Patchwork Poems

Today I was reading about poetry forms and in particular cento, or "patchwork" poetry made up from lines of other peoples poems, which I think is actually harder to do than it sounds, and also 'found poems' which take random text and make a poem. For several years I've been making patchworks out of found objects and also paper images and texts. If I'm reading a magazine or newspaper and a caption of text leaps out at me I cut it out and save it to be incorporated at some later stage in to something I'm making.

So I was sorting through some images on discs today and on the computer and came across some pieces I made a few years ago and thought I'd post them. But first this qoute from Jim Jarmusch, which I always find so liberating and inspiring.... and I first read on Jessie's blog, wonderlustandstardust.blogspot.com

Just a few random bits that have been sitting on my desk gathering dust........... and getting a bit faded in fact

The piece below I made a few years ago as part of a degree module, making a cloth, not exactly, but at the time, and i still am, I was soooo inspired by the work of Mark Dion , and so rather than all these precious things gathering dust, and due to a lack of specimen display case in my ownership, I thought this might preserve them better.

Cut and stitched pieces of masking tape that had been pulled off a drawing board.....like a sampler of discarded marks.

Bits of things that I loved and experimenting with using image maker.

And this piece below was inspired by Japanese 'boro' (patchwork) which is usually varying shades of blue as it is made from indigo fabrics that have gone through several incarnations, and the occasional piece of red.

I'm reminded of this story from Daisaku Ikeda's 2009 Peace Proposal (from the Edo Period)

'One day, Doi picked up a discarded scrap of Chinese silk and handed it to one of his samurai retainers. Many laughed at this seemingly insignificant gesture. Several years later, when Doi asked the samurai about the piece of silk, he produced it, having carefully stored it. Doi praised the samurai and increased his annual stipend by 300 koku (the standard unit of wealth in Japan at the time). Doi then explained his actions.

This fabric was produced by Chinese farmers who plucked mulberry leaves to raise silkworms and spin thread. It came into the hands of Chinese traders, crossed over the great distance of sea to reach Japan, passed through the hands of the people of Nagasaki, was purchased by merchants in Kyoto or Osaka, and finally reached Edo [present-day Tokyo]. One cannot but be struck by the enormous human effort by which it reached us, and thus to discard it as a worthless scrap is a fearful thing inviting the rebuke of heaven.

To empathetically connect, through a scrap of fabric, with the lives of farmers working in mulberry fields in distant China--'