A little over a year ago, I started working in an art journal using the book The Life of Poetry written in 1949 by Muriel Rukeyser. Attracted by the title, I bought it several years ago from Dawntreader’s Bookstore in Ann Arbor for $2.50. It almost immediately fell apart. the pages were dry and crisp and falling out of the paperback binding. I was unable to read it through, but I couldn’t bring myself to toss it. The book, I discovered, was a series of lectures she gave during the 1940s. I worked my way through some chapters, thinking I might use quotes as prompts for poetry. Many of the popular cultural references were not familiar to me, but enough of the book resonated that I circled passages. Later, many of these ended up on the pages of the art journal I began in July 2021. Before my accidental book purchase, I had never heard of Muriel Rukeyser, so I was excited to learn that she was a progressive, a feminist, a poet, writer, and lecturer.

My journal is leatherbound, hand-made paper from Teresa Merriman, an artist I met at the Ann Arbor Art Fair in 2019. The journal was so beautiful that I was intimidated to even begin to fill it up. And with what? I’ve been interested in art journaling since the early 90s, when I became acquainted with the Journals of Dan Elden, a young photojournalist who was killed in Mogadishu in 1993 by US Marines who thought they were bombing warlords during the famine in Somalia. I studied Dan’s journals, talked to his mother and sister about his work, and included references to it in my master’s thesis entitled “Dialogues with the Imagination.” I circled back to these ideas in the summer of 2021 when I had some time off to focus on how to fill pages.

That summer, I discovered I could work each day in a different way and embraced a process that produced consistently satisfying work over the summer and fall. I lost a bit more of the fear and perfectionism each day I worked. When I didn’t know what to do, I sifted through the pages of the Rukeyser’s book, or I sorted through scraps of colored paper. Since I hate wasting paint, I used every bit by painting squares that I could use down the road. I threw them on the floor of my studio to dry, and the floor became my palette–but a dry one I could move around. Early on, I made the decision to have fun with it. I decided that each double-page spread should be related–almost as one image. Gel medium needs time to dry, which was very helpful because I had to work in sprints; this forced me to be more patient and deliberate. Pick a palette, create a background of textures, arrange the shapes, choose the text, and embellish with metallics or spatters. I developed a vocabulary of arrows, dots, rectangles, and squares that would move the eye across the pages. I photographed my progress. There are only a few pages left, so I spent some time with Rukeyser’s poetry. I have to say I was inspired by the fact that some of it is not that good. In The Speed of Darkness, there are a few that stand out. It’s encouraging, actually. I’ve just begun reading from her collection Out of Silence and these poems are contemporary, powerful, and authentic. I plan to use some as prompts for my own. Below are a few images from my journal when it was in progress.