What May Come of Doodles

I'm taking a class this semester called Creative Writing and Cultural Studies. One week's unit was on Micropoetries. Maria Damon gives an incomplete list of what might be considered Micropoetry: "graffitis, prison poetry by non-literary inmates (as distinct from figures such as Oscar Wilde, Osip Mandelstam, et al.), slogans, private (scrap-book or diaristic) or semi-private (correspondence, blogs or social-network) writing, poetry written by children or their strange and charming utterances, “écriture brute” (outsider writing), thieves’ cants and other argots or vernaculars, and so forth, may be considered micropoetries, as might newspaper poetry, greeting card verse, prayers, idiolects."

After being told what I'd brought it as an example wasn't Micropoetry, I'd have to add to that definition to art-that-wasn't-intentionally-art. But anyway, in this business of art, we shouldn't sit around defining art. I suppose. Micropoetry seems like a category created by academics in order to define non-academics. In other words, if you produce Micropoetry, you probably don't consider yourself an artist of any kind.

Why I bring this up is not to start a debate on what is or isn't but to showcase a Chicago friend of mine, Will Larsen, and my delight with his process. Although I do believe Will considers himself and artist and poet, the process of how this particular work began seems to fit in well with Micropoetics.

Notes from Dante a la Will Larsen.

His sometimes updated blog is here. The artwork on this blog essentially started out as doodling in class and at his job. In terms of Micropoetries, I think that his illuminated notes (above) are a good example. Micropoetries, although the study of them is confined to the academic world, their existence creates a thread between all artists, in that, whether you choose to consider yourself an artist or not, these doodles, scraps of paper, ticket stubs glued in a scrapbook, have a kind of artistic merit. And that how we look at them will certainly change over time. Today's pop lit is tomorrow's literature and what have you.

More great textures by Will Larsen

I love the idea of responding to information in a visual way. I myself have gotten into the habit of drawing pictures in reaction to my colleagues' poetry - which for me makes sense, since so much of poetry is visual...even if it is made solely of text.

The result of workshopping one of my poems. Clearly, this responder could see into my inner soul.