For the last couple of months, I've been playing around with a new manuscript, which at this point is just a document, 18 pages in length, full of poems, scribbles, notes, boxes (some empty, some not), detritus, room measurements (8.75 x 13.5), the color red, depression, maroon and black, quotes, some research, a postcard entry, and such. After seeing the Rothko exhibit at the Tate Modern in late January, I decided I wanted to write something--on him or inspired by the Seagram murals or something. It's been slow going.
In order to gather some energy, I'm trying something new. I've signed up for google alerts for the month of April, and the keyword is simply "Rothko." For those of you unfamiliar with google alerts, go here. You can set an alert for anything you like: your favorite musician, baklava recipes, G-20 news. What's fantastic so far about this project is that the alert arrives directly in my mailbox and is one of the first things I see in the morning after opening my inbox. I get a mixture of articles--some specifically on Rothko, some that offhandedly mention him when discussing other artists, and some random blogs entries. I've been working a kind of skimming/cut-up of these internet sites, and thus far, I've written six poems in three days. The results have been mixed. CP said of one poem: "not gonna lie to you, that wasn't great." We'll see where this experiment takes me.
If April is indeed the cruelest month, I've decided to "torture" myself with poetry.
