This was taken from scraps.  Cutouts produced incidentally while creating other black and white paper designs, extras tossed aside in the moment: the true first negative space of those projects, their waste, their remainder.   Sifted through the pile of odd shapes belonging nowhere, randomly assorted without purpose.  Four pieces chosen quickly, without thinking and no plan, without altering them further in any way, and within minutes assembled together and pasted up this leaning figure.  Looks like a lot of things to me but speaks like an example.

Urging to make significant or even delicious more of those elements in us and in the world so easy to reject, to cast out, to trample on, or to simply pass by.  Art and poetry are not luxuries but necessities for this reason.  To allow the unattended or just what looks like refuse to be seen and voiced and appreciated rather than tossed a token now and again, hardly a crumb.  The expendable, impractical, unnecessary – yours and mine too.  With poetry especially we have a marginalized form expressing the marginalized in apt communion.  To celebrate mystery, quiet amidst the noisy, or to place the unwanted or left behind because are we not all neglected or forgotten in some way and do we not all feel this.  To serve the imperfect, the difficult, the unsavory or troublesome, even the scary at times.  Our beauty does not exclude these flaws in a culture pretending to disown their existence.

What nobody would detect or consider without looking very, very, closely – art changing our minds about what’s beautiful and worthy, what we’re capable of discerning.  Not just a world in which we consume choice fragments of one another relentlessly and treat ourselves so, but a hunger for the whole range and process of a more private experience admired, an intelligence beyond the conspicuous so that every day just a little bit, even just a little to be able to show up and not be afraid to look further.  Since it’s the not looking – hiding – that’s more dangerous.

— And since culture’s infinitely richer than it could possibly be credited in any given moment — momentarily magnificent or bewildered or painfully plain.  So are we.