I’ve been writing for the past few hours in one of those rare, uninhibited spurts where something inside of me shuts off and so the actual writing process is uninterrupted by “oh jesus that’s awful.” It’s something else. [The kind of fish that have to hop out of the water to fuck.] Lately I have to draw for 10 minutes before any words come. Which means that maybe this narrative sequence I’m working on will become a comic book poem. Maybe I’ll put in all those collages and pen sketches I’ve been doing in between the poems or maybe I’ll break all the lines, push them into everything else. I’ve had a hard time imagining words without images, and vice verse, lately everything I make comes out like a mash.
A really distinct memory just came back to me. Something I haven’t thought about for over 5 years but now that I’m reconnected to it, it seems odd that I would ever have forgotten it. It’s the cover of this book about 1960s Japanese theater posters. Deep blue and drippy technicolor. Psychedelic bodies. What was the title? (Angura, apparently. Thank you google). I was obsessed with it in high school–but how did I discover it? In the memory, I’ve found it in my high school library–in the section about Asian art, maybe? It seems so improbable that my very conservative high school would have this sort of book, but for whatever reason, I can almost see myself paging through it in a very specific row of the library. Cross-legged on the grey carpet. When did I start to realize that posters–that enticing mix of text and printed color–could be “real” art? If the book wasn’t in the library, where was it, how did I find it.
And anyway
