current experiment. shoe shrine. early stages. the hardest part, well, til now, the hardest part figured out: how to attache the shoe and get a base started. this is for my participation in a reading festival (where i’ll be reading some of my poetry)..this is for the Exquisite Corpse - a parlor game that started with a bunch of artists - think dali, van gogh, picasso, etc - where one person would draw a head and fold the paper down to the neck, the next person would take the neck and draw part of the torso and then fold the paper down to the end of their drawing and so on…until the last artist drew the very bottom and then…voila…a really bizarre looking person or ‘corpse’. then of course, the poets took it over. so they would write a few lines, fold down to the last line, the next person started with that last line and wrote lines then folded down to their last line and so on until voila..you get a very weird or bad poem. in my experience, someone always makes something sexual in the poem. but, i’m betting the artists took time on the genitals on their drawings…so, turnabout and all that. anyhoo. for the reading festival, we do both…words and art. if you want, you can do your own art for your lines. so i do. this time, we decided we would use clothing for our corpse. i decided to use a shoe. still not sure how i’m incorporating my lines … but, this was the biggest hurdle - physical structure and something manageable when it comes to hanging…for this deal, it has to be able to be hung on a hanger because we’re using clothing racks so you have to walk the racks moving the clothing to read the poem.
the festival is in ybor city. deep carnivale…a phrase taken from a short called The Kite Trick - which I understand is going to be made into a film? The guy who wrote that is actually going to be with us this year…so kind of cool.
anyway - wish me luck. though i may have had a bit of serendipity the other day…walking around i found an awesome seashell just lying in a pothole on the property … obviously it was paved over. but it was just there, in all its perfectness, i think waiting for me. my lines mention the ocean, or an idea of the ocean at least, emotionally. i’m thinking it has to get in this shoe…but in a non permanent way because i want it back!
