SPORED: Brenda Schmidt

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This is the first in a series of spore prints I did last month when the mushrooms were plentiful. After I ran out of paper at Sage Hill (where I was also doing spore prints), I started ripping pages out of my Jane Smiley abolitionist country western novel.

When I got home, I wanted to make spore prints on some of my own poems, to overlay text about mushrooms with the spore prints of mushrooms but when I came home with a lap full of mushrooms one fall day, I didn't have time to rifle through the ms. and pick out a poem or two.

(Nevermind that I'm not sure the poem I want to spore print has been written yet.)

Spores wait for no one, and since I had the books of four of my favourite poet/friends - Brenda Schmidt, Tracy Hamon, Gillian Wigmore, and Kerry Ryan - at hand, I started desecrating their books instead.

For the record, I had two copies of each poet's book. But I think I would have done it anyways. It's a lazy and inherently destructive collaboration, true, but it makes me glad.

It also feels like a way of feeling forward, creating a dialogue between the scanned collages and the in situ photos of the mushrooms and the spore prints.

I like that it's not quite a straight spore print and not quite a collage...

I'll post one a week for the next several weeks, starting with Brenda Schmidt and her poem Ultrasound, from More Than Three Feet of Ice (Thistledown, 2005).