Earlier this week, I spent a decent amount of time putting the finishing touches on the final galley proof of animal, vegetable, monster, including some time with the last section, and maybe the most central part of the collection, the extinction event poems. I have no idea if they are my favorites because they are so core to the book and rather excellent as poems, or if they are my favorite (and there is much to love in the manuscript) because the experience of writing them was such a great experience.
In late summer of 2019, that very last year when we were anything like living normal, I had a simple task--I would be granted access to the Field Museum , as many times as I desired, to find something to write about, and then give a reading in the fall. It was a crazy fall--including the financial issue that resulted in leaving the studio after years of trying to make something work that just was not. But I was determined, even as the upheaval unrolled through October, as I packed up the entire studio and prepared to jam it all into my apartment's dining room, to enjoy my Field Museum project if it killed me--the process, the drafting, the research.
Granted it seemed kind of daunting--the reading was set to be an entire hour and just me, which meant I'd be reading far longer than most readings--and reading from a single series, which needed to be long enough to fill the time. So I was just pouring out poems all through September and early October. There was a lot of fluff I would trim, after the reading, but before I issued the zine project last year (which also included a number of photographs I took at the museum.) My initial impulse of course, had been to NOT write about birds, though the Hall of Birds is certainly my favorite spot at the Field (says the girl who wrote a whole book called in the bird museum. ) Of course, first trip, I wound up there, but later, spent time in the evolution exhibits and was struck by the lit placards, as you wound your way through dark rooms filled with dinosaur bones and prehistoric rock formations, announcing each major extinction event every eon or so. It was chilling that summer, in this era of climate change. It would be moreso, in hindsight, as the next year brought the pandemic (not an extinction event, per se, but certainly an education on the possibilities of viral threats.)
So I wound up writing a series of poems about climate change, about birds and dinosaurs and museum dioramas. Also our role as artists and writers (and anthropolgists and historians) in capturing and rendering the past and our own framing effects. It works so good in the context of animal, vegetable, monster, because of this. Because, ultimately, it's a book about art--the Antoineta/Lavinia poems of pelt, Walter Potter's animals, the strangerie peices, and, to begin, my artist statement series.
As I finished my proofing, the book felt so very completed and finshed, and correct margins willing, will be in my hands in her final form soon.
