of poems and pictures

the paper house (2006)

I was always a writer, but only around 30 did I become an artist. I grew up with a background that pretty much centered around language, be it poems, studying lit, writing newspaper pieces, or working in theater, where so much is dialogue and recitation. Not to say I was not fascinated by visual art. Paintings, prints, and postcards littered my walls and notebooks. I was obsessed with Impressionists/Post Impressionists for a while in the 90s, then even more with Joseph Cornell and other Surrealists in the early aughts. When my sister (who originally went to study art in college but later changed to classics) was in high school, she brought home things she and her friends were working on that utterly fascinated me. A zine made old-school style. A huge handmade artist book bound in sparkly vinyl. But I was focused on words, though In the 11th grade, my first project that could have been considered an artists book happened--a crudely drawn retelling of The Scarlet Letter. Later, in college, I would learn to paint sets and backdrops for theater productions, something which I didn't pick up again for nearly two decades.

In the spring of 2003, the library had been hosting art exhibits in the 3rd floor space, and while I was surrounded by talented co-workers her were visual artists in multiple veins (it was Columbia after all), many co-workers kept telling me I should find some way to exhibit my writing visually. The result was probably the largest scale installation I ever attempted, with lines of poems, written on rice paper, that ran the circumference of the first floor, up the stairwell, and into the exhibit space. Later, there were similar projects-. Tea-stained muslin banners in the 1st floor stairwell littered with poems. An installation involving text on hanging upcycled card catalog pieces.

early collage, circa 2004

In 2004, I took a collage workshop down at the sadly defunct Book & Paper center that sort of broke things open. Suddenly i was making collages like a fiend, even opening an Etsy shop in the fall of 2006. Most of my visual efforts were separate from writing in those early days, but there were a couple exceptions. An artist book version of "The Book of Red" sequence I did for a WomanMade Gallery show. A shadowbox called "The Paper House" I made for a vispo unit in an MFA forms class. Some of the projects that did blend the visual and written were more collaborative, including at the hotel andromeda (2007), me and Lauren Levato Coyne's love letter to Joseph Cornell, which used her images and my text. This all overlapped with my design exploits with DGP titles and furthering my graphic design experience and skills. I also worked designing paper goods and other object things--like paperweights and jewelry.

Later, the poems and the images began to fuse more cohesively. I was creating purely visual zines and collage series up til around 2011, but in 2012, made the first zine that involved both--the shipwrecks of lake michigan, which I debuted at Printers Row that year when we had a table. A handmade book with a beautiful navy textured cover and full-color collages inside. It was followed by other things. A series of postcard watercolor paintings called ghost landscapes (2013), a set of anatomy collages and prose pieces called radio ocularia (2014). By 2016 or so, most poems had affiliated art and vice-versa. Sometimes they were created in tandem, though often one came first before the other.

I toggled back and forth between modes in these years, exhibiting visual work occasionally and publishing the textual portions. Combining both in zines that I created in print, or later, via digital means. My art itself steadily became more digital as well with occasional analog exploits --altered books, zines, monoprints, assemblages. By 2020 or so, there were only a few written projects that did not have accompanying artwork.

from CLOVEN (2026)

Now, its pretty much a given, whether its my own collages or prints or the experiments I've prompted with image generators for fauxtography projects like EXOTICA or the artist book/box GHOST BOX (though with the environmental impacts we've since learned of re: LLMs, I am using AI tech much more sparingly than circa 2023-2024 when it was new and shiny.) While these images aren't my own--more like something found--I favor them much more for creating faux artifacts--like a series of cabinet card photos of cryptids, or strange and eerie dioramas. of a haunted dollhouse that I'd love to use to inspire some new writing at some point.

Since I've been publishing my own work for the past five years, it makes it easy to create bound editions for things like the antiquities series, now with its second volume of text and visual art with CLOVEN. Also more luxe, hardcover editions of things for Patreon and such. There is immense freedom in this, especially since most poetry publishers do not do combined visual and text projects (largely because they are expensive to produce along anything but a POD route--which us still expensive--but entirely manageable in small lots.) there are also other things I kick around in the mud in, like video, which I am still learning new things all the time. I also love the potential for different types of media and performance for poetry. 

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