This asemic political poem takes as its source an execrable tweet
goes for its colour scheme to the US electoral map
and lives now as a 45′ long scroll of polypropylene paper, rolling pins for handles.
Pins to mark a longing for mother-comfort I sense beneath the man’s raging misogyny. I hope also to make an affordable trade edition – a codex, or even an accordion fold, to keep its (doom)scroll structure in play.
It uses a distortion technique developed on a home-office scanner. My first pass was a play on words, “Iamother,” that came as I thought of the children our proto-fascist paramilitary border forces were taking from their parents. I felt & feel the inner severings they’re going to suffer.
Wanting to face the one responsible more squarely, I moved on to the tweet above. A text I could critique, mock, savage, by unravelling it. Work I could put my anger & horror into. On some panels I take him at his word. When he says please, someone in him really means “please.”
When he says “understand,” something in there asks, flailingly, to be understood.
Others twist his language as an image of its author’s moral perversion: “when people cross” becomes
The images are made by scribbling real fast on notebook paper
& shivering the page as the scanner scans. I’ve described the method here.
The title is full (too?) of word plays. Red white and blue. Black and blue. Redblack, a cryptography principle. Racial & political shorthand & derogation – Black, Red. And the blues, which do help to true stranger-to-them-me. The final panel fills it in.
Post Holes
Some blog posts on my own flailing towards a (somehow) meaningful work.
Red Black & Blues – A proposal
On monstrosity & its critics
Red Black & Blues (III)
Its verbal skeleton, by anagram and other violences
Illogical operators
Alt takes of a word patch, “or not – and,” in The New Post-literate
Red Black & Blues (II)
It takes wing, having found its text, an execrable tweet by DT
Red Black & Blues (I)
First plays in red & blue on the ground of m/otherhood
The Art of Compost 