Tag Archives: poetry

Summoning the Autumnal Spirit Triptych 2025, with Great Horned Owl and Amanita

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This one took 5 days! I mismeasured the letters in both directions so you really have to view the first 2 of these boards together because the text cut off in the middle and spills over.

Sometimes art is about forging forward regardless of existing mistakes.

Last week the Coyote and I were skinny dipping when suddenly the sky opened up in a much needed monsoon burst, so we heaved ourselves out of the pool and took cover under the porch, from which vantage porch we observed a juvenile great horned owl appearing to dance in the rain for 5 or 10 minutes.

The Coyote told me that this behavior is intended to keep their wings from being saturated so they can still fly even though they’re wet, but it did look like a lot of fun. Joyful.

I actually made the third panel first, and I absolutely delighted myself with every detail.

I was almost finished Friday and I potentially could have stopped but there was too much blank space, so I came back and added the stars and the blooms.

The feathers and the brooms all have 3-dimensional details that the kids may very well destroy but that’s what happens when you make ephemeral art for elementary students.

The Pencil Eaters, Volume 2

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Somehow or other, I did it again: a literary journal written and illustrated by children. I used tax credit donations to pay for professional printing, which saved me about 5 hours and really provided a superior product. Although these books cost a little more than $7 each to produce. This year we have fiction, poetry, 3 interviews (1 real, 2 not), 4 songs (3 original, 1 a parody of “Eye of the Tiger” called “Nose of the Panther”), a very silly book review, and a lot of drawings is lions, plus a few other things.

Tuesday we had a release party and literary reading. The kids catered it so there were a LOT of cookies. We had about 40 people I’d say, which is not a bad turnout for a literary reading.

If you would like to support the arts and writing programs, you can visit this site: https://www.tusd1.org/donate

Select “Lineweaver Elementary” from the school menu and “Writing Program” from the item menu. If you are an Arizona resident, you can apply this money to your state taxes and even if you’re not a resident it’s still tax deductible.

Tyger Tyger part 2

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Somehow I managed to carve out a couple hours to finish this thing before December swallows the clock whole! I start teaching again tomorrow, so that’s going to eat up my Tuesdays until May. I needed to get this thing done.

i feel like I slightly phoned it in. Mismeasured the last line so that’s annoying but what can you do? I mismeasured where I placed the tyger on the first board and had to truncate his tail. O well.

This is basically a joke for myself and the very few other people who are familiar with this poem AND my work. Because the poem is religiously themed. The whole book is about God, a mystic experience of God, but a Christian God, which I don’t believe in. Obviously, I don’t think my hand or eye are immortal, but the evidence is right here—it’s *my* hand and eye that framed this paper tyger’s fearful symmetry.

So that’s what I created. A meta-tyger to illustrate my mortal and two-dimensional fabrication of a tyger.

I doubt anyone at the school will get it or notice.

I had to go back after I finished and change the scissors. The scissors I was using at the time had black handles, so I made the paper scissors black as well, rendering them invisible against the black background. I hastily patched red handles on top when I realized my mortal mistake, so the second pair isn’t quite as perfectly aligned with the hands and blades as the first, but I think this scans.

Tyger Tyger part 1

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This is, of course, an excerpt from William Blake’s “The Tyger” from his book Songs of Experience. This is a famous poem you likely read in English class a million years ago, which explores religious themes about creation. In the book, the poem appears in Blake’s handwriting, accompanied by a watercolor illustration of a tiger, which suggests that William Blake never saw a tiger in his life and had no idea what one might look like (Blake’s tiger looks like a taxidermied sloth-bear-dog) but he didn’t have the benefit of being able to access the sum total of human knowledge from a tiny box from which he could lifelike images of his subject while lounging around the studio in his pajamas.

Not being the religious type, I have a fun idea for the next panel, which I hope to finish next week.

My tiger is also hilariously inaccurate, but in my lifetime I have seen many tigers, real and in images and videos, and I think mine, as comical and cartoonish as I made it, is more recognizably tigerish.

As usual I see a million mistakes I made. But it’s cute. I just don’t have the time or energy to focus minutely on this project lately. I am making a lot of art, and my hand only has so many hours of functionality.

How Do You Like to Go up in a Spring Bulletin Board?

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cut paper little girl swinging on a swing with Robert Louis Stevenson quote
I like it!

COVID knocked me down, but I am slowly getting up again. It took me a lot of weeks to make this bulletin board, because I got the long COVID and it slows me down. One week I cut out all the flowers, but it was a while before I got to the lettering, which took 2 days, and then the girl also took 2 days. And I still forgot to give her a second leg. In this picture I also forgot to glue her hair down. If it was, you would see that her hair beads are rainbow.I know I’ve done 2 Robert Louis Stevenson poems in a row, but they spoke to me.

These Cherry-Blossoms

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Let me count the things…

For my spring bulletin board I was inspired by images of lush cherry blossoms. After deciding that I wanted to recreate one branch, I knew that I needed a Japanese haiku to accompany it, and turned immediately to the words of Basho, whose poetry you probably read in school. I considered some other cherry-blossom haikus but ultimately thought this one the most accessible to schoolchildren, although it’s really about the fact that Basho is, at the time he wrote it, an older man recalling his childhood.

I cut the flowers from 4 different types of paper I found around the school. They often change suppliers so I’m never quite sure what I’ll have, but this offered a nice effect. I cut them all from a single stencil, and created the anthers from 5 staples for each flower. I estimate that I used 1500 staples here, so maybe 300 flowers?

First, though, I cut the lettering. I wanted to make it look like it was done with ink and brush, so after cutting the basic shapes, I went back and snipped at the edges and I have to say the effect is perfect. I’m so thrilled with this one and would like to keep it, but I don’t know how to deal with the 1500 stapes, and half the flowers are construction paper, which tends to fade in the sun anyway. Japanese people use the time of the Cherry Festival to reflect not only on the beauty of the cherry blossoms, but also upon their fleeting, delicate, and ephemeral nature.

Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”

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Will I be doing any more hand lettering in the immediate future? Quoth the raven, “Not tonight.”

This is Halloween! This is Halloween! Halloween! Halloween! La la la!

Pretty often, the Halloween design is the bulletin board I’m most looking forward to. This one definitely was. I knew I wanted a raven, so I knew I had to do Edgar Allen Poe. The sticking point there was picking the right stanza; the poem is a lot longer than I remembered. I guess it could have worked with just “Quoth the raven ‘Nevermore’,” but where’s the fun in that? You don’t get very much poetry in 4 words.

Then again, cutting 170 paper leaves with terrible plastic scissors was nothing compared to the 4 straight hours I spent inking this bad boy. The raven himself was fairly simple. I sketched him out on Monday, cut and pasted him Tuesday (lost a lot of time because the Girl had hours of math homework to get to), fixed him up a bit more on Wednesday and blocked out the letters (in true Halloween horror fashion, I lost a lot of time on Wednesday because the school had a freaking hard lockdown because there was an active shooter across the street; The Man says it was an accidental discharge but tell that to 400 crying children who have just spend the last hour hiding quietly under their desks in a dark classroom), sketched out the lettering on Thursday (lost more time because the Girl had conferences at a different school in the suburbs and also some jerkface kid had pulled out 30 or 40 staples and tried to peel the raven off), and then strapped myself into my iPod and went at it with a handful of permanent markers on Friday.

It was 4 hours straight with no more than a few minutes break here and there to stretch. Made a lot of mistakes toward the end. It is what it is. I don’t have a name for that font; it’s just something that came up when I Googled “fun Victorian fonts for kids” and started clicking.

Sadly, the kids are on autumn break, which is a thing here. I always wanted an autumn break was I was a kid, and was always told to shut up about it, that I didn’t need a break because school just started. Kids today are lucky with their autumn breaks and their regular early dismissal days. But not so lucky with their active shooter hard lockdowns. Anyway, good thing their break had already started and the teachers just had grading day, because there’s no way I would have finished this if I also had to deal with children.

Anyway, you can read the complete poem here, and you should if you haven’t.

Seriously, my hand hurts. Happy Halloween.

 

“Youth” by Langston Hughes

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Seems like an appropriate message for today’s youth.

I chose “Youth” by Langston Hughes as the theme for this bulletin board, as it seems like a timeless poem, about feelings that keep coming around, and also because it feels hopeful. It suggests a sense of agency on the part of the reader, with the poet clearing the way. You have power! Into the future you go! Good stuff.

I wanted to change the board for September but I didn’t want to go too crazy time-wise, because soon it will be October and this year’s Halloween design is going to slay. Cutting all the letters took about 2 hours, and glueing them another 3 and the feet took about 3 more. So really I didn’t save any time.

Poetry Is in the Air

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Always searching for words to explain.

This is my friend Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, the Liberian-American poet, in the first panel. We went to graduate school together. She came to America as a refugee, one of a million people displaced by a war that killed 200,000. There were only like 2 million people in Liberia before the troubles. She knows something about how bad the world can get.

Most of my poet friends seem to write Facebook statuses that are also poetry, and when I saw this update, it felt like it had the same rhythm of some of my 4-panel comics, so I asked her if I could adapt it and she kindly said yes. I love the line, “If you ain’t start writing poetry this year, you might never.”

If you’re unfamiliar, panel 3 is Harry Carey, a popular sportscaster whose catchphrase was “holy cow,” and panel 4 is an iconic picture of activists Gloria Steinham and Dorothy Pitman Hughes illustrating solidarity.