The images connected to my poetry have developed along several thematic and formal lines, typically (but not always) with the poetry leading. An ongoing sonnet series works loosely through a vampire story inspired by correspondence with another author, one of the former students in my "Vampires and Blood Myth" course. As is evident from my August-September 2009 show (see Images and Poetry journal entry), a substantial series of works also relates to feminine deity, feminist consciousness, and spirituality.

When I began pairing individual poems with images, however, a session with Natasha took a turn when we decided to inscribe a poem I had written for her on her back. That opened a new direction. In my ongoing series, the models and I select whole poems or evocative lines or stanzas for inscription on the body. At the same time we have experimented with low-light and flashlight illumination. The series involves less photo-manipulation than some of my other work, although there is some digital-darkroom modification of these images. I'm also moving away from presenting the full poems alongside the inscribed images, as in the "Sea Child" and "Mallow" deviations here. This allows the icons to speak for themselves. In that way, we iconically call attention to the derived, fragmentary, multiple, and potentially chaotic meanings the symbolic process of poetry typically offers. This all plays around the semiotic backgrounds of all my work.

"Sea Child" .......................... "Lovers' Dreams"



"Sign World Study One" ...... "Sign World Study Two"



"Mallow" .............................. "Poetic Repose II"



"Ashley's Inscription" ................"Words II"



"Discursive Moment" ..............."Mourning Tea"



I want to close this journal with a poem, something more "in the raw" that speaks to some of the visual intentions of the "inscriptions" series--not so much to say that words always fail as that they always over-achieve, struggling with each other inside formal structures, leaving us in uncertainty.

"What the Sign Is":

Now what the sign is, exactly, pushes a mind
expecting smooth edges and polished surfaces,
since across the shimmering blurs of our event
horizons the object falls both ways, in senses
taken, imperfectly, from a mind-independent
everything located on being, and thrust intently,
wildly, back on being from our solipsistic whim—
our name on name and name in name to name
arbitrary but conventional representamens—
that we often own and sometimes worship,
ad infinitum, until the rough edges of sense
are smoothed by the blurring to that precision
which can only be false, like the image
of a ghost on a negative, or love, or the word
a newborn cries out as it leaves the womb,
as though the world were only an equation
and X actually meant something in particular
independently of Y, which we think we know
cannot be, unless X is Y and Y is waiting
and having a bit of a hard time comprehending.
how we hold that capacity to be wrong
in such creative ways, so sign magic quells
urges to run running hard across the tongue
in spells unpronounceable through the slather
of features pausing and running all qualia
in trace part ace divisia est so we make
logical descent with so much gall we
mistake hubris for a gift and poison
as the well of meaning when both all
from the interpretant leaving only what
needs to be read to be grasped,
and then, the tangible blot is only a lie
behind which nothing stands for anything.