Wednesday, November 05, 2008

SPORED: Brenda Schmidt



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This is the first in a series of spore prints I did last month when the mushrooms were plentiful. After I ran out of paper at Sage Hill (where I was also doing spore prints), I started ripping pages out of my Jane Smiley abolitionist country western novel.

When I got home, I wanted to make spore prints on some of my own poems, to overlay text about mushrooms with the spore prints of mushrooms but when I came home with a lap full of mushrooms one fall day, I didn't have time to rifle through the ms. and pick out a poem or two.

(Nevermind that I'm not sure the poem I want to spore print has been written yet.)

Spores wait for no one, and since I had the books of four of my favourite poet/friends - Brenda Schmidt, Tracy Hamon, Gillian Wigmore, and Kerry Ryan - at hand, I started desecrating their books instead.

For the record, I had two copies of each poet's book. But I think I would have done it anyways. It's a lazy and inherently destructive collaboration, true, but it makes me glad.

It also feels like a way of feeling forward, creating a dialogue between the scanned collages and the in situ photos of the mushrooms and the spore prints.

I like that it's not quite a straight spore print and not quite a collage...

I'll post one a week for the next several weeks, starting with Brenda Schmidt and her poem Ultrasound, from More Than Three Feet of Ice (Thistledown, 2005).

4 comments:

Brenda Schmidt said...

Lovely! What an honour! I thought you were kidding when you said you were ripping pages out of my book.
I should have known.

Anonymous said...

Terrific!

SMSteele said...

frigging gorgeous Ariel...

all of you guys, B, T, and you, your words, your work, push me to work harder, keep my head down, my eyes clear, my ears open... I'm grateful to know you all...

Ariel Gordon said...

Thanks, all...

Sms, it is untoward to say the exactly right thing, to steal the exactly right thing from my addled brain.

(Put clumsily: right back atcha!)