April 6: I seem recovered from my bout of bronchitis, and semi-creative, as a result. Yesterday, I made a new visual haiku:
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This is experimental in the sense that I really don't know what I'm doing. More exactly, I know that I'm trying for a new kind of haiku (for me) the employs stacks of planes, each with a haiku or part of a haiku, or a graphic, on it. Where I'm experimenting is in figuring out the graphics instead of randomly using graphics on hand. That is, I have no handle on how to use my graphics, but hints. To give a for instance: the inverted white Y at the bottom of the graphic intrigues me, but what does it mean? I don't know. I want to know. (And I'm not talking verbal meaning, I'm talking what is it doing visually, what may it be suggesting tonally, how does it relate in any manner to the work's text? Etc.) The poem is nice enough, but I hope to do much better. On the other hand, I feel I may already have exhausted the idea! Fun, fun.
Meanwhile, here's a conventional haiku I threw together to use in the visual haiku experiment preceding the one above and have consigned to the trash bucket:
summer sky unhindered
down to the weeds in the lot
where Boyce's candy store was
Boyce's is one of the two stores I used to buy comic books at. The poem is a lie. I don't know whether the building still stands, though I know the store itself is long gone. If gone, the building has surely been replaced by another. No vacant lot. But I grabbed for an image, needing some kind of haiku. It's about as standard as they come in contemporary haiku, and used just about exactly as such images are used in them. Too many syllables. Conclusion: probably not worth keeping but it shouldn't bother the fastidious too much, and there are probably a fair number of haiku-readers who will like it.
I also have a new version of my "old poem":
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I like the blue background and the color and font of the text, but am still unsure that the main graphic works. I may ditch it and put in a quite different one. I do think a fragmentary graphic placed like this one should be effective. I cut the original version of the one in the poem now out of a larger Paint Shop exercise because a small area in the bottom left quadrant seemed Very Pretty to me. Once the excerpt was by itself, the area I liked no longer did anything for me, but I stayed with it. I like it, but think it may not be right in this work.
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