So, I currently have two new projects. One is a book I'm doing collages in in which I'm using Me: Stories of My Life by Katherine Hepburn. (faster poems, with writing and drawing)

The other book is Ron Hansen's Desperadoes---but I really want to read it. So I'm reading it first. (think collaborative!)

I've been trying to make image transfers with a blender pen and it's not working! Grrrrr.... I'll be so excited if I can get it to work.

I'm thinking we need more and more things collaged now--all kinds of texts. Collaborative collage interests me. Working on integrating writing, drawing and hopefully some images.

the first book is done!

You can download it here:

http://www.box.net/shared/static/am5hdlf1h5.pdf

I'll post it on the Gourd in a day or so... just wanted all my friends to get it first. :)

(See also: 22 reasons I make collage poems)

I've always had a need to feel grounded, rooted, connected. I love the idea of imitation--and how imitation was understood before the modern era as a wonderful thing. Now we have to act like it doesn't happen. My work is apart of the longing to imitate.

I also like to think strategically--I enjoy making connections across disparate bodies of knowledge. I like to break things apart and then mend them--break--mend--break--mend.

Much of my poetry prior to this has had a similar need to be ecstatic and scattered--a voice that is attempting to express deep emotion through some invisible constraint.

I want work that is both playful & literary. I love when work is moving on multiple levels at once--the more levels of connection the better. Collage poetry provides more layers of possible self-reference.

I love systems, processes--when the outcome is unpredictable. I want a method I can manipulate but never dictate.

You can plan, plan, plan but at the moment of action you have to give up, adapt, head in a new direction, follow wherever the river takes you. (See Lewis & Clark)

I wanted to do something difficult--a built-in difficulty. For me difficulty is proof of work.

I have had existential worries since I read Sartre and Kierkegaard in high school. This work is about that fear.

The desire to escape the Word Document, the blue-lined notebook page, to work on larger, larger paper (I generally do all my writing now on a very large sketchpad)--all that is an Abstract Expressionist impulse, I believe. I have a need to write BIG (-sized) poems...

...the loss of self-consciousness. Intuition, at play among the materials--I've always wanted that. Also, to be physical, to be active, to make art standing up, to be alert to my surroundings... You see, I never played many sports growing up because I hated competition. It so often ended with someone feeling bad or with people depending on me and me letting them down. For a long time I've been looking for some way to make writing like a sport, to make it fully active, tactile, to require my body and my senses.

As early as I can remember I made things in my bedroom, typically alone--watercolors, board games, short stories, shadow boxes, little environments. I think in my bedroom alone, working with very simple materials, is a very happy place for me.

Someone might say that I collage out of fear of writing my own material. I've written my own material--I'm already tired of myself.

The Trinity, becoming one with the Father, Jesus seen in the face of a stranger... all this is a pseudo-theological justification for something rather mundane that requires no justification (and it sounds kind of overblown anyway).

I've always felt very empathetic towards people. I imagine what it's like to be any stranger I see. Perhaps it started as a game and then became something more. But my whole family is very sensitive to people--all more compassionate than me. I've tried to suppress my own and have also used it very selfishly, especially as I've grown older. Anyway, being inside someone else's words seems very natural to me. I don't really imagine myself as the original author but the idea that we might share something together, that our voices might permeate one another, feels very wholesome to me.

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Source: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

This one did not make the cut for the collection. I thought it just didn't have as much punch as the others and was perhaps redundant. However, I do think it has some interesting parts.

...almost done!

Tonight I wrestled over a title for my book (from scraps, of course):

| brave little joke | play | free |

| to see a storm | of | repair |

| a towering pile of | meaning |

And many others I loved less than those. But, as always happened, the best (and final) title happened in a flash of seconds and without warning. Boy, do I want to tell you what it is. But I want everything to come at once like Christmas.

What I have left to do: possibly add illustrations (I want little birds somehow), cut the pages, scan the pages, figure out how to make a PDF file, then figure out how to bind the book. Since there will be only be one book I think the primary distribution will be as a PDF file.

There are several small design problems because I've been making decisions on the fly, which in future books will be eliminated. A few little gluing errors, but much-much cleaner than my early poems (now that I have bookbinder's glue and a fine brush).

Most importantly, I think, is that the humor and playfulness comes through, and the musical qualities of the language, and the love. These poems are the most personal, most honest I've ever composed--unabashedly sentimental.