Daily art -- I feel good!

When I defined my daily art project for 2017 as "found text," I had an envious eye on the work of Judy Kleinberg, who posts a daily poem on her blog.  I had been following her work for a few months and wondered if I could ever "write" that kind of poetry.  For the first few months of my own project, the answer was no.

I was having a good time with my stuff.  I did a lot of found haiku, a literary form that I have been doing for many years, and I came up with a bunch of new formats that are fun to make, such as theme collections from crossword puzzle definitions, like this:

But I had a surprisingly hard time figuring out how to make compositions that act and sound like real poems.  What I realized was that reading the newspaper and searching for poem-like phrases was different from searching for theme words, such as my book of "early" and "late" references. Searching for poems requires you to not just read the newspaper story, but to be always aware of the words adjacent to it (on the page as printed, not in the text as written) -- perhaps words in the next column, perhaps words above and below.

A few years ago I was doing a lot of found haiku taken from reviews of books and art exhibits.  I set a rule for myself that my haiku had to fairly represent the views of the original critic; if the critic liked the book, I wouldn't assemble phrases that appeared to trash it.  But I have realized that the rules have to be different when you're searching for poems that sound and act like poetry.  In fact, my new rule is that the found phrases should be different from the writer's original meaning.  If all I did was to condense the writer's original message into shorter, pithier lines, that wouldn't involve much magic.

The opposite trap is to find original text that reads like or quotes poetic language to start with.  As an extreme example, think of a review of a book of poetry that quotes ten lines from one of the poems.  I could cut out one or two of those lines and they would make a Reader's Digest version of the poem that would be truly literary -- but that would be cheating.

After a lot of frustration and some rather lame poems, I think I've finally figured out how to do it right.  For the last couple of weeks I've been finding poems that I'm really happy with!  Here are a few of them, and you can check out all my daily text here.

 the poem reads:

Surrealism takes wing as 
music

Out here, 
music of the ghosts 
echoes

a squall of 
bright sound 
darker than blue

music 
come to life, 
sky 
style

the poem reads:

herders' 
haunted cry, 
songs to camels, 
sighing
goats and camels; 
herding 
endures

what most endures, 
big dreams

Ultimately, 
brilliantly 
memory -

the poem reads:

crazily
-- she has 
a poet's prose

gives us words for
words for before
from a dream

a cascade of
returns to the past and
of repeated refrains
always saying:

what's there in the snow, in
light,
through the trees."

Networking and poetry

Toward the end of last year I wrote a post about my "found poetry," a technique in which you search out intriguing phrases from newspapers, magazines or books and combine them to make "poems."  One of my internet friends, Sharon Robinson, left a comment that I should check out the work of her friend Judy Kleinberg, who does the same thing.

So I did, and fell in love -- Judy's work is a lot more sophisticated than mine, and she must have one heckuva collection of magazines to cut from.  Partly because I admired her work so much, I decided to define my daily art project for this year as heavy on text.  Every day I have been making a small collage composition that features some text that must be read to be appreciated.  (You can see all my daily art here.)

I follow Judy's blog, and earlier this year she wrote that she had two found poems published in an online website called Rise Up Review, which bills itself as "a landing site for the poetry of opposition."  When I visited the site to check it out, I noticed that they were inviting submissions, and since some of my daily collage texts are highly political, I sent a few in.  Here's one of them:

And this week they were published. 

I was happy to see them on the same page as Judy Kleinberg's work, since she is the connection that brought me to this venue, and more important, that brought me to making this kind of daily art.  I  love the way internet friends expand your life.

Three months of daily text 3

Conceptual art, which I enjoy both observing and doing, is big on text, and on the manipulation of same.  I decided early in my daily text project that it would be interesting to search out certain words in a given area of the newspaper and see what came up.

My first approach was to find all the people listed on page one for that day.

Next I looked for all the places in that day's obituaries.

Then I looked for an alphabet of proper names.

What I find fascinating about these lists is that they make you think and wonder.  I've done four everybody-on-page-one lists so far.  Trump, of course, is on every one, and so is Stephen Bannon.  But you might be surprised to find George Washington, not once but twice (and his cuz Denzel once).  The usual suspects (James Comey, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama) are there, and so are the Pope, Warren Buffett, Roger Federer, Etan Patz, King Salman of Saudi Arabia and a bunch of ordinary people in foreign lands, many of them crying.

I plan to repeat these recipes many times in the coming year.  I look forward to seeing how the front page names reflect what's going on in current events, but also the lives of people we'll never hear of again.

Some days, of course, you can't do a decent list piece.  More than once I've looked at the front page only to find lots of stories with hardly any people (doesn't seem possible, but it happens), where all the photos are of oil wells or tornado damage rather than of people.  I've done a couple of alphabet pieces solely because I was fortunate to find a Q and an X, although on one I had to use a lowercase z.  A good day is finding a guy named Xander and a guy named Zaire, going to Qatar for a soccer tournament.

Three months of daily text 2

A recurring format in my daily text is to cut haikus (three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables) from book pages.  Instead of simply finding three separate lines of the appropriate length and pasting them down, this kind of poem is more difficult.

It's more difficult to find, because the three lines have to appear in their proper order.  And it's more difficult to paste up, because you have to whip out the X-acto knife and cut all the irrelevant words away, leaving just the surrounding page and the words of the poem.

I try to cut long strips of white space between the lines to hold the remaining words in place, but when I use an old book the paper often shreds under the knife or dissolves under the glue stick.  So sometimes the poem isn't as robustly attached to its page as I might like.

Sometimes I'll find a picture to go with the poem.

This format of "found poetry" is the oldest trope in my repertoire.  I started doing this in 2010 or thereabouts.  I did lots of these for gifts and birthday cards.  For a year I participated in an online project called "Haiku Art" in which people wrote a haiku each month to a prompt; I would submit a found poem rather than write my own.

I spent a lot more time on each one then, but it feels familiar to go back to this method every now and then in my daily art.

You can check out all my daily text here.  In the next post: found text lists.

Three months of daily text 1

It's April, which means I'm more than one-quarter through my daily art project for this year, and I thought it might be time for an update.  My rules for this year are to use found text and paste it onto 4x6 cards in poems or poem-like configurations or other meaningful arrangements of words.  Some of my pieces resemble the collages that I did for three years, but they're way less concerned with the pictures and way more with the words.

Mostly I find my text in the newspaper, which means that a lot of it has to do with politics.  I'll leave that part for another day; if you'd like to read those you can find them on my daily art blog -- look for the orange cards.

Sometimes I'll find an article in the paper that I "retell" in haiku form, often with several 5-7-5 verses rather than just one.  Using multiple verses takes more time than just finding three lines, but it allows me to tell a longer and more interesting story.

I've been collecting certain kinds of word clusters for several months, even before I started this year's project, so I have lots of questions and parenthetical remarks socked away in my files.  Sometimes I'll compose a text with them.

I have lots of "early" words left over from my book project last year, so they occasionally make their way into a daily text.

I'll write more about other forms and formats that I've been using in another post.  Stay tuned!

A week on retreat -- and not much to show for it

I got home yesterday from a week at our twice-yearly retreat, just 25 miles down the road but so far away in mental distance.  It doesn't seem that I accomplished very much at all -- mainly I read through a huge pile of newspapers, cut out this many little clippings for my daily art and other found-poetry projects

and put a foot-high stack of papers into the recycling bin. But yes, it takes three full days to accomplish that much, and I didn't even get the little clippings sorted and filed.  And I brought home another stack of papers that still haven't gotten read.

I did come across interesting things in the pile that I should have noticed months ago.  Here's one that made me crabby.

It's from an art review in the New York Times of a show by Nari Ward, a sculptor who immigrated to New York from Jamaica and who has worked extensively with themes of African culture coming to the new world.  The photo shows an installation of bricks covered with painted copper.

photo from New York Times

The reviewer comments, "African-American history is embedded everywhere. The colored patterns in the floor installation are derived from 19th-century African-American quilts....  The quilt patterns derive from African textiles."

Well, I beg to differ.  Perhaps the artist was inspired by a Bear Paw or Shoo-fly quilt made by an African-American -- those traditional quilt designs were no doubt popular among quiltmakers of all ethnicities -- but those patterns did not derive from African textiles.

It's just another example of people who don't know much about quilts being glib -- and wrong.  (And on that same note, the other day I saw an announcement about some woman giving a speech about quilts used as code on the Underground Railroad....)

Not fun / not art?

Earlier this week I wrote about my daily art project, which requires me to collect text from the newspaper or other printed sources and paste it up into a "poem" or other presentation.  I said I was feeling overwhelmed by the collection and sorting of my raw material, and still didn't feel as though I totally understand where this project is going.

One of my readers left a comment on the post:  "I see a daily art activity as being something FUN with little to no background work.  What you are doing doesn't sound like fun and it doesn't look like art."

(So I take it she's not going to do a project like this in the foreseeable future.)

I thought about this comment for a while and decided I needed to write about it.  Not so much to have a debate, but to make sure my own thoughts are in order.  Having committed to this project, with 327 days left to go, I would like to feel that I've made a good decision and am going to accomplish something, even if I'm feeling a little iffy right now.

I've been doing daily art for all but one of the last 17 years and I've learned that such projects usually surprise me.  I think I know what I'm planning to do, and then it doesn't work out exactly that way.  I encounter obstacles, which either get overcome or get creatively avoided.  New ideas sneak in and make themselves at home.  I learn things and incorporate them into my daily practice -- and often they slop over into the rest of my life and art.  So feeling in early February that I don't quite understand what's going on is perfectly normal.

I differ with the reader on the part about "little to no background work."  If something requires no work I'm not sure it's worth committing to doing it 365 times.  True, I don't want my daily project to take up two hours, but I also don't want to dash it off in two minutes.  To my mind, the point of an art project, daily or not, is to stretch your brain and your art muscles, to do something that challenges you, or improves your skill, or produces something worth having, or all of the above.  I don't do art for fun, I do it to say something, to learn something, to make something.

That's one reason I commit to a daily project rather than just promise myself "I'll make some art when I can."  The fact that the daily art gets made even when I'm sick, or busy on another project, or on an airplane, gives substance to the work, a new dimension that wouldn't be there if I just made stuff every now and then.  The fact that some days obviously involved more work than others is part of the texture of the project.

So yes, I'm having fun, if you define "fun" as feeling good about what you're doing, that you're accomplishing something.  The fact that I'm wrestling with logistics is part of the fun; the fact that I figured out how to use sticky notes to organize my little cuttings is part of the fun.  Each time I discover a new trope -- such as this one, in which I present every name that appeared on the front page of that day's newspaper -- it's exhilarating, realizing that I'm going to come back to that again, and over time it will be interesting to compare the different versions of that trope.



But is it art?  In some ways it's very little different from my collage projects, where I used text every day.  I've given myself new latitude this year to focus on the words rather than the images, which reflects my growing interest in poetry and poem-like wordplay.  So maybe the art is a little less visual this year and a little more verbal, but it's my project and if I say it's art, it's art.  (Isn't that the whole point of postmodernism?)

Stay tuned.  I'll be making this stuff for the rest of the year, and I'll keep you posted.  Meanwhile, you can see all my daily art here.

And to everybody -- thanks for reading, thanks for commenting!

Daily text for 2017

I wrote last week that I didn't yet know what to do for my daily art project in 2017.  At practically the last minute, I decided to do a composition with text.

I've been noticing for the last four years that text keeps creeping into my artwork, even when I try to express myself visually rather than verbally.  During my first year of daily collage so much text sneaked in that for the second and third years I made that part of the rules.  And even when I switched to drawing last year, text sneaked in there, too.



Two other elements entered into the decision.  One was totally serious.  Several weeks ago when I posted about my "found poems", Sharon Robinson left a comment that I might be interested in her friend's found poems.  I clicked on the link and fell in love with the work of Judy Kleinberg, who posts a found poem almost every day.  I have spent a long time contemplating her poems and wondering how she does it (well, it's obvious how she does it technically, but I am in awe of how she makes actual serious poetry with her torn bits of text).

© j.i. kleinberg

































The other element was totally trivial.

A long time ago I bought a one-pound package of "scrap cardstock" in a variety of colors, cut to 4x6", the size I was using for daily collage.  When I ran out I went back to the store where I thought I had bought it, only to find nothing of the sort, and the clerk swore they had never carried anything like that.  So I had to finish out the year with plain white index cards.  Three weeks ago I was in another store and found my scrap cardstock!  Always one to overreact, I bought five packages, brought them home, and wondered what I would ever do to use them up.

five pounds of scrap cardstock



















When the idea to do daily text struck, I knew exactly what I would paste it onto.  Clearly the universe was ahead of me in enabling a project that I hadn't even thought up yet.

So  here are my first two daily texts.  I'm not giving myself too many rules about this project, so I'm not sure what I'm going to come up with.  I suspect a lot of them will be found poems, but maybe I'll come up with other models as the year goes on.  As in previous years, I'll be posting all my daily art on my daily art blog.  Please check them out!