Day 29

Today was Barbara and my third meeting at the pond and Gage Park and it was so productive today. We are really enjoying this time together and collaboration and discovering our collaboration what it means. We simply sit together and we can feed off the energy from each other of just being at peace in the park, of looking. I will often look at what she is sketching and use that as a moving Force to discover when I want to write about next. She looks over and we have a talk and she decides what she'd like to sketch. For example, she was sketching the bridge and did this amazing sketch of it, while I was writing about the bridge about the phrase things being under the bridge while it's growing with ivy.

We then felt cold and went to Blackbird and we talked about her ideas of using black white and gray paper and that I hadn't even thought about how to present my poems yet. I've always wanted to learn how to use a Letterpress and this might give me the chance to learn, to reserve time to learn how to use Letterpress for using the press to make poems. Really, this sabbatical might be all about having time again to learn something new to write in the way I love writing to explore things that I haven't thought of. I'm writing a lot about carrying the children now too which is sometimes tough to think about how to enter those poems. I'm so close to them so how can I write from that distance that poets need? I've been using a lot of what my boys say as ways to enter poems, but now it might be the experience itself of leaving home of what it means to go to the park to the pond.

As far as the Letterpress there is that faculty member Michael Hager who has the Letterpress but I don't think it's working. There's another faculty member who has her own Letterpress and boy did I forget her name. The Lawrence Arts Center allows people to use their Letterpress. Also 712 Innovations has a laser cutter so having cut out poems might be a really interesting effect for what the poems look like black paper with a green background coming through to make the words.

We also discuss then a collaboration as installation as I told her about making a piece from different pieces to form the shape of the pond. This would introduce the element of time, a meditation, Assembly not just looking and moving on but being stopped asked to look at each piece read each piece look at the photos with a sketches throughout the pond just as we sat in front of the pond doing that, looking at each piece of the pond and as well as a whole. I'm going to start looking for leaves for Barbara to use for nature printing and it made me think of how my boys love leaves how I love doing sketches of leaves with crayon in that with leaf printing it looks so organic because you're not sure where the ink will go.

Finally, this is a time where asmond made a small canvas that said no and he let out his energy and feeling a frustration into a positive thing on canvas. How may I work with us for my own either in poetry form or an art. How can I have my children continue doing sketches and drawings for possible book?

I've been also quoting a lot of the things that Barbara says and that might be its own interesting thing?

One of our discussions today when she saw I was carrying around a book ironically called the carrying by Ada Lyman, that she looks at art for inspiration to if she feels stuck. I like to carry books around in the same way that I'm not alone in my writing. Today, this book served me well in my own creativity. This is just a reminder to pick up my books to about childhood writing as soon as they come in through interlibrary loan.