I. Dark Territory
Just sent my manuscript to a friend for feedback, edits and critique. I am hoping that the comments will give me new alleyways and sidestreets that I have yet to explore in the work.
II. Back to Start
I am going to be re-reading Katherine Harmon’s You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. While this text definitely helped me birth at least one poem – atlas of nationalism – I think there might be some other poems in here as well. Especially when I think that the Anywhere Avenue is an actual place with dead-ends, alleyways, cul-de-sacs and at least a couple of playgrounds in it. Times like this I wish I had some serious visual artist skills so that I could lay out a real map.
III. Strange, Indeed
If you don’t get a chance to pick up Harmon’s book, you can still get yr cartography on by hitting up the (unaffiliated) strange maps blog.
IV. Diggin’ Deep
Also starting to think that I might have to explore more of the Bronx’s actual landscape history to get more material for the MS. (Yes, that is the first time in this blog I use the term MS. Cue the Golf Clap.)
V. Back in NYC
Not physically but definitely poetically as I am close to finishing up my *first ever* read of GarcÃa Lorca’s Poet in New York.
VI. Still in NYC
At least when it comes to GarcÃa Lorca’s eloquent definitions of the hecho poético and the lógica poética which I am interpreting as the points on the map between orature and literature, two places I seem to be stuck between. More later when I find a better compass.
Hii. Re: poems on maps, I don’t know that you have to be a (freehand) visual artist so much. In grad school, I remember Sean Manzano Labrador used a graphics program to make this huge poster map of CA and plotted out military (naval?) bases (that he’d visited?), and if I remember correctly, he may have been laying out his poems on these.
Online map making? Yes. I think that is gonna be the way to go.
I can already see in my head where the poems take place. Also thinking about “incompleteness;” how some of the citizens of Anywhere Avenue might or might not be privy to what is happening in their ‘hood.