My poetry is highly layered, like a painting that uses multiple thin layers of translucent color to build up depth and accuracy of image. Our “seeing” of the world, in the same way, is a complex interpretive event, that lays narrative and value into sensory inputs. Our senses are not clear windows on “reality”. They are lenses with a large, mostly unconscious set of filters, in place at the outset by a synapsed nervous system, and then built up thru layers of mind (a crude list): emotions, needs, intellect, experience, conscience, soul/spirit (a vague term because our tools are weakest here).
I try to diffract and expose some of this thru my images, both textual and visual. In the visual image below, the abstract “background” is the chaos, the tohu and vohu, the perspective-less consciousness out of which we create narrative. In this image we discern three women, and with the poem as background, we can construct a tenuous narrative out of the atomized and incoherent ground in which they are embedded.
The image below, entitled Arrownd Her Klay Silluwet, accompanies the following lines that can be found in the early part of the poem, when Elmallah (an angel descending from the upper genomes) first encounters Ertha:
I ternd awway
But agen loukt bak.
Wen Lots wife loukt bak
Tu the Soddem that she fled,
Her Sol kristeld in salt.
Wen Polladekteez ternd frum revvelree
Tu reseev hiz gift,
Proteyus held the hed ov Meddusa
And froze him intu stone.
Wen Eddippus ternd and staggerd
Frum the bed ware he
And hiz muther had lain,
He gowjd hiz eyz with redhot pinz.
Wen I loukt bak
Her tangeld hare wuz kut and koemd;
Her hed wuz bownd in kloth.
Her hips, her legz, her kumlee brests
Wer titelee rapt in dust-brown muzlin.
Akros her fase emotenz rippeld
Like wind akros the surfas ov a bay.
But arrownd her klay silluwet:
A korrona, like the Sol in eeklips.
(In most browsers, if you click on the image you can view it in larger format.)
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