In a few days, I’ll post complete images of a new book art piece over on my 2014 Book Arts page. Here’s a teaser:
One of the joys of doing book arts pieces is that I get to use my old poetry, rather than trying to sell it for one cent a word in poetry journals very few people ever read. If I’m lucky, the books go to universities and private collectors who enjoy the words as well as the art framing them.
Materials: cotton, linen, machine-made cotton lace, hemp thread, glass beads, commercially-printed fabric with a daVinci theme (Japan), laser-jet printed portraits and text pages, historical images drawn from Neo-Classical engravings.
‘Arachne’ is a poem I wrote over a decade ago, always intending it for book arts content. Like ‘Handprint’, ‘Guiding Angels’, and other works, this one falls squarely into my agnostic philosophies about the dangers/usefulness of relying on gods. I’m going to be very happy with how ‘Arachne’ has turned out.
Arachne
by Marian Crane
We work from the center of a web. Every moment, strands shiver to the ticking clock,
The passage of leviathans half-seen, slow voices counting one number a year,
Always faster than glory inching from our fingers.
Wind blows. All our spinning frays to gray rags in the dusk.
We do not own the web or the wood, the steel or the silk.
But we own Vision until the moment we make it real.
Is this how Arachne felt? Not hubris, but love of the work challenged Athena only playing at her loom.
Milton dared us to reach for heaven.
Gods lay shadows on the path. They cannot quench the furious thunder within us –
Are they jealous?
The clock chimes: thread a new needle under starlight.
***
Update (more here): here’s the finished cover.
