Green Chair Press Blog

From a Distant Road

Haiku seems to be popping up all around me this summer and keeping me on track with my off-again-on-again practice of writing a haiku a day. Most of the ones I wrote through the end of July were about the lack of rainfall here in New Mexico & my very dry garden.

the sky grows dark.
thunder. lightning.
not a raindrop falls.

Once I got to Vermont, where it is very wet (rain every other day, and my sister’s house is surrounded by lakes and ponds), water became the recurring theme.

far across the lake
a loon’s cry.
cattails at attention.

While in Vermont, I attended a reading given by David Budbill, whose poetry is very haiku-like. Then last week I went to the opening of From a Distant Road, an exhibit at the Museum of New Mexico that includes John Brandi’s contemporary haiga (haiku poems accompanied by brush art work). That’s an example above, and click on it to see more of his pieces from the exhibit.
Brandi gave a talk before the reception, introducing us to the history of haiga. But most interesting to me were his comments on his practice of writing haiku — that it was often about encapsulating an “aha” moment or that he sat outside and wrote about what was happening around him. I usually write at the end of the day and use it to reflect back on what took place that day, with my generally imperfect memory.

Dryad Press

While in Vermont I had the chance to meet two of my sister’s friends, Merrill Leffler and Ann Slayton. Merrill runs a small publishing company, Dryad Press, and his wife Ann is, among other things, a poet. Merrill showed me several of the chapbooks and prose pieces he’s published and talked about why he’d chosen various titles. Especially interesting is They’ll Have to Catch Me First about a woman who was a prisoner at Mechelen during WWII and “assigned to the painters’ workshop, she painted numbers that prisoners wore around their necks, linen armbands for other prisoner-works, and signs. During her year-and-a-half of imprisonment, Nazi officers had her do portrait paintings of themselves and mistresses — at the same time, she and other artists surreptitiously drew and painted scenes of camp life. After liberation by the Allies, Mrs. Awret was able to rescue what was left of her own artwork.” The book is a memoir that includes the artwork of various prisoners as well as interviews and with former prisoners.
On the drive home from Vermont, my sister & I read Ann’s poetry aloud, a lovely way to pass the time!

How to Steal Like An Artist

On his blog, Austin Kleon (who I wrote about previously here — he makes newspaper blackout poetry) has posted a talk he gave How to Steal Like An Artist (and 9 other things nobody told me), explaining how his creativity works or a “list of 10 things I wish I’d heard when I was in college.” (First seen here.)

Paperphilia

I’m back from Vermont and one of my first tasks is to tackle rearranging my studio. Or at least dealing with some of the boxes I haven’t unpacked since we moved. When packing my studio to move to Santa Fe, I got so overloaded with deciding what to keep and what to get rid of, I finally just put everything in boxes and brought it with me. There’s been so much to do to get our house set up, I’ve not unpacked several of those boxes. And the other day when I finally did, I got a pleasant surprise — a little roll of 2 sheets of handmade paper from Cavepaper, one mustard colored and the other grey blue. When I unwrapped them, I gave up on unpacking and rearranging and instead spent the rest of the afternoon going through my paper stash, getting reacquainted.
Then yesterday a wonderful word showed up on word spy: “paperphilia”

n. A deep appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of paper; a preference for reading items printed on paper rather than displayed on a screen.

Here’s one citation they give (all of them here):

Why Moleskines, and why now? Their resurgence coincided exactly with the rise of digital connectedness, and my gut told me the two must be related. But how? Was it just nostalgia, an effort to escape from the messiness of the present into the simplicity of an idealized past? Maybe paperphilia really isn’t so different from the recessive pinings that motivate some people to own antique cars.
—William Powers, Hamlet’s Blackberry, Harper, June 29, 2010

Designing Alphabets

Last fall, the blog DesignSponge had a Design Your Own Alphabet Contest and I’m just now getting around to looking at all the entries and the winners.

Although it didn’t win, my favorite is shown above, “Kern Over” by Daniel Wintle — who picked the name because “kerning is the process of adjusting white spacing in a proportional font.”

Within the Envelope

Within the Envelope For the past week the news has been full of pieces about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary. Ten years ago I’d just started a year-long class on artist’s books at the San Francisco Center for the Book. Many weeks we had an assignment to make a book for an upcoming class, and the one prior to Sept 11 was to make a book using a paper sleeve from an old record and the text from 2 letters written by Kafka to his fiance Felice. The letters are completely over-the-top — I don’t have the 2 we used, but here’s an example:

Dearest, what have I done that makes you torment me so? No letter again today, neither by the first mail nor the second.

You do make me suffer! While one written word from you could make me happy! You’ve had enough of me; there is no other explanation, it’s not surprising after all; what is incomprehensible, though, is that you don’t write and tell me so.

If I am to go on living at all, I cannot go on vainly waiting for news of you, as I have done these last few interminable days. But I no longer have any hope of hearing from you.

I shall have to repeat specifically the farewell you bid me in silence.

I should like to throw myself bodily on this letter, so that it cannot be mailed, but it must be mailed.

I shall expect no further letters.

As I stood at my workbench after 9/11, reading the letters and fingering the record sleeve, I wondered how to recover from such a horrible shock, how to feel safe again. The book I made was an attempt to work through what I’d seen on TV and in the photos that filled the newspaper.
I titled the book “Within the Envelope: Fear and Comfort.” It’s got an accordion spine and each page is a small record sleeve with a piece of paper where the record would go. I was taken with the idea that what one saw through the hole in the sleeve was about fear, but there might be comfort after pulling the page out to see the entire picture. This is an idea I’ve returned to several times, but none, I think, as successful as this first attempt. I’ve made a video of the book below.