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.