Jane Blanchard
Precipitation
Someone decides the snow globe needs a shake,
and any figures in it must endure
the sudden blizzard until every flake
has settled down again. None can be sure
just when the next commotion will occur—
in seconds maybe, hours or days perhaps—
then instantly the scene becomes a blur
which takes less than a minute to elapse.
Disturbance is the raison d'être for
a snow globe, though. Whoever grasps the thing
and shakes it wants a flurry—if not more—
within a world without the hope of spring.
Britney
Once she is free, she wants to show
her fans and friends and family
how far a famous star can go
once she is free.
Her selfies of near-nudity
(none needing any studio)
are put online for all to see.
She rants or raves. Does she not know
exposure leads to infamy?
She soon becomes her own worst foe
once she is free.
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| Maureen Alsop:I often create visual art as a memorialization to the closure of a written work. However, many of these visual pieces arrived as a trajectory while writing a larger 'work-in-progress.' The text within the visual poems do not speak to the content of the larger work but are autonomous, acting as bridge between the written and visual bodies. The original text draws upon ghosts in the hall of battles. It is a glittering solar analemma, an unattested revolution, an infinity reflected in ellipses, omissions, and disintegration. A full collection representing many of these images came to fruition recently in Tender to Empress (Wet Cement Press). Yet the act of creating from text continues, as the digital collages here also include newer works based on miscellaneous notes, old emails, and most recently a short story, "The Unnamed Woman of Mary River" (forthcoming at South Dakota Review). The title to these are based on cargo ships which I pass on my daily commute from island to mainland. These small cities of people, afloat for weeks on end out at sea, are a looming story that embarks and disembarks in my imagination.
The visual poems are crafted under the mechanics of "Écriture Féminine," literally "women's writing." These principals advance a feminine perspective. I write from parallels, cyclical slips through stream of conscious and fragmentary processes. The writing exists as rough erotic. As talisman. Interpersonal in their ruptures and syntax, soft in their discomforts; a splintered narrative. Through writing, I can go anywhere and never be found.
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