Fragments

I spend a good part of each week helping students fix sentence fragments in their essays, and another good part of each week creating my own sentence fragments disguised as haiku. I have always loved the "know the rules so you can intentionally break them" aspect of the craft of writing. This includes breaking all the laws of physics, which might be a little out of the scope of this blog entry, but I promise I'll return to it in the near past.

Those of you who know my work know that "shards" of things often make an appearance. A haiku is a shard of image, a shard of moment, a thing whole unto itself that is also a piece broken from a larger whole. This is part of the allure of haiku, how it so blatantly allows the reader to "fill in" all the space around it.

It also describes haiga, which offers in visual form the image broken from its context, becoming self-contained yet evocative of something more, something at once known and unknown.

On this last fragment of the month, a fragment of image, a fragment of moment, in which may or may not be contained all of something, to begin us on the journey of today...

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ferns
and
water's
edge
is
where
November

A Word from Our Sponsor (Poetry!)

A few days ago, I read some sad news from a small press. Sales were almost non-existent, and the press had decided to stop reading new submissions, at least until the spring of 2017.

Poetry (and all art) is the LAST thing we should let slip from our lives, especially in this disturbing world wherein lies and hate and an overall lack of critical and creative thinking are gaining ground.

Please support poetry presses. Please buy books. Please buy art from local artists. These are the only things that last. And while we last, poetry and art give meaning to our lives. Please shop on Main Street or Spring Street or Broad Street or wherever the small, locally-owned shops are located in your town.

I have brazenly included my own books to illustrate this plea, but I'd be just as happy if you buy the books of other poets and writers (there is some wonderful fiction and memoir and biography out there, too).

Give the gift of poetry and art. Buy some for yourself while you're at it. Splurge on poetry. We need poetry. Poetry needs us.

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For people in the vicinity of Sussex County, New Jersey, two local bookstores go out of their way to support local authors. Please visit Black Dog Books on Spring Street in Newton and Broad Street Books in the very center of Branchville for books by local authors and other wonderful gifts.

Feel free to post a comment below about other great bookshops and local artists and craftspeople. Support a neighbor and a community as you do your holiday shopping this season.

Outdoors Again

My innovation today was photographing this collage before I glued it. I like the three-dimensional quality of the scraps just resting on the paper.

A walk yesterday and today along one of my favorite railtrails provided the inspiration I needed to see colors anew. Thanks to this morning's flock of bluebirds, I even remember there are colors other than brown.

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November
poor posture
in this wind-swept place

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More Broken Shells

Geez, what is with the earth tones? Even as a kid, I loved all the names for the shades of brown pencils in my father's Prismacolor collection: terra cotta, sienna, burnt ochre, light and dark umber. This time of year, the browns come into their own, as if to say, Appreciate me while there's time, before the world goes white.

You might not think of brown when you think of seashells, but as you can see from the moonsnail pieces in the haiga to the left, there's umber, and copper, and a grayish mauve that saturates into terra cotta in the topmost whorl. You can't stop staring at those three gorgeous broken shells, can you. You aren't even reading this. I could write "the" six times, and you won't even notice: the, the, the, the, the, the.

You want them, those shells, don't you? Heck, I want them,  and they're right here on my desk in front of me.
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sacred
geometry

the
arc
of
each
desire

*

I desire colored pencils in all the shades of brown I saw in the woods this morning: oak-tannin, wheat-field, November phragmities, cattail, coffee-bark, hopping wren...

...you know that's going to be a poem some time soon...

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true
north

ours
the
only
definition
possible

*

Broken Shells

Yesterday's three posts about collage and the brain are with me still, as I think about the difference between collage--disparate elements working together to form a whole--and chaos. In this time of chaos, I have turned to collage to try to make or find sense. It's a great strategy, if one concentrates on six or seven square inches of notebook page and doesn't look up.

The seashore is an example of a "natural collage," a random (laws of geology, hydrology, physics, meteorology notwithstanding) collection of stone, sand, shell, patterns of water, wind. Broken shells defy the adjective "broken," being almost as beautiful as they were when whole, sometimes more lovely for revealing the inner whorled column.

Can we defy the adjective "broken"? I think this is what artists do in every work of art: either celebrate the broken or take the first steps toward mending the break, forming the broken thing into something new.

From broken to new. It's what we are working towards in these difficult weeks, holding on even to broken things, because broken is still better than surreal. Collage is better than chaos. Even a few square inches here and there.

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broken shells
complaint echoes complaint
throughout the night

From Brain...part trois

And so it continues, the creative energy of the morning of the first day of a long weekend.

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every brain
a collage of

what's
the
last
word
of
this
poem
?

From Brain...part deux

And then I thought (this is continued from my previous entry, so it really isn't as non seq as it looks), of course, the brain itself is a collage, one to which we keep adding fragments of impressions of images and tearing away some fragments and superimposing all. the. time. or so neuroscientists tell us, creating a new memory each time we recall something we call a "memory" even though it's never the same memory twice.

(Can you image what these posts would be like if I drank coffee?)

The brain itself is a collage. Of course, then, we are drawn to collage as a means of expressing all the simultaneous, important, beautiful, worrisome, haunting, haunted bits of information we want to impart.

I wonder if we process stuff better when it is presented in this aggregate. Certainly we make connections when we have stuff to connect. Can you look at the above collage with an awareness of how your eyes are moving up, down, around, across; how you are reading some words and forming others to tell yourself what it is you are seeing? I sort of do that in slow-motion as I am creating the collage. Then I let it take me in new directions as I write the text that will "complete" (wrong word for a collage) it.

Then I start thinking of the next one...

pieces of
the memory of
speaking of
a feeling of
not enough of