Poems

I've started to write poetry lately. One because of my bookmaking/letterpress class and two because it seems to aid in making my art work. I've been thinking a lot lately about how artists create their art. What is their inspiraton and how do they execute it. It is always different for everybody, but it occurs to me that most people these days have a system of rules that they work off of. I seem to wing it most of the time. Ever since starting graduate school it seems as though I'm supposed to have already worked out a system that works for me, and a system that makes logical theoretical sense. Well, I did that in Greece and produced some prints that on the one hand were fun yet on another hand are totally boring. We spent half an hour last week looking at a students project where she creates scribbles. It's all systemetically in order, but it is so boring. Can you believe that we spent such a long time talking about scribbles? It drives me nuts. Then after her, we went and talked to a fellow printmaker who produced some really interesting narrative series, and I think nobody actually said anything about her work. It's so strange to me.
Anyways, back to my poetry. In the past I have relied on moments of anger, frustration, and any other visceral emotion to produce my art. This really doesn't fly in art school. But working through poetry....my visceral emotions go into writing and then get translated into visual work. For some reason this is okay in art school. So here are my poems and it does help to do these first because I can sort through my ideas better this way.

I was four and Jesus was staring at me.

The death-red glowed blanketing the mucid-room

His face was soft yet he was demented

Between his fingers and his thumb he gripped his heart

A heart still swelling and enslaved to thorns

The hot blood dripped and I started to flinch

Fear encompassed me

He towered over me

"Hell to your soul" he said

He smiled and stared at me as if to say "you are next".

(To ease the pain of moving to a new country my parents bought us a dog.)

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I was seven and the Germans were bombing us

Overhead I heard the zooming planes and I panicked

The T.V. said to hide under your bed or better yet go to your shelter

My parents should send us away to the country like the other kids

Why did we come to a country that was at war?

As scared as I was, I was alone

At night my parents turned into aliens

It was better not to disturb them

Eventually the Germans stopped bombing, but the Irish began bombing

My dad would say "did you know that a deck of cards can blow up a building?"

I thought it was a horrific magic trick only Irish people could do

So, I was careful when I played with cards

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(To ease the pain of moving to a new country my parents bought us a dog.)

I was thirteen and I was in an Irish nightmare

The Americans were enamored with the Irish

The town we moved to in Wisconsin had five hundred people,

Two Catholic churches, and a man who was once abducted by aliens

A woman asked us over for an "Irish" lunch one day

We walked into her musty house

Green was everywhere

There was a shamrock table cloth

Little glasses with shamrocks on them

Lots of Irish knick knacks that I had never seen before

We sat at the table and she brought out the food in shamrock dishes

In front of us she placed cabbage and corned beef

I had never had corned beef before and my mom never cooked cabbage

This poor old woman only wanted to make us feel at home

It was the first of many Irish meals to come.