Koss Works
Writing | Poetry | Art
Grateful to have erasure work in (Re) An Ideas Journal. Thank you H.E. Fisher and Felice Neal for including me. Pleased to share space with James Diaz, Amarilis Amy, M.A. Scott, Twila Newey, and everyone else!
Check out my other posts and pages for more Wuthering Heights visual poems. They are inspired by someone I love and lost but explore a range of subjects, including grief, women’s issues, and suicide.
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I’ve been doing a series of artworks based on Wuthering Heights. Some of them have a feminist bend, some are about someone I lost (who loved this book). Most are pretty nightmarish. Whether you call them collages, blackout poems, or visual meditations, it does my soul good to do them.
This one was from an introduction by Currer Bell (from a very old copy I’ve been working from). This, like many others, is a combination of handmade materials and digital enhancement. This started out with meditative, modulated pencil work. William Blake meets art deco airbrush meets Xerox machine.
Among other things, I’m searching for a unique visual approach to erasure art, and allowing text to show through, multiple readings, is also part of the practice, as you’ll see on my “garbage dump” page. It may not be “erasure poetry” at all, but I’m more interested in the journey than the destination (name), or aspiring to be like something else. And if you can make anything look remotely original in this post-modern era, just yay! Most of the work is jolie laide or art brut. I try to avoid “designing” or being illustrative, although this one could go that way.
View more erasure poems here or on my thrown-together, temporary gallery. Thank you to the journals who have published them (diode, Anvil Hammer, Up the Staircase Poetry, Harpy Hybrid Review). I also have several forthcoming from (Re)Ideas and in Permafrost’s next print journal. Check out the (Re)Ideas on here.
Happy to be included in this release of Anvil Tongue, a website and book publisher run by Daniel Ryan. An Emily Dickinson erasure on hope, a written poem, and some visual word art based on Wuthering Heights are included. The work is in my manuscript about the suicide of a person dear to me. Some of it is erasure, some of it Art Brut but it defies categorization. See the page here and be sure to check out the whole issues. Also see more images/erasures from this series in Up the Staircase Quarterly (also published this year).
Another crossword poem (or the crossword list). Graphite and liquid graphite on mounted crossword poem.
Finished a couple pieces and am playing around with another asemic art or writing piece. The big-nosed magpie on board is finished. I posted it earlier. I’m still playing around with drawing/writing on crossword puzzles. Used a fixative, but am struggling with (albeit intrigued by) how media behaves on the cheap newsprint/manila paper. Conjures memory of hauling around huge sketchpads as an undergrad. So consider it an in-progress shot. The hare poem is now finished (an earlier state posted in another blog post. The original poem was called “Shoulder Story” and published in Rogue Agent. I shortened it, cut it up, and used it in the piece. I like that there’s a weird positive/negative play and the large black shape could be a womb, a black flower, or a fist. The stem might be entrails . . .
