mapdress

Highland Dress, 2008, Susan Stockwell

This is for my poet friend Rebecca Loudon,

who lives across the country and is celebrating

her birthday month. Happy birthday Rebecca!

Isn't this sculpture amazing? It's life size and is made

of 19th century survey maps of the Scottish Highlands.

It was part of an exhibition at the Katonah Museum

of Art (where I work) last year on mapping as material and concept.

I'm not a dress person (in that I don't wear them much

and when I do am rather uncomfortable while wishing

I could be more at ease) but have long admired artists,

like Lesley Dill, who use the dress form in their work.

cloud city

heat wave

dragonflyscape

I counted my Submishmash rejections today. Oh well.

Poor dragonfly. I wrote a poem about you a long time

ago. Here's the link to Anecdote of Air.

poetry

poem

I have a poem in UTTER a cool new

journal. Read it and let me know...

Ganges

An amazing thing it will be to travel, to write,

to be in India...coming!

mask

After the Mother of the Ball Turret Gunner

In sleep you are hawk-slipped near some stream

Perched on its bank, moon snagged in your rusty chest

You are back on earth a rowdy boy sailing over the lawn

I don’t wake from the nightmare of you alive

Your body mine again as we rock and doze

more cindy

Then of course it's not much to write poems

as mothers of soldiers, because

that's what I am so am I really becoming

an other? The Poetry Foundation says

the persona is a dramatic character

"distinguished from the poet."

Cindy Sherman's personas at first seem

like charicatures. But move up close and you

notice the extreme and reverent attention

to detail. The women are simultaneously

generalized and specified. As you can see,

the photographs continue to do some work.

Cindy Cindy Cindy

(The guard's hand in front of my camera to block the shot)

Finally saw the Cindy Sherman exhibition today. It felt

good to be in another museum space -- other than where

I work. And it felt good to look and listen. I admire

Sherman's determination to construct personas so fully.

She is immersed in the drama of her characters. I was moved

by that, by all the women she becomes. And yet there she is,

under the makeup and costumes, her face. I've been playing

around in my own writing recently with personas. A series

seems to be developing. Mother of warriors poems.

I'm going through an anthology of war poetry, reading randomly

and then writing a poem in response. Without planning

the poems have been in the voice of or from the perspective of

the mother of the soldier speaker or subject of the poem

from the anthology. To do this is to take on the face of that other.

Not only the face but the sound. To write in a different

octave or scale, or say as a soprano rather than alto, if that makes

sense. I think I'd like to see the Sherman before it closes, soon

unfortunately. There's more for me to learn. Of course.