Words I Held

On waiting too long

Content Warning: I briefly talk about my depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, suicidal ideation, and delusions. Just a few lines really.

For a number of weeks, I've want to apply for the Internet Phone Book, which is "a physical directory for exploring the vast poetic web. It features the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators." Created by Elliott Cost and Kristoffer, the latter who runs Naive Weekly, a wonderful Sunday newsletter delivering sites and open calls from the poetic web.

I'd submit this website, www.eileenramos.com, but right now I don't feel like it's built out enough. Too few blog posts, no projects in this iteration, and I still need to build my open calls and close calls prompt pages. The book will debut on September 20th, at Naive Yearly in Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. So that doesn't leave me much time to submit, though at this moment, the form is still up.

This is my tendency--to work on something or even put it off 'cuz it's too imperfect and not enough, and just not submit it and miss the deadline. I've done these with way too many ideal jobs & internships, cool classes, wonderful open calls, art shows, mail art, etc. I don't want to do that again. I should just go for it, right? If they say no, that's okay, at least I tried. And sometimes I'd apply and get surprised by a "yes". I shouldn't self-reject myself, maybe my site as is, is more than enough. It doesn't and shouldn't be lofty, I don't think that's what poetic web is all about at all.

A few months ago I had a short, but amazing streak of applying everyday. And I believe I scored mostly yesses! I got into a chapbook, an art show, a sweet rejection but an auto-yes for next year's gallery exhibit, a class, zines. It astounded me how often I got accepted. So I'm gonna submit everyday again. Here are some stipulations:

I registered for three classes, one day before yesterday, then yesterday and another today. First up, at Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn:

“Sunday, August 18, 2024 ​ 2:00pm-5:00pm ​ WORKSHOP: VISUAL POETRY Led by Anna Doyle

August 18, 2024, 2:00-5:00 PM email info@millenniumfilm.org to register $15 Suggested Donation

THEORY: My conviction that experimental film is poetic by nature. In this workshop, we will learn a few principles of film poetry – how to use poems as an inspiration and script to your film? How did the French Surrealists, Pasolini or the American New York experimental filmmakers do it? Poetry Films are not illustrated poems, nor are they texts combined with moving images. How does one visualize the malleability of poetic language and text into the materiality of film? We will watch a few examples of film poems and analyze their effects.

Practical workshop: “EXQUISITE CORPSE” The "exquisite corpse" game was invented by the Surrealists. First used by writers, it consisted in writing a surreal sentence without knowing what the previous player wrote. Each player had to write a subject, verb and then complement. The process was then applied to drawing. We will apply it to film.

Bring a line of a poem you like! It can be your own creation or one of your favorite poems – each of you will try and translate the linguistic effects of the line of poem into film, using your smartphone or personal camera, by exploring the visual and acoustic environment of the neighborhood!

Do you want to use objects as a metaphor, or else shapes, faces, symbols, colors, reflections? Do you want to express contradiction, surprise, beauty, choc, or melancholy? Then we will discuss the material and I will gather it to combine it into a collective film-poem -- I will send to you once edited! -Anna Doyle”

It sounds amazing. I’ve been wanting to make a poetry film and this feels very approachable as as complete novice. Plus she’s part of the Plantasia Exhibit running at the workshop:

“Millennium Film Workshop presents the second annual screening and gallery exhibition, PLANTASIA, curated by Brooklyn artist Holly Overton. Whereas the first installment focused on works by artists who use the outdoors as a tool, PLANTASIA VOL 2: WORLD WIDE WEB TAKEOVER visualizes an internet landscape, from the expansive cloud to the world wide web and all of the bugs caught in it.

The films, paintings and sculpture in this show feature many interpretations of interconnectivity, whether viewed as omnipresent and vast or felt as isolating and distorted. Consider the dialogue between a woman’s search for digital and physical belonging in Anna Doyle’s 16mm to digital short film, GOD BLESS I CLOUD, and the countlessly layered abstracted, organic forms in Kate Alboreo’s acrylic on canvas, Heavy Toward Each Other.

In PLANTASIA VOL. 2, Overton asks how far we can extend ourselves into the digital world, and what would it look like if we could see where each piece of us goes. Installed as floating in the air, Janelle Krone’s MidJourney Collab #15 and #4 severed head paintings envision an answer. While Alanna Rebbeck’s short film, an Earthly Expedition, captures Google Street View’s camera as a sentient being along the Colorado River, Jessica Scott’s Snapshots from Terra Nullius viewfinders on pedestals reveal a close-up of mold landscapes at various moments in their life cycle… So is the internet a digital mycelium?”

More details can be found here.

The next workshop I’ll be attending will be online with the Echo Park Film Center Collective, 8/28 7PM ET, Haiku You. The EPFC Collective is “a diverse group of artists, activists and educators dedicated to sharing film/video resources, partnering with arts, education and social justice organizations, and continuing to support the creation and exhibition of heartfelt, handmade movies around the world.” They have a lot of cool screenings and workshops so I’m grateful they made this one available to everyone online.

“In this workshop for poets and filmmakers, we’ll use the natural wonders of the season as our inspiration to write and share haikus and then turn them into experimental short films. Free event!” You can register by emailing the address given in the event page above. I really like that this is monthly, it gives me a chance to refine my skills and storytelling. I hope I like it enough to continue attending but I have a feeling I will.

The next class I’ll be taking is on October 26th, Saturday with Mita Mahato at the Poets House in NYC. Mahato was a fantastic teacher when I took her online workshop with Common Area Maintenance. CAM is “a shared art studio and gallery, founded and propelled by artists, whose purpose is to cultivate an inclusive, affordable, and supportive creative community through resource-sharing, collaboration, curatorial events, and spontaneous karaoke parties.” I’d love to attend an event there one day for sure.

We brought food packaging and used it for our poetry comics which was later compiled in a risograph zine. So cool! One of the best workshops I ever took, online or IRL. I can’t wait to finally meet her and I know the workshop will be ten times better in person. Poets House is “a comfortable, accessible place for poetry—a library and meeting place which invites poets and the public to step into the living tradition of poetry. Poets House seeks to document the wealth and diversity of modern poetry, to stimulate dialogue on issues of poetry in culture, and to cultivate a wider audience for the art.”

You can access the library for FREE. Their open hours are: Tuesday to Friday, 11am-7pm & Saturday, 11am-6pm. I haven’t visited in a number of years and I’m excited to return. I definitely want to donate the poem comic zine I made, I think it’d be super cool to say I’m on their shelves hehe.

Mahato’s workshop is The Poetry of Paper:

“Instead of approaching the page as an emptiness to be filled with words, what if we perceived its texture, weight, size, or color as just as fundamental as words to the meaning and impact of a poem? Concrete poetry, erasure poetry, collage poetry, and poetry comix are all forms that depend upon the materiality of paper to contribute to a poem’s making and meaning. But even in the most conventional sonnets or sestinas, we feel the impact of a page’s surface as we pause in the “blank” between stanzas or navigate an enjambed line. In this 3-hour workshop, we will feel into the poetry of paper—both drawing out written poetry’s visual and material aspects and experimenting with making visual forms that will tickle, sharpen, and possibly corrupt your creative habits.”

I can’t wait, this sounds so lovely and physical. I know it’ll open my mind to the further possibilities of the page and my creativity.

You can actually pre-order her Poetry Comics book Artic Play now at The 3rd Thing:

“Arctic Play is a drama, a dirge, an expedition log, a series of poetic experiments, a comic book. Mapping an Arctic imaginary of beings and landforms onto a shifting stage of woven and layered papers, Mita Mahato conjures geographic and creative uncertainty as the necessary condition for navigating the climate crisis and its sorrows.”

I’m gonna order it soon, can’t wait for it to arrive. I love her work so much. You can check out an excerpt at Ecotone: Whale Fall Sequences 1, 2, 3. It’s a moving and layered read that is unlike anything I ever read. I love how she utilizes space and color and the grid.

I spent much of my life in standstill, stagnant, stasis. Not pushing myself to try things or talk to folks outside my circle. I didn’t believe in myself. I actually absolutely loathed my being and more. I was severely depressed which I’m still currently treating, along with my anxiety disorder and bipolar disorder. I just slept the day away in order to stay up all night to not interact with anyone. For years. I get sad when I think of those days, but I’m a lot better now. More self-assured, more joyful, more optimistic of what’s to come. I strive to do things that would’ve made my younger selves excited and be like “I get to do that?!” I’m at an age I never pictured myself as, for many years running, and it’s only been a few times where I could see myself as old and gray. But I have a feeling I’ll have that vision more and more as time goes by.

Every opportunity and class and event and show and so on, is a chance to see how I’ll grow. It’s fun and wonderful to figure out what I’ll make in the next experiment. As long as it’s something I would’ve made outside of the prompt, it’s well worth it. I’m grateful I have the time and space and money and resources and ability to do all of the above. I’m lucky beyond measure and I don’t want to be someone who misspent their blessings and potential. I’ve waited too long in a number of ways, but honestly, I feel like I’m on time. I’m a late bloomer through and through, but I’m way more grateful to achieve things at a later age than I would’ve if I did it “on time”. Because that’s what’s expected. But doing it on my own timeline, in the way I want to, is such a great gift. I don’t want to take who I am for granted. I love who I’ve become and even the little one I was back then. She got me here. She still tried. Even when she thought she ended the world, she tried to save it anyway. And no matter who I will be or what the future holds, I’ll never be able to take that away from her. I’m getting teary-eyed realizing that hehe.

Man, I love blogging lol.