Dear Midnight Dancers,
I’ve written three different drafts of this email and erased each one. Each time I began believing I had something to say—only to discover a few hundred words in that I did not.
Instead of sitting in frustration, I grabbed my notebook and sat out on our front deck. We’ve been suffering through a nasty heat wave in the Pacific Northwest the past week, but today the temperature was a comparatively cool 88 degrees. I sat, watched, and listened. A bank of portentous clouds rolled in, dumped an unexpected summer rain, and moved out. This activity got me writing.
One of the poems I wrote is the one above. I’m not sure where it came from. The word firmament popped into my head, and the rest just came out.
Once the poem was written, I knew it needed to be a comic. I knew that I wanted to create a sky with stars that looked like they could be dancing and that I wanted a ghostly image of a dancer in the sky as well.
I went looking for public domain images and found this picture of Isadora Duncan taken by Arnold Genthe.
I love the grace and poise Duncan displays here, and her pose fit perfectly with my idea.
Isadora Duncan was a pioneer of modern dance. She became quite famous in the United States and Europe for her rejection of standard dance forms and discipline, embracing a style that celebrated improvisation.
I cut the dancer out of the picture and colored her in to match the color scheme of my sky.
The stars are all seastars I found in early nature photographs. I have assembled quite a collection of seastar pictures. I chose these specific specimens because they all looked like they were dancing. Again I colored in pink and lavender hues to give the panels an ethereal feel.
The crescent moon is from a full moon I drew for my earlier book of prose poetry, Quantum Joy Infinite Melancholy. I just cut out a crescent shape and recolored it to match the rest of the sky.
I added the moon to give the images some differentiation and to add a sense of time passing.
This past Sunday, I quietly launched a new creative project, The Weido Poetry Show. It’s a 5-10 minute poetry videocast. I’ll be sending out new episodes to you each Sunday and then posting the episodes and excerpts from the episodes on social media starting the following Monday.
If you haven’t watched it yet, you can check it out here.
Creative Challenge:
Think of a rule in your artistic discipline that you always follow and make a conscious decision to break that rule the next time you create something. See what happens if you set a few sentence fragments loose or if you disobey the rule of thirds in your next piece of visual art. You might find yourself pioneering something like Isadora Duncan.
Be the poetry you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
Jason, I'm coming over from Dascha's publication, Fiction in 50, that she may change to Eclectic Ink. I'm now a new subscriber to yours, and I love this haiku verse. If you don't mind me sharing, here's one of my conventional haiku verses, where I break with traditional human sensory experiences. I enjoy using haiku verse to break a few rules.
Sounds of Light and Love:
https://jenisecook.substack.com/p/sounds-of-love-and-light