Write So the Land Can Read You and Finds You Beautiful. How Do you Know? by Pamela Paulsrud and Michael Swierz
1.
One by one marshals of the sun...
From the shadow of my shelter I watch as I wait...
O how the wind scrolls unanonymous...
Weathering or weatherless, I wait as I watch...
Seedeaters, flycatchers, puzzle-keepers, fire extinguishers!
Compost pile of rhizomes heaping up earth...
I forgot the answers I was being asked...
Decomposing at the root tip, metamorphosing at the meristem...
I cook up the questions, to remember them again...
When, star-like, suddenly, chickadee-dee-dee!
2.
Once I had articulations—
thoughts, feelings,
bones, wrists.
Now, this
philosophyless
surf of time.
The sun and the moon
share the same word again.
If there is a future, it is
a metronome that doubles back
on a different star than what it started with.
Pure blood,
I must confabulate
a lexicon of wonderment.
3.
In my attachment to the wind
when I peel myself back from it
my back goes with it
Was there a shadow there
where now a high noon sunburst
Tomorrow cloud and stillness
My back the shape of the wind
My wind-shaped back
the wind's own shape
The titmice feast from now through eternity!
Collaborations Q&A
How did your collaboration develop?
Our current round of collaboration began when one sent the other a question and a challenge: "Write so the land can read you and finds you beautiful. How do you know?"
How has it deepened since you started to collaborate?
This prompt became the kernel for further thought-provoking chatter, ideas, laughter and ultimately, the mingling of poetry and words in the landscape, each feeding and leading the way as frequently as the other. In terms of depth or growing, you might think of it like the way you build up trust when you're jumping up and down with someone else on the same trampoline. Boing!
When you were working through these collaborations, did you begin with the text or the images? Which usually comes first in your partnership (and why)?
Neither! In fact, most of these gestures began during a bike ride or while out collecting seed in a prairie. Something spoke in the landscape and, because one of us was there, we heard it. Maybe it then found a den in a line of handwork or a line of speech, evolving as it "reached the page," so to speak.
In addition to your Quarantour from December, where might we see more of your collaborative efforts?
Stay tuned for a release party of tumbleweeds and axioms later this month during Evanston Made's Winter Wonderland at Canal Shores Golf Course, followed by a prepared tumbleweed launch at the Weinberg/Newton Gallery on March 27.
Notes on Works
“Basic Harmonies I,” “Basic Harmonies II” and “Basic Harmonies III” by Pamela Paulsrud
“Seedeaters, Flycatchers, Puzzle-keepers, Fire Extinguishers,” “Chrysalis” and “The Titmice Feast from Now through Eternity” by Michael Swierz
About Michael Swierz
Michael Swierz is a poet, maker, and participatory ecologist. He has tended livestock, lived in a non-Indo European community in rural Mexico, drank water straight from the stone in the Pyrenees, and gathered ancient prairie seed from remnant railroad right-of-ways in the Midwest. His work synthesizes aspects of poetry, visual art, translation, subsistence, earth repair, and interspecies communication. You might find his works on an orb-weaver’s web in the real-world prairie, if you look.
About Pamela Paulsrud
Through her investigation into the concept and process of handwriting, Ms. Paulsrud became intrigued with the ability to communicate beyond the message encoded in the text. Handwriting is a visual language emanating from our thoughts and emotions, a remnant of a process. Each line, each stroke, is distinguished by the materials, the mood, the day, the rhythm, the breath—a visual language within a language, a cross between a fingerprint and an EKG, telling not only who we are but also how we are in that moment of time. Paulsrud’s intrigue lies not only with line and space but heartbeat and breath—and resonance, that energetic quality, that vibration that seems so illusive.
Her mark making began as an abstraction of handwriting, intuitive movements, with particular attention to the rhythm and mood, referencing response to her environment. As she develops a new body of work, she feels herself drawn to nature—time that she spends not necessarily seeking or looking but simply being—and then seeing—the lines, the stories, the visual language. The rolling cornfields blanketed with snow suddenly appear as text—the smooth sand along the shoreline tufted by tiny stones emerge as musical scores inscribed with calligraphic lines of remembrance. She sees before her that meaning—language embodied in the “mark.”
When Paulsrud began paper making years ago, it was for the purpose of examining and exploring the creative process from inception to completion. From the formation of sheets, to working with fibers in its various degrees, she was led to create spontaneous marks within the pulp. The medium became an art unto itself and now offers a multidisciplinary approach in her exploration of capturing sound/resonance in paper with cymatics—sound wave phenomena. Paulsrud’s artwork, her life—informed and inspired by both the inner and outer landscape.
For more information about Pam and her work, visit her website: pamelapaulsrud.com