Greetings all – thanks to the continuous hard work of Lisa Thatcher et. al., the experimental literary-aesthetic new magazine Henry is live! I’m excited about this project, not only because Thatcher’s own work and interests are so astute and lively, but the principle of the thing and the open energy of the legacy of Henry Miller. I invite you all to check it out (helps if you are able to read French), and you will also find a piece of creative writing by myself within. Thanks Lisa & co., thanks Henry for verve and example, thanks writers and readers – it manifests!
Category: Photography
Among the Leaves
Suddenly I found myself among the leaves, diffuse as light, but darker. Almost a shadow, if I’d found myself at all.
For it came of a simple moment in-between. Between responding to this or fetching that. Perhaps waiting for coffee to brew, or just breathing. In cold sunlight. In kitchen. It had something to do with my daughter. Or she was the first one I told.
“I’ve found myself,” I burst upstairs and explained, holding out my phone which had captured the image like communication. “I’ve found myself, see?”
But no one quite did. I was thereby forced to point it out. Which is a lot more like making something up rather than discovering. More like envisioning than recognition or taking notice.
Yet I can tell you I saw right through it in that gap. Made out my identity in that fluster of sunrays and blockage.
An insubstantial sort of silhouette designated by a drove of other things – that “it” – that ephemeral, vacuous “me.”
In fact, the way I remember it, I was harried by flickering thoughts, responsibilities, and a mantled dose of tired, and it was only morning. I’d backed up against the steely sink and weighted my palms, hoping my neck might loosen by letting it drop. The floor there.
Something alerted me – a “honey?” or a child’s announcement from some other room – and so I swung and hoisted toward action. My roving eyes sniffed at calendar and began steadying toward a list comprising my future, but instead.
Instead, a patterning of leaves translating immediately to a scatter-shot messaging of light, exposing some presence in its midst that was absorbing or otherwise deflecting. Signifying, nonetheless. A kind of tracing of a head, a photo-graph I guess, a contour drawing by our prominent star. And if light could trace it, could scribble a quick sketch out of me, well then,
I’d guess I’d found myself among the leaves,
which went something like these pages.
N Filbert 2012
To Grow
try driving through the Flint Hills in Kansas
with accompaniment
For Image-lovers
Bill Jacobson
Check out Gypsy Wall!
http://gypsywall.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/taking-note-rememory/
Weekly Photo Challenge: Dreaming
This one developed into a series. My wife’s art works are all about the house and I move them here and there for various inputs/effects on my brain as I work…She recently hung a few encaustic pieces in our dining room where I have been writing due to the heat in our studio attic. For “dreaming” I’d had the idea that I’d challenge myself with my Pantech phone and try to take some pictures of my head and smear it up without help from photoshop or other treatments. It grew into a little series, beginning with her pieces and their slow consumption of my world.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Movement
dug about and found this one…2 versions… for the weekly photo challenge, although perhaps I’m a day late…
PHOTO BY HOLLY SUZANNE
SnapShotting Summer
I lived for awhile in Grand Rapids, Michigan, attending graduate school and being regenerated and grown in-vitro like a culture into the family, religion and industry of literature. I’ve recently stumbled across a photographer’s blog who shoots many subjects in and around that West Michigan area. If you browse her photos over the past week or two it will provide you a feel for snapshotting summer…and here are some verbal renditions…
by Cornelia Lohs
Snap-shotting Summer
Ever the distortion of mind. With emotion, contortion.
At times, a necessary snap.
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A young woman peddling her bicycle, unclothed for summer. Body moving like taffy on its paddles. Just as pliant, just as tight, and just as supple. As salty, as mouth-watering, as sweet.
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Tumbles in the machinery like loose screws, clanking and rattling around.
A clicker, a habit, desire.
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Sun sears glares upon moments, lasering trains of thought. Dis integration. You stumble, you wobble, you very nearly fall. Erasing inspiration with foul mood. You adjust.
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Scars like the outside, on the surface of the brain.
Called memory, called dreaming, called thought.
Or so you imagine.
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Pool or sprinkler, sweat and breeze, you forgot. Moment’s season’s change, and you were happy. Somewhere in mountains, or North by the sea. Without belongings.
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It emerges like a wire, a monster’s bite.
You’ll call it “me” or “I” and it’ll stand for something. Continuity.
An inventor’s dream.
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Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
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“I” continues to sit and walk, lie and stand. To eat. To breathe.
Weekly Photo Challenge : Fleeting Moment – street scene(s)
There was one I liked best…but then when I got them uploaded…I wasn’t sure! But I promise they all were fleeting….
What Once Was Here…Again
A couple of days ago I reblogged Searching to See‘s incredible posting “What Once Was Here.” Their pictures lived on and wriggled their way into my psyche, so I asked if they would be open to me composing some paragraphs responding to the images. What follows is the result of that…
images – Emily and Alex Hughes
texts – N Filbert
- What’s left hanging, a dangling or loosened shadow, often ends determining. A note you left with simple instruction opened on unprepared mystery. Unable to handle and afraid of the dark, tiny conduits tunneling everywhere. The twine wobbly and knotted, but the lines of the threshold so clear. When things are left hanging, though exciting and ominous, possibilities frighten. The key to what once was here is risk.
All my Words are Silent 