two poems and a zine
Hello. It has been a few months. Slightly over the unofficial bimonthly schedule that I’ve kind of been adhering to. At first I felt kinda bad about that but then I was like, that’s okay. It doesn’t really matter. Prolly no one will notice anyways. And besides, my intention is to share when I have stuff to share, not just for the sake of doing it.
And with that as a default introduction, here’s some stuff I have to share with you.
1.
Here are two poems that I wrote recently and shared at the the poetry workshop in February and April. The second one was especially reworked based on feedback. Neat!
February 24, 2025
all a fog in
a veil in this veil
morning fogged
brain
a veil
vale veiled
afog
avail a veil a vale
lost in chase
a riddled attempt
afogged
asleep in haze
handwritten script changed
by this state of being
ears agauzed
aweaved with mud and cotton
afuddled be-addled sponged and glazed
membraned web
as try to lift head
April 29, 2025
I see you bright within trees
pushing green through brown dryness
coral of exposed heartwood
a porous fibrous wonder
you, bound within the circumference of your breath
I dream of sewing boneset
a spontaneous offering at secret shrine
padded paw
cloven hoof
gnats minuscule in fast congregant
the smell of warmth
a glimmer of impending heat
taut with color on lilac wind
In general I feel like it’s still been more challenging to write for the past six months. I’ve recently tried getting back into forcing myself to do some automatic writing at least a few times a week. Without any point to it just to practice physically writing. Maybe that will help get things going again. But I’m also trying to not pressure myself and move beyond puritanical and capitalist conceptions of productivity and worth. I imagine I will be working on that for the rest of my life. It is so ingrained.
2.
After lots of procrastination and telling myself that it’s stupid and that I shouldn’t do it and it’s not really a zine and worth doing if I don’t print it myself; I finally put together a “zine” of some photos I made between 2000 and 2024 and had it printed by a company instead of me. It ended up being a lot more affordable than I thought it would and the photos look infinitely better compared to my laser printer that I use at home for text zines.
An aside. I have a weird hangup about how I define “zine.” I’m very pedantic when it comes to this and my own detrimentally narrow definition of “zine” is that it must always be photocopied or printed on a laser/toner printer and on matte paper of some sort. And it should be printed by the person making it. However, this definition is very much based on my 16 year old self’s reading of it in 1994. Clearly there is room for growth and evolution and change.
So, although it offends that inner teen’s sensibility, I will say that I made a photo zine. There’s no real theme to it, just a vague narrative connection. I kept it simple since it was mostly an experiment to see how it turned out. I printed twenty of them and it cost between 2.50 and 3 dollars for each of them. The total was around 50 dollars. Not bad. I can’t imagine needing to make more of them than that. I called it system of repetitions and am kind of thinking that that will be the title of any ongoing publishing that I do.
If you are interested in getting a copy of said zine, I am more than happy to send you one at no charge. Just send me an email and I’ll get it to you.
3.
Kind of photography related. I did start an account over on pixelfed. Mostly cuz I love the theoreticalness behind federated, open source, and distributed social networks and wanted to try it out. I thought about mastodon but decided it would encourage too much scrolling for me. Pixelfed seemed like it had more relevance for me cuz I wanted to find other contemporary photographers that I liked and see more photos in general. And also to reduce the amount of time spent looking at gear-obsessed photography blogs and forums. More art and less tech specs. It’s been working out alright. I intentionally post stuff slowly and very irregularly so as not to fall into a habit. You can see my stuff there if you want. Most of it has been shared here as well but I imagine the two will eventually diverge a bit.
flotationdevice (@flotationdevice@pixelfed.art) - Pixelfed
16 Posts, 44 Following, 41 Followers · An attempt to share my visual art type things. Prolly mostly photos. Ridiculous lefty. Nerd.Keith.he/him.Chicago.
4.
A few things I’ve enjoyed recently.
Cleveland Museum of Art
Superelectric pinball bar in Cleveland
Illuminance by Rinko Kawauchi
Six Days newsletter by Ángel Jacinto
Linda Lindas at the Metro / taking our son to live music shows
Concentrating Chaos poetry workshop
Labagh Woods
Successfully making pita bread
Films of Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda
Anders Nilsen / XLAOOC art opening at Lula (also, some of the prints are still for sale and the proceeds go to Doctors Without Borders)
I believe that will be all for now. How are you doing these days? What are you spending your time on? What has been motivating/inspiring/beautiful? I do always love to hear from you and I hope you are doing alright.
Defend all trans people, defend all immigrants, and free gaza.
Keep loving, keep fighting
Keith