Weekly art for 2018 -- Found poetry 1

In the 17 years I've been doing daily art, I've always ended the year with a bit of sadness.  I have always been so happy with my choices of daily art projects that I've been sorry to see them go -- the last couple of days are always a desperate choice among several exciting ideas, some of which have been left on the table unexecuted.  I take that as a ratification of my decision to do daily art; somehow it taps into some deep need in my psyche, and that's why I keep doing it.

Last year my project involved text.  I would find phrases in the newspaper or in magazines and present them in ways that said something interesting.  As the year began I wasn't sure exactly how this was going to work out.  I had been in the habit of doing haiku from found text so I spent many, many hours finding, clipping and organizing 5- or 7-syllable phrases.  But as it turned out, I used only a fraction of those haiku bits.

I also experimented with other recurring formats, which I will tell you more about in a few subsequent posts.

At about mid-year I figured out how to find "poems" from clippings that didn't follow the haiku format, and thus much richer in possibilities.  Those turned out to be the most rewarding of the formats I used during the year.  After spending many, many more hours finding and clipping these text fragments, I found myself with hundreds of potential "found poems" in my pile that had never made it to fruition.

When the year ended I first rued all the hours spent on unused clippings.  I don't even want to think about how many hours we're talking about -- certainly hundreds.  I was sad to see the 2017 text project end not just because I loved doing it, but because of all that investment that might go to waste.

As I contemplated my daily art rules for 2018 I thought I would continue doing "found poetry" -- not daily, but weekly, as my regular Sunday blog post.  I like having a regular feature on Sundays, for many of the same reasons that I am drawn to daily art: I like the structure, and the discipline of the recurrence.

So here's the first of my Sunday Found Poetry posts for the new year.  I hope you will enjoy reading them.  And you can check out all the daily texts from last year HERE on my Daily Art blog.