A Cage interlude

Today we received this wonderful book at my library. The subtitle is "John Cage's Complete Watercolors," but it's specifically about work he did at the Mountain Lake Workshop in southwestern Virginia.

The book is especially significant to me because my friend and collaborator (mentor, even) Stephen Addiss was involved with Cage's work at Mountain Lake Workshop. Wearing my other hat as the book artist behind blue bluer books, I've been neck-deep recently in producing 2 editions of an artist's book based on some of Steve's haiku. It's called stitching speechless. Given Steve's close relationship with Cage -- who in turn was HIS friend, collaborator and mentor -- our artist's book owes much to him, right down to the random methods we use to burn parts of certain pages, and to draw on them with smoke.

So for me, the book mentioned above was the perfect serendipitous find today to keep the flames burning to continue making progress on stitching speechless. (Please stay tuned to my blue bluer books blog for continued updates on that progress...)

Over here on "no more moon poems", though, today's poem is inspired by Cage's smoke-and-watercolor paintings in The sight of silence:


caught
on paper

smoke
is permanent

water
solid

the rocks
hollow
and empty