I got this cool e-mail from Liza Cowan, a Vermont artist, director of the Pine Street Art Works gallery in Burlington, and regular blog reader:
I’ve been reading your blackout poems avidly, and trying and trying to find a postcard I made in 1981. It was kind of a blackout poem except that instead of showing all the black areas, i just took the words or word fragments and re-typed them, using a font as close to the original as I could find. Mind you, this was before personal computers. My rule was that the words or fragments had to be in the same order as the original. I probably have a copy of the original catalogue but I’m not sure where. I do remember that “She” came from “Sherwin Williams” I think it is the only word fragment.
I did the card as a part of Jerri Allen’s Apron Project. My text source was a Sherwin Williams Paint catalogue from 1939. That was also the image source. I processed the image with a Mita 900D copier, which I happened to own at the time, because I lived an hour’s drive from the nearest public copy machine (I kid you not!) Then I added a quote from Robert Graves, The Greek Myths. I published the card under my own imprint, White Mare, Inc.
It’s all on the back of the postcard.
Good Grief, I had to look everywhere to find this one scrap of paper. Thank goodness I found the one remaining copy!
I mentioned how impressed I was by Liza’s elaborate pre-Photoshop method, and she said, “Not only was it before photoshop, it was before any design program. I had the words typeset, and used letraset film for the background. And did cut and paste for the composition. It all seemed very modern then.”
Spiffy – puts me in mind of my high-school newspaper days, where I caught the tail end of (relatively) old-fashioned typesetting — as in, using a typesetting machine rather than a computer.
WHEN DINOSAURS ROAMED THE EARTH!
;-)
Indeed.
Thanks Austin. Its a cheery thing to see my card in circulation again. Hearty thanks.
I’ve linked you on my website, under “news & events.”
Blogged at Apartment therapy…my wife reads that thing religiously!
wow iPhones are amazing… Greetings from the mac store
Liza has broken ground with her bare hands (and Letraset) for decades now. I’m not exaggerating when I saw a postcard from her in 1978 actually helped shape my destiny.
LOVED it as an “other mother”.
I got to be a whiz at press-on letters from non-stop demand for Lesbian political flyers in the ’70s and ’80s. Before that, it was mimeograph machines and razor blades — the smell of mimeograph ink still makes me want to ask the nearest woman for a date.
In a sense, all poems are found poems. In her book “Blood, Bread and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World” by Judy Grahn, my favorite poem expounds on the (then) recently confirmed knowledge that ALL new language-based information (as opposed to music or mathematics or images) can only be taken into the brain in the form of metaphor. Some people (me, included) think that’s what dreaming is — the brain rapidly, without barriers, holding the day’s input up to what’s already in the databanks and making comparisons, kinda like the Sesame Street game, which of these things is not like the other, only in reverse. Poets and artists have developed their ability to use metaphor as directly as possible.
And — Liza is a poster-child for that ability. So to speak. Thank you SO MUCH, Austin, for scanning this in to share with us all.
Hey Maggie — thanks for stopping by! I love the idea of dreaming as a collage — but I tend to look at everything through the lens of collage….