Piecing It Apartogether

I'm not so great around my birthday anymore since my mother died. I feel deeply lonely, no matter what, and a scrambled, frenetic energy that goes nowhere. For my 56th birthday, I was determined to make the best of a year that was divisible by eight, my favorite number. I collected all the self-portraits I've written over the years, took them to Staples, and had copies made to create a book. My plan was to make the book interactive with pull-outs and pockets with secret messages for the recipient, and collaged covers. This never happened because the project was beset with printing errors, user errors, and a general sense of "maybe this just doesn't matter all that much to anyone other than me." So I relegated all 100 (why?!) copies, and the special binding machine I purchased to the attic storage, and forgot about it. A week or so ago when I was digging around for art supplies, I opened up a suitcase and rediscovered all the copies of poems.

I left them out as I worked on another project. "Maybe now is the time to do something with these," I thought. Then I really looked them over, all these versions of me, poems I no longer related to, and I threw them all away. The spontaneity! Whee! I'm letting go of all this ego! Also, how wasteful. I felt liberated, with a coating of light guilt and melancholy.

Later that week I was looking for some drawings to show my friend, and I found yet another box of those self portraits. I must have said to myself that if I left the poems within view, I'd do something with them. But the box became part of my everyday landscape, just another object my eyes grazed over to get to the glue sticks or pompoms they were truly seeking. I ignored them.

"Those are some determined poems," I decided. Now I had to do something with them. 

Every morning I've been cutting these self-portraits apart, redacting myself. I redacted my own book of poems, Year in the Blanks, a few times over, and I have so many versions of that book now on my hard drive it's confusing. My process was different for that. I started by blacking out words and phrases on the printed pages, and then quickly went into the file and removed words, and tinkered with space. It had less a physical, visceral feeling to it. I was, for the most part, focused on a screen.

Cut-up technique is nothing new. The Dadaists started it in the 1920s, and William S. Burroughs began cutting up newspaper articles and rearranging the words to create prophetic phrasings in the 50s and 60s. Many artists use the technique now in varying ways. 

"When you cut into the present, the future leaks out."  - William S. Burroughs

I'm not exactly cutting into the present when I take apart my old poems. I'm cutting into the past me, revealing what I hope is more present tense, and less about me. It's hard to get away from yourself when creating though. There's always just a titch of you flavoring the soup. I think that's what I find fascinating about this. How much do I pare away and what do I keep?

Cutting up paper is a very tactile, focused experience. The screech of scissors from the 1970s, the little slivers of paper that I flip over carefully with a licked finger then shuffle around the desk. I trim away suffixes, prefixes, rearrange words in a puzzle that has no end goal image to follow. When I'm done I take a few photos of the poems as they rest on the desk, and then I whisk them into the trash bin. Ephemeral. That kind of letting go feels good too. It is pure play. Quiet and filled with delight.

Here's the source self-portrait I used this morning. The poems you've seen throughout this post were made from this poem. 

The Best of It

“How is the ring of my being singing through others?”

- Nora Bateson

Of course this book of poems

is me, and you, 

and the stranger who

starred in it, looped, bracketed, underlined

whole passages —

order is always

starting over

A reminder that objects

invite our touches,

just a highlight here

and there

As though the self

were eager to be wrecked

As though each of our selves

were dying to be found

and then cut out 

of our muzzy landscapes

and the chap of dreams, 

rearranged, out-of-context,

and out of order.

How messy

it is to live, all

marks and meaning

to get to some final

point of exclamation,

to feel connected.

How distance

begins to look extraordinary

and logimagical enough to abandon

this poem-book-lover-past-tense-childhood

for someone else to pick up 

and start over.