Reflection on Bugs Have Invaded Las Meninas and Winding Ways

These 2 projects have been the start of my 2024 Poetry Postcard Fest. I had figured doing a bigger project or 2 and then cutting them into pieces would help me to generate a lot of cards very quickly, given that I am attempting 3 lists - or 93 postcard poems in 56ish days. And that it has done, I've got 30 something cards, maybe even more, ready for me to send out as soon as I finish cutting up Winding Ways.

I finished Bugs Have Invaded Las Meninas first, so I'll think about it here first. I'm left feeling like there are some seeds in that project that I will want to pluck out for use elsewhere, but the writing itself felt somewhat... unperceptive and stale. I do like the idea of the labyrinth made up of the side effects and fine print in medication advertisements, especially for the project I'm currently thinking of calling The Dump, but maybe still The Wasteland, we'll see. Dionysus, glass of red in hand, will tell them their quest will take them through it and hand them a fistful of pills that he says might be useful at some point. The writing took place before the collage though, and I have to say the invasion of map-bugs gave the undertaking a breath of life. I found the theme of bugs appropriate/funny because what I did to the print by collaging on it, and even what a print does to an original work, is digest it in the way bugs are often responsible for in nature. And of course, then I brought the metaphor into reality by actually cutting the piece up to send it out and writing the title in an third, unused color (previously I had used black and green sharpie to write the poem on the back of the print, for the title I used blue ballpoint). Writing the title on the pieces I found to be the needed final piece of this 'digestion' of my own poem and the painting. It was kind of the stamp, the signature, the pile of dust that marks the termites' nest.

Winding Ways, the title I have given the second larger work I will cut up and send out as postcards, was the name of a quilt pattern I found in a book of quilt patterns which I was sent by accident, instead of the book on trees I had originally ordered. It is that same quilt pattern which I used to make the collage on the front of this work. Composed of warped triangles, it forms winding circles that intersect like venn-diagrams made of fragments cut from maps I have collected from visits to museums and parks around the world. Some of the art on the maps I found to be particularly alluring - colored pencil drawings printed on one of them in particular, the map of Acadia National Park. The writing on the back was composed from random notes I have jotted down in the notes app in my phone over the course of the past year plus. As with the poem on the back of BHILM, I allowed the writing to curve and turn and warp and build like pyramids and fall like jagged stones. The exercise of writing that way got me away from thinking about how much I was writing, how many words or syllables or where to break lines or what have you. It was very flow-like in that way, augmented by, whenever I paused or came to the end of one thread, I would immediately pick up another from the notes I had at hand. This allowed me to keep my hand moving when, if I had not been using that, I would have spent much more time tapping my pens against my lips. I also used the black and green sharpies for this project, and alternating colors was a pleasant change to keep the flow going.