in the belly of the beholder

Ethernity + Etsy craft party = Poem Collage

Ethernity Card



Just open...



Flip the top page to the right



And close!




The other night I was lucky enough to go to the Etsy Craft Party, where they had music, drinks, silkscreening, letter press, a photo booth, and free giveaways! So these photos are the results of that party. The background is the bag that we silkscreened (side note, while I was at the Renegade Craft Fair I bumped into the silkscreen designer, Virginia!) and the card is the letterpress print that we did. The collage images that you see were taken from the coupons and giveaways that they handed out at the Etsy event such as Craft-In (ed. Kathleen McCafferty). The poem and the sailboat, I cut and organized, but I should give the real credit to Christian Bok for the inspiration. Below are my/Bok's words on Ethernity:

Ethernity

interzones
describe, existence
a man has lost
his tuning fork
a fiat lux ex nihilo
reality built
out of thought alone
navigators make land
not find it, provide it
a Wunderkammern Wonderland
a body becoming a book
a papyrus cadaver
an unscroll
a musical score
a superman
an absurd vessel
a sieve of words
…perfect nonsense
hyperbolic exactitude
suggests a drive through
elastic crystal skin
exponents in a vacuum
the surface of a leaf
exploded transparency
the truth exists undeniably
in error in ur in
faith in swerve

Dumpster Dress

Here's an old poem that was published on Nameless Magazine online, but is no longer available on the site. Nameless updates their online fiction and poetry regularly and have a great assortment of work that I would recommend checking out!

Dumpster Dress

And here, pulling up in the Wal-Mart Shopping cart,
comes the unforgettable Miss Blech.

Last time she stepped up to the red carpet,
she was adorned in a classic potato sack
custom-made and hand-stitched.

Tonight she is garbed in a risqué bubble wrap,
quite possibly shipped as an industrial size roll.

There isn’t a fan out here that can take his eyes off her.

The translucent material is wrapped mail safe
around her chest into a provocative tube top;
the plastic forms a white haze like thin clouds grazing her skin,
so that her nipples are no more than two mysterious red suns.

The skirt is also crafted out of those delightful air pockets,
a blue-hued tissue paper trims the edge,
and just barely spills to her thighs.

This is quite a fashion statement.
One of a kind
A kind of one
A one…kind of
She has received several eye-popping glances now.

But this gown is only as appropriate and revealing as
other award winning celebs’. What more could be done
to push the envelope other than wearing a discarded envelope?

Besides…
Torn tin foil for a bracelet,
Colored funnies from the Sunday news for sleeves,
Packing peanuts instead of precious pearls,
A Pete’s Pizza box in place of a brand name purse,
or straws as a stand-in for sweet cigars?

The little accessories that keep her mediocrity
from hitting the hot or not page.

She is now approaching the spaghetti sauce trail.
Let’s see who the next arrival is.

Loveliest Poison Erasure

The last two posts have been on the "Loveliest Poison" erasure that I experimented with. I had only intended at first to upload the poem and explain how to go about doing an erasure, but realized as I was posting it that the formatting does not carry over without me having to upload the doc as an image. I have to admit I am not tech savvy at all, so instead of attempting to teach myself how to do that (which may have been the easier route now that I look back at it and my google search bar) I attempted to illustrate the piece. Here's what I came up with. Unfortunately I'm not a professional designer or illustrator (my sisters snatched the sketching genes and left me with the words) but I still had fun with the project.

So, if you want to do an erasure, pick a book or a song or a poem etc. and just take white out or a black marker to the words and delete things until there's an outcome that you're intrigued by or until there is nothing left. The work that got me started on this is called Radi Os by Ronald Johnson. He did an erasure on Paradise Lost, which is a great example that I'd recommend checking out. It's especially entertaining if you've had to brave the full journey of Paradise Lost.

I hope you like the poem which is written into the illustration, but also below (formatting be dashed) in case my handwriting isn't sufficient.

loveliest "poison,"

____________________________________________________
loveliest “poison,”





















and what is
----------------------------------------------------
____________________________________________________
a large rabbit-hole




a






well fell


slowly






and book-shel
----------------------------------------------------
____________________________________________________























a waist-
coat-pocket
----------------------------------------------------
____________________________________________________


a jar


drop








Down, down, down







to
----------------------------------------------------
____________________________________________________





















an ignorant little

somewhere
----------------------------------------------------
____________________________________________________
Down, down, down.












doors all around










----------------------------------------------------
____________________________________________________




















rat-hole
garden



----------------------------------------------------
____________________________________________________






shut up like a telescope!

out-of-the-way

indeed




hoping




“DRINK ME”


“Drink me,”
----------------------------------------------------

Loveliest Poison

Here is an art piece I designed, inspired by an erasure of The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. It's sharpie on stolen translucent trash that my boyfriend found after the holidays near a phone service company's dumpster. Mounted on a Queen's apartment complex deteriorating rooftop.

N+7 Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Somewhere over the Rampage

(I recommend singing this one aloud with your best young inquisitive Judy Garland's Dorothy impersonation. It's okay if your voice cracks, mine did when I sang it in front of my class of thirty undergraduates, but that's all part of the fun ;)

Somewhere over the rampage
Way up hinds,
There's lanolin that I heightened
Once in a lust.

Somewhere over the rampage
Slanders are blush,
And the droughts you dazzled to drought
Really commit unable.

Someday I'll wobble on a statistic
And warble up where clues are far
Behind me.

Where truces melt like lesson dues
Away above the chiropractic torque
That's where you'll flash me.

Somewhere over the rampage
Blueblackjacks forecast.
Blackjacks forecast over the rampage.
Why then, oh why can't I?

If hardy little blackjacks forecast
Beyond the rampage
Why, oh why can't I?


Here I'm experimenting with the N+7 form (Noun + 7 words in the dictionary). It can also be Adj + 7 or Verb + 7. Basically what you do is start with any poem or song or piece of literature. Use a dictionary of your own choosing and change all the nouns by taking the seventh noun after the original noun in the dictionary as its replacement. I did this with all of the nouns, adjectives, and verbs with the exception of “melt”. Give it a try with a pretentious piece of literature or your favorite rap song. You will likely be surprised by the end result. And don't cheat and pick the 8th noun instead of the 7th!...okay you can cheat a little. But just have fun.

Compass Rose Volume XI

I've been mentioned as a contributor for Compass Rose's Volume XI!
http://compassroseonline.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/contributors-for-volume-xi/

Please check out my poem "His Secret Garden" when available.

left-handed lipogram - Deer Treats!

Lately I've been looking into Oulipo and discovered the left-handed lipogram, which is a poem that is written with only the left side of the keyboard. It was a fun exercise that I would encourage trying. Here is the piece that I produced, enjoy!:

deer treats!

average cedar
seed swag
sacred ragweed
grass axes
grafted trees
severed dredges
safer darts
averted gazes
gagged dastards
arrested traders
fat rears
fear extracted
regretted tadas
car swerves
severe vexes
garage access
rare feed
red tea
rafter vests
free faxes
wax cards
tattered rags
café tarts
dragged saxes
excess feasts
rewarded greed
water stars
westward sex
wet ewes
revered eves
dew graves
a weft~wave

a new hope...

Currently I'm in a course called by poetry machines, in which we have focused on Oulipo poetry and are inventing our own machines to drive our poetry. One of the poets in the class has created a form that is based off of blog entries, and this previous week she mentioned that referring to blogs can sometimes be repetitive because a good number of blog posts begin with "sorry for not posting in a while, but this finally warranted an excuse to put something down in here" more or less. So to circumvent that scenario I have waited until the 1,2,3rd sentence to say, wow there's a big gap between the last time I wrote and now (sort of like how there's a gaping hole (time, plot, moral standards, etc.) between the stars wars prequels and originals (I don't frequently reference star wars, it just seemed to fit with the entry title...also I just finished watching the reviews put out by RedLetterMedia check it out). Sorry for the tangent...but unlike the Star Wars epic, the newer posts in here will be an improvement from previous works of art (hopefully, or else I'm in more trouble than I know).

I'm also going to start posting in here things like events that I perform at, as well as publications of mine, in case anyone is interested in looking them up. So I'll take a moment here to post the past few I've been in just to catch you up. Unfortunately Seele Literary and Produce Magazines don't have websites, because they have merged and have found new management since publications with them. But check out Nameless Magazine which is an awesome student-run magazine at UCDavis:

http://www.namelessmagazine.com/cherry-and-trish/

I also have my poem "C[ase] 88" printed in Zyzzyva, but it seems their website is currently under construction, so I'll link you to it later.

Stay tuned, poetry and essays are on their way!