collage & tarot & poetry

i have always wanted to be an artist but i can't draw very well.  so collage has always been my thing.  a long time ago, i created large mural-like collages that collapsed under their own weight after a few years.  i also made collages out of the walls of my rooms where i lived, taping & tacking pictures to the walls.  

you can see the pictures on the wall of my dining room here.  they went across the entire wall & around the corner & covered all the walls of the room.  it was really impressive.  when we moved, it took me a week to take all the pictures down.

poetry is a kind of collage.  you cut & paste words & phrases together.  i always thought that collages of words & collages of pictures were very much alike.  whenever i got stuck with one form, i switched to the other one. 

i have boxes & bags filled with pictures & i have folders & notebooks filled with poems & partial-poems.  between the two of them, i plan to write as many poems as i can & create as many collages as possible.

as for the tarot, i have been reading the cards since 1988.  my first deck was a rider-waite deck & i still read with that deck most often.  but i have other decks.  i particularly like collage decks & look for those decks online & in stores.  one of my favorites is kat black's golden tarot.  she puts together pictures from medieval & early renaissance art & the result is magnificent.  

another set i own is the love tarot.  a majors only set, it also features an innovative way of using collage imagery.  

i especially like the high priestess.  but all the cards are fabulous. 

which brings me to the card i created today, for the poem (ii the high priestess).  i used a picture i found on mythindex.com called "diana hunting" by guillaume seignac.  the link is here ... http://mythindex.com/greek-mythology/A/Artemis.html.  the columns were clip art that i had for a long time.  i really don't know where they came from.  i wanted to add a large crescent moon at her feet & i tried several times but didn't like the results so i removed them.  so this is a very simple card.

but i think one of my best so far.  i think if i would change anything, i would make the text bold face so you can see it better.  but other than that, i'm really pleased with it.

so over this weekend, i'm going to start working on the empress card & a few other little collages for a few other poems.  & post it here so the whole world knows about how creative i am. 

An end to writer's block

I have been suffering through one of the worst writer's blocks I have ever had.  I went eight months without writing any poetry whatsoever.  That's pretty grim.  I did write my diary, although not every day.  I kept up on emails.  But when I sat at the computer to write, I ended up playing game after game of solitaire.  The wheels of my brain weren't even spinning.  They were stuck in ice & snow as thick as the ice & snow building up on the roof of my house.  

So I focused on other things.  Knitting, for one.  I finished a shawl, a scarf, & started an afghan.  I cleaned the house almost non-stop, clearing out closets & cupboards, filling bags & boxes, & giving things to charity.  I radically changed my diet & daily work-out & lost twenty-five pounds since the New Year.  

No matter what, I kept reading.  This winter I read novels by Jean Plaidy, Jane Oliver, Elizabeth Byrd & Anya Seton; poetry by Bernadette Mayer, Jonathan Brannen, Carol Watts & William Shakespeare, of course; & feminist political essays.  

I could feel the stirring of creativity with the moving of the geese.  I wrote a new poem the very first day of April and posted on my sonnets blog for the poetry challenge.  Within days, I was writing almost non-stop again & I was also working on collages, an art form I hadn't worked with in almost 30 years.  I do not pretend to be any kind of great artist or any kind of artist at all.  But I am having FUN.  Which is really all that matters to me.