzing images along with reading the written portions. Through the years, some graphic reviews took on qualities of contemporary art - - less words - - therefore, I ask my contributors to write a short essay along with their art interpretation because RHINO Poetry publishes book reviews. Book reviews aim to have clear messaging to properly portray books to potential audiences. Allan Haverholm saw Tana Oshima's graphic review and introduced RHINO *graphic* Reviews in a British podcast, Comics for the Apocalypse. Oshima recommended it to me, and I eventually started communicating with Haverholm. He studies and writes about various concepts of uncomics in Sweden. Those are four things those uncomics want: To not be figurative, but also to sing, dance, and to jump hurdles, all made possible by the subversive maneuver of declining sociocultural perceptions, and of conjugating linear narrative into labyrinths or rhizomic networks. They want to be uncomics. Uncomics is new to me, so I decided to ask Haverholm three questions. After I learned about uncomics, I had the fantastic idea to have book reviews without words. I am considering what different curators aim to achieve with their platforms, and am excited to explore this idea.  Art by Allan Haverholm, from "Time & memory" (2020) What are uncomics?Uncomics are works that use visual language and structures from other art forms to expand upon the field of comics — or modern and contemporary art that employs comics characteristics. But "uncomics" covers both the artistic practice and the research into the works. The term came from the need to theorise that growing, experimental periphery without getting bogged down by, say, superhero or graphic novel discourse — and the name is a nod to the fact that most readers of traditional comics will look at these works and say "Yeah, but those aren't comics". So, in one sentence? " Uncomics is an artistic and research field where traditional comics end but formal characteristics of comics intersect with the wider arts" Uncomics – an artistic field where contemporary art and comics inform each other. Give two examples of uncomics and explain what makes them that.I'll give you a comics example and one from 20th Century art. Example One: "Spider" by Gareth A Hopkins, 2021  Gareth is an abstract artist who works mainly in comics. Because the visuals of his work leans toward abstract art, only the text implies a conventional reading direction. Yet the page layout gives the work away as a comic, and it was anthologised along with more traditional, figurative comic works. It is the ambiguous meaning and directionality of the visuals that make this an uncomic, because it opens the work up to interpretation and analysis outside the comics theory toolbox. And in that interpretive process of decoding and navigating the pages, the reader takes on a co-creative, puzzle solving role that goes beyond pure reading or viewing. Example Two: "Untitled (triptych)" by Joan Mitchell, 1971-3  "Untitled (triptych)" by Joan Mitchell, 1971-3 In many ways, the triptych (and other multi-paneled artworks) is structurally comparable to newspaper comic strips. However, in visual arts the triptych is a multiplication of canvases, whereas the comic strip is a condensation, like a haiku form compared to comic books and graphic novels. Joan Mitchell did several multipanel works, but in this one she adds an extra dimension by composing each panel from roughly rectangular colour surfaces, not unlike Gareth Hopkins' page layouts. In an uncomics perspective, she turns the basic comic strip structure into a metatextual space where each comics panel is itself more like a comics page consisting of several subdivisions, or metapanels. On a side note, both of these examples are painted but because the field of uncomics casts a wide net, an art installation or sculpture might also be considered an uncomic. What is the Uncomics podcast, who are the guests and what are the subjects? I have called the Uncomics podcast an "online symposium" into the field of uncomics. For the first season I recorded and published a dozen artist talks with some of the leading artists in the field, such as Gareth A Hopkins, Rosaire Appel, Warren Craghead and Aidan Koch, to give a cross section of the wider practice. With each I talk about their oeuvre and vision, and try to contextualise it in terms of other, contemporary art forms — including of course comics. The next season will shift its focus toward scholars and theorists that work within fields I have found adjacent to the works and artists from season one. I am attempting to build a framework that will bridge art history and comics theory — or that is my thesis at least, I'm still only preparing talks for the second season.  Photo by Zenia Johnsen Allan Haverholm is a graphic artist, independent artistic researcher, editor, curator and performer. His experimental comics practice has been exhibited across Europe and North America, and he has given talks, courses and workshops across Northern Europe. Since his 2015 abstract comic "When the last story is told", he has formulated the field of uncomics to describe and study similar multidisciplinary practices in comics and contemporary arts
 Gifts from Francesca Preston Working on Gallery does not have a new article this December; however, there is so much content you may enjoy reading and experiencing.
Working On Gallery Past Guest Lists Something is Going On This is a new blog where I showcase interviews and reviews outside Working on Gallery. Graphic Poetry Study Guide Site Map of Study Guides WG Instagram I renamed my website to FUJI HUB in hopes that this website becomes a way station where people come and find other outlets. There are many articles and writers' & artists' website links. Working On Gallery is one of the projects. Please explore! 
I am so excited to introduce Lúcia Leão as a guest editor. I met her when I stayed at the Betsy Hotel by SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami) residency programs. Leão is originally from Brazil, and she occasionally travels between Miami and Chicago. When she is around, we visit the Art Institute of Chicago and talk about poetry, translation, and art. In this article, Leão curated visual poetry projects by a Brazilian artist/poet, Angela Quinto, along with a Brazilian poet, Dirceu Villa. --- NOTE: The majority of this interview and details are originally written in Portuguese. Leão translated them into English.  Lúcia Leão - Guest Editor INTRODUCING ANGELA QUINTO Lúcia Leão - Guest Editor When Naoko Fujimoto invited me to invite guests to her gallery, I thought of Brazilian artists and replicated Fujimoto’s gesture. I invited Dirceu Villa, a Brazilian poet who lives in São Paulo, to be part of the project. He helped me find and contact visual poets in Brazil. Angela Quinto is the first artist. The three of us are introducing to you in this vibrant collective space that Fujimoto’s Working on Gallery opens to us. Angela Quinto once said if she could be an animal, she would be a buffalo−or a termite, because of the kind of writing termites make, “so kindergartenish.” This is a compliment to termites, since for Angela, writing her presence in the world has been an act−many acts−of freeing interventions that go deep into the matter of composition.  This Brazilian artist who lives in São Paulo is a poet, performer, weaver, and therapist. She was also a clown, part of a group called “Little Company of Mysteries and Nonsense,” with two other women. “Termites” is the title of her series Cupins. These insects entered her poetic perception more vividly when she had to take care of the furniture she inherited from her father’s printing business. Family history is also present in “Anyletters” (Quaisquercartas), in which she used the letters exchanged by her parents during their engagement period (1950-1952) to create a space for what she calls instanternity. Angela’s brother was a typographer, and a visit to a printing press in São Paulo a few months after his death inspired her work “I lost my tongue abroad” (Perdi minha língua no estrangeiro). “It was like walking backward... In August 2022, she launched Fosse porque fosse (For Whatever Reason), “almost a poem, a hybrid text with an undefined territory” crossed by her “body-language,” after she experienced the kidnapping (her word) of a sibipiruna, a tree native to Brazil, across from her house. It is with the work of decomposition, the repetition of impressions, and of movable types that Angela engages her whole body. Using the fragmentation of her own work, she breaks unity−time and again−also with her voice. A friend who listened to her performance “ver o poema desmontado” (“see the poem disassembled,” link below) said her cat ran to the sliding door, probably thinking it had heard a bird sing. Angela’s work and her performances file the edges of circularity, of time, of types.  Dirceu Villa[1] introduced Angela Quinto (1955 - current). Villa wrote that Quinto is composing a body of work (and, in this case, “body” is a very precise word) in Brazil that ranges from poetry to the visual arts, performance and ritual. Her amazingly inventive mechanism combines important references in Brazilian art, of such artists as Arthur Bispo do Rosário (1909-1989) and Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980), among many others. But her dynamic is unique in creating objects meticulously crafted with a deep knowledge of the graphic arts, with the manipulation of the object trouvé (breathing life into them when operating their transformation into figures of speech), with apt knitting of symbolic patterns, charged with meaning, allusive to the work of the ancient fiandeiras, composing talismans that become part of performances reenacting lost rituals. She also naturally brings together the three great ethnic origins of Brazil: Indigenous, African, and European (particularly, Portuguese). But this is only a part of her multiple visual and performative repertoire, which is also a part of her poetic writing. The word is as fundamental to her art as it was for the great Catalan master Joan Brossa (1919-1998). It is not a coincidence that both were fascinated by the circus, and have experimented with its unusual trickery, its distorted mirror-image of the world as a way into the deep recesses of the human experience. Angela Quinto writes poems that carry with them an amalgam of Brazilian traditions down to its linguistic labyrinth: she joins the modernist experiments of Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) in a book like Macunaíma (1928), and Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967), who would forge a new language based on Brazilian Portuguese, blending different etymologic, polyglot sources into a speech that would depict with inventiveness the way Brazilian sertanejos speak. Quinto doesn’t make polyglot reinventions of language as Rosa does: her particular way of writing is aware of a wide range of Brazilian speeches and their use, combining the Afro-Brazilian tradition of the candomblé, its rhythms, the chants of the Guarani people and a very keen knowledge of Brazilian and Portuguese traditions of poetry and song. --- [1] Dirceu Villa (1975) is a Brazilian author of seven books of poetry, the latest of which is ciência nova (2022). His work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Rattapallax (USA), Alforja (Mexico), alba Londres (UK), Neue Rundschau (Germany), Retendre la corde vocale (France) and Atelier (Italy). He has translated Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Mairéad Byrne, and Jean Cocteau into Portuguese.  Photos by Angela Quinto  Cupins Termites - Angela Quinto Interviewed and Translated by Lúcia Leão 3.100 known species, less than 10% are pests, bioindicators of ecosystem health, they contribute to water retention, porosity and aeration of the soil, help in the carbon-hydrogen balance, are a source of protein and resources for the production of medicines, feed on cellulose, wood, grasses, herbaceous plants, nocturnal creatures almost blind, they act almost in secret, térmita, siriri, sililuia, ririruia, aleluia, arará, salalé, muchém, itapicuim, kupi’i. Termites are super decomposers. The traces they leave in decomposition suggest a writing. Considering that animals don't need to enter language, because they are already in it; the one that sensorially opens up to its cracks and that, without limitations, enters into a state of astonishment, opens new paths of knowledge. A writing analogous to the corporeal system, like the kindergarten language in children's drawings, like the footprints of birds on the sand, or even in Chinese ideograms. Consonance between text and image, language as a kind of algebra, an ancient voice, a powerful sound heard from silent creatures.  Plaquette  Poetry Performance by Angela Quinto in Portuguese Cartasquaisquer Anyletters - Angela Quinto Interviewed and Translated by Lúcia Leão My work seeks to contact experiences of life&death&life. It is an answer, in language, to loss, and although it uses art as an expanded field, it is poetry that gives it all its movements, and light. Cartasquaisquer (Anyletters) is a series of interventions in the letters that my parents exchanged from 1950 to 1952, which I received after they died. After a while, this familiar universe crossed another. During a walking trip through the Brazilian backlands, I started a poetic barter experience with someone in prison, a political prisoner* − In order to open words, to open paths, gestures that make worlds move. The creative process started with the most archaic manual aspect, the weaving of the original letters; weaving an answer of my own, bringing temporalities disconnected of meaning closer, and making the non-semantic writing appear where words escape−one of the characteristics of this series. From the raw materiality, I traveled to virtual experiments: enlarging, reducing, and photocopying copies. Now the whole body is caught in the interventions and in the territory where erasure and chance court the imperceptible. A new dimension emerges, the failure of language. From material to virtual, from virtual to failure, from failure to the non-word, from emptiness to concreteness, the word-thing is the hot core of the experience.  yearnings Woven original letters 0.74 cm x 0.44 cm  uni verses Envelopes woven in copper wire over mirror 0.41 cm x 0.49 cm  I don't know how else to say it Human hair pressed onto merino wool 0.42 cm x 0.68 cm  quelêquelê: ponto feito Installation - mixed technique (side view) Four panels, 1.0 m x 1.5 m To walk on letters and different grounds, to have in the needle, thread, and dye the basis for a transcultural worldview, to compose and wear a cloak to celebrate the encounter with another in diversity is to give words a new tactile-sounding body, is to allow modulations to thoughts, and so perhaps this word-body will come to occupy the place of instanternity. *Jorge Augusto Xavier de Almeida, leader of grassroots movements, Black, poor, and from the Northeast region of Brazil, was in prison from 2016 to 2021. No evidence against him was presented.  Poetry Performance by Angela Quinto in Portuguese  OriOyá Buffalo horn and printed silk strips 0.37 cm x 1.5 m Used also as a costume for a performance Perdi minha língua no estrangeiro I lost my tongue abroad Translated by Lúcia Leão [1] “Ori” means “head” in Yoruba and “Oyá” is an Orisha, also known as Yansã. The silk strips have excerpts of the letters Angela’s mother, Irene, sent to Angela’s father. Angela is a daughter of Yansã, and here she mixes her biological mother and the Orisha. [2] cassofracasso – A play with sounds and meanings, mixing words such as “casso,” first-person present-tense of the verb “cassar” (to repeal, revoke) and “fracasso,” failure. The word “caço” that we also hear here, means “I hunt.” [3] Fogueiralta is a combination of two words, “fogueira” and “alta” – “bonfire” and “high.” Angela wrote this poem after she heard Camila, the daughter of Jorge Augusto Xavier de Almeida read her father’s letters, during Angela’s trip through the Brazilian backlands. Angela would later exchange letters with Jorge for five years. [4] quelêquelê: ponto feito – “Quelêquelê” is a word Angela created.”Ponto feito” is a “ebó,” an offering to a spiritual being. [5] Reerence to a song “Vela no Breu,” by Paulinho da Viola, a Brazilian guitarist, composer, and singer.  words-fish Raffia in copper wire over mirror 0.64 cm x 0.68 cm Guest Editor:
Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM Every Day, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, and elsewhere. It is also included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing. Lúcia holds a master’s degree in Brazilian literature (UERJ–RJ, Brazil) and a master’s degree in print journalism (University of Miami–FL, USA). She is a book reviewer for RHINO literary magazine, a volunteer copyeditor for South Florida Poetry Journal, and a board member for TCLA, a non-profit organization based in West Palm Beach, Florida. She has been living in South Florida for 30 years.  English & Spanish Editions I met a Chicago author with Guatemalan roots, Dennis Avelar, at the 51st Ward Books Festival, where celebrated multi-cultural and linguistical books for young readers.
"The Blue Q" was a fiction novel for young adults, though Avelar's cinematic story-telling made it enjoyable for all adults. The main character was a young boy who became a spiritual animal - - you'll know what I mean if you read this book - - wink, wink. I think that Avelar has two strengths: ONE, The ability to create highly detailed narratives (his film background may contribute to this); TWO, Great support on his book tours (from his family and friends). I met his family at the book festival. They were indeed supportive, gathering audiences and talking about "The Blue Q" and Guatemalan culture & history. Many writers may be shy when selling books themselves, but family support is very reassuring when close people excel at it. Recently, I went to Beth McDermott, "Figure 1" book release party. Her mother ordered cookies that were frosted with the cover of her book. Those little things were real encouraging to the writers present. Takashi Murakami, a Japanese contemporary artist, once said that writers & artists must sell their products to their parents & family first. If your family is convinced of your projects and purchase your works, your art is real. "I don’t know of anyone in the traditional publishing industry. I have no contacts, I know no agents, and I have no idea how to go from completed story to New York Times bestseller – but that doesn’t mean I will not do everything in my power to at least try." - - Dennis Avelar Here are three questions about Dennis Avelar's creative processes!  Dennis Avelar How did your family support your creative process?My family has never stopped supporting my creative process, though I have been challenged in many ways by them. Prior to writing “The Blue Q”, I studied and graduated with honors from Columbia College Chicago’s film and video program. Here I learned the fine art of filmmaking, which is a massive undertaking regardless of the scope of any project. Regardless of how thoughtfully diverse or just plain weird my ideas were, members of my family were eager to help me. My mother has always been my greatest fan, and my brothers have contributed wherever possible. My nieces and nephews have many times been my key actors and actresses. Even when I was working in a creative field on my own, I was fortunate in that I could lean on them for help when needed. In terms of being an author, my first presentation in Guatemala (for a book with a Guatemalan theme and protagonist) was done in front of my extended family, and they happily and proudly purchased copies of the book and asked for them to be signed and dedicated. My family in Guatemala helps me tremendously, and they continue to do so even when my requests are above-and-beyond. There are some members of my family who refuse to miss a single one of my presentations, and even if they are the only ones in the room for the presentation, it makes me smile to know they are there for me. That’s a dedication and commitment that has no value, yet means more to me than I can express through words. I can tell you a short story that recently occurred to me, which caught me by complete surprise. My nephew is currently a sophomore in high school, though he was a notoriously distracted child – very intelligent, but when he was younger his mind would travel to faraway lands while his teacher tried to get him to focus on something like spelling. He has always been a fun-loving kid, but now as he has grown older, his priorities have shifted. One of the ways in which he is more social is by talking more to others, and in a complete, uncommon characteristic, he is now even talking to girls his age. I have yet to confirm whether or not he is interested in a particular ‘friend’, but we’ll see what happens. I learned just yesterday that he asked and took this young woman as his date to homecoming over the weekend. Anyway, the friend that he may-or-may-not-have-a-crush-on had a birthday not too long ago. Now, having huge selection of options from which to choose for him to gift this young lady, my nephew choose to give her a copy of my novel. What’s more, he did not want it donated, but rather he used his own money to pay for a copy. I was shocked; not by the action, but by the gesture. The best gift a shy young man chose to give to his young crush for her birthday was a copy of his uncle’s novel, my novel! That is a compliment worth far more to me than any star-rating on any online network.  How did you find time to write such a long novel with your full-time job?It comes down to one word: perseverance. After some time, it became more about the story I wanted it to be than about the number of words or pages that were typed. But there is much more to it than just sitting down in front of my laptop and adding words to a blank document. The journey of “The Blue Q” began when I was approximately 9 years old. I vaguely remember the summer of 1992 as that was the year the Olympics were in Barcelona, Spain, and the first time professional basketball players were allowed to participate (being from Chicago, my family and I were BIG fans of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and the Chicago Bulls). My family and I were in Guatemala at the time, so while I do not recall watching the events like we may have done back in Chicago, I do look back on that trip as the first I can recall of my visits to Guatemala. What I most remember is visiting a small town named Esquintla – which is approximately halfway between Guatemala City and the city of Mazatenango (where most of my family lives) – where we had ice cream under a large tree. My mother explained to me that the tree under which we found shade was actually a ceiba tree, which is the national tree of Guatemala, and that it was unique because of its roots, it’s bark, and the formation of its branches. I did not think much of it at the time, but I recall that tree in the town square. The only other aspect I recall about that trip to Guatemala was an interesting rock formation along the side of a busy, 2-lane road. It was a creation of art made of a few very large stones, slightly carved and then painted to look like a bird known as a quetzal. Now, I vaguely remember an uncle of mine pulling over the car and stopping briefly on the side of this narrow road to explain the quetzal to us. He explained that the quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and that it is a symbol of our people. I remember the impression that rock formation made on me, and despite it being noting more than a few painted stones - it was not nearly as massive in scale as Mount Rushmore or any number of rock carvings that are so prominent in the United States – the fact that this bird was important enough to be represented in this manner made a great impression on me.  Mi Quetzal Restaurant/JIREH GT Bakery in Bensenville, Illinois Time went on, years passed, and though I vaguely (though fondly) remembered that trip, new priorities came to light. Chicago continued to provide endless stories, but none were so prominent in my life than the (mis)adventures of my brother’s activities. He seemed to always find a way to get himself in trouble (or methods in which to get himself out of it), but no matter what he gave me the foundation for storytelling. One day, for reasons I have yet to understand, I took pen to paper and wrote a story about him. The short story became my very first, “My Big Brother”, which today is the standard by which I create my artistic universe; not because of its success nor its global appeal, but because it taught me about the power of the written word. “My Big Brother” was not published, was not entered in any competition nor was it memorable to anyone outside of my family. But to me, it became the foundation of what I wanted my future stories to become. At the age of twelve I learned that my father – a man who worked hard to provide for his family, even though doing so meant working the 2nd shift at a factory and missing a great portion of his children’s activities – took a copy of “My Big Brother” to work with him and would read it on particularly difficult days. The story would immediately change his outlook on work, and while it did not solve the problem (or lessen the work-related stressors), it enabled him briefly escape and find joy among a place of tension and pressure. The standard of my stories thus became to have a similar impact; to use words in a way in which people can escape, where readers can discover laughter or joy or drama, and be transported somewhere else entirely if even for a moment. It was at that age in which I told myself and my mother that I would one day write a book, even though I did not have the slightest idea of how to do it. But of course, at the age of twelve, the term “some day” could just as easily be a few weeks as much as it could be a few months. For me, that statement lasted two and a half decades. Twenty five years later, I had nothing but an extensive list of excuses as to why I had not achieved my goals – personally or professionally – and I found myself at the intersection of perhaps the darkest crossroad I hope to ever face in my life. I had lost myself along the trail of excuses, and I had little more than a long list of failures, experiences, and a few minor successes for which to draw upon. It was my mother who then reminded me of the promise I had made to her and to myself, and the process began as a subtle attempt to silence the voices that lingered austerely in my mind. But the challenge was not merely a creative one. I was forced to challenge every part of my being in every possible way. In order to help clear my mind, I first needed to clear my body of years of laziness. I began to walk – first just around the block, then at a nearby trail – which later became longer and longer distances. The days grew colder and shorter, though my running distances became longer. In the fall of 2018, I thought it would be highly unlikely that I would be accepted to participate in the 2019 Chicago Marathon, yet I chose to submit an application. As fate and luck would have it, I was selected as a participant, and so rigorous training became a part of my daily routine. Having my body burn thousands of calories on a weekly (sometimes daily) basis was by no means a simple task, though I found that my creativity flowed like a strong river as I ran on the woodland trails, or along bike paths, or anywhere I found it to be safe enough to run. Ice formed on the sides of my shoes, and while I was pushing the limits of my physicality, my mind thought of nothing but highly imaginative scenes of a story I was yet to draft. My body was exhausted, though my mind felt liberated, and I had yet one part of me that remained to be addressed. In an effort to not decline a sincere request from my sister, I attended a service at her church. I listened and felt something within me that needed to be reconnected to a greater source, and I found a passion that I thought had long since abandoned me. I found a purpose beyond hope, and despite my heavy training routine, I knew I did not want this to end. I expressed my gratitude for my life while on the elliptical. I found the joy of nature while running hundreds of miles back and forth along the Great Western Trail near my home. I discovered that I had yet to fulfill the promise I made to myself such a long time ago, and I had run out of reasons not to. Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the entire process was getting started. Even after I had fully committed and decided to begin writing a story, any story, I had brought forth a list of reasons and excuses why it would not be done. Page one began as an attempt, but I had made it a strong point that this would only be a short story with no more than 10 pages and certainly not any chapters. Ten pages later, I found it to be exhilarating and liberating, but remained skeptical that it would become anything greater. I worked the courage to give myself more time and pages, resetting the limit from 10 to 25. I got to page 30, and learned more about the process than I ever knew to be possible. The new limit was re-reset from 25 pages to 50 pages, but that was the absolute maximum I would allow! I landed somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 pages before I realized how far the story had gone, and I had absolutely no intention of ending the progress I had made after weeks of writing. I loved the process so much, and each day brought forth new scenes and challenges that came to life with the magic of the written word. My daily schedule became as follows:
I stayed true to this same daily routine, minus a few changes on the weekends, for 10 months. I say this not to boast about my accomplishments, but rather to express what it took in order to transform 25 years of negating my own passion to produce something that would outlive me. I did not want to create just a story, but rather a memorable mission that would encapsulate the very core of my being and that could be used to create a positive impact for readers around the world. And so for those 10 months, I did not see it as putting myself through hell, but rather as a means of escaping from it. There is a strange correlation between training for a marathon and writing a novel, and I discovered a joy that far outweighs even the darkest, coldest nights I have ever experienced. I ran the 2019 Chicago Marathon in 4 hours and 24 minutes, and at exactly 400 typed pages, had finished the first draft of what became “The Blue Q: The World As I See It”. Both of these events happened around the same time, which I now see as ironic. Just as I had after completing the first draft of the story, I had one tough question to answer: now what? The response was to keep going. Surely there would be other marathons, but more importantly, there was a 400-page story to edit. The schedule persisted as best as I could manage, though it was altered in March of 2020 due to the pandemic. Unexpectedly, I hurt my knee as a result of over exerting myself, and while I may have temporarily put away my running shoes, my bike enabled me to greatly over-exceed the difference. I biked just shy of 4,000 miles that summer, and by the end of it, the book was completed. When I saw and held the book in my hand for the very first time, I became completely overwhelmed. It was an accomplishment that I never thought would see the light of day, and now it had a title, a beautiful cover, a mission, a purpose…and my name at the very top of it. I had to run hundreds of miles for months in order to draft that story. I had to bike thousands of miles in order to edit it. I had to invest countless hours in prayer, self-reflection, meditation, and self-help literature in order to be lifted to the point where I felt that I was worthy of my accomplishments. For me, I hope the process never ends. Though new challenges may be on the horizon, new chapters for the sequential books are already underway. I have learned to enjoy and appreciate each step as it represents a new word; each mile as it represents a new sentence; each tough training month as it represents a new chapter; and each achieved goal as means the story is further along. Though I may not win the race, I am in a far better place knowing that I at least got up and did my best. I recall that your English edition was self-published. What are the pros and cons about working through Amazon publishing?Well, I must start by saying a pro to one may just as easily be a con to someone else. My experience with being a self-published author is not the same as other authors. I found the Amazon process to be simple to navigate though oftentimes difficult to understand. Unless you know about the business (through school or self-research), it can be very daunting, intimidating, and confusing. Amazon does its best to explain the process to new self-publishers, but it is not as user-friendly as one would hope. Much of what I learned I gained through Google searches and through the kindness of strangers (many of which are on Reddit). It can be difficult to see your competition and see how success seems to come to so incredibly easy to some authors and writers, while I can go weeks without selling a single copy. That’s part of the game, and you must realize this prior to launching your work under the self-published title. It can also be disheartening to see how big of a percentage Amazon (and other retailers) take from each sale of your work, but that is part of the process. What I appreciate the most is the complete creative control I am given (via Amazon and other self-publishing networks) over my work. Just as an independent filmmaker has complete creative control over the vision of the film, so too does an independent author over their stories and characters. Amazon does not limit me on page numbers, or story content, or character names, or anything really. As long as I fit the dimensions of the print-size book I want, the rest is relatively simple. I have my own ISBN numbers, I have my own barcodes, I run my own websites, and I have entirely full control. On the other end of that, however, is that because I am on my own, I am solely responsible for the book’s performance. I have to be an author, a content developer, a web developer, a content writer, a photographer, a videographer, an editor, chief spokesman, legal officer, public relations manager, marketing and communications director, head of operations, accounts payable and receivable, and also the chief financial officer of the entire enterprise – not to mention social media specialist, travel manager, public speaker, and other duties as self-assigned. That might not be worth it to some, but for me, it is the best that I can do – and I truly appreciate all that I am learning because of it. I don’t know of anyone in the traditional publishing industry. I have no contacts, I know no agents, and I have no idea how to go from completed story to New York Times bestseller – but that doesn’t mean I will not do everything in my power to at least try. This is not in any way an attempt to discourage self-publishing, but rather a method in which I attempt to paint a more accurate portrait of my experiences. Here is a word of caution for anyone who wants to go it this endeavor solo: there are PLENTY of scammers out there waiting patiently for your money. These are difficult waters to navigate, and even after years of learning, I am nowhere near the level I want to be to say I am an expert at this. But I don’t have time to waste, as my story is not going to tell itself and will not find readers by just sitting in my mailbox or tucked away in a storage closet. If I have the opportunity to work with publishers in the future, I welcome the opportunity to do so, but if not, then at least I know I did my best in putting my work and my name out to the world.  Dennis Avelar’s mission to become a published author began while he was in middle school, where he developed a passion for telling compelling stories. Born and raised in and around the suburbs of Chicago, he drew inspiration from the people, places, events, and experiences he shared with friends and family.
As a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s film and video program, Dennis further developed his passion for storytelling by incorporating elements of cinema into the universes created by his mind. His lifelong goal remains the same as it was when he first sought to achieve it, and he hopes that the opportunity to help others with his words and writing continues to inspire his future works and stories. He currently resides in Addison, Illinois. Learn more about the author and view his other creative works at www.DennisAvelar.com.  With Lúcia Leão Working on Gallery does not have a new article this September; however, there are so many contents that you may enjoy reading and experiencing.
Working On Gallery Past Guest Lists Something is Going On This is a new blog where I showcase interviews and reviews outside of Working on Gallery. Graphic Poetry Study Guide Site Map of Study Guides WG Instagram  Angela Narciso Torres reads her newest book, "What Happens Is Neither". I was so happy to catch her before she took off for Los Angeles!
She educates me about poetry. She stands by me when I go through difficult times. She guides me as to what is life. I only met her briefly in Chicago, but I am such a lucky person to have our friendship grow over such distances, sometimes between Manila & Tokyo. Cheers for our friendship.  Today's guest is Virginia Bell!
She is our RHINO POETRY new leader who made sure that we survived the pandemic & will have more poetic moments with our local & international writers. When she read two poems at the University of Chicago, tornado warnings started blaring like crazy!! This portrait picture was taken just before the storm. (I love it!) We relocated to a safe area to finish the video recordings. First Poem: "Sallie Gardner (1878)", Published in Kettle Blue Review, 2018 Second Poem: "The Man Who Perfected the Disappearing Thumb Trick", Published in Cider Press Review, 2015  Congratulations, Beth McDermott!
Her first poetry full-length book, "Figure 1", has just come out from Pine Row Press, AND - - drumroll, please - - she is the new editor in chief at Cider Press Review! Please enjoy watching her reading on Instagram WG Channel.  I became familiar with Anne McGrath's works when I ran Working On Gallery's Instagram account. During the pandemic, she posted a piece every day -- some were black & white paintings, some were naturistic adaptations -- it became my morning routine to observe her art with a cup of coffee.
Today's process essay especially encourages me because I have been thinking of how much I have yet to achieve in creative writing. During the pandemic, I was really thankful and lucky to survive as a poet & artist. Though, I also realized that I was becoming a professional creator who has to be flexible under many circumstances. I likely burned out, because my mind told me, "I don't want to read or write in English anymore!" "Then the pandemic lock-down hit and I found myself at home with time and a small tray of my son’s leftover watercolors, crayons, and markers... At the risk of making a fool of myself I posted one of my creations on Instagram." I would like to express McGrath was a nonfiction writer. She started painting when the pandemic started about two years ago.
My past contributor, Luisa A. Igloria (the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia), also started creating three-dimensional art & writing pieces. Now she publishes her crafts. In addition, she is organizing a Poetry Postcard Project this National Poetry Month. I noticed more and more that writers jumped into different genres like paintings, playing music, practicing yoga... and many of them started new professions in addition to their existing writing careers. "At the risk of making a fool of myself..." What kind of risk can I take to further myself? I create graphic poems and play the piano. Why do I -- write in Japanese -- don't I? You may be thinking it is your native language! And you'd be right. But I have never seriously written stories in my mother-tongue. Now, I am writing something in Japanese everyday. This is how we -- writers -- keep building on our craft: at the risk of making fools of ourselves.  Art by Anne McGrath Essay by Anne McGrath Having been crushed by art teachers early in life, I was as frightened of drawing as I was of taking the math portion of the SATs. Humiliating attempts at making art had revealed my inability to create anything resembling anything I was aiming for. By the age of six I’d written an obituary for artistic endeavors. Then the pandemic lock-down hit and I found myself at home with time and a small tray of my son’s leftover watercolors, crayons, and markers. I started scribbling, collaging, and experimenting with mark making using bright colors and wild lines.  Instagram @theannemcgrath At the risk of making a fool of myself I posted one of my creations on Instagram. I connected with other artists and posted another, and another, and I have made and shared some form of art nearly every day for over two years now.  Photo by Anne McGrath I began trying every art form that caught my fancy. I hand-sewed textiles into little booklets made of scrap fabric and left them covered in dirt for months to deconstruct their surfaces. You never know what you’re going to get! I buried the one pictured above in the fall, dug it up in early spring, and washed it in a mudpuddle. It was underground through rain and snow and had delightful little squiggly marks on one page where a leggy bug had roamed through. The process was meditative and joyful, which is how I now think art making should be—full of wonder.  Art by Anne McGrath My pile of vintage books was perfect for making erasure poems. I was amazed when gorgeous literary journals like Thrush, The Indianapolis Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and The Ilanot Review agreed to publish them. I bought several Pilot Parallel pens and discovered the bliss of asemic writing—placing brush strokes on paper to form words without regard to logical language structure. It was thrilling to let my imagination run free and I had no problem looking beyond the illegibility of my writing to find beauty and inspiration. I was writing nonfiction before the pandemic but stopped to focus on worrying and am only now returning to a semi-regular writing process. My visual art practice—now mostly in black and white— has expanded the way I perceive the world and I’m hoping this shift will inform my writing. It’s easier for me to see value gradations in a limited palette and I want to approach words and sentences in a similar way, to keep things clean, to add wonder and meaning in layers.  Art by Anne McGrath I’ve learned that using a range of values—light, medium, and dark—makes my visual work more interesting. I can create an energetic mood using strong contrasts or I can create a sense of calm using more subtle variations. I want to bring these nuances and juxtapositions to what I write. Something as simple as using different values in a piece reveals visual texture and a sense of depth which can be used to lead the viewers eye around a canvas or a page of text. Depth and texture might be added to writing by alternating big and small voices and varying the lens from closeup to distanced. If I can pair down my palette and my expectations for my writing, be open to taking to risks as I did with my visual art, I think I’ll find more satisfaction in the process. Anne McGrath was noted in the 2020 Best American Essays series, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she was the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has work published or forthcoming in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Ruminate, Entropy, Columbia Journal, The Writer's Chronicle, and other journals.
 Today's Working On Gallery Instagram guest is Nan Cohen!
Her newest book, "Thousand-Year-Old Words", has just come out from Glass Lyre Press (Chicago local Publisher). She is currently a resident at the Ragdale Foundation. Please enjoy watching her reading on Instagram WG Channel.  First time I saw Francesca Preston's works was when she submitted her piece to RHINO Poetry. She added images to Luisa Caysedo-Kimura's poem, "Santa Rosa 2015" (RHINO Poetry, 2020). Her art was shared in RHINO Poetry Instagram.  RHINO Poetry Instagram @rhino_the_poetry_forum Later, we exchanged some letters and email, she told me of an article about Anselm Kiefer. I acknowledged him in my book, "GLYPH", because I created my very first graphic poetry sketch in front of his gigantic concrete pieces in North Adams, MA.
After I read the article (New York Times, Interview by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2020), Keifer reminded me of Professor Calculus from the Adventures of Tin Tin. Both are genius, but oddly strange -- perhaps, like movements of a pendulum. In case you are unfamiliar with his pendulum, you may visit this Q & A website about How does Professor Calculus's Pendulum work in Tintin? Yes, it is weird. I used a pendulum when I was sixteen in the countryside of Oregon. It was my first summer visiting the United States by myself without any English abilities. I was there as a part of school activities or sort. I knew that it was a pendulum (thanks to Processor Calculus), but I still did not know why a young Japanese girl with no English-speaking abilities ended up walking in circles with a pendulum in the middle of nowhere. Where does this pendulum keep guiding me? From Preston's picture (in the very end of her essay), there is a pendulum with Tony Himan, Water Witcher. I assumed that he used his pendulum to look for signs of water. "The question of whether water witching actually ‘works’ doesn’t interest me. I know it works, in the way that I know poetry works. What does interest me is how a poet, an artist, or a water witcher tunes their body to their craft. Writing a poem, like looking for underground water, is feeling for something you can’t see – a fluid source, a mystery that cannot be truly comprehended. But you can use that source, you can work with it." I wonder if my pendulum experience connected me with today's craft essay. My Language Wants to be Seen By Francesca Preston  Francesca Preston, "Impetus" I once spent time with a talented water witcher, a special man named Tony Himan. He’s gone now. He would be hired to dowse for peoples’ wells - still a common practice in the country. We stood together in the dry, rocky foothills of my grandmother’s land, and he showed me how he looked for water. On the surface it was simple – he was just holding a bit of dangling metal and walking around. Tony Himan was so good that he could tell not only where the water was, but how deep within ten feet, and what minerals were at certain layers: where salt, where iron. He was self-taught, and had spent years practicing in a big cardboard box out in the fields. He said it didn’t really matter what tool you used; in the end it was all about the relationship between your mind and your hand. You have to develop the rest of it. The question of whether water witching actually ‘works’ doesn’t interest me. I know it works, in the way that I know poetry works. What does interest me is how a poet, an artist, or a water witcher tunes their body to their craft. Writing a poem, like looking for underground water, is feeling for something you can’t see – a fluid source, a mystery that cannot be truly comprehended. But you can use that source, you can work with it. The comparison here is perhaps obvious. Word/image = water; writing/making art = tapping, listening, using your body and mind to locate, to place. But Tony Himan revealed something to me that I will never forget. He practiced in a cardboard box! The thought of him carrying an enormous cardboard box out into the fields, and sitting inside it while he concentrated with his mind, re-minds me of my childhood, and my inward-looking self. How the land tugged the fingers of his mind.  Bruce Nauman, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths" I grew up in the country on a dead-end road. It was eerily quiet, and we had few neighbors. I spent a lot of time by myself, reading, drawing, and fantasizing about making 3-D houses out of white paper. Every once in a while we’d go to San Francisco and my mother would take my sister and me to an art museum. Eventually I noticed something internal: when I’d look at a piece of art on the wall, I would feel an intense urge to read the title underneath it first, or at the same time. My eyes would flick back and forth, out of my control, and I often couldn’t settle down. But when I looked at pieces where image and word, art and text, were fused – as with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Bruce Nauman – I felt my body relax and a sort of ecstasy emerge. It continues to be this way for me. I have a presiding obsession with the relationship between words and images, and a desire to have them together. More specifically: to rejoin them where they have been broken apart, back to their birthplace in the earth itself. In working on this essay I realized yet again that my art is the pictographic version of my writing: symbols that circle back to what I’m tracking or constructing in the verbal realm. My art is writing too. When I encounter unnecessary jargon in the world – dead, technical language used to alienate people – I get really angry. This type of language refuses to allow images in the mind, which I believe are essential to live. My language wants to be seen.  Francesca Preston, "The Two Parts Fell Open" These are old, blacksmithed ice tongs from the ghost town where my mother grew up, and to which my Ligurian ancestors arrived in the 1800s. I have never used them. There is no longer a need to lift heavy blocks of ice – cut from a pond! – in order to keep food cool. But the iron object, which resembles scissors or birth forceps or talking snakes, gnaws on me with its enduring presence. Hefting chunks of a frozen ‘body of water’ in order to keep something (that will be consumed in short order) seems related somehow to the act of writing – from fluid to solid to fluid again. Catching a thought-form in the right state, working with it as fast as you can, and then letting it do its own thing. * During the pandemic I’ve started listening to people more, or rather overhearing them. Perhaps it’s that the opportunities for stranger-exchange are fewer, so I am alert to any stray gems. A couple weeks ago I heard teenagers in a cafe discussing the holidays, what gifts they’d received, and the topic of gift cards. I heard one say, My family’s so weird. I had a massive laugh inside when I heard this. I love that she used such specific words (for a teenager, particularly) to describe what she didn’t want: tangibility, specificity, the physical evidence of choice. And I realize that is exactly what I do want in my writing, and my art. I want to use mysterious means to pull tangible and specific things out of the ground: coins, parts of old tools, bits of dialect, other peoples’ dreams, neglected words, uneasy memories, anything ancient. My poems are often dark-humored. It is no surprise to me that ‘humor’ originally meant ‘bodily fluid.’ The inner syrup of not only humans, but animals and plants, occupies me.  "My father being followed by a bummer lamb; My mother with moss over her left eye" No matter what I think I want to write about, there is often my family in the way, like a cow standing in the road on a warm night. By ‘in the way’ I mean part of the way; they are part of my work. By the time I was 10, my mother had fully become a painter, and would leave cryptic notes to herself around the house, things like ‘tiny, squash-eared babies’ or ‘precarious’ written twice. There were always words in her paintings. She walked on them intermittently, and then left them on the floor, where I would come to stare as if they were lost siblings. My father was (is!) a rebellious farmer who started baking bread when I was a child. The images of dough being kneaded and allowed to rest are visceral for me: flour and bread enter my poems regularly, like a kind of ghost. In a recent piece for the Ekphrastic Review I found myself describing my great-great-grandmother’s face: moon-wide as bread / squashed into a suitcase. The polarity of dough-rising (roundly expansive) and the truncated form it must sometimes take (boxy, contained) feels like what her life must have been, in shifting from one place to the next. My desire to retrieve things applies to my poems themselves. I have a chapbook coming out, {If There Are Horns, to be published by Finishing Line Press} after 17 years of not sending out poetry. I wanted to honor these older poems, written as I was navigating within and away from my family, away from academia, away from this country, becoming lost in an important way, and then back finally to the land of my ancestors. I wanted to give them a home, a suitable container, after all these years.  Thank you to Tony Himan, Photograph by Maggie Preston Francesca Preston is a writer, artist, and editor based in Petaluma, California. She graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, and then dropped out of two MFA programs in her twenties. Her poetic works have been published or accepted by journals including Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, Crab Creek Review, Ekphrastic Review, Fence, Feral, MALUS, Phoebe, Walrus, and her essays by various magazines. The land she mentions in the essay, a ghost town called Calaveritas, is located in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Her chapbook If There Are Horns is forthcoming in fall of 2022.
Website: francescapreston.com  The first time I saw Kelsey Zimmerman's erasure poems at Indianapolis Review, I immediately contacted my dear friend Natalie Solmer, and I asked her to introduce Zimmerman. I sensed new elements of visual erasure poetry from her work, but I couldn't pinpoint exactly what they were. Her poetry erasure technique is similar to other erasure poets (erasing words from an intriguing original text), but something stood out and captured me. Coincidentally, this was around the same time I was discussing and observing erasure poems with students at Northen Iowa University. I eventually created a study guide for Visual Erasure Poetry, and in it I wrote Zimmerman has advanced versions of visual erasure poems that we were currently familiar with.  "Reliever" Kelsey Zimmerman, the Indianapolis Review I was glad that Zimmerman shared her creative process because it identified what I was seeing as new to visual erasure poems. Her work was indeed moving forward based on what we knew about visual poems - - she was inspired by many poets & artists such as Douglas Kearney, and then she created her erasure poems using new computer tools and existing photos that she took. Now, I understand how her vivid colors (she uses monotones, but those colors stand out) were adapted, and how she thoughtfully coordinated texts & images. There are new elements that uniquely signify her work. This is both unexpected and thrilling, and I seriously enjoy being in the front row of this visual poetry renaissance. YouTube by Douglas Kearney, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Octavio Quintanilla and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth. By Kelsey Zimmerman In March 2021, I attended an AWP session online that pushed me for the first time towards visual poetry. Compounding the Line: Visual Poetics in a Word Doc World with Douglas Kearney, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Octavio Quintanilla and Jennifer Sperry Steinorth. For some time, I’d been thinking about ways to integrate the photos I take with poetry and hadn’t been able to identify a method that didn’t feel tacky somehow—my worst fear was creating something that made someone think, “Looks like that was done in Canva!” But the examples of these amazing artists in this session reinvigorated this quest for me. Douglas Kearney shared a video of some of his process while working with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator that, in particular, opened my eyes to the possibilities there if I could improve my comfort with the software – I was a novice, but already comfortable with Adobe Lightroom Classic and InDesign. The cross-platform functionality of all Adobe programs is somewhat similar, and my knowledge of the latter provided a much-needed entry point. Around that time in March, I was also in a poetry workshop in my MFA program that centered on the performance of poetry, not just as it’s spoken aloud, but how it performs on the page. I began to integrate that idea into my “normal” poetry, but also began to spend much more time thinking about how visual elements could perform on the page and what exactly I wanted any visual poetry of mine to say. I also read Hotel Almighty by Sarah J. Sloat, which proved highly influential, and a friend introduced me to Nets by Jen Bervin, Emily Dickinson’s postcard poems, and several other books on the history of concrete and visual poetry, and explored the work of several small presses, Ugly Duckling Presse in particular (and UDP is now very high on my list of dream publishers, given the esteem in which I hold their work!). Another friend had worked with Katy Didden at Ball State as an undergraduate, and her Ore Choir was another inspiration. Trying to situate myself into the context of the arena I hoped to enter was both daunting and inspiring: there was my little myopic self, surprised on some level that so many other people had worked to solve this same problem, make art in this same vein. All their work proved to be instructive and inspirational.  "Dancer" Kelsey Zimmerman, the Indianapolis Review I often think of my creative process as a sort of machine, or maybe an animal, where I go through weeks or months of input input input input, voraciously reading and exposing myself to ideas, and at certain points I sit down and switch to output. So I had all these things floating through my brain and had some half-formed ideas floating around, and there was one thing on my brain that superseded most other thoughts, and those were thoughts on the pandemic. The idea for how I would make an erasure poem of poetry had come to me, but I had to have the right text and the right images. Luckily, I already had a catalog of thousands of my own photographs to choose from. But for those initial text scans, I turned to archive.org and searched “pandemic.” That’s how I found the text for these works in The Indianapolis Review. A small tome, digitized in the infernal magic of the internet, on the 1918 flu response and vaccination, in the public domain on the Internet Archive. As far as page selection goes, I choose the ones I make erasures from more or less at random: I do scan the page for content, looking for words I think I can work from, words that interest me and spark something – I also especially like pages with ornamental designs (such as chapter openings in some books) and lots of white space (such as on chapter-ending pages). These allow for an extra dimensionality, another way of letting the original work speak for itself and highlighting what it says in a new way. The examples of my work in The Indianapolis Review are from the very first time I sat down to ever seriously try to create something like this. It’s fascinating to look back because, while I still like them, there are definitely things I’d do differently now – especially when it comes to figuring out ways to make the text flow more easily and stand out -- though in these pieces that the text and imagery battle for first relevance is a feature, not a bug. There are thousands of photographs in my catalog, and after skimming a page I’d picked to be an erasure, I comb through all those photos for one that seems like it would capture the right mood. From there, it’s all listening to the combination of words and image within the project, letting the final form reveal itself. Since March I’ve found it’s extremely difficult to find high-quality scans online, even on websites like archive.org or Project Gutenburg. Or if you can find them, they sometimes have restrictions associated with the file types or the scan quality as low. I take my own scans now, with books of my own or interesting ones I find at estate sales or thrift stores. In the meantime, I’m continuing to make more erasures in this vein, but am also always trying to think of what to do next. There’s always some boundary to be broken. Kelsey Zimmerman is a writer and visual artist from Michigan currently living in Iowa. A 2021 Best of the Net nominee, her work is published or forthcoming in Hobart, The Indianapolis Review, Nurture: A Literary Journal, and Ghost City Review. You can find her on the web at www.kelseyzimmerman.com or on Twitter @kelseypz.
It was an interesting coincidence that Leão talks about Yukio Ninagawa, a Japanese theater & movie director, in her essay.
Recently, one of Ninagawa's productions had its final show. He created Saitama Gold Theater with only actors who were over fifty-five years old. Due to the pandemic and declining number of performers over recent years, the company officially closed. Ninagawa is best known for adapting Shakespear plays into Japanese and fusion cultures. Here is one example on YouTube of his production of Hamlet. There are translations in Chinese and English; however, the actors perform in Japanese. Their stage sets and costumes are deeply influenced by Japanese traditions.
The majority of Japanese people were not familiar with Shakespear until Tsubouchi Shōyō translated all the collections from 1909 - 1930. Some of his translations have free online archives available at Aozora Bunko. So in Japan, Shakespear is considered "new" reading. Many people do not have the opportunity to read Shakespear in its original English, but they seek life answers from translations. I also did not know that Tsubouchi spent his childhood in Nagoya, my home city. (Borrowing Leão's words, I had never researched - - until now.) In addition, he was one of the first to highlight the differences between European and Japanese writing styles. He explained European key writers such as Homer and Dante. Tsubouchi also wrote a textbook of English Literature 101 contrasted with Japanese writing history. "I had never researched - - until now..." This is what I want to achieve with Working on Gallery. A curious dot guides the us to unknown, large reflections. I met Lúcia Leão in Miami when SWWIM hosted their monthly poetry reading event at the Betsy. She helped me order a magically tiny emerald-like key-lime pie and a small porcelain cup of coffee in Little Havana. I indeed felt like Alice in Wonderland. There, people often speak both Spanish and English, switching flawlessly between each. I witnessed how Leão's writing reflects this fusion culture.  This w-place By Lúcia Leão I often feel that writing poems takes me to the theatre. The morning I was imagining this piece, one image caught me. It had been laying on top of a chest of drawers in my bedroom for years. It would not leave me. My eyes traveling around it, thinking − Graphic? Appealing? Flowing red strips made of silk, so scarlet I had to look for wounds. It seemed it was not by chance that the mouth and the hands exposed the hurt. Places of words and writing. Eyes facing grief.  Directed by Yukio Ninagawa, Photo by Ellie Kurttz Trying – able? – to stay with the movements of meanings. The photo is on the cover of a book. It is from a Japanese production of Titus Andronicus, by William Shakespeare. Directed by Yukio Ninagawa, designed by Tsukasa Nagagoshi, Royal Shakespeare Company, 2006.  This is Titu’s daughter, Lavinia. She suffered a kind of violence we can and cannot absorb from this picture. Blood has been replaced by silk, to soften the horror, to increase it. My mind recalls Artaud and traps me there. Where to go with this? The page as the stage. A flow of words being held and escaping. A corridor opening to many. I am still looking at the picture, my eyes in a curious fashion, with hers. There is no tongue. There are no fingers. I am an explorer. It is a tragedy. And this, not an exit sign:  A name under Shakespeare not familiar to me. But of course, the photographer is Brazilian. My roots not a point of departure but of a meeting. She lives in London, not in Brazil. The traveling eyes and the traveling mind continue. It was in a bookstore in Rio de Janeiro that a friend and I got together, both by then foreigners in our city of origin, drunk on the joy an antique friendship releases. About to leave, she bought me the book, gift-wrapped it. The cover a postcard I kept of a time, of the craft of theater. I had never researched the photographer or the stage designer, until now. London, Rio, Japan, the places where I am – restart and mix. Pain, cruelty, hatred, and love – subtitles that move. They walk on the surface where the names stay. This is more than a postcard. But the leap to graphic poetry seems to be missing. In the play, Lavinia is able to grab a staff, put it in her mouth, and write on the sand the names of the people who had harmed her. There is a deeper wound the photo doesn’t show. While approaching this frame, I was drawing myself close in the process of her, sentences brushing against sensations, opening air. Papery silky strips in this  w-place. The leap missing. But first we circle, select, gather, leave behind pieces. Lúcia Leão is a translator and a writer originally from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her
poems have been published in South Florida Poetry Journal, SWWIM, Gyroscope Review, Chariton Review, Harvard Review Online, among others. Her work is included in the anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment & Healing, edited by Richard Blanco, Caridad Moro, Nikki Moustaki and Elisa Albo. Lúcia has been living in Florida for twenty-five years.  Photo by Layne Dixon I met Claire Bauman at Enrich Chicago workshops, where we learned how to update ourselves for an anti-racism initiative in Chicago art professions. We had the opportunity to learn about each other (she knits for her family members!) and I was interested in knowing more about her theatre directing along with her ballet and dancing experiences. "Just technique is stiff and academic. Expression alone is chaotic. But, together, they are exquisite." Bauman compares her art theory with "form" and "structure". I think that if dancing is cooking, "form" is the ingredients (pumpkin, flour, & spices...) and "structure" is the recipe. What can we cook with pumpkins, flour, & spices? Pumpkin pie? Or Pumpkin tempura? With the same ingredients, the outcomes can vary depending on how we approach them. The performer takes their ingredients (emotions, academia, & experience), and uses them in a performance flavored with the nuances of how each were prepared. The outcome becomes a tragedy or comedy. Her conversation reminded me of my recent Instagram TV guest, Jen Karetnick, who said, "Everyone gets the same ingredients & recipes, but the cook must tweak it for the best taste. It is same as writing poetry". "It may be easy to write off an arm gesture as icing on the cake, but I see such movement as an inextricable aspect of choreography that transforms simple dance steps into a form that can be manipulated to carry meaning." Bauman is my first guest outside the writing community. But I love to realize again how art and creativity connect different professions.  Claire, as a Munchkin, with her first ballet teacher in her first-ever performance, "The Wizard of Oz", in 1996. PERSONAL MUSINGS ON FORM AND STRUCTURE By Claire Bauman (she/her/hers) Every ballet class begins with pliés. As the knees bend to a demi plié, the arms float to first position, and the head tilts, gazing at the palm. As the knees extend, arms open to second position, and the head follows the hand out. This exercise not only begins class, but also forms the foundation of most balletic movement. But it is not just the mechanics of the movement that matter. The épaulment, or positioning of the shoulders, head, and neck, and the quality of the movement are essential in creating subtle, twisting lines, a sense of effortlessness and grace, and depth of emotion in any movement. Moments like the Black Swan’s 36 fouettes are easily memorable and spectacular even, but what is Swan Lake without the iconic floating, beating arms of the swan corps de ballet? It may be easy to write off an arm gesture as icing on the cake, but I see such movement as an inextricable aspect of choreography that transforms simple dance steps into a form that can be manipulated to carry meaning. My interest in theatre began with ballet. The story goes that I begged my mom to allow me to take extra ballet classes in preparation for the annual exam required to pass on to the next level of training when I was in kindergarten. Throughout my childhood, my teachers taught me to point my feet properly through reminders to avoid “dead fish,” to expand and lift through my chest by feeling the sun shining onto it, and to elongate through my neck by imagining myself wearing a crown. This imagery allowed me to tap into the creative and emotional qualities of ballet. I didn’t have the highest grand battements or the most pirouettes, but I stuck with ballet for as long as I did because the rigor of the technique gave me an emotional outlet to explore storytelling. I loved both the technique and the expression because they needed each other to be a complete artistic form. Just technique is stiff and academic. Expression alone is chaotic. But, together, they are exquisite.  Photo by Nate Bartlett I would not work the way I do as a theatre maker if not for ballet. Whether I am directing, devising, or choreographing, I seek to create meaning through form: the shape, appearance, or quality of something. I build images, metaphor, and juxtaposition to construct meaning and evoke visceral responses in audiences. If form is the essential construction of an entity, I believe those inherent qualities can elicit emotion. Let’s return to the ballet. Throughout Act II of Giselle, it’s a common stylistic, or formal choice, that Giselle and the Willis (maidens who have died before their wedding day) dance with their eyes downcast. The eyes downcast is part of the form of the steps for these characters, creating an eerie aura of grief. The Willis would not be half as powerful without this choice. I do not think form is synonymous with structure (the organization of things). But structure is an important component in creating meaning, and another study ingrained this perspective in me. I chose to take Latin in high school (following after my brother). I loved it because it also uses form and structure to create meaning; in this case, through cases (pardon the pun). Cases are like verb conjugations but for nouns and adjectives. Latin uses cases because it does not require word order. So the ending of the word tied it to other words rather than its location in a sentence. And by changing the case, you change the form, and therefore, the meaning of the word. With a different case, the word “painting” becomes “to the painting” or “of the painting.” Words and their cases could have their meaning further manipulated through rhetorical devices. This leads us from form to structure, from the manipulation of the thing itself (words, in this example) to the manipulation of their organization. Rhetorical devices are the structures that elevate language into poetry, layering a visual and auditory meaning onto the simple definitions of the words. Alliteration is a good example, since we also use it in English, and such repetition of consonant sounds can add to an emotional response. Because of the use of cases and the fluidity with which words could be placed in a sentence, Latin gave us other devices like chiasmus, a mirroring device that placed words in an “a b b a” pattern. Another favorite is caesura, a word break in a phrase. This makes Latin poetry even more powerful through its visual structure.  Photo by Claire Bauman A rehearsal photo from "The Grandmothers", a devised dance theatre piece. I fixate on form and structure in theatre because I think they are often overlooked as the containers of meaning which can evoke emotion in an audience. And form and structure are a choice. Choice is where my artist perspective and inquiry emerge from. So often, in art and society, we forget that everything is constructed, and anything that is built can be built anew through different choices. Antonin Artaud hones in on the power of theatre to challenge social inequity in his essays collected in Theatre and Its Double. He laments that, “our theatre never goes so far as to ask whether this social and moral system might not by chance be iniquitous.” I want theatre to be more than just a story that happens onstage. Form can evoke a reaction more powerful and subliminal within an audience than the combined definitions of words spoken by a character that feels relatable. I hope such an emotional connection can challenge how people view themselves in space and in society. I deeply believe that movement, form, and structure hold the power to change systems and people and that theatre is an essential tool in imagining and creating such change. Claire Bauman a director and choreographer who creates theatre, dance theatre, and performance art through devising practices and ensemble-based collaboration. She approaches her self-produced and devised work with an interdisciplinary and feminist lense. She has worked with Red Tape Theatre, Interrobang Theatre Project, Walkabout Theater, Rhinofest, Broken Nose Collective, and Chicago Theatre Marathon. She is the Grants Manager and an ensemble member with Red Tape Theatre and an Institutional Giving Consultant with Artistic Fundraising Group. Claire has participated in DirectorsLabChicago, Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation Observership Program, and Hangar Theatre's Directing Apprenticeship. She graduated from Vassar College and further trained at the Moscow Art Theater School.
 Glenore Dallenbach was Ann Hudson's great-grandmother. Here’s a photo of her at age 19, beside the Balanced Rock in Colorado. The photo is dated 1904. We think what we can't see can't hurt us. I met Ann Hudson when I joined RHINO Poetry in 2016. She pays meticulous attention to everything; especially to identify side-stories in our submission reading process. In other words, our editors are often convinced to reconsider poems nearly rejected after hearing her unique interpretation of them.
Her new book, "Glow" (Next Page, 2021) has just released. The opening reading event will be hosted by the press on October 26. This collection entangles her family, Marie Curie's discovery, and girls in the Radium Dial Company. The narrative bounces between science and history. The Radium Dial Company opened a factory in Ottawa, Illinois in 1922 to be close to Westclox, major clock manufacturing company in the area. Radium Dial hired young women to paint watch faces with luminescent paint; they were ideally suited for this work, it was believed, because of their fine motor skills and attention to details. They were explicitly taught to press the paintbrush between their lips to get the brush tip to the finest point possible. In doing so, they ingested radioactive paint, which managers assured them was safe This book is one only Ann Hudson can pull off. The language is beautifully tragic. Today, Hudson shares her zuihitsu-like-list essay (her essay reminds me of Sei Shōnagon's "Hateful Things") showcasing the story behind her new book, "GLOW". Ann Hudson, Glow 88 Pretty Much True Facts
 9. John Dean Caton, exhausted by overwork, moved from Chicago to Ottawa in 1838. He farmed for a few years before returning to the law. 10. In 1849 he helped establish the Illinois and Mississippi Telegraph Company, and 18 years later, sold to Western Union. 11. We spent a weekend at Starved Rock State Park, just outside Ottawa. My favorite spot is Council Overhang.  13. One afternoon we visited the nearby Ottawa Scouting and Historical Museum, where Mollie Perrot, local historian and JDC enthusiast, agreed to meet with me. She was excited to meet a Caton descendant. I was excited to see his giant, honorary hat outside the museum.  15. The kids were restless. On our way to get ice cream, we found the statue to the Radium Girls. I’d known it was nearby, but wasn’t looking closely for it.  17. It’s an odd, sad statue. The “girl” in question was likely in her late teens or early 20s, though there’s something about this statue that makes her look considerably younger. 18. The tulip in her right hand sags: defeated, deflated. It’s flaccid. It’s uncomfortable, no matter how you think about it.  20. By the time I got home to Chicago, I was more curious about the Radium Girls than JDC. I didn’t have any intention of writing poems about them. 21. I think “Work (1922)” and “Work (1923)” were the first poems I drafted, intending to leave it at that. 22. 88 is the atomic number of radium. 23. Marie Curie discovered radium. 24. Which makes it sound like she was digging through an attic and found it in an old box. Or she dug it up like a fossil. 25. No. She guessed it was there. She worked in foul conditions, laboring with the heavy materials, tending to a cauldron of what I imagine to be foul-smelling pitchblende she’d somehow finagled to be shipped to her from what is now the Czech Republic. 26. Pierre was interested and supportive. Marie did most of the heavy lifting. 27. At the time she didn’t get her share of the credit. 28. That’s my grandfather’s watch on the floor. It tells time, but it doesn’t glow.  30. My grandfather was JDC’s great-great-nephew. JDC died in 1885, 24 years before my grandfather was born. 31. There are a zillion Johns, Charleses, and Williams on that side of the family. It makes research confusing. 32. Maybe you’re still thinking of that limp tulip. 33. It’s odd to think we vacationed in an EPA Superfund site. 34. The Cleanups in My Community map is pretty sobering. 35. Marie Curie’s cookbooks are kept in a lead-lined vault. If you want to visit them you have to sign a release form. 36. Loie Fuller’s birth name was Mary-Louise Fuller. She was born in what is now Hinsdale, a western suburb of Chicago. 37. I haven’t found Fuller’s Radium Dance on film, but you can see her Serpentine Dance and get a feel for what she was up to. 38. It makes me think of ribbon gymnastics. 39. Fiesta dishware had uranium in its glaze; red was the most radioactive. 40. Fiestaware remains highly collectible. 41. There were casinos where you could play roulette in the dark. The ball and roulette wheel were painted with radium. 42. A musical number called “The Radium Dance” was written for a Broadway musical called Piff, Paff, Pouf, which is pretty mystifying in its own right. 43. One brand name for luminescent paint was Undark. 44. The Radium Girls weren’t just in Ottawa, IL; there were other factories in New Jersey and Connecticut. 45. One bite from a radioactive spider changed Peter Parker forever. But no bad side effects, not even a headache, and he gets the girl. 46. Necrosis: the death of all or most of the cells in an organ or tissue due to disease, injury, or failure of the blood supply. From Greek nekros = corpse. 47. Body burden: the concentration of chemical in the body at any given time. 48. Until the 1970s shoe stores would x-ray your feet to ensure a proper fitting shoe. 49. In 1998 the US FDA declared Mercurochrome as unsafe. 50. Marie Curie’s niece, Helena, was known as Hela. She died by her own hand in Chicago in 1921 at the age of 29. 51. Curiously, scientists refer to the oldest and most commonly used human cell line as HeLa, after Henrietta Lacks, from whom the cells were stolen. 52. A 1933 article in the American Journal of Public Health opens with the paragraph: “The excitement caused by the poisoning, or alleged poisoning, of a number of women engaged in applying a radium compound to watch hands and dials is well remembered. We understand the company was very liberal to the victims, and that new methods have been insisted upon which obviate the danger.”[i] [i]“RADIUM POISONING”, American Journal of Public Health 23, no. 4 (April 1, 1933): pp. 350-351. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.23.4.350 53. After the Radium Dial factory closed down, it reopened a few blocks away under a new name: Luminous Processes. 54. Luminous Processes. Shining Procedures. Glowing Practice. Shimmering Exercise. Radiant Problem. 55. Marie Curie also discovered polonium, which she named after her country of origin, Poland. 56. Peg Looney started working at Radium Dial when she was 17. She made good money: $17.50 a week. She died on August 14, 1929, at the age of 24. The causes of death listed on her death certificate were diphtheria and anemia. 57. Radium can also be instrumental in treating certain cancers. 58. Dial painters were paid eight cents per dial. The faster they painted, the more money they made. They were taught to pinch the tip of their camel-hair brushes between their lips to create a fine point. 59. Chemists at the factory operated behind lead screens. They used tongs. They wore masks. 60. Starved Rock State Park is on land once inhabited by Hopewellian, Woodland, and Mississippian tribes. From the 1500s to the 1700s, it was the land of the Illiniwek. 61. According to legend, Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa tribe was killed by an Illiniwek warrior during a tribal council. During a battle to avenge his killing, the Illiniwek wound up trapped on a cliff overlooking the Illinois River. The Ottawa and Potawatomi surrounded the bluff, but the Illiniwek refused to leave, and many starved to death, giving the area its name. 62. There’s no evidence that suggests this story is true, but it’s so widely disseminated most people take it to be true. 63. John Dean Caton recounted the story during an address to the Chicago Historical Society on December 13, 1870. 64. JDC also turned his attention to studying the natural world. He sent Charles Darwin a copy of a book he wrote on antelope and deer; Darwin sent a gracious thanks, and artfully avoids mentioning whether he plans to read the book. 65. Ottawa has a lot of large, vibrant murals that celebrate its history.  67. The high-quality silica sand in Ottawa is mined to make glass. One newspaper article called it “hypermining.” Turns out it’s not just good for glass; hydrofracking operations use this high-end sand to “prop open cracks in deep underground shale deposits, allowing natural gas to flow freely toward the surface.” [i]The sand is rare, and plentiful in the region. Intense sand mining is putting the local ecology in danger. [i] Dan Ferber, “Scenic state park at center of Illinois frac sand fight,” Midwest Energy News, 6/4/12, https://energynews.us/2012/06/04/state-park-at-center-of-illinois-frac-sand-figh/ 68. The Peltier Glass Company in Ottawa used to produce marbles.   71. William Penn Caton married Elizabeth Steele. They had six children (one John, one William, one Charles, by the way.) 72. Charles Caton married Fannie Hull. They had seven children (including a William and a Charles.) 73. THAT William Caton married Glenore Dallenbach. Here’s a photo of her at age 19, beside the Balanced Rock in Colorado. The photo is dated 1904.  75. She lived to be 100 years old. 76. Glenore had a life-sized doll at the top of her stairs. It scared me and I ran past it. 77. Glenore was my great-grandmother. 78. Glenore’s husband (William, of course) disappeared in 1912. He boarded a train to work and was never heard from again. 79. There’s a glass blowing shop in Ottawa where you can get your loved one’s cremation ashes turned into a paperweight. 80. JDC is buried in the same Ottawa cemetery as William Dickson Boyce, who founded the Boy Scouts in 1910. With the exception of Mollie Perrot, folks in Ottawa seem much more interested in Boyce than JDC.  82. When he lived in Chicago, JDC had a big house on Calumet Ave. Family rumor had it that there was a tunnel of some sort that led from his house to another house. 83. I looked it up in the Chicago History Museum archives. Turns out JDC’s son, Arthur J Caton, was married to Delia Spencer. After Arthur Caton died, suddenly and unexpectedly, Delia married her neighbor Marshall Field, founder of the famous store that bears his name. The tunnel rumor made it to print, with the implication that Delia and Marshall were using it to tryst. 84. So that clock on the corner of State and Washington is in my family. Pretty much. Actually, there are two clocks: one at the SW corner of the building and one at the NW corner.  86. Marshall Fields went bankrupt years and years ago. Its flagship store is now owned by Macy’s. 87. But the clocks are still there. 88. And they still tell the time.  Ann Hudson (she/her) is the author of The Armillary Sphere (Ohio University Press); a chapbook about radium, Glow, has just been released from Next Page Press. Her poems have appeared in Cider Press Review, Orion, Crab Orchard Review, Colorado Review, North American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a senior editor for RHINO, and teaches at a Montessori school in Evanston, Illinois.
  Miami-based poet and writer Jen Karetnick is the author/co-author of 20 books, including the cookbooks Mango and Ice Cube Tray Recipes. Her food, health, and lifestyle pieces appear recently in Allrecipes.com, Business Insider/Insider, The Counter, Indulge Magazine, NPR, Shondaland, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com for more or find her on Instagram @JenKaretnick and Twitter @Kavetchnik.
 "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. |
