5 May 2004. Just a news item today: spent so much time readying two mathemaku for upcoming exhibits I only yesterday and today decided to submit to that I've run out of time to do more than that here--unless I stay up past 9, and I don't want to because I have a lot of sleep to catch up on. The words of one of the mathemaku, "Long Division into Poetry, Frame #1," weren't printing crisply, so I redid them. It didn't take long, and now they look pretty good when printed. The other poem I worked on, "Mathemaku No. 62," which I'll be calling "Long Division Visual Seaside Poem" for the two exhibits, took longer to fix--it was the lettering, again. Every time I fixed one letter I thought not quite right, and printed the poem, I found some other letter that needed repair.

The two exhibits are both local and minor. One is an exhibit of poems by children and adults put on by a local writers' center I belong to. The other is a juried illumagery show at the local visual arts center. The two poems I mentioned will be in the first show. I'm submitting copies of the same two plus my "Mathemaku for Robert Lax" to the other exhibit. I have no idea if any of them will be selected for the show, but it will be interesting to find out. Any way of getting one's work seen is, theoretically, good, since who knows who might see it, like it, and actually be in a position to do it some positive good? Or so I tell myself.

Just to finish this report of exhibits I will or might get into, I should add that last Thursday I brought two visual poems, "Mathemaku for Robert Lax" and an abstract-expressionist visual poem in black&white about summer to the local arts and humanities council offices where some people having to do with art in public places looked at works brought in. I thought they were going to critique them but really had little idea what they would do. Well, basically they just looked at all the works, and took the names of their creators. But one of them seemed interested in my mathemaku and said she would get in touch with me later about an exhbit of my stuff in a cultural center we have that's used for things like dances, meetings of various kinds of clubs like the chess club, etc. They have a lobby that's good for exhibiting paintings. In 2005 I may be given the whole lobby for twenty or so of my works, or share it with someone else sometime. The lady was unsurprisingly concerned that my poems might be too much to handle for the retirees the cultural center is mainly patronized by, hence the possibility of half a showing. Either way, I'd love a chance to see a substantial group of my works hung somewhere. I can't believe neither of the two local papers would not want to do a story on such weird art, either, and I always like a chance to say something about it, wherever.