paper cravings

river-breath frozen to a branch, Athabasca River, Jasper, January 2011

In the midst of doing research here, & living rather simply (as in, my collage-box is precisely 6046km away from me, & I have pretty much no access to art supplies here), I am finding pretty much all I want to do is make things. Particularly things that involve the cutting & gluing of paper to accent the theme of words on a page, i.e. poetry chapbooks.

I have been knitting madly, which fills a certain need to do things with my hands, and this is good, and I have been trying to do more photographing, but I also have all these poems that want to be on paper. Paper in books that I can give to people! I haven't made a chapbook in years (I was about to manufacture one in Fall 2009, but then I left for Scotland, again without the collage-box) & there is one all ready & waiting to be made, & I think another one is starting to come into being. I also had another idea for a little book I want to make, about all the lovely people I know who make stuff with words & pictures & cloth & yarn & sounds & such.

I also want to make prints of so many photos, & put them in wooden frames. I want to make collage posters of poems... I want to go to an art store & feel all the fancy book-papers, the ones with thready textures, & the soft-rough edges, & the filmy Nepalese lokta leaves... I want to watch ink from the fountain pen my mother gave me absorb into the fibres... & then I will glue wool and buttons and cut-up photographs everywhere amongst the words! And rejoice!

Oy, such a longing... When I get home in the summer, one of my first plans is to make and eat a grilled sandwich with avocado, smoked tofu, & spinach with hummus on the side. Then I will sit on the floor somewhere & cut & glue things until I am sated.