Day Two ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2018

For the second day, Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem-a-Day prompt is, "write a portrait poem. You can use an actual portrait to write an ekphrastic poem. Or think up an image from real life. Or fake life. Or don’t be so literal; instead of writing a poem that describes a portrait, use the poem to frame a moment or lifestyle or whatever." Maureen Thorson’s second-day NaPoWriMo prompt is, "we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that plays with voice." She then gives some examples: "you might try writing a stanza that recounts something in the first-person, followed by a stanza recounting the same incident in the second-person, followed by a stanza that treats the incident from a third-person point of view. Or you might try a poem in the form of a dialogue, which necessarily has two ‘I’ speakers, addressing two ‘you’s. Another way to go is to take an existing poem of yours or someone else’s, and try rewriting it in a different voice. The point is just to play with who is speaking to who and how." Well, let me use perhaps the most famous portrait ever painted, with a little embellishment. That's a little Photoshop parody I made, at the beginning of someone's presidency. I hope Leonardo will forgive what I've done to his Mona Lisa. I like to think he would laugh. (Here's where this image lives, on deviantART.) And now here's today's little ditty, again a tanka. Mona Lisa Tanka I, Gioconda, say #MeToo with Pussy Hat. Even in heaven, gotta keep up with the news. We've got CNN! No Fox. —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] Friends, won’t you comment, please? Love to know what you’re thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don’t find the word “comments” in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks! Ingat, everyone.  ヅ

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On Deviancy in 3 Dimensions

I AM A DEVIANT. I must confess. Yes, I am. And I have been for a whole month now. It's true. What I'm talking about is that I am a new — or fairly new — member of deviantART, an international social network for artists . . . would-be, new, emerging, established, whatever. My little node, my deviant identity, in this network is vincegotera. Yep, that's me. You can do a lot of über-cool things on deviantART: for one, you can upload your own art, called "deviations." I now have 10 deviations (don't know if they're art, really, but there they are). Actually 9 plus a photograph of me I'm using as my "deviantID" . . . it's from a time a coupla years back when I shaved off my mustache. I hated the way it — no, I — looked and you'll see how I kinda solved that problem at that time — at least for the picture, which I used as my facebook photo then. It's also a tribute of sorts to one of my favorite artists. Something I've learned about recently while strolling the avenues of deviants and boulevards of deviations is 3D images (or stereograms) . . . called "free-view" because you can see them in 3D without special glasses. Remember those Magic Eye puzzles that were all the rage a few years ago? Where you gaze at an apparently abstract image and then out of it resolves a "secret" picture that not everyone can see? If you ever learned how to make those hidden images appear, you already know you do it by crossing your eyes. (These stereograms I'm learning about are also called "cross-view" or "crosseye-view" images.) As part of my new "deviancy," I've started making such "crosseye-view" stereograms. Here's my first one, "Exhaling Dissolution 3D." (Click on the image to go to its deviantART page, where I have instructions on how to view it in 3D.) My subject here is the huge wood-and-metal sculpture by Sarah Deppe, a BFA student at the University of Northern Iowa. It's quite a tribute to Sarah that her sculpture — titled "Exhaling Dissolution" — is permanently featured in a courtyard on campus. For those of you who can't simply walk over to see this twelve-foot-tall behemoth head, I hope my stereogram can give you a feeling for its glorious humongousness, its driftwoody enormity. Click on one of the heads above; you'll be amazed. Thanks for letting me "3D" your baby, Sarah. Friends, watch for Sarah Deppe's art in the future . . . you'll hear of her again, I guarantee. Here's another stereogram project of mine on deviantART, a "WIP" or work-in-progress. What you see below are two versions — one with background, one with. Knowing the name of my blog, you'll appreciate my interest in this project. Please click on the guitars directly above and you'll be able to access the two versions. I'd really love to hear which one version works for you (both 3D-wise and otherwise) and why. Please leave your comments on the 3D blue guitar pages in deviantART rather than here. Thanks for your help! Back to the über-cool things you can do on deviantART: they let you compile a collection of other people's artwork (sorry, other "deviants' deviations") and "curate" an exhibition of these objets d'art in your profile. For example, I have a slowly growing little anthology of images that center on the color blue, which I call "Blues." Perhaps not the cleverest of titles, but I'm rather deviantly proud of how it's a musical pun. I am also collecting art pieces on the Filipino monster, the aswang (you might know my poem on that subject). Also images of guitars, of dragons, of steampunk artifacts. Lots more, LOTS more. I hope you'll come and visit my deviantART profile. You'll have a blast. And leave me comments all over the place there. Oh, while we're on the subject, do leave me a comment below as well, please. You'll make me one very happy deviant.

Carrie Arizona's Altered-Page Found Poems

Do you know about "altered books"? Around the late 1970s and 1980s, a "grassroots" art movement began in which people would save books that might otherwise have been thrown away and would turn them into works of art. Glue, glitter, collage, paint, pencil, pastel, sculpture even . . . these are the materials these artists would use to change these books from mass-produced, disposable things to one-off, highly personalized objets d'art. I mention sculpture because an altered-book artist might, for example, cut out a cubic enclosure inside the book, out of many pages perhaps, and maybe suspend something like a small nail-polish-red papier-mache heart within that space. Sometimes people would do this with only one page, perhaps torn out of such a book, and this would become a free-standing artifact . . . in other words, a poem, a found poem. As the Altered Books website puts it: "Find poems in the pages by the process of obliteration." Find the words that will make up your poem in the page at hand, maybe in order down the page or left to right, circle them (let's say), and "obliterate" the rest of the text on that page: cross out lines of text, draw an image over areas of the page, whatever. Look at the Altered Books website (link a couple of sentences back) for some examples. I gotta tell ya the altered pages you'll see there seem quite slapdash, clumsy, not really artful at all. The website's endorsement of the word "obliterate" in this context suggests violence to the text, to the page . . . a confrontation between the purpose of the original writer of these words and the artistic intent of the mixed-media altered-books artist. One would think some delicacy would be called for, a commitment to beauty, to some sort of unified vision. Well, look at the example to the right. That's an altered page from the artist Carrie Arizona (deviantART.com) . . . notice how her black "cross-outs" start at the top left of the page and meander down to the bottom right, clearly an echo of the way we read in Western culture, left to right, up to down. The page has been converted into a pleasant cascade of organic shapes, bubbles in which are revealed Carrie's found poem. The wonderful thing about this poem is that it's a great poem, a — to use technical poetics lingo — a kick-ass poem. The page has not just yielded up, via Carrie's hand, a beautiful visual pattern; the poetic text she's culled from the page is profound, intelligent, and pleasingly defamiliarizing (that is, it helps us see our everyday lives and reality in new, surprising, potentially delightful, ways). Like all excellent poetry, it can both unsettle you and make you think, feel . . . have an experience that is both visual and textual. Here is the page magnified so you can read the poem. Notice how Carrie even finds us punctuation in the page, as needed. The poem can also (should also) be experienced in its "natural habitat" (so to speak) on deviantART.com — an international social network for artists of all skills and backgrounds and cultures. Along with the image of the book page, Carrie also provides for us the text of the found poem:             Beautiful Leech Whoever you may be, be as blood flowing to a bleeding answer. I am a wound who lives on blood like a beautiful leech. And then below that Carrie adds, quite delightfully, "Nietzsche, of course." As far as I'm concerned, there's no US poet working with found poems and altered pages/books who can come close to the rich elegance and exquisiteness of Carrie's work. She rules, no question about it, friends. I hope you can take some time to explore Carrie's deviantART gallery: paintings, collages, photographs, digital art, "regular" poems, and of course more found poems on altered pages. I always enjoy how beautiful these poems are, visually. Marvelous marvelous work. Here is an intriguing self-portrait by Carrie; she can be an enigmatic, mysterious figure . . . the few self-portraits you'll find in Carrie's deviantART gallery don't give much away. Her pseudonyms, carrieola and Carrie Arizona, don't reveal much either, except that she lives in the state of Arizona. How about this . . . let it suffice to say that Carrie Arizona is a wonderful, talented artist. Let's leave it there, shall we?

P.S. If you'd like to find out more about altered books and found poetry, google the words altered, pages, books, found, and poetry in various combinations. That the "altered books" art movement had been quite a strong force can be seen by the existence of a website titled Altered Books &mdash The International Society of Altered Book Artists (ISABA). This organization evidently dismantled itself only recently: December 2010. But you can still sneak into their gallery of altered books. Here's the back door that I found ajar. And try to "write" one of these poems yourself, for National Poetry Month! Have fun. Note added 7 May 2011: Carrie's work is featured today in an art exhibit.