birdseed

The Art of Remembering and Forgetting, The Husks and Hulls of Memories

Yes, I have a book coming out next year.

But before I post about that, a few months ago my mother sent me a package that mostly contained Halloween candy for her grandchild, but tucked into was something that reminded me of previous creative endeavors. It was a small chapbook I wrote, printed up, silk-screened each cover, cut each page by hand down to a smaller size, hand-stitched the binding on, and then gave out to a few friends. If I made 50 copies in all, I would be exaggerating. In total, I believe I crafted five poetry chapbooks between 2002 and 2010. (I wish I could say for certain that I had all of them somewhere safe –and maybe almost certainly I do– but I couldn’t tell you where that is exactly.)

Birdseed was the third chapbook I made. And only when I thumbed it again did I realize that this small little endeavor emerged 20 years ago this year! It was an homage concept-wise to my two pet canaries that I had come to NYC with, the last of which had just passed earlier that year. But it was also a document of a summer of travel, which I didn’t really recall until I looked at the locations printed in the back. That summer I went to a friend’s wedding in Vienna, returned home to Texas to visit my grandmother, and visited my father in Costa Rica.

In those early days, I was floundering as a writer (hey, some things never change!), working on these little poems that I would print out at my day job, only to leave them laying around my room. The birds would bathe in their water and kick out birdseed with every peck, the damp paper holding the bits of seeds tossed from the cage. And the longer these papers sat on my desk, the more likely it was that the paper would warp and crinkle, with little hulls and husks epxoied to them, a sign to get to editing or else discarding the work. The folio was subtitled “Husks - Hulls.”

I remembered hand-stitching the binding (I have since forgotten that stitch), that I used my friend Rob’s little Japanese silk screening device (the name of which escapes me now) to print each cover, that the image was taken from a sculpture my ex-girlfriend had made that I flattened to a 2D silhouette…