Velvet Foot

Remember all those orange stump mushrooms? I spore printed them. Since I didn't know what colour the spores would be, I needed both white/coloured paper. So I used the end papers in my battered reading copy of my Hump and a brand new copy of Lisa Pasold's The Riperian. Based on the white spores, I identified the orange stump mushrooms as Flammulina velutipes, commonly known as the Velvet Foot.

SPORED: The Book of Wonders

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From page 174, "When Man Began to Live," from The Book of Wonders (Toronto: Bureau of Industrial Education, 1916).

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I bought this encyclopedia of sorts at the Symposium on Manitoba Writing this past spring. 

The cover is purple and features an owl with gold foil eyes staring down at the earth.

Its subtitle is: Wonders of Nature and the Wonders Produced by Man. Its sub-subtitle is: Gives Plain and Simple Answers to the Thousands of Everyday Questions That Are Asked And Which All Should Be Able To, But Cannot Answer.

And in addition to answering an array of questions - p. 174 includes Where Do Living Things Come From?, What is Inorganic Matter? Where Did Life Begin on Earth? When Did Man Begin to Live? Why Must Life Be Reproduced? - it also includes mini-essays on topics such as The Story in a Railroad Engine and The Story in a Drink of Water.

Having put the Edison manuscript aside for the moment, I haven't been working from this book very much of late. But it's a fascinating text...and so, I decided to spore it.

SPORED: Eden Robinson

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From Eden Robinson's The Sasquatch at Home (University of Alberta Press, 2011).

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I've had a thing for Eden Robinson's writing ever since I read her Monkey Beach back in 2002 or 3. It was dark Aboriginal fantasy, and like nothing I'd ever read. Similar to Neil Gaiman, that I was also reading at the time, but Canadian and somehow completely fresh (and bleak and sad) compared to Gaiman's retelling of European myths.
 
In late 2005, I managed to snag her third book, Blood Sports, from the Winnipeg Free Press' pile of review copies. It was dark, again, but completely different from Monkey Beach...

I've been waiting for another Robinson novel for a few years now, but when I saw that U of A Press had published her Henry Kreisel Lecture, The Sasquatch at Home: Traditional Protocols and  Modern Storytelling, I had to have it.

At 50 pages, it's a slim volume. But it has french flaps. And the most awesome cover image ever. The Sasquatch at Home indeed!

So while I usually spore poems, and poems by people I know, I made an exception for this text. Because it's knocking around my head. And because I saw three magnificent boulevard mushrooms one day when I was walking to pick up the girl from daycare.

(I also spored for a few other texts, which I'll post in the coming weeks...)

SPORED: Darryl Joel Berger

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From Darryl Joel Berger's short fiction "Beulah" in his Punishing Ugly Children (Killick Press, 2010).

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I've been collaborating with visual artist/writer DJ Berger the last few months. Which has been nifty...but our exchange has been strictly one-way: he sends me artworks, I send him poems.

But Darryl's also a writer, so I thought I'd bring his words into our realm, if only by desecrating them with mushrooms.

Working with fiction is different from poetry. Usually I pick something nature-y, or something COMPLETELY non-nature-y, and then play with what the mushrooms cover up. Because some mushrooms rain spores down in profusion and others, depending on their age, do not.

So I can control when I remove the mushroom but largely I wait and see what's what. An evening of pulpy mushrooms-on-paper will usually do it...

Anyways, I was happy to see that this piece was thematically right, given the boulevard volunteers, but also the piece's use of the page (i.e. it was short).

Oh Beulah. Buck up.

SPORED: Brenda Schmidt

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From Brenda Schmidt's poem "A Field of Round Bales" in her Grid  (Hagios Press, 2012).

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This is the second spore print I've done on a poem of Brenda's. Let's just say that I'm honoured to desecrate her work. With mushrooms.

These ones are from the glorious boulevard mushrooms that have sprouted up this week. I'm off to the forest tomorrow to see what's what but for now, it's been good to see how green - and mushroomy - the neighbourhood has gotten.

SPORED: Robert Kroetsch

From Robert Kroetsch's poem "Making an Impression" in his Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait (University of Alberta Press, 2010).

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So this is an ugly spore print, from last-chance mushrooms I found on the boulevard instead of in my precious forest. And I think it's right that it's ugly, sort of jagged and shapeless, because that's how this poem in particular makes me feel.

Because Kroetsch died by the side of the road, after an accident. And I'm still (selfishly) sad that he's dead, despite not having really known him.

So RIP Robert Kroetsch. And RIP Michael Van Rooy, whose face peered down from the wall at McNally Robinson when I was there for an event last week.

And RIP to M's grandmother and Aa's great-grandmother, Julia Onody, who died Thursday night, her daughters holding her arthritis-gnarled hands.

SPORED: Jenna Butler

From Jenna Butler's poem "Petroglyph Trail" in her aphelion (NeWest, 2010).

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When the ONLY place, perversely, that mushrooms are growing is the boulevard in front of a neighbour's house...you make (figurative) hay.

Which means picking a few from the edges of the inky clumps and making spore prints! On poems!

First up is a gory print on a poem from Edmonton poet/publisher Jenna Butler. After Winnipeg and maybe Regina, I think Edmonton has one of the dreamiest poetry communities. So many good poets!

Still to come is a spore print on a poem from Robert Kroetsch's Too Bad. Which I'm saving for a (figuratively) rainy day.

SPORED: Bren Simmers

From Bren Simmers' poem sequence "Weather Observation Record: Cline Lookout" in her Night Gears (Wolsak and Wynn, 2010).

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I picked exactly two mushrooms on the walk described below. And promptly ripped a page out of Night Gears, which I'd been re-reading at the cabin, and placed it on the woodstove in one corner of the living room.

The next morning, as we were packing up to go to the city, I nearly cooed with pleasure when I saw what the mushrooms had been doing to the paper. Such glorious ruin!

Given Bren's subject matter in much of Night Gears - time spent in fire lookouts in Alberta, a road trip north and her work as a park interpreter - I LIKE that this is a cabin-y spore print.

SPORED: Anna Swanson, pt. 2

Anna Swanson and her Pass Creek Tower: Solstice, from The Nights Also (Tightrope Books, 2010).

SPORED: Jonathan Ball, pt. 2

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Jonathan Ball and his poem [61], from Ex Machina (BookThug, 2009).

SPORED: Barbara Nickel, pt. 2

Barbara Nickel and her poem Annular, from Domain (House of Anansi Press, 2007).

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Another attempt at spore printing, another failure. So I left the mushrooms on the pages, in the hopes that they would at least rot interestingly. And then, instead of decomposing, they dried.

So I left them on the windowsill in the hopes that I'd figure it out.

And then, when my daughter was painting, I had an idea. Potato printing! Except with a mushroom!

But only one of them was stiff enough to survive painting and pressing on paper. The others sort of crunched. So I used the same purplish mushroom on all three.

I'm determined to keep going until I have an actual spore print on poems from all three of these poets. But until then...

SPORED: Anna Swanson

Anna Swanson and her The smell of heat, from The Nights Also (Tightrope Books, 2010).

SPORED: Jonathan Ball

Jonathan Ball and his poem [57], from Ex Machina (BookThug, 2009).

SPORED: Barbara Nickel

Barbara Nickel and her poem Annular, from Domain (House of Anansi Press, 2007).

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So I mentioned that I had attempted to do spore prints last week. And that the mushrooms I picked had white spores and so didn't produce a visible print.

I figured out this was likely to be my outcome as the mushrooms wilted on the windowsill, so I pulled out my camera.

So these are resultant spore prints, just ones overly um, influenced by the notion of palimpsest.

Heh.

SPORED: Neglect

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This gory pinwheel is what happens when you neglect a spore print, leaving the mushroom to decompose on your careful verses...

Imagining the wrath of Tracy/Brenda/Kerry/Gillian - and because I had a veritable spore print production line happening, what with the bounty of four books' worth of poetry and a lapful of gilled mushrooms - I carefully removed mushrooms from poems before they turned into...well, fungal matter.

Hence the clean spore prints I posted, lo these last few months.

But when it came to spore printing one of my own poems, all bets were off, as I'm bad at sustaining anger at myself. And so the mushroom slowly flattened and dried out on my poor poem.

I think if it had smelled, I would have got to it sooner...but rationalizations of my neglect aside, there I was with a liquified mushroom and an obscured poem.

I left it where it was for a while longer, thinking that really, it couldn't get any worse. Eventually, I removed it from the windowsill and picked at the mushroom crust half-heartedly.

Then it spent some time on the stairs to the second floor, where semi-important papers season before being added to another pile in my office upstairs.

But somewhere along the line, I started to appreciate the beast a little.

So I'm posting it.

The text, though you can barely read it, is from my poem Toddle, which is currently on the bottom of the pile at the CBC Literary Award offices. Okay, the CBC Literary Award cubicle.

But still. Maybe this spore-printed-call will generate a shortlisted-response.

Couldn't hurt, eh?

SPORED: Kerry Ryan

Owl survey from The Sleeping Life (The Muses' Company, 2008) by Kerry Ryan.

SPORED: Gillian Wigmore

From the title page of Gillian Wigmore's Soft Geography (Caitlin Press, 2007).

(Gilly and her book are the freshly minted winners of 2008 ReLit Award for poetry, "the country's pre-eminent literary prize recognizing independent presses," G&M.)

(Yay Gilly!)

SPORED: Tracy Hamon

Glass House from this is not eden (Thistledown Press, 2005) by Tracy Hamon.

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).