On Poetry as Sketch and Sketching as Poetry and Life as Something Altogether Different

I'm deeply into it now. I have the titles in my head for the remainder of the poetry chapbook (World's Colliding) and many of the sketches underway. I go down, down, down into the poetry. Then I come up and away with the sketching. The object of the poetry, of course, you understand. The chapbook title tells all. But the artwork?

It's not difficult to illustrate a booklet like this with pencil drawings. The hard part is to turn the intentionally simple pieces of art into a kind of poetry in their own right. And not in any form of sketch/verse that might gently coordinate with the words, but in such a way as to push, push, push against them until you can read the intention freestanding, without the poetry itself. The sketches must live to serve a separate and distinct purpose; yet, to remain, in themselves, those same worlds colliding.

I've chosen a little leather book with a clasp, unlined, and a larger leather notebook with lines so softly printed that they would never interfere but only give the sketches a sense of forcefully dropping down on the page in spite of them. I'll probably end up with something in between. Poetry, handwritten. Illustrations in pencil, also.

I have this feeling that few, if anyone but me, will get it - the reasoning;  and because it's been heart-wrenching to write on this theme having faced the fact that my life has been entirely composed of those same worlds at odds with one another, there's another project going on over here to break the tension.

 I've been going through (finally) my photographs of Tallahassee churches. Now, that I can see to drive again (post-cataract) and colors are once more vibrant and true, I want to finish that lovely picture book along with dialog. Not the histories of the churches, per se, but the feelings the buildings actually impart. Just like the chapbook. Poetry handwritten on every page.

I've always had a struggle with writing. Not that it's difficult for me. It isn't. It's the most natural thing I do. Not that I don't think in haiku and waken on beautiful mornings with poetry falling out of my head. It's just that I hate to be tied to the computer (in the past, typewriter) wasting the joys of what I call "real life."

That dilemma has eased up in the last year or so while people I know (or know of, or love) in my age group are falling off the earth at lightning speed. Warp speed. And so, in the essence of time, I now compromise.

My interest in food preparation - shopping for and preparing;  that love of time spent in the secret garden with music pouring onto the patio: the curling up and enjoying a good book; many lovely, tiny naps that spit me back out into the world in time for wine and cheese on lingering Florida evenings; these remarkable kittens and their blood-pressure-lowering abilities;  and my delightful newly-merged modern family are first priority.

Poetry and photography and art are not (never have been) my only passions. At this time of my life, they have become what I do for a hobby. That decision is a replay of one that I made long ago. To live in the real world not the world of my mind. I would have missed so much living otherwise.