Sherry Chandler

Used, New, and Out of Print

I’m working with a collaborative group called WaMo. We’ve spent the last several months looking for innovative (fun) ways to combine poetry and visual art.

The visual poem to the left is the result of one exercise we did that I’ve been calling White Out Poetry. The base document was a print-out of a book review from Powell’s. The review, from The Atlantic Monthly, was written by Peter Beinart about Giles Kepel’s The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West.

This exercise was suggested to us by Ruth Bavetta. It’s adapted from an exercise she was doing in a workshop with Sarah Maclay.

I thought the result was rather interesting, and the group is going on retreat today to practice more mutilating of text, so I post “Used, New, and Out of Print” here as my Friday graphic.

I like the way the exercise forced me away from linear sense (in a very, very linear base document), the way the words cluster and can be read vertically and horizontally. I also like the texture caused by the White Out (in my case Liquid Paper) as it thickened and became more and more aggravating to work with and the pattern the whole thing makes on the page. I could never get a result like this if I set out to make a random pattern with my own words. I even like the bleed-through from the other side of the page – it’s just cheap copy paper. In short, I’m totally pleased with myself.

This whole exercise was done in an hour so there was little time to think – part of its value. You can see that I had a few second thoughts and wrote words back in but by and large I stuck with what my brush did and if my hand wiped out a phrase my left brain had meant to keep, I let that stand.

Click the image to see the full-sized piece.

WaMo stands for Women Artists Group and Mosaic poets. Our exhibit goes up on March 21 at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, Kentucky, and we have an opening reading/performance on March 23 at 7:30. Mark you calendars.

Possibly related posts:

from Secrets

from dbqp:

Cat with Love Poem by Ernie O’Dell

Where Poetry Meets Graphic Arts

The Sideshow

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.