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29 July 2005: The actual date is 5 September 2005. My vacation worked, I think. I think I felt somewhat better after it than before, and this past week I've felt very okay for the first time in quite a while. Shortly after my vacation ended--on 13 and 14 August, to be precise--I made a sequence of ten frames intended to serve as an introduction to my The Long Division of Poetry sequence. I called it Prelude to the Long Division of Poetry. Between 14 August and yesterday, I've revised and rearranged it a bit, but consider it now done. The (poorly reproduced) poem below is its first frame:
This, "Summer Things," is an old visual poem of mine. It must have been at least fifteen, possibly twenty, years ago that I made it. It was, I believe, my very first fully visual visual poem--i.e., the first with substantial non-textual elements. I thought it was terrific, and that I would explode into a slew of visual poems of the same kind--i.e., with torn-scrap collaging, a strong feel of abstract-expressionism, scattered averbal textual matter, but also effect passages of lyric poetry (like the "summerthings" poem in this piece). I did make one additional poem in the manner of this one, but didn't much like it, and seem not to have made anything resembling the two poems again until, possibly, I got into Paint Shop and started abstract-expressifying all over the place. My high opinion of the piece remained with me, though. As a result, I based the sub-dividend products in my The Long Division of Poetry on it.
Later, a friend of mine who knows a gallery-owner who might be interested in carrying my work, suggested I send him a portfolio. I thought I'd include pieces from my long division of poetry series. I hesitated, though, fearful they--and the other mathemaku I'd include--would not be understood. It was at that point that I thought some kind of series of works that would lead up to my first long division of "poetry," might help. "Summer Things" seemed an obvious starting frame for it (and would allow me to get it into a series, which is something I like to do with all my solitary works). The rest of the frames in the prelude are new. They do little more than visually portray the coming together of my first division into "poetry." I think most of them pretty fair illumages, though. They were certainly fun to make.
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