Penny Post #6: Michaels
My favorite store on Earth
Before this week, I could count the number of times I’d been to Michaels on one hand.
There is just something about the endless aisles of artistic possibility that pull me in. I find things I’d imagined and things I had not imagined, yet I can’t believe I had not imagined said thing in the first place. It has a way of provoking insanity along with its provocation of creativity.
I walked through the aisles with a list of several imagined things:
a wooden block
paintbrushes/paint
container to hold it all
Somehow, I walked away from the Michaels register with a bag full of several unimaginable things:
a wooden block
10 paint brushes
4 bottles of acrylic paint
a bag of purple feathers
a collection of bird stickers
an obnoxiously large posterboard
a pack of 20 mini envelopes
a jumbo sharpie
and a very long receipt
I don’t know what happened between lists one and two, but I do know that Michael is (clearly) very persuasive. Ever seen the clip of the Lotus Casino from the Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief film adaptation? I’ve linked it below for your convenience. In the halls of Michaels, I felt like I had ingested the lotus cookie and lost all sense of time. I was consumed by sparks of creativity, calls which I had trouble ignoring.
All of these materials - imagined or unimagined - were used to create a multimedia project for one of my classes. It was a project of which I didn’t know where it would go until I strolled through the aisles of Michaels. I knew I wanted to write poetry and wanted some sort of visual representation for the poetry I would be writing, but I didn’t know how these two wants would interact.
I began the project by writing. I compiled a list of short poems I had written that resonated with the themes we had explored in class. Next came the challenge: revising these poems to fit as characters in the Ogham alphabet.
Ogham is an ancient alphabet that was used to write early Irish languages. We used old Ogham inscriptions to understand Deidre Sullivan’s preludes to her remastering of The Children of Lir myth in Savage Her Reply.
I handwrote the poems to mirror the architecture of an Ogham character, as you’ll see below. It was the most merciless revision process. To fit a poem that I had written outside of the constraints of the Ogham alphabet often meant the original poem lessened in size & scope. I’ve never thought as much about the architecture of words as I have over the hours that I spent constructing. It was a more furrowed brow, less cerebral action. As you can see in the following photographic evidence, it took several iterations of the same poem in a separate notebook before I even picked up the sharpie. During my first attempt, I didn’t even consider the white space I would need on the left-hand side of the poem.
During my second attempt, the structure of the Ogham character got lost with the volume of words.
During my third attempt, I removed any and all words that would distract from the structure of the Ogham character, which led to a more concise and direct poem.
Here it is, in sharpie:
The Ogham character is written on the envelope, which translates to “leaf”.
Several attempts to get the words to fit in the shape I needed them to. I normally exercise a tremendous amount of control over my writing, as if a delicate tapestry strung together by a relentless hand. What would happen when the structure of the words, how they inherited each other and joined together, was not up to the writer? Could I surrender that control? Most importantly, what would the writing turn into when that happened?
Here are my poems below:
nature’s truth
the truths we seek in nature
are the truths we seek in ourselves
a swollen heart
anchored to the truth
i can feel it beating like a clock ticking loudly.
heartbeat
just after the beat, can i hear it
gone.
in giving me my name
did you give me
your ghosts?
haunt me
born
with ghosts:
yours & mine.
your pain is yours
no one can take it from you
yet sadly, no one can take it for you
my pain is mine.
raindrop on my bottom lip
an invitation
lovely
beckoning my closer
getting to taste what comes from the sky without flying
it carries
a smell
delightful
warm
suddenly i want nothing more than to be water
my echoes are audible
can you hear them whisper
can you hear them roar
often i’m entranced by
the journey of a single leaf
released from her tree
seldom gets far
yards at worst
miles at best
far, not far enough
desperate to meet
desperate to leave
All of this flourished into a well-decorated board, as you can see below. I made use of all the unimaginables from Michaels and combined them into something tangible, something cohesive, something I’m proud of.
Creativity has a way of procuring possibility out of unimaginable circumstances. Here’s your sign to go to Michaels, to willingly ingest the lotus cookie, to lose all track of time, and see what comes of it.
Questions I leave with you with:
How do you use your imagination?
What is considered unimaginable for you?
When was the last time you went to Michaels? ;)