Really all im trying to do is {simply} combine post & poetry into mystery & kindness. That’s enough.
Here are some “Items, Forgotten” series (there are several volumes of this series constructed all over the world, quite literally) and nicks cut and paste poetry on various substrates usually with some sort of postal origin.
Dropped a letter in the mail on the way home from our unexpected seaside journey.
First one going out with my new ink stamp + Taisho-era artist Yumeji Takahisa washi tape.
Next: this story worked out really interesting… Dropped a postcard to India last year September, 2022 and finally found its recipient >> then the recipient tracked down the sender (me obv) via a social media channel (guess he didn’t realize that my name was also in the postcard fine print”credit” for the painting of an Indian train station) anyhow, embeds tell the story
Ephemera, snapshots, stamps of all kinds, snippets of poetry, forgotten claim checks, former “safe house” addresses, secret compartments and whatnot all conspire to create a passport – with decoder book not included (consider Lamb’s edition of Shakespeare, without the poetry)
Everything is significant, coincidence is futile
Though i’m not an Egyptologist officially, I do know that the old-timey Egyptians believed you died a second time when people stopped talking about / remembering you.
As such, i’m keeping the folks (from CCCP, Albania, Yugoslavia, Romania and so on) in these passports alive in a sort of way by making them into postcards and sending them on special missions out into the world
With relevant snippet of handcrafted poetry on reverse (Flood’d).
Are you in the diplomatic club of mysterious goodness? $5/mo gets you handcrafted art & story.
Often, a poem comes out fully-formed, fiddling and remixing only dulls the knife, sometimes however, variations are eager to come out to shine light in another corner: Lonely, Joyful, Melancholy, Mysterious.
In this case, (my) familiar themes of un-confidential love letters on postcards mailed from foreign places and glanced by – or maybe sadly not glanced – by personnel along the way who (may) add their pathos to the journey.
One version of this (do you care to guess which?) will go on the reverse of the post box at Farmer Mac’s goat farm – Perhaps another painting will follow… and then a postcard a photograph of the painting mailed to the post box and so on. Always be remixing.
No pardons for redundancies, variations on a theme require riffs on the same blues.
Do you care to posit which your prefer?
Somewhere along the way, someone came to visit me when I lived in Olympia in a dark and dingy duplex on Quince St (near the OlyWa.net, later Zhonka) office. Maybe it was brother Bob? Maybe it was buddy Mike? Or Brad? Anyway, someone who had done something pleasant to Christmas previous. And somehow they were coming to visit and I got this map to them / I’m not sure how any of this worked out, especially with the cryptic map.
I’m not a cartographer it seems, regardless this map survived the decades and here it is now. Mysterious and no longer relevant (like Terry Z’s noted internet café).
Items: Forgotten, backgrounder etc
Along the way, I produced a series of visual freeverse poetry called “Items: Forgotten in Drawers“ – part pirate treasure map, part meanderings stashed in a non-secret hiding place, part punk rock handbills.
+ Back Story
The poems started in an Ayurvedic clinic the Himalayas, a ship in Arabia, and ruins around Mediterranean, …then attached to vintage hotel letterhead (much acquired from a tiny Greek Monastery store in a heavily Hasidic neighbourhood Montréal neighbourhood), assembled in off-strip Las Vegas, shared in Utah canyons… and now distributed to points unknown. Further batches were assembled on in a camper truck in Olympic Peninsula, Wa, and later Sanur and Nusa Ceningan, Indonesia with scraps printed here and there.
+ Process
Sometimes, i don’t have a printers, other times no Internet, often no typewriter, so i make do with what i have: scissors, glue, paper… items i can pick up a dusty island shops and forgotten stationery stores.
When i write, (usually) starts as scribbles in notebooks and then gets hastily transcribed into a digital form and printed when opportunity strikes for editing – in this case, the editing leaves errors in typing and structure and instead cuts and pastes (like Burroughs to Bowie would do) and then reassembled in various ways.
+ Form
Each substrate (hotel letterhead, aerogramme, envelope) shown is uniquely augmented with stamps – both postal and ink – and other ephemera, carefully selected and then applied as though it wasn’t.
Sometimes, lettraset letters, fuzzy Lomo photos and bits of typewriter come along.
+ Themes
Overall, the pieces explore themes of wandering lost, losing self and others, scraping beneath the crust of culture and myth, remixing identity, connecting the history to the present in all it’s vagaries, and considering what becomes of our story when we vanish… naturally made with affection.
+ Next
What follows (and brings me here) is another series is queuing up – Vol. 6 “Circumnavigation” spanning cultures, geography, form and accruements.
The first dispatch in the series is a remixing of myself (originally written on 3 postcards and mailed to 3 different people) with insomniac observations about Yangtze River and Shanghai’s absurd skyline as seen from a ship.
Analog loops, guitars, feedback and poetry about impossible alleys, 8 seat bars, villages with book shops, woolen scarves, Fado, Enka, Kathmandu mud, and umbrellas thwarting tactility.
Video features snaps of Thorvald and Thurston in a Provo basement, 2018 making the song as well as artifacts in the environs.
Analog loops, guitars, feedback and poetry about impossible alleys, 8 seat bars, villages with book shops, woolen scarves, Fado, Kathmandu mud, and umbrellas thwarting tactility.
Made by “Thorvald and Thurston” in a Provo basement, 2018
Read along: Rainy Mystery Alley poem
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