Earthly

Earthly 📖 / A Book made of Clay / Visual Sound Meditation with Singing B...

Collaboration: Marie Wintzer (Japan) (Flowsounds) and Cheryl Penn

 

MoJoian 5 Babel

As part of the Visual Poetry class in the Right of Writing module, I used the Babel collaboration as a collaborative exercise. It was the first time quite a few participants had been given a severe time limit to add/subtract from a creative exercise. I'm, hugely pleased with the result - I think so will they be when I show them tomorrow!  As we only had an hour left by the time we begun this, with 6 participants, everyone got 10 minutes...a hard task indeed! Each participant had a copy in a round-robin exercise, so more results will come to light.

Babel Collaboration # 3 Cheryl Penn/John M Bennett

1.    uncertainty/ confusion

2.    paper trails and ignorance

3.    cluttered pages dis-arranged/re-arranged/un-arranged

4.    blank

5.    bewilderment/perplexity/puzzlment/multitudenous voices

6.    broken letters

7.    disorientation: how is the babble today different from Babel?

Babel Collaboration # 2 - Cheryl Penn and Jackie Freer (South Africa)

I have at last got to copying this collaboration which Jax finished a good 2 weeks ago. It's a beauty - loaded with visual poetry, Babel and cross references, things red and well-read. Pale letters and whispered phrases, doomed utterances and leaking letters: "Big head, never mind Big Foot" - babble - something we're all still so good at. Block by block, letter by letter, pride is still our downfall - confusion reigns still.

Babel. Edition 9 # 1. Cheryl Penn and David Stone.

I have not done a large collaboration for quite a quite a while, so I’m really looking forward to seeing how it pans out.  The idea is that I send participants 2 copies of a chapbook titled Babel, one to keep and one to alter.  The original altered copy is sent back to me and I make an edition of 7.  I keep one, two get sent back to the artist, one bound, one unbound for them to copy and reproduce if they wish.  They also receive 5 other chapbooks from other artists who have followed this same process. 

The first one I have tackled is with the poet David Stone (USA). As a wordsmith David is immediately responsive to titles and images and his poetry is its usual enigmatic, apparently disconnected phrases and words which, once read somehow make total sense. They also evoke strong mental imagery. 

“bracketed barriers enclosed the summation of

orders

toes tagged

silence lost” 

As I had a bit of time on my hands, the copies I made have numerous hand painted elements, but I‘m not sure it this practice will remain, although 7 copies is quite manageable. There are an extra few copies for him and I to both distribute. 

The original looks like the image below (the centre spread) - and if you would like to participate, please let me know.