Article Contributed on: 8/15/2007 10:36:58 AM
It took several hours, one easel and a couple tubes of no. 66 cerulean blue oil paint (which is one dollar cheaper at the
CSU bookstore than at
Meininger's) to do it, but finally -- the painting I promised to create for my boyfriend
Alex is finally done. After almost a full year of inspiration in action (or
inaction, since it took me about ten months).
The painting was just one of my missions this summer. I also planned to send poems to two contests. I will drop my entries into the mail this morning, thanks to poets who I regularly meet with to workshop (critique and encourage) our poetry.
All these efforts are influenced by form, an aspect of poetry I will examine this semester as a grad student at
CSU. In a letter to my friend
Julie, I started writing more about form and visual art, so, if your name is Julie and I've written you since we were in high school, you may want to wait a week to get a first draft of the rest of this blog.
When putting together my work for the Ellen La Forge Poetry Prize, I found a poem called "Backstage" that I wrote while reading
Joshua Marie Wilkinson. He was, last fall, getting his doctorate at
DU and the book I was reading,
Lug Your Careless Body out of the Careful Dusk was subtitled with four supernatural words: "a poem in fragments".
A poem in fragments is cubist, in a way. Snippets of verse connect to form a larger poem that shares the theme or voice, etc.
The fragment poem is a fruitful form for me. Buzzing from Wilkinson's poetics, "Backstage" poured from my imagination, an attempt to portray moments of preparation for a school play.
Another poem I'm submitting is also a fragment poem, called "Gestures from Chicago", after my fellow poet
Ron Green's suggestion.
The working title was "Because it's unfair you can't give names to poems like you can give paintings". That's a joke between fellow poet
Steve Eggleston and I. We've worked on each other's poetry for almost three years and titles are often difficult for me to come to.
My friends have workshopped a lot of my untitled pieces.
I may have titled some poems things like "Yellow Composition, no. 2" (I love abstract art and I like having a good time with titles). I think I remember Steve once telling me he suspected a title like that was not a title for a poem (He was right. It didn't work.).
Then I went to
Chicago last Labor Day. Where I retaliated at the
Art Institute.
"Gestures from the Art Institute of Chicago" is painted with subtitles like "Red and Yellow, no. 1" and "Brown and Indigo, no. 3".
Galleries are a perfect fit for the fragment poetry form -- each piece of art, each artist, each exhibit, even the visitors and museum staff, are all snippets of a greater work.
While I'm at CSU, I hope to incorporate my love of visual art by making another word-art piece (like
the one I did in Vermont) centered on my CSU experiences. I know I want the first thought/phrase/line to spiral from the middle. Now I just have to find the words.
Guess who has grad school orientation tomorrow and will be taking notes for a piece of muslin?
... I'll do my best to keep you updated on what I can this semester. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy doing what you do -- art or poetry or school or none of the above.
Thanks for the read.