Here are the last of the drawings originally published on Instagram (@mlevacy) for the Inktober 2016 challenge. While I missed a couple of days throughout the month it was nice to devote the time each night to a drawing. I got more into it than I though and realized that – daily – I don’t carve out enough time like this. I also realized just how much I let exhaustion cause me to make excuses for not taking the time I have off to make art. I’m a shitty artist while I’m teaching – all of my energy goes into it and there’s really very little left for my own practice sometimes. This is something I need to work on. It feels good to have a more regular practice again and I am going to try to keep it up.
Without further delay (since it’s already been over a month) here are the remaining illustrated poetry pen and ink drawings from October 20 – 31:
Day 20:
“The shadows of the clouds / pass through him, as though space / were slowly thinking thoughts for him.” From “Rhonda, early 1913” by Rilke
Day 21:
“The ghosts swarm. / They speak as one / person. Each / loves you. Each / has left something / undone.” From “Undone” by Rae Armantrout
Day 22:
“We feel everything hovering / on the verge of becoming itself.” From “Owl and Pussycat, Some Years Later” by Margaret Atwood
Day 24:
“For we are only the rind and the leaf. / The great death, that each of us carries inside, / is the fruit. / Everything enfolds it.” From “The Book of Hours” by Rilke
Day 29:
“So she broke herself / to bits, / but the sense / of having coming full circle / could not be eliminated.” From “Thrown” by Rae Armantrout
Day 30:
“At the bottom, / the ancient one, / tangled root of all that has been, / forgotten fountain left unseen.” From Rilke’s “Sonnets” part one, XVII
Day 31:
“Now I am ready to lay myself down / on the earth, to listen to the instructions / for how to talk of love and land, to sing / of home in the horrible years, and to fill / my language, like the stars do, / with the light, anyway, of a future tense.” From “The Black Maria” by Arocelis Girmey
I am looking forward to next year. I’m considering a year-long challenge but I’m not confident that I could keep it up! It would be very difficult – a month was very hard and I wasn’t very successful in that I missed about 7-8 days overall. While I’d love to be the person who completes a year-long challenge, maybe I’ll just try to do a monthly challenge again… there is a lot to be said for making oneself commit to something like this but it’s important to set achievable goals (at least that’s what I constantly tell my students when they try to bite off more than they can chew… I should probably listen to my own advice, right?).
Cry The Bird 