Exploring Visual Poetry: Creative Techniques and Personal Growth

It’s Sunday and here I am, fighting the urge to post five bullet points highlighting what I accomplished last week. Why does that edict remind me of the old Cheech and Chong stoner recording, Sister Mary Elephant, in which a student begins every sentence of his homework essay, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, over and over with, “On my first (2nd, 3rd etc) day of summer vacation, I woke up” ?

Instead, I’ll write the usual old blog post. 

It’s challenging to reinvent oneself from a popular nurse and artist blogger into a full-time artist and writer. As part of the transformation, I’m taking writing workshops to broaden my language skills and connect with other artists and writers who are doing the same. 

As I stated in this recent

video post

I don’t consider myself a poet, save for the mostly angst-ridden verse of my adolescent years. However, last week, I completed a six week workshop entitled Visual Poetry: Seeing is Believing through Portland’s Literary Arts (Thanks Paige!).

Visual art and poetry are closely related. Writing poetry develops facility in using more colorful and descriptive language. Besides adding traditional illustrations, poems are capable of being visual works of art in themselves-more on this in another post.

Circling back to stoners, one assignment was to create an ekphrastic poem using artwork from the Portland Art Museum. I chose a poster from the Psychedelic Rock Posters and Fashion of the 1960’s exhibition.

I took the assignment a step further at home, creating a book for the resulting poem named after the poster, Phloebus Union, Soma Daze of Night 1971 by Bruce Weber. I chose this particular book format to accentuate the “mind expanding” visual elements. The poem is written in the voice of the woman figure in the poster.

Here’s the poem:

Phloebus Union, Soma Daze of Night 1971
I don’t know
What the words mean
A giant butterfly floats
Above my head.

I feel dizzy and
I’m not dressed appropriately
For this event.
My bloomers and boots are old-timey.
I think I was roofied.

Across the wall from me a purple cowboy
Who looks a lot like Theodore Roosevelt
Rides a horse through an acid green sky.

He’s singing a song
But I don’t know the words.

I’m dizzy.
What time is it?

The room is e x p a n n n n n n n ding

I won’t be going to
work tomorrow.

I’ll post some of the other visual art poems I created in the workshop soon.