Things Seemed to be Breaking, visual poetry by Stuart Kestenbaum

things seemed to be breaking visual poems

Stuart Kestenbaum

d e e r b ro o k ed itio n s

published by Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542 Cumberland, ME 04021 deerbrookeditions.com issuu.com/deerbrookeditions

first edition © 2021 by Stuart Kestenbaum All rights reserved ISBN: 978-1-7368477-0-1 Book design by Jeffrey Haste All erasure images, including the cover, are © by Stuart Kestenbaum

List of Images A Blessing America the Beautiful Arise Artist’s Statement At Last Beware Bible Studies Blessed Are the Peacemakers Bottom Line Comparative Religion Cradle of Civilization Darwin’s Journal Don’t Start Early Warning Sign Elegy Enlightenment Arrives Everyday Everything Figuratively First Commandment Forgiveness Giant Step Give Some Away God’s Journal Day One Guide to Meditation Here Come the Poets High and Mighty How About Now? How to Be a Poet How to Love How Trouble Starts Join the Club Let Us Pray Listen Love Thy Neighbor Memoir Metaphor Modern Times

Mourner’s Kaddish O Brave New World Open Heart Oxymoron Peace on Earth Peace Process Perchance to Dream Read It and Weep Redaction Repair the World Same Old Story Silence Slippery Slope Speed It Up The Rest Doesn’t Matter Therapy Forever To Do List Today’s News Today’s the Day Waiting for a Miracle What Else Can You Do? What to Pray for Who Will Fix It? Wisdom of Dorothy

for Susan

Visual Object as Poem I began making blackout poems when I was coteaching a workshop that combined visual arts and writing with visual artist Susan Webster at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina in 2016. One of our exercises was to create a piece of writing by placing a template over a page from an old discarded paperback book, isolating phrases and words. I had never worked like this myself, but Susan suggested it as a way for our students to create language to combine with visual art.

I decided to work along with the class, and after I had blacked out words, it occurred to me to add rubber-stamped text to the mat above and below. I remember the first one. The words I left on the page were “even a small pond.” I stamped the word Thoreau’s above the rectangle of text and Dream below it.

In that moment I could see it as a call and response.

The two texts could speak to each other to create an emotional synthesis. In six words I was by the shore of Walden Pond.

After I returned home to Maine from Penland, I got a few books from the Take It or Leave It Building at the Deer Isle Transfer Station—our local repository for items we’re not interested in keeping but don’t want to throw away—and removed random pages.

I’d slide my template over the page, wait, slide, wait, slide, until a group of words began to join themselves in my mind.

As a poet, other than making line and stanza breaks, the visual thinking isn’t a part of my writing. This body of work has given me a way to create visual objects. Blacking out the majority of the text creates

a redacted look—as if I’m working for a government agency that oversees metaphors. It also evokes for me something that is present in haiku—where the expected and unexpected can meet in a few words and become something else.

Each piece is its own meditation. The words that remain and the words that are spoken back. The space in between.

Stuart Kestenbaum

Previous Publication Credits: Hole in the Head Review: Mourner’s Kaddish, Same Old Story, Slippery Slope, What Else Can You Do?, Wisdom of Dorothy The Sun: Blessed Are the Peacemakers, How Trouble Starts, Modern Times, Redaction Union of Maine Visual Artists Journal: Metaphor Acknowledgments Thanks to Monson Arts for providing the time and space to work on some of these pieces, to Jeffrey Haste for his longtime support of my writing and his support of this new body of work, and to Susan Webster, who encouraged me to think visually and trust my instincts.

About the Author Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of five collections of poems, most recently How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions 2019), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press). He was the host of the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here and the host/curator of the podcasts Make/ Time and Voices of the Future. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021.

Former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser has written: “Stuart Kestenbaum writes the kind of poems I love to read, heartfelt responses to the privilege of having been given a life. No hidden agendas here, no theories to espouse, nothing but life, pure life, set down with craft and love.”