I have been experimenting with casting, but I haven’t used any of the pieces I’ve made yet.  My resin limbs are refusing to dry properly despite adding the correct amount of accelerator and my plaster feet won’t come out of the moulds without snapping off a toe or two.  This is what happens when you mess with magic you don’t quite understand – it’s all kind of hit and miss.  Serendipitous, if you are being poetic and overly optimistic.

So here is something made from somethings that can be pinned down.  Any mutability has been decided by the scalpel in my own hand, and whatever happens afterward when the brain puts everything together.  Again, words courtesy of good old Aurthur Mee, baby from Save the Children

I’ve been making latex moulds of limbs all week.  It requires more patience than skill – you dip whatever you want duplicated in the latex and wait for it to dry.  Half an hour later, you add some thickener to the latex, dip  again, wait an hour to dry.  This goes on and on, so you have five or six layers, and drying time gets longer, or it did when I was doing it anyway.  Oh, and I forgot to say, first you make some kind of drying rack for your pieces to suspend them from any surfaces.  I didn’t do that first, I realised I should have done that before the first dipping, after I’d done the first dipping.  So once I’d removed the ick and the newspaper, I took a piece of wood and whacked some three inch nails into it to skewer my limbs.  When I said it required more patience than skill, a little skill might have come in handy.

But anyway, I am there.  I have seven moulds of arms and legs and hands and feet and a seashell.  The seashell was an impulse mould after I’d realised I’d mixed too much latex thickener, but I am sure it will come in handy for something later.  The trickiest bit will come next…I want to cast with clear resin and to be frank, I’ve never done this before and am a bit terrified.  The resin won’t be as forgiving as the latex, and I am more likely to get into an undoable muddle, given my cack-handed approach.  I need to work out how to support the moulds while I pour the resin in, and am thinking perhaps placing them in a tub of soft sand might to the trick.  I am not an idiot, I have used my googling powers to research this.  The last piece of advice I read was to prop up the mould with paint tins.  This doesn’t sound very SAFE!  What with the chemical reaction happening as soon as you add the hardener to the resin. I can imagine the whole darn shooting match tumbled over, and caught like that in water clear resin forever as a glowing example of my ineptitude.  I think I will need a cup of tea before I take this any further.  Here’s a dog child to look at in the meantime.  He has flutterable eyelashes, but you’ll not see that in this still image.  They’re very fetching.

I have twelve Bluebeard poems altogether now.  It’s a partly autobiographical, partly fictionalised account of a woman living in Bluebeard’s house.  She doesn’t suffer the fate of all of the other women who’ve lived there – her death is slower and bloodless.  I am thinking of it in terms of a novel (I think I am, I’ve never written a novel) in that there are various strands of the whole I am playing about with, wondering how I am going to bring them together.  There is a child in the house somewhere, the woman knows it.  She thinks it is her child, but I am not so sure myself.  She spends a lot of time looking for it.

The first poem I wrote of these is called ‘Waiting for Bluebeard’, and this is in the first person.  All of the others are in the third person, yet I have been toying with the idea of having the ‘I’ morph into a ‘she’ as the woman loses touch with herself.  I thought it might have possibly happened during poem I posted on here a few days ago –  ‘At the Dress Shop’.  I have played with the idea of this poem in the first person.

At the Dress Shop

At the dress shop, the assistants bustle
as Bluebeard watches from an ornate chair.

He has phoned ahead and they come at me
with his choices, all prim on wire hangers.

I parade for him and so do all the women
in the mirrors. Every one looks older than me.

I imagine being animated by Muybridge,
the drabbest dress painted onto my body;

Bluebeard at the handle of the zoopraxiscope,
me spinning too fast for myself.

I don’t know whether to spell out in the poem which will follow this, that the ‘I’ is losing her ‘me-ness’, or whether to move seamlessly into the third person.  Whether this spelling out might be too gimmicky….Hmmm…anyway, I’ve inserted an image here to illustrate a bit how I feel….

Well, it’s been quite a while since I had a minute to write anything here.  Because of Martin’s Whistle show, our lives have been taken over somewhat, and neither of us have been finding any time to make any new work.  On Monday though, I took part in Luke Wright’s This is What a Poet Looks Like, which involves a group of poets over a period of weeks, taking it in turns to sit in The Book Hive window and write something underneath a sign with arrows pointing This is What a Poet Looks Like.  The Book Hive is a wonderful independent book shop on London Street in Norwich and I sat there for two and a half hours after teaching, on Monday afternoon.

Pretty much the whole of Norwich walks past the Book Hive, so before long people are waving and taking your photograph.  It was actually quite nice sitting in the window, watching life go by while being disengaged from it by the slight kink in the window glass, which makes some of London Street look a bit swimmy if you catch it at the right angle.  I probably could have sat there longer, but I’d become chilly and was starting to seize up.  I’d been writing – yes, really writing, most of that time so I didn’t realise I was getting cold such was my laser concentration on the job in hand.  Perhaps I should have worn a thicker cardie.

I took two nearly finished poems away with me and some notes for another one.  The two kind of finished ones are both Bluebeard poems – one I have given to Luke Wright and Sally Roe for a Nasty Little Press anthology they are putting together to mark the residency.  It is called ‘Bluebeard at the Bookshop’.  The other I will paste in below.  I know this counts as publishing, so I won’t be able to send it anywhere else, I know.  But I like to use this space as an open sketch book, so occasionally a new poem will find itself here.

At the Dress Shop

At the dress shop, the assistants bustle
as Bluebeard watches from an ornate chair.

He has phoned ahead and they come at her
with his choices, all prim on wire hangers.

She parades for him and so do all the women
in the mirrors. Every one looks older than her.

She imagines being animated by Muybridge,
the drabbest dress painted onto her body;

Bluebeard at the handle of the zoopraxiscope,
she spinning too fast for herself.

In case you were wondering, the ‘zoopraxiscope’ is the carousel thing which Muybridge created, which heralded the moving image.

I feel a bit like Dr Moreau as I scour the secondhand shops, looking for potential subjects for transformation.  Perhaps I have seen too many Toy Story films to not imagine them trying to hide behind each other on the shelves.  Yet still I persist, as you will see.  Yesterday I bought a Bagpuss, which is absolutely not for unpicking and restitching.  He sits on a high shelf as a presiding spirit.  All I need now are some singing mice.

I posted this image onto the Ink Sweat and Tears sight on the day of The Royal Wedding to accompany a short story by Sarah Bower.  The words at the back are too small to see and don’t relate to the RW, they relate to me: “The first picture shows a child balanced on a see-saw looking at a doll; the second shows how more blood goes to her brain and her head sinks when she thinks or works out a sum.”  Martin says that he is probably the smiling evil little boy holding up the sum, in this particular equation.

When Martin first met me he would try to help me with ‘simple’ maths – but numbers do not stick inside my head at all.  I can feel my brain physically hurt as the synapses try and fail to make connections in what feels like an old fashioned telephone exchange operated by a rabbit, eyes fixed on looming  headlights.  And always the wrong number, every number is the wrong number.