visual poetry – Page 6 – The Art of Compost

Domestic Metal

And another, kitchen metal collaged.

A few nights ago I was taking apart my box spring and a bunch of cool staples, as long as vampire teeth, were wedged into the wood. I started to realize how many things are made from metal in my room and around my house.

I of course went to the kitchen and found spoons, knives, and so on.

That’s when it clicked: photocopy collage of domestic metals. Metals that stay around the house but are distinct and specific tools for living.

I wanted to combine the two cohorts (building tools and kitchen tools) not so much that they clashed together, not so they would battle for the attention of the owners hands, but that they would coexist.

If usual domestic metals had feelings, I think the kitchen items would be happiest and the tool box metals would be depressed. The kitchen metals get to be played with daily, the…

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Son

And another for ya, from a student blog on the persistence of folk music in American life.

Run Off

Folk is for the future.

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Dirt

So as I go through the student blogs for The Art of Compost (the course not the blog) grading (cuz one has to) I think I’ll repost some posts that strike me as particularly apropos or sharp or just effin funny. (They’ve come together lovelyly, even the ones, AHEM, kind of assembled in the final 48 hours.) Here’s the first.

Piles of Distinct Pieces.

The assignment was simple.

“Paint.”

Very simple,

if you have paint.

If you don’t have paint, you find some pretty dirt around campus and mix it with some water in your coffee mug and you use it to paint on a sheet of paper you snuck from the drawer of the copy machine in Haggard Hall.

I adore the micro flecks of brown that gave me my pigment.

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Overdraft

First of three sections of Overject, very roughed out, on my dining room table.
Fifty pages give or take. This baby’s going to be a monster. Next is to feed it some foliage. The little leaf impresses you can see there are oceanspray red osier dogwood and vine maple from my back garden. Quaking aspen to come (for some scary bits).

Out of the mouths of nieces

By Isabel, age 10, nature poet in the key of blue.

Writes her dad (my bro): “Asked if she had written a poem, Isabel answered, ‘No. It’s just words that were in my head.'”

My work as a teacher would be so straight & simple, if I could just put this at the front of the room, point, quote that, and go.

Sheeee-it, my work as a poet would be so straight & simple, if I could about forget making poems, & just put some words in my head on some pieces of nice paper.

P.S. Am I just being a foolish uncle or is it kind of exquisite how that raindrop hangs from that that more-than-line but not-yet-branch? Light as air and heavy like a pear.

No one tells you when to breathe. These hands.

A second effort at scriptural overlay. (First pass was scruptrual and I may stick with that.) First was here. This one I think the composition’s a bit livelier.

Working with phrases talismanic to me for deep and private reasons. I have trouble with such language, artistically, because it won’t let me go, but won’t convert easily to poem, either – won’t get adequately ironic, won’t have the transparent sentiment washed from its smeary face. So this here’s a try at that.

A try at what, do you mean? At being oblique enough for the spirit of the current moment of our art. Which is my spirit too oh trust me. Obliquity, and, yet, a core sample. Knowing the core empty I still find me trudging there for a sample.

The source text for this’un:

Thanks for reading. For reals.

Pee, ess, this one wants to spin. Tried to set it in motion as a GIF but couldn’t find a way, w/ my limited skill set and prog means, to get it working. Am signed up for first date with Flash at the end of the month. Am hopeful, heart in throat.

Student work: Compost mural

A mural my students made last week in class. The prompt: using only the materials you have on hand, or can forage from the surrounding environment without breaking the law or hurting anyone’s feelings, express your understanding of “the art of compost.” Oh, and no legible text, other than found text.

Here it’s, as composted through my iPhone:

Interesting to watch them work. Each one herself, himself, just about perfectly. Last year I gave this, every one worked pretty much on their lonesome, class dynamics, long story, and it did come out okay. This time, some leaned toward solo, some into duo, some asked as to overview, but as they felt their way into the actual question at hand – are we one or are we many – those arrangements softened and shifted.

That is, as they composted their thinking, they found a rhythm where each had room to breathe, or so it seemed to me, and nice to see. Nice to be part of just in watching. Here ’tis, as panorama,

Compost mural 2015 — Click on me to see (and again) compost understood

Sometime soon, a post on breath, breathing, the breath, which I’ve been thinking and not-thinking about, these days of hot high still air all round. How’s it I ever thought my breath was anyone else’s to order around? That’s my little bit cryptic thought of an evening, after a day hiking up at Baker, forest fire haze out of BC hanging on air, dulling Baker and Shuksan to the eye, but someone or something was watching lupines and mimulus shivering in wind bits, and what’s wind but earth’s breath, what we’re in.

This one invites you in

Migraine, salmonella, I gotta say, been a crappy week off. Too, though, a sunny Sunday morning, I sit here on the couch sipping tea and eating a few berries, my gut don’t hurt too much of the moment & my cat’s basking in the sun, and so.

The week of serious concerted poem-making I pictured has not happened. (Nor have the coincident weeks of serious gardening or concerted bill paying.) But did come one I’d love to show you.

It began with a glimpse just of a picture poem by Robert Grenier on Craig Dworkin’s Eclipse archive –

– and in particular the overlaying of words: I and my, am and heart, a and is, (something) and beating.

I’ve been working for a while on a script got by writing something over twice – as I’ve written about here. What, I then wondered, if the overtext weren’t just the undertext, shifted. What if a good deal more difference were let in.

As it turned out, I worked with just one phrase, this one that popped up in earlier work on Overject—

I inscribed the phrase over and over, following a protocol dictated by the digits of π, and when that felt done I stopped, and then I started filling in some of the spaces created by the intersections of overlapping letterforms. After a while I got to this.

Don’t honestly know if it’s any good. But it’s, at least, a new method I’m curious of. Click on it maybe to see how the details go. Thoughts?

Pattern play – making marks

Looking round for blogs for the blog unit for ENG 460 The Art of Compost 2.0 and came to this one. And this pattern, dunno if it fits for the course, but hells it sure is purty, more than purty, it moves and keeps on moving. Earths and skies and more skies and heavens in it your eye climbs. Or rock strata thought drops down thru. What I love most in it’s the move up & the move down in it, are one. Wow & wow.

On playing well w/ others (II)

The other live collaboration is teaching. My vis po group delights me yet with their attention and good cheer. I love spending time with them; they’re a twenty-one-person friend; I’m going to miss her him them when we’re done.

One thing happening, new for me, is what I’ve been calling co-teaching. Instead of breaking up the class period – student presents then I teach – I’ve let the presentations go long and tried to weave my teaching into their teaching. That’s made for challenges. I can’t wholly recede into the role of just-one-more-student. There are lines of inquiry I’m best positioned as teacher to introduce. If I just chill and let the conversation go wherever it wants to then I’m not really doing my job.

How to do my work then? My best work has always been done Socratically. But it’s been hard to work Socratically in this new context. Turns out there may be space for only one Socrates in the room. Is that what Athens meant by the hemlock?

Gist of my last post was, look how strong these friendships are, that they can withstand some sore tension, be hardly shaken. Here my gist is, look how strong this class is, its esprit de corps, that they can let me learn along with them, so exposedly.

No question I feel exposed – they see me fuck up half a dozen times a day – but some mix of apology teasing and good cheer keeps me persistent. The fabric feels not injured by my error.

Half a dozen times a class, I need to make a call, do I step in here, redirect our line of inquiry, and if so, by two degrees, or twenty? (How does anyone teach who’s not OMG a martial artist of the mind? What all factors are in play that moment? My sense of the presenter’s confidence level. Of her command of the material. Of the chances she was headed there anyway. Of the class’s interest and engagement. Of who does and doesn’t have the text. Of X’s irritation at not being called on five minutes ago. Mirror neuron overload. Also I need to pee.)

Let’s say I do, I step in. I want several things at once. I want to model, for the presenter, the Socratic method – how to use questioning to lead your charges down a path of inquiry. (Coupla troubles with that I see now. One’s time frame – I’m wanting to deliver in seconds a lesson that may need weeks months years to offer. Another’s ego – why should my given method be template for another?) I also want the class to taste the fruits of Socratic method in action – if we can get there that way then someone has been actively making connections. And I want maybe also to sustain the arc momentum substance of the class.

I wonder why I’m tired after a two-hour class and ravenous? Surely my brain has burned a burrito’s worth of blood sugar.

In practice, as often as not, stepping in, I knock the presenter off his game. He feels interrupted, disrupted, not I hope corrupted. And I do my Socratic thing, pursue a line of questioning, maybe get to an answer, maybe also model the process in the way I’ve meant to. Then awkwardly hand the presentation back, perhaps with apologies, and we laugh, but it’s awkward.

I often don’t know where I’m headed with a blog post when I start one. That’s what makes these worth writing – what makes them live, long I, the way poems are live. The reason I’ve spent hours on this one (yeah, believe it, hours) is that I’ve slowly come to see, in my own internalized Socratic process, that I’ve been headed for something all along. It’s this.

It’s this. Though it’s been awkward, though students have felt off-put, though I’ve felt sorely mixed about the move I’ve made, these may have been the most important moments in our time together.

I’ll say it again. It may be that exactly in these most awkward moments we’ve done our best learning and our best teaching.

One thing that happens in such a moment – I’m exposed as not in charge and not not in charge. That’s not nothing. Another thing that happens – the presenter’s been challenged without being told she’s doing it right or told she’s doing it wrong. That’s huge. (She’s doing it a perfect that’s other than right or wrong.) Another – everyone in the room has been witness to these aporias, these insoluble knots, and that’s gotta shake your head.

Any of this can only be done, sorry to go all dharma on y’all, this can only be done in a context of perfect and complete, one bright pearl. That is to say, the joy I’m feeling in this company is the joy of sangha, like minds gathered in.

Most focally, sangha means, community of fellow practitioners, meditators, followers of the eight-fold path. Most widely it means all sentient beings, and maybe some mosses too, rocks and stones, broke girders. Somewhere between those two it means hanging out with some folk who get some sides of you as they are.

I fell out of formal Buddhist practice a while ago but seem to keep stumbling into it informally and here I see’s been one way.

Have I gone on long enough? I think so! Wanted last to say though, these have been good teaching days, both classes. My intro to Brit Lit, we hung out with Billy Blakefish today, I don’t know why I call him by that. They seemed to get quite quickly that this prodding

is invite to wander out of the lockbox of the senses, enter a life of imagination, of Imagination, the world-making faculty of mind, which for Blake was undifferentiable from God. Before we were done one offered, prompted by nought but irritation & consequent inquiry, that this Proverb of Hell

Where man is not, nature is barren

(which pissed me the hell off, too, when I first read it, and it still can) made sense in that light. Nature is made to be nature by human mind. Not anthropocentrism – phenomenology in embryo.