A series of visual poems created in Summer 2020. Most of these pieces were published in various issues of Artedolia, Synapse, Otoliths, and Utsanga. The source material? Well, since the 90s, my friend David Craig has sent me the stuff he’s found–and actually picked up–on the street (and other locations) in Herndon, VA, and Portland, OR. Maybe some other places. More or less, each piece is drawn from the contents of a single envelope. There were lots of envelopes, and I still have lots of them that remain untapped.

To my regret, these works exist only in the form of digital photographs. Once they were composed, everything went into the trash. One could argue that’s where these “poems” and the junk in them belong. Fine. But I do regret I didn’t glue some of these down and keep them for my archive. At the time, I was packing for a cross country hell move, and needed to unload as much stuff as possible. And there was a swift, improvisational process involved: composing, photographing, clearing them away. At the time, the impermanence of the work seemed important.

Art critic and musician Dan Barbiero wrote an essay about these works for Artedolia, which you can read here.