L to R: Ryan, Bart, Colleen C, Amanda, Colleen M, Garrett, Meryl, Shawn
This weekend, Ryan and I were blessed with a series of guests--Saturday evening, full of friends from various aspects in life, and Sunday was dedicated to some of my favorite MFA people: Amanda (who is recently featured in Lit and will soon be in New Orleans Review) (and her boyfriend Will would be with us, but he is Ph.D'ing at Cornell), Colleen C (our fearless dislocate leader) and her boyfriend Bart (who is working on a lit Ph.D and is also poetry MFA), Colleen M (whose work has been featured in dear camera, among other places) and her boyfriend Garrett (who is soon to be speaking in Austin on the Politics of Naming, which sounds incredibly interesting), and Meryl (whose poetry inspired by the work of Virginia Woolf has inspired my own focus on canonical writers and her blog inspired me to start this one) and her husband Shawn (who is hugely talented and I will be selfishly taking advantage of said talent).
Amanda, Colleen C, Colleen M, Meryl, and I make up a loose collective within in the program. Last spring, we did a bit of collective reading, and this autumn, we'll work on chapbook manuscripts.
(The evening before, I allowed my husband and my friend's husband to lighter-fluid a book I'd been using to futz with, found-text-wise, as these two charming men, one a bit tipsy and the other equally giddy, were seeking something compelling to toss into our bonfire--and I took a few photographs, which somehow allowed this fahrenheit 451'ing of a biography on one of my favorite poets--this Plath biography, I must add, I picked up a library book sale for a few pennies and discovered I owned a duplicate, but still. Burning books? Then: I kept thinking of the beauty of altered books.)
It's strangely beautiful.
4 comments:
Oh, Molly, those pictures are amazing! Makes me want to go out and light things on fire. :)
the progression of the book burning is just amazing! you should definitely save them for a potential book cover someday :)
I just don't think I have it in me, the book burning, but I agree, the images are strangely beautiful.
Oh, I fully admit I felt so strangely uncomfortable doing it, but it was that boyish glee and my too-many-wine-tastings--the book itself had pages torn for found poems and whatnot, and since it was a duplicate and a library cast-off... excuses, excuses. Symbolically it was awful. Aesthetically, detached, it was beautiful.
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