Egyptian Travelogue: Week 4

I am finishing my journey with Emily much earlier than I had contemplated. But it has been so good, so full of adventure that I will miss the daily connection and its intensity.

The last hour underlined a special kind of creativity for the last week. I have been collecting bits and pieces of information, parts of poems, random thoughts on Emily by others or myself.

I had no idea how I could use these when at the conclusion of our writing together (me acting more as a scribe) this poem began to emerge, coordinating all of these leftovers that before had no home.



was i not self-published?
you say my punctuation is ambiguous
and my capitalization capricious
but i know what i am doing
these poems shift and change,
lean right or left according to whom they are addressed
they live in letters, breathe as objects,
manifest fully with multiple perspectives
you can read them, but don’t edit them
their line breaks are for your eye, not your sense of propriety

an aged bee asks
must not people have puddings?
but i make bread.
them when I die

Egyptian Travelogue: Week 3

I am reading Emily Dickinson and feel her presence not only across my glass table but everywhere I venture, though crowds still seem to eclipse her. We are in a different landscape from Amherst.

In the process of fathoming her poetry; I feel enormously the need to push beyond paper. Papyrus as I have discovered is a perfect medium to express dimensionality/new circumferences. When I portray a house, rendered more or less in its actual existence on paper, I am pleased with its external dimensions.

When I portray the same image on papyrus, I seem invited to "open up" the image through wiping, rubbing and blotting. Using gum Arabic rather than water assures a torrent of image obliterating liquid that will not destroy the fibers of the papyrus, but will create the capacity to get inside the house without leaving its outside existence.

After blotting, I see images fading into the fibers thus providing me an opportunity to obliterate the image and celebrate its after images as something closer to the content of what I want. The house becomes a home. " Nature is a Haunted House—but Art is a House that tries to be Haunted." In other words, paper provides a surface reliability; papyrus celebrates dimension or in Emily’s case, larger circumferences.