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12 April 2004. I may have finished a new mathemaku today. My tentative title for it is "Bayside Mathemaku." 
It's based on one of the Paint Shop exercises I posted here at my blog a while back--almost exactly two months ago, in fact. I was looking through my recent compositions because Kathy Ernst had requested her visual poet friends to send her stuff she can use in a workshop she's been asked to teach--in Visual Poetry, of all things. It will be at Taos Institute of Art in New Mexico from 31 May through 4 June. This is is great news, by the way, because it indicates Kathy is getting a little of the recognition she deserves, and that visual poetry in general is being taken seriously by some portion of the BigWorld.
I had always liked the original of "Bayside Mathemaku":
I'd not been able to think through word-images for it I thought effective, though. I was going for Florida banal--beach and buried treasure. But I got sidetracked by the idea of music times iron equalling forest. This worked in some odd way for me, but had little, if anything, to do with the rest of the poem--which didn't start coming together until I made "blay" by accident, as I now remember it. This morning, as soon as I saw the piece again, I felt I could easily get it right. I got the words fairly quickly (although they seem less subtle than I would like), but doing the Paint Shop moves I needed to, to remove the old words and insert the new, took a while. The re-coloring took a couple of hours after that. I think I spent over four hours on the piece. That seemed a long time--which made me think of how look pre-Paint-Shop painters took on works! How'd they ever do it!
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