MacArthur Park

I never understood the words to MacArthur Park, they seemed so silly as to be unbelievable, surely I was mishearing:

Someone left the cake out in the rain
I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it
And I'll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

Why would someone leave a cake in the rain? What happened to the recipe? Why such wrenching emotion about a wet cake? But together with high school friends I sang along anyway as I danced to the Donna Summer disco version and it has a little hook in my heart whenever I hear the soaring violins or the part where it suddenly speeds up from a slow soppy ballad to a dance beat.

Yesterday I was delighted on my way to work, and even more delighted on my way home, to see someone has staged MacArthur Park in Mander Park, Whangarei. Mander Park is one of the two parks I walk through between home and work. It is a big open square of grass bounded by two very busy roads and two very quiet ones, with a playground, some big old deciduous trees, one diagonal path through it and lots of daffodils right now.

And yesterday someone left a cake in the rain there. I always imagined Donna's cake as being a fragile yellow sponge (there's a yellow dress in the song too) melting in a drizzle, but the Mander Park cake was a big old fruitcake, the kind with about an inch of marzipan icing set like rock. The rain was pounding down on it for much of the day and it still looked as solid and impervious at 5pm as it had at 8am. I tell you, you could roof a house with that icing and stay dry inside. The fruitcake itself was holding up pretty well despite valiant efforts from flocks of sparrows and pigeons.

I imagine it as an wedding leftover that has been hanging around someone's cupboard for months or maybe years, solidifying to a stone-like consistency until they couldn't stand it anymore and took an axe to it, hacking it into chunks and then carrying the heavy, heavy sack of dismantled cake to the park before dawn and heaving each big piece onto the grass hoping the rain and the birds would just make it all go away. But that cake, man, that cake, it is shining on the grass like blocks of white marble. That cake isn't going anywhere fast.

Count 'em and weep

I am making a piece called Charnal Grounds, a sort of mixed media thing which is almost finished except for the printed text. For the text, I have collected four short poems/fragments of poems written at different times when I felt like I was facing the worst life could throw at me. I'm pleased to report that even at these times of feeling like death would be a blessed relief I could write about it with a sense of humour.

Anyway, on Sunday, I was composing the type with Jim Morrison, an amazingly generous, talented and fun teacher of printing. We got three of the little poems in the chase in 10pt Roman italic (I don't want such bitter, dark words to be too easy to read!) and then realised there were only two 'e's left in the e-compartment. I searched the rest of the case and found two more, but four 'e's were not going to be enough to make up the fourth poem of the set.

It was nearing the end of a long afternoon so Jim and I, (along with Peter Strong, another helpful printer who has offered to help me out) locked and proofed what we had. We talked about printing the page in two separate runs in order to recycle the 'e's we do have but in the end I decided I would rather write a new poem, with only four 'e's and print the whole page at once.

Revisiting the feelings of Charnal Grounds when my life is in pretty good shape means there is some dissonance between my emotions and my experiences. It's a useful lesson in the immateriality of feelings. And out of feeling a bit yucky for no real reason other than paying attention to old hurts I was able to summon a new Charnal Ground poem using only four 'e's.

Cast out
on the hot high plains of humiliation
my skin shrinks and pricks
hairs twist viciously in my follicles
my eyes parch and throb
as tears fill my mouth:
if I try and talk, I'll cry.

Under a smiling new moon

Earlier today I caught up with a friend who I hadn't talked to since he and his teenage daughter helped chalk Love Letters at Your Feet during the Mid Winter Arts Festival. He told me that his daughter, when asked what she enjoyed most about chalking poems in Cafler Park, replied: "Seeing Meliors get so excited about it."*

And that reminded me how much I did enjoy it, the memory having been dimmed slightly by the intervening rainy weeks and my new focus on preparing for the Domestic Pilgrimage exhibition in November. Emboldened by no rain all day(!) this evening I spontaneously decided I'd go out with my chalk and write up some fragments of the poems I've been working on for Domestic Pilgrimage. It was pretty dark and I seem to have lost my intuitive judgment of word spacing at speed, but I had fun. If it doesn't rain before dawn there should be a somewhat legible surprise for farmer's market shoppers and library users on Saturday morning.

I wrote a couple of fragments from Do the Dishes which I am making into an artist's book at the moment and a couple of very fresh poemlets:

How gentle we must be
How resilient we are

and

Come back to yourself
you are beautiful
when you are here

*Which made me think about how rare it must be for young people to see adults show uninhibited passion for their work.

Chandler and Price for sale

I received a call a couple of weeks ago from a lady at T & D Print here in Whangarei. They are upgrading to digital printing and are looking for someone to buy their old platen jobber press. It's a Chandler and Price (a much better known brand than TKPT's Arab) with the number 837 on it. It looks very much like this C&P press on Briar Press and the one on this site.

I'm not in the market to acquire a printing press (they just aren't portable enough for my transient lifestyle), and if I was I would want something with a big platen so I could print posters and wallpaper, big stuff that the Arab can't handle. In fact, the C&P is very like the Arab, they could be brothers, at least to my inexperienced eye.

But I couldn't resist the opportunity to visit a venerable old press so I went round for a bit of tire kicking. In a tiny print shop chock full of machinery, the C&P is tucked into a little alcove with just enough room for a skinny operator to get in behind the feeder board. They have disconnected the rollers and and the treadle as it has been used solely for motorised die cutting and creasing. But all the bits are still there and it would be pretty simple to convert it back to a foot operated printing press.

It's a lovely press it deserves to go to a good home where it will be used. If you are interested, call T & D Print on (09) 438 1194

Big Storm Series

This week I am sending books away to two different book arts exhibitions: one in Noosa, Queensland and the other starting in Auckland and touring to Dunedin. Amongst the books for exhibition are these three (above) of the Big Storm series. Big Storm, Broken Window and the one I haven't posted on here before: The Mandala of Non-Attachment.


This is the Mandala of Non-Attachment (above). I cut out water drop shapes from the Love Falls prints and collaged them into a mandala on a Turkish Map Fold. The image first came to me as a kind of exploding chrysanthemum and then developed into a much more watery theme in keeping with my rain-drenched challenges of the past couple of months. Part of me wonders if working with this image hasn't invited rain more intimately into my life than I might otherwise have encountered.

Else, a friend at Te Kowhai Print Trust, has also been working with mandalas over this period, and as she said to me one day, the spiritual power of the mandala is experienced more in the making than in the viewing. But nonetheless, it's a pleasing book, in an edition of three, one available for sale at the moment, POA.

Beautiful photographs thanks to Marguerite Kent.

Magnolia of the Year Nominations Open

Yes dear readers, magnolia season is upon us, at least in the northern North Island of New Zealand. And that means it's time for the second annual Bibliophilia Magnolia of the Year Awards. The criteria for the winning tree remains arbitrary and opaque, though hints about the judge's personal taste (mine) may be discovered in past magnolia-themed posts here and here and here.

This is the first year that I am organised enough to accept nominations for Magnolia of the Year from Bibliophilia readers. You may email me SMALL photographs* of your favourite magnolia tree. The tree must be in a public place or visible from a public place. The photo must be taken this year. Nominations will stay open until my sources in Dunedin tell me that South Island magnolias have run their course, which gives you at least month or two of magnolia appreciation!

Please include location information so that the tree's remarkableness can be confirmed by independent sources.The winning tree will featured on this blog, and the person who nominates it will receive a handmade limited edition artist's book, so make sure you include your contact details so I can send you the prize if your tree wins.

* Photographs of a very small size please-I am on dialup and large photos will be automatically disqualified for being annoying to download. And to inspire you, here is a terrible photo of a kitsch painting of a nice sprig of magnolia blossoms, found over the toilet in friend's house.

Love Letters Photographed

Here are some of my favourite photographs that Paula Campion took of Love Letters at Your Feet. I might post some more later as there are so many beautiful pictures to choose from.

* * *

Wish me luck. I'm driving into Auckland for the weekend, and driving in Auckland is generally so traumatic (at least for me) that I have largely avoided doing so for nearly two years. If there are never any more posts on this blog you can assume that I am still hyperventilating in circles around Te Atatu or somewhere like that.

Gratuitous Cute Animal Photo

Here is the famous fur seal pup who graced Cafler Park during the Mid Winter Arts Festival, attracting many more people to walk the paths of Love Letters at Your Feet than would have otherwise.

The Department of Conservation eventually uplifted the pup to a more seal-friendly environment.

Photograph by Marguerite Kent.

Bookmarks in Libraries

I’m continuing to use public libraries as a mechanism for distributing my large edition letterpress work. I printed about 270 bookmarks with the second (hopeful) part of my Big Storm poem, the storm dates and this URL. I also embossed the Te Kowhai Print Trust kowhai blossom onto them because it is such a pretty decorative element, and to honour the wonderful place where I do my work. And then I mailed* a little stack of bookmarks to every library in Northland with a letter asking the librarian to put them out where people could see them and take one if they wanted.

The idea for printing bookmarks and giving them away through libraries is lifted directly from Centre For Fine Print Research's Bookmark project. A kind reader of this blog directed me to their website in response to one of the Addicted to Capitalism posts. Unfortunately I was too late to sign up for this year’s international project, but the idea of making some bookmarks was too compelling to be postponed until next year.

I like the way that sending out the After the Big Storm bookmarks links up the libraries and gifting elements of my Addicted to Capitalism postcards, and the creative and emotional epiphanies of my Big Storm books, and grounds those themes in the here and now of my region this winter, Northland in July 2007.

I’ve also been thinking about what it means to have created what I think of as tiny pieces of art, multiples, a hand-made, hand-crafted edition of poetry and letterpress: the words set letter by lead letter and every one of those strips of card handled by me through three different pieces of cast-iron antique technology; and then to put it out into the world to sit on a table surrounded by the social marketing ephemera that is also given away in public libraries.

My thinking weaves ideas about ‘new genre public art’ and non-traditional audiences; creativity and compassion; how art and books and text and letterpress are valued and recognised (or not) and my place in/out of the Art and Literature Worlds; the history of letterpress printing as a catalyst for radical change… all these ideas woven together like a kete (basket) carrying the bookmarks out to little libraries in little towns digging themselves out of the mud while it just keeps on raining**.

What the bookmarks will mean to the librarians and library users who receive or choose them, I would love to know. I hope that someone who encounters an After the Big Storm bookmark is moved to comment here or contact me directly and tell me their reaction. But my rigorous non-attachment training through writing poetry in chalk this wet winter makes me feel (mostly) equable that I may never know the fate of a single one of my bookmarks. I am free to imagine some crumpled in the recycling bin and some treasured in precious books- both outcomes seem likely and while I prefer to envision more of the latter, the possibility of former doesn’t distress me.

* Delightfully I was able to stamp the envelopes with these very cool stamps which play with language and some kind of heat sensitive technology in a kooky and kitch manner. Sometimes I love New Zealand’s civic quirkiness so much.

** Last time I went to the library I didn’t borrow an otherwise desirable book because it was so freshly moldy and damp that I didn’t want to bring it home. Another book I did borrow turned out to be more discreetly rotting and it’s pungent fumes hit me whenever I go near the pile of books. Another legacy of the weather, like all the fallen trees everywhere. I wonder how many library books have been damaged or lost in the storms? Is anyone counting that cost to Northland?

Broken Window

Yesterday afternoon when a friend mentioned that there was a heavy rain warning for tonight, I felt my body curl back towards the defensive posture that the last storm folded me into. I had let myself be lulled by a week of little rain and some glorious sunshine but it wasn't until noticing my physical response to anticipating another storm that I realised how viscerally I have been responding to the weather.

As I write, it's early, early Sunday morning, rain and wind have been battering my windows for hours of darkness and I long ago gave up trying to sleep. I used to enjoy the sound of rain falling heavily, but that was a couple of weeks ago, when I still maintained the illusion that being inside a house would keep me dry and safe. Then I found out just how fragile my sense of self is once the sheltering membrane of a house is breached by a storm.

This is the second of the series of three books made about the big storm of 10-11 July using prints in which meaning was washed out of the text. Turns out that those prints (made a week or two before) were the perfect expression of my response when the wind broke a window and the storm invaded the house like an angry soldier, bent on senseless destruction just because he can.


Broken Window is a unique book, letterpress printed on a Turkish Map Fold.
Photographs by Marguerite Kent.

Weathering poems

Three days so far since my wild session of chalking poems in the park on Saturday afternoon and there is still plenty to read. I've been detouring through Cafler Park on my way to and from work to check out the survival rate of my words, and every day I've been pleasantly surprised. A couple of poems are still almost intact. A couple have disappeared almost without trace, with just a few flecks of pigment clinging to the pavement. Most poems are marked only by a few words left legible and some faint traces that probably only I can interpret.

There has been one light shower that I know of, but mostly conditions have been frosty and clear so I've been trying to make sense of why some have lasted so well, while other's haven't. It's a lot to do with exposure to weather and traffic. Poems in sheltered places and words on vertical surfaces are doing better than most. Also I think the vigour of application has much bearing: the poems I impressed into the asphalt using all my body's strength are hanging in there, where as the poems that were written with more grace and speed are almost gone.

I'm really enjoying reading the remaining fragments aloud as I walk around the park: hearing how the words fit together in ways I didn't intend and which bring new meanings to light. In a couple of places, traces of a poem written on Friday are still legible, entwined with a different poem written on Saturday, creating interesting juxtapositions, if not always ones that please me.

There is one poem left in particular, the longest one, which stretches right around two sides of the library and half way behind Forum North. I like reading the surviving words of this one backwards, walking from the end of the poem, written in a long string of words (which is mostly intact) to the beginning written in stanzas (which has been heavily trafficked into near obscurity). From memory, that experience goes something like this:

asleep I fall until
hear we animals night about
stories me tell you warmth
for together leaning
surface pool's across slowly pass reflection
its watch to us rouses
and late rises moon shaped egg
light of tongue flickering a fire
small a mouth canyon's over
draped curtain spangled becomes sky
navy, cobalt, mauve through falls
dark water glassy deep of pool
round by camp make and
packs our off pull we until
shadows lengthening through
on walk we
upwind still and quiet
willows the dapple rest midday
walk hand in hand
gnarled ancient tree trunks
sandstone
rust and sunlight
maroons of a veteran's faded ribbons
when you are ready
imagine the warm breeze collecting
embrace, imagine
tender swollen
unpack your bags looking
put my toes to the very edge
rising

Love letters at your feet

I'm just back from completing Love Letters at Your Feet, a collection of my love poems written in chalk in Cafler Park, Whangarei, in association with the Mid Winter Arts Festival. It looks beautiful and was great fun to do. I'm exhausted and aching all over but I want to try and share some of the highs and lows before I collapse and then get busy with the next thing (letterpress demo at the Quarry tomorrow).

All Friday I watched the sky, listening to the weather forecasts, wondering whether the afternoon would clear. Amazingly it did, right on schedule for my chalk-writing posse to come and help. As we wrote, the park was busy with people heading home from school or work, or coming to see the fur seal pup that had landed up on the banks of the stream. Many people stopped to look at the poems and comment curiously or appreciatively. It was incredibly thrilling for me to see my vision being manifested, with the help of my friends, under a clear sky. By the time we finished at dusk I was on a high of pleasure and excitement.

Saturday morning, as the sun rose I walked around scarcely believing my luck that the chalk had survived the damp foggy night so well. I started writing another poem and then fat, heavy drops of rain started to fall from the sky, slowly at first and then in a torrent. I railed at the wet clouds, as though shouting 'no, no' at the sky could make any difference. Then I sheltered under a tree and watched the rain dissolve my words, literally, before my eyes.


At that moment a friend called and offered the first of many affirmations that got me through the rain that morning: celebrating the Buddhist concept of impermanence that has informed this work through all the planning; delighting in all the metaphors offered by rain and chalk in a work about love; keeping me connected to the true intent of the work and it's vulnerable, fragile nature. The rain fell heavily, then steadily and then long and lightly through the morning and into the afternoon. I hung out with friends in cafes, then went home and rested, then walked up the hill in the rain to where I could look out across Whangarei, and remember the aspect of Love Letters that is about loving this town and wanting to give it a gift. At that moment, ragged patches of blue started to appear in the sky and the rain died away.

Back down the hill I went with a bag of chalk and poems. I started writing before the ground was even close to dry, writing through puddles in a couple of places. Two of my posse showed up to help and we wrote and wrote through the afternoon, much more spontaneously than my carefully controlled set up on Friday afternoon. We wrote passionately and wildly and persistently. In the middle of it all Marian found me: the woman who was my second mother during my troubled teenage years and who I haven't seen for a decade or more. As I wrote, we talked about love and family and death and art, and seeing her again was a gift.

The writing was so physical. Big, whole body movements that allow a whole different way of engaging with the text than typing or reading or even typesetting. Some of my helpers commented on how powerful an activity it was, all said they enjoyed it. For me it was exhilarating, liberating, cathartic magic. I realised in one place that I was writing my most recent poem over the dissolved traces of one of my oldest poems and that seemed fitting. Peternel chose to write one of the poems I had held back earlier out of shyness or shame, and then I decided I would also write out some of those I'd held back. In the end, nothing was reserve. I gave my all.

The park was full of people, mostly come to see the wonder of the stranded seal pup, some from the Festival, a few looking for the poems. Children read aloud as they followed the trails of words. People followed me slowly as I wrote to the end of the poem, wanting to see how it would turn out. Couples meandered hand in hand. A small child delighted in scuffing as much chalk as she could. Many bicycles and a van wove and drove across the writing. Some people ignored it, walking past without looking. Two dogs, a pair of ducks and a black cat all came to see what was happening.

The sky was still clear when dusk fell so perhaps the chalk will last the night, but really, it doesn't matter. The work was done (twice), it was beautiful, many people enjoyed it, not least those of us who did the writing. Let the rain come when it will and wash the words away.

My thank you speech...
I am enormously grateful to all the people who helped and supported this event, often through apparent adversity. First and foremost, my chalk-writing posse: Susan and Peternel (who came both days!), Alan and Summer, Kate, Nip and Mary, and Daniel. Thanks too, Liz, for hanging out with me during the rain and helping me realise what a difference an events manager would make to the future art 'happenings' I'm already dreaming about. Thank you to Kaari, the organiser of the Mid Winter Arts Festival for inspiration, encouragement, publicity and funding. Special thanks to Paula and Mags for taking photographs (not the ones on this post, these are off my phone- real photos to follow at a future date). Thanks to Daniel and Tonya for feeding me, nourishing both body and spirit. Thanks, too, to all the people who took the time to come and look and say nice things as we were working. Deep thanks to the seal pup who attracted so many people to the park who might not have otherwise had any poetry in their lives this weekend, and divine thanks to the rain and the sun for falling when and where they did. Amen.

Big Storm: The Book

I'm too tired for words but here is a beautiful photograph by Marguerite Kent (a photographer I cannot recommend highly enough) of one the three different books I made during/about the big storms last week. This one is called Big Storm. It's an edition of 3, with 2 of them for sale, price on application.

Big Storm

Life is defined by membranes.
When the storm smashed a window
and shouldered its way into the house
I stopped thinking I was safe.

* * *

Waking early into silence
after the big storm
the starry sky seemed like a gift
I couldn't close my eyes on.

Love letters dissolving in the rain

It’s raining again. It seems to have been raining every day for weeks. I am particularly sensitive to rain this winter because I am writing fragments of poetry in chalk around Whangarei, and they last only until the next rain, though a sheltered spot might remain legible through a swift shower.

Officially, my chalk poem fragments are teasers for Love Letters at Your Feet which will involve about 15 of my love poems written in chalk along the hidden paths and quirky concrete structures of Cafler Park, as part of the Mid Winter Art Festival. Unofficially, I am practicing chalk legibility, training my thighs for extended squatting, indulging my poet’s ego, healing the bruises on my heart, meditating on non-attachment, playing at transgression and offering gifts to friends and strangers.

Sometimes I pay attention to the weather forecast and their usually spurious promises of sun or showers, and sometimes I try to interpret the arcane code of scudding clouds, and sometimes I go out with my chalk even though the pavement is wet, the sky is grey and I know it will be raining again soon.

When I am organised enough to be responding to the forecast I’ll usually have some fresh text prepared to copy onto suitable surfaces. When a spontaneous urge to write in a rare dry spell coincides with having enough chalk with me, I usually end up adapting something from memory or making it up on the spot. It has turned out to be very freeing to know that what I am writing is ephemeral. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just legible (and spelled right). And if the rain washes it away over night or in the next hour, well, that just means the surfaces are being cleared for me to write on again.

In two weeks, weather permitting, it will be a different story for the Mid Winter Arts Festival. I have chosen a selection of love poems that I wrote between 1987 and 2007 and I have persuaded some friends to come along and help me chalk them around Cafler Park. I know which poems I want written where: the sundial, the wishing well, the amphitheatre, the old swimming pool ledges, the footbridges, the paths that wind aimlessly through the shrubbery and the lovely smooth asphalt around the new Library.

If the weather is too dire on 20-21 July then my alternate day for Love Letters at Your Feet is the following Friday the 27^th, which just happens to be Montana Poetry Day. And whether or not it is raining during the Mid Winter Arts Festival, I welcome visitors at Te Kowhai Print Trust, at the Quarry, where I will be setting type and printing on the Arab press from 9-4 on Sunday 22nd. Examples of my letterpress prints and artist’s books will be on view and available to buy.

A rare moment of sunshine in Whangarei, at the Quarry entrance.