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POETRY & ART INTEGRATIONS

My experiments in dying cloth and paper using iron oxide, copper, or alum mordant and botanicals (e.g. walnut leaves, pokeberries, elderberries, redbud leaves, beetroot) and then enhancing with watercolors have led to poetry/eco-print fusions. Here is an example of a tanka poem and copper-watercolor fusion:

 

Freeing the Poem

May this eco-print
free the tissue-thin layers
of that first attempt . . .
mere words, love's tangle flattened.
Here colors tendril, quiver.

Here's another example, a mulberry-paper scroll with wool threads among gold figures and haiku lettering:

Another technique is to paint a leaf or flower and use a hot iron to press it to paper.
Thus my "Shapeshifters" book.

The next two books showcase longer poems, "Approaching Sycamore" and
"Holy Shadow." The alum-mordant eco-prints are enhanced by cloth that
has been dyed with similar botanicals and then embroidered.

Outside Inside Poems

Go to these sites for some of my online publications:
No Contact
Wild Roof Journal
The Spectacle
Tanka Journal

Haiku on the scroll . . . and key to the ten gold figures:

Mulberry paper
threads, crisscrossing story lines
begging to be read.

 

 

T-rex looks back to the close
of its world.

Sperm swim into the unknown . . .
become the future.

Dragon inhales cold sky . . .  
stirs warmth into air.

Fern takes root in the riot
and rot of earth.

White crane lifts broad wings . . .
strong hollow bones.

Snake undulates above it all . . .
observes . . . waits.

Silkie likewise awaits the threads
of life . . . of magic.

Runner sprints into the warmth
of keyhole light.

Keyhole serves both the opening
and the close.

Omega pulls all threads together . . .
pinches endings into seeds . . .
seeds threading toward the future.