Loose Leaf Notes

I write poetry by ear like a musician who doesn’t read notes can still play music. ~ Colleen

Some people make quilts, stitch blocks of designed fabric together. Others mix colors and paint. The theme of my creative life has been finding my voice and using it through speech and the written word. Considering that, it was no surprise that my recent series of collages have been about finding voice, with captions over my head or scrabble letters, cookie fortunes, crossword puzzles, and magnetic poetry flying from where the top of my head has been cut with scissors from my face.

I first started using my poetic voice writing poems in my bedroom as a teenager. My awakening to language had less to do with school and more to do with popular music and maybe the discovery of pot. At the close of the 60’s, I experimented with psychedelics. My first (and only) trip revolved around words. Whatever I thought appeared as words to be read over my head.

If a singer overuses her voice without training, her voice can be damaged. I wonder if the same could be said for poets.

I got a late start. For a variety of reasons – as a female, as a sibling of nine from a blue collar family – for too much of my life I didn’t know how to use my own power to make things happen and I wasn’t even aware of the truth of that.

It’s too late for me to start using punctuation in poetry now, I tell my poet friend Mara. When Mara was accepted to go to Hollins University for creative writing, she suggested that I might like to go back to school as well. “What? And spoil my self-taught reputation?” I answered.

My sister Kathy is a master seamstress, something she inherited from our grandmother and I did not. Kathy taught herself rug braiding (and then hooking). After a couple of years of making rugs and because she wanted to solve a rug making problem, she took a class. She learned what she needed to know about braiding but also ended up teaching the teacher and the class some rug-braiding tips and techniques that they didn’t know. She went on to later teach her own class.

Since those days in my bedroom when I would spend hours writing poems and reading them aloud to my sister Sherry, I haven’t been able to NOT write. I keep plugging away at what I do by instinct and with perseverance. I may have had to take the long way around more than once, but eventually I discover what I need to know. Eventually I do arrive.

Post note: Click and scroll HERE for more “Say So” collages.