Collage No. 2

Posted on January 27, 2008
Filed Under Seeing, Writing |

This is a collage I’ve made over the last few days consisting of a two-page spread in the book I sewed together last week (with Carole’s help). The first page was not built up very much, but in these I did more layering. I’m still trying to work quickly without much premeditation using whatever material is easily at hand. In a strange way, I think this project may teach me something about the sequencing of the poems in a long manuscript of a long sequence I’ve been working on for a long time. How to you hook things together formally & thematically without making the connections either too obvious or too obscure?

Comments

4 Responses to “Collage No. 2”

albert geiser on January 27th, 2008 3:35 pm

Hello,

Just started my own poetry blog and searching for other poetry blogs came across yours on about.com. Potsdam’s my hometown, grew up there in the 70s. Boulder Co is where I live now. I know a lot of people in Potsdam. My dad, Eugene Geiser, was a professor at Clarkson in Accounting for many years and well known in town. I can’t recall your name, but it sounds like your time overlaps with my parents’ life in Potsdam. I moved to Boulder because as a place it’s got a lot of similarities, for poetic influence, because I can write about what I know, in Boulder, from my identity in Potsdam. Boulder’s a sandstone town, for starters, although mostly not a Potsdam sandstone. I do see some small amounts of Potsdam sandstone in buildings here. It must have been expensive for them when the old buildings here were going up.

I’m excited finding a Potsdam poet, and soon after starting to look. Do you know the Purcells? I did open mike readings in ‘98 at Strawberry Fields, which was a year I spent most of in Potsdam after my father died that year (quite a while ago now), and having to decide how my mother would be cared for…)

Sincerely,

Albert Geiser
jd on January 27th, 2008 7:22 pm

Albert, I do know the Purcells, though not well. Don had retired before I came to town twenty years ago. I’m from California by way Seattle. I don’t know your folks, but it’s certainly nice to make the geographic connection. The fact that there is even a little Potsdam sandstone in Boulder strikes me as pretty amazing — one of those facts that ties the world together.
edward mycue on January 31st, 2008 12:53 pm

i wish i were a teenager and could be in your class.
i would love the painting as well. i recall during a year as an intern at wgbh-tv (then located on the mit campus)in boston (while doing graduate study at B.U. as a ‘lowell fellow’ 1960-61)in those long intervals between shows would use the flats(4feet by 8feet) and write my poems and paint some abstract somethings. it was a pleasure. of course i’d just paint over with the watercolor-flats paints (mixed from big cans & boxes of colored powder–so i mixed my colors as well). [the flats, you may now know, were clamped together to make the rooms or backgrounds of sets for the various pgms, one of which was the forerunner of sesame street.]
edward mycue
albert geiser on February 1st, 2008 10:33 am

jd-

So you started at Clarkson about ‘87? Just about when my father retired. He mentioned your magazine to me, so he had heard of you. My Dad, as with my family in general, always had an eye on anything literary going on. One of his ambitions, along with Dalma Brunaer’s (sp?), was to improve the English of Clarkson students. I used to visit the Purcells for dinners…

The sandstone used for trim in a few buildings that I’m talking about is dark red enough to be Potsdam. I know Potsdam was a prized sandstone in the 19th Cent. But there is also a lighter red sandstone native to this area called The Fountain Formation. It could just be some of that in the buildings. It’s just that the way the dark red is used in churches, and a few other spots formally, suggests to me it’s Potsdam that people were willing to pay a lot for. You can find Potsdam the say way in NYC.