Found Art

Purple Orchids


When I was clearing some old files I found a folder of poems -

1.  On Connecticutt Avenue

A woman wearing burgundy hose
laughs with two men on the corner of R

I am stopped at a red light
a siren behind me ----where is it?
    I CANNOT MOVE

It  passes on the right -
             the tension in my chest eases

Two blocks down - a fuschia cab is parked

A succession of green lights, red lights,
             stops and goes

Snow flurries and COLD   the first day of SPRING
       YELLOW jonquils stiffen

What will happen to the vulnerable blossoms that
     trusted the premature warmth
     and opened themselve up to

                   F  R  E  E Z  E
                                 March 20, 1990


I remember writing a series of poems like this
catching colors around me.

Not a terrific poem but, like a photograph, it brings back a moment in time.
Reminds me of a ride down Connecticutt Avenue going home from work with Jim
on a snowy afternoon -

1990 - That's 21 years ago
 and, its a window into a long view
of our history.

Here - I will show you what I mean - -

I remember I was
Working on a 'found art" idea -
like the Surrealists
or the DADAists who tossed pieces of paper into the air and where they fell was the composition -

I scribbled the lines in my journal as I saw them  -hoping those bits of accident would build up into
    a poem.

Then I typed my hand-written notes into the clunky Compaq desktop computer
and printed them out on our dot matrix printer
on scrolling paper.

I can see the edges on the page where I pulled off the holes along the sides which held the paper in place.

Remember those - the noisy, grinding dot matrix printers -
our first one was a narrow nine-pin - later we moved up to a wide-body machine.

Writing machines are part of our history
From the upright Royal typewriter - we bought at a GoodWill store in Baltimore when we were first married
to non-electric and electric portable typewriters
  I still have the blue Olympic portable Jim gave me for Christmas in 1968
  along with Jim's Dad's hard case portable from the 40's.
to the IBM selectric with the built in eraser - Jim bought when he opened his medical practice.
  Yep we still have that too - its great for envelopes.

to our first computer - a luggable
It was advertised as a portable but weighed in like an old sewing machine
The casing box was huge, used large floppy disks,  and the green computer screen was teeny-tiny but -- it worked.

To desktops

to laptops

to using a PDA with a folding keyboard attachment - did not have an internet connection - true - but was a great traveling typewriter - great on the train or plane and ---it fit into my purse.

and lately the iPad with the attachable keyboard - that also connects to the internet - if you can pick up a connection.

Can you tell - I love machines that write.