We’re finally seeing the first flowers here in Maine—forsythia, daffodils, hyacinths—even the first few little wild violets are springing up. The mosses and lichens seem softer and more vibrantly green every day. I’m soaking up all the fresh energy to help myself get organized. I’ve got my market schedule pretty much worked out for the rest of the year, have some gallery events set up, and have gathered a few intriguing deadlines for open calls I’d like to participate in.
I’m also making new work, having spent most of the month of March (and as much as I could spare of April) on a large-format multiblock linocut I hope to be able to share in its final form soon. (You can follow along with the process, as always, over on my Instagram account, @hiwaterpress.) A couple of other new things are taking shape in my sketchbook, and there’s the usual jumble of collage materials out on the table for those rare open moments between freelance assignments when I can fit in a more spontaneous session.
More about all of this later in the month, but since Mother’s Day is coming up, I’ve got an order of small gold and silver metal frames on the way, to offer alongside these hand-printed keepsake cards. I’ll let you know when those arrive—should be any day now. These and others are available through the Hi Water Press shop over at Bloof Books, and locally at Makers’ Market Shop & Studio.
I’m pretty sure this is the twentieth year in a row I have done NaPoWriMo alongside Maureen and others. I just went back to my old blogspot to check, and yep, April 2005. Amazing. I have lost count of how many poems I have written in that many Aprils, but I can say that all of my books have at least a few that made the final cut, with the exception of Midwinter Constellation, since that was cowritten in December 2018.
INTRODUCTION
the world is impatient.
its influence, and
its law
blunders
To the circle of
sky
these shining constellations
flame
these lines
peruse with care
Here’s a brochure I designed for the Union of Maine Visual Artists, and I’ve also been on the committee for a new website that is being designed. It’s all gonna look quite spiffy, I think, and be a much better resource for both members and the public. The new gallery and directory features are gonna be fancy and we can find each other. (The current website is here: theumva.org.) More about that later, perhaps. I’m not designing it, but the person who is has done several for other arts organizations and I’m excited to see what she comes up with.
The Union of Maine Visual Artists, founded in 1975, is a nonprofit organization that promotes and advocates for the visual arts, artists, and all arts supporters.
If you’re a visual artist in Maine, are you a member of the UMVA? If not, are you in any other organization or group? Do you wish you were? What sorts of benefits and opportunities would appeal?
I’m excited and honored to be part of this stellar collaborative book, forthcoming next month (January 2022) from Black Lawrence Press. The spark was Becca Klaver’s, and the experience remains among my favorite being-a-poet-among-poets happenings to date, writing through a full day together.
Here’s the preorder link, and more info about the book below. In addition to being one of the coauthors, I’m also the book’s cover artist and book designer. It’s a really special project to me, obviously!
The cover design for MIDWINTER CONSTELLATION by Becca Klaver et al.
Book Description from BLP: On December 22, 2018, the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer’s writing of Midwinter Day, thirty-two women poets typed into Google Docs titled Dreams, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, Evening, and Night. Following the six-part structure of Mayer’s book, they composed alongside each other all day, dozens of cursors blinking in a virtual happening. Midwinter Constellation is the result. Part patchwork quilt, part collective consciousness, the book hopes “to prove the day like the dream has everything in it,” as Mayer wrote in 1978, and to extend her vision into a global 21st-century everyday.
A radical experiment in collective writing, the book embroiders, echoes, and blurs the voices of poets across the US and beyond. They wake up in bed together and spend the day writing while nursing babies, grading papers, driving home for the holidays, making meals, and gathering in bookstores and living rooms to read Midwinter Day aloud. While threads of identity can be traced through the repeated names of children, highways, books, and pets, Midwinter Constellation declines to identify who’s speaking when, exceeding the territory of authorship and rejecting the illusion that we are separate.
The Authors:
Midwinter Constellation was written by Stephanie Anderson, Hanna Andrews, Julia Bloch, Susan Briante, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Shanna Compton, Mel Coyle, Marisa Crawford, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, Arielle Greenberg, Jenny Gropp, Stefania Heim, MC Hyland, erica kaufman, Becca Klaver, Caolan Madden, Pattie McCarthy, Monica McClure, Jenn Marie Nunes, Danielle Pafunda, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar, Khadijah Queen, Linda Russo, Katie Jean Shinkle, Evie Shockley, Sara Jane Stoner, Dawn Sueoka, Bronwen Tate, Catherine Wagner, Elisabeth Workman, and Mia You.
Praise for Midwinter Constellation:
Challenging capitalism’s relationship to the world as one of objects for use or ownership, the collective of writers of Midwinter Constellation write in creative participation against forms of certainty, mastery, and possession. Boundaries collapse as new psychogeographies form in modes of response and reflection “for history to be like food / On the table of the window”. A welcomed space of unruly measure. A constellation of meetings, wild and wonderful. —Hoa Nguyen
“Bernadette Mayer is the mother of us all.” Overheard in Brooklyn. Midwinter Constellation, a luminous collaborative poem written on the 40th anniversary of Bernadette Mayer’s epic poem Midwinter Day, is a conversation between 32 women poets and the poet herself. This gathering of poet-daughters continues Mayer’s experiments with form and content to make a portrait of the possibilities of living within the shortest day of the year. Midwinter Constellation raises the bar of what can be written, captures the fullness, the sensuousness, even the tastiness of living with lovers and children. —Brenda Coultas
“In a collection that is two parts feral eco-poetry, and one part stingingly personal reflection, New Jersey writer Shanna Compton uses re-engineered punctuation as the soundtrack to her crucial work. Here, the woods and the animals do not merely appear as backdrops and extras, they are creatures in coexistence with the speaker, sometimes mingling until the narrative voice and the wilderness are indistinguishable from one another.”
“Readers of Camille Dungy, or Mary Oliver fans looking for something with teeth, will find this collection vital to their bookshelves.”
Screenshot of review‘s opening paragraph and book cover image at robmclennan.blogspot.com
“The latest title from Lambertville, New Jersey poet, artist and book designer Shanna Compton is (Creature Sounds Fade) (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a collection of poems predominantly built of single-page lyric narrative sketch-works, as multiple of her poems give the simultaneous impression of quick thought and deep consideration. Her poems move across the page at quite a speed, from a human interior to an exterior and engagement with landscape and eco-concerns, enough that the two seeming-poles become nearly indistinguishable. ‘The picked edges of the birches’ / bitter bark,’ she writes, to open the poem ‘Paper Trees,’ ‘Red-gold admixture / of mind a fleeting logical thread / she keeps tangling around / her spindle body [.]’ Compton plays with familiar landscapes and phrases fragmented and re-formed, twisting expectations and direction, constantly darting between lines, between trees, in an out of view in simultaneous outreach and retreat. Compton writes through a voice akin to something wild, something feral, one hesitant to step to far towards an encroaching array of human activity. “My love I am a tangled I am choked & salted,” she writes, to open “Shorn Fur,” “My love I am feeling the itch of the buds soon to burst from my skin [.]”
A friend holding her copy of (CREATURE SOUNDS FADE)
The official publication date is now November 15, but copies are back from the printer and Black Lawrence has started shipping out the preorders!
I’m thinking of some alternate ways to virtually celebrate, since I can’t do the reading trips I’d originally planned. (Turns out I’m not really all that comfortable on Zoom, reading to an empty room! Not to mention the lack of closed captions, which are kinda essential, considering. It’s such an odd time to try to launch the thing, but here we are, and it’s a bright spot in this dark, weird, disconnected year.)
If you’d like a copy, see Black Lawrence Press or SPD. Here are the links:
I’m working on a series of 50 collages using found imagery and closed-caption sound effects, which will be going to the first 50 people to preorder (CREATURE SOUNDS FADE) from Black Lawrence. A visual take on the method behind many of the poems in the book, the sound effects are more disjunctive in the collages, in the same way they often lag in realtime or live video, referring to imagery that has already flicked off screen. Each is 5 x 7 inches. The full series with more details (and alt text descriptions) can be viewed at Instagram.
