The tale of the stitch

About mixing stitches and words and colors and sounds. A textile artist and a writer trying to work together || by Raffaela Gottardelli & Guido Montegrandi

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Hagiwara Kyōjirō, View from a Balcony of an Early Summer Street, 1925, Translation by Kevin Shadel, 2018; in Visual Poetry of Japan 1684 – 2023, Edited by Taylor Mignon, Coedited and Designed by Rick Elizaga, Introduction by Andrew Campana, Kerplunk!, n.p., 2023, p. 17 [Art/Translation: © Kevin Shadel]

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Monk Hats

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Kitasono Katue

BLACK PORTRAIT hopelessness's alcohol's purple moustache or shadow's egg inside cage of bones distance of night of death's turtle solitude is wetted by black rain rotting in ladder shape that wall that brittle cone's lonely part

ON THE TYPOGRAPHY OF BLACK FIRE from John Solt's Shredding the Tapestry of Meaning

Each page (of Black Fire) contains only one or two lines, positioned near the top of the page. These fill approximately 5 percent of the page, thus creating a tension between the type and the blank space. If Katue had not shortened the page, the disproportion between print and emptiness would have been even more pronounced. Another striking feature of the design is that the poem titles are printed in red ink and the poems in black, thus reinforcing the theme of a "black fire."

More radical than the short line lengths and the two-color lettering is the innovative way the poems of Kuroi hi are to be read: top to bottom and right to left. For other modern Japanese poetry, the eyes move vertically and then shift a line to the left and proceed down it, and a page is read right to left; or, when the type is laid out sideways as in the case of European languages (common these days), it is read from left to right. Katue essentially throws his readers off-balance by forcing their eyes to move horizontally in the "unnatural" direction of right to left. (On the rare occasions when Japanese was written horizontally in the past, the common direction was from right to left, and in a sense Katue was reverting to an old practice; it is, however, new to modern poetry.) He was the first poet in Japanese, as far as I know, to use a "double axis" of vertically down and horizontally right to left, thus rattling the reading process. Following is a transcription into directional signs for reading (down and right to left) "Kuroi shozo" (Black Portrait), one of the most extreme poems in the double-axis mode. Each letter or number stands for one graph; letters are read vertically (top to bottom) and numbers are read horizontally (right to left), starting at the top right-hand corner. The common form by other poets could include a string of letters ad infinitum, but would never have a number higher than 1.

January 16, 2013

Above section from jacket2.org

Kitasono Katue at Knott’s Berry Farm in California

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Narrative Threads. Palestinian Embroidery in Contemporary Art, Edited by Joanna Barakat, Contributions by Rachel Dedman, Wafa Ghnaim, and Tina Sherwell, Saqi Books, London, 2025 [Common Threads Press, Norwich]

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Eliana Riva, Esami fra le rovine: la prima maturità a Gaza dal 7 ottobre, «il manifesto», July 20, 2025

Image (still from a video): Gaza students sit exams for first time since war began in October 2023, «Al Jazeera», July 19, 2025

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July 14 Woody Guthrie's birthday

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Roger Ballen, Roger the rat

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Tree of Life

Masters of Surreal Storytelling, The husband and wife team Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Their highly constructed scenes take on multiple disciplines including theater, sculpture, painting and photography.

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Lbf

I am conscious of cold

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Emil Nolde, Yellow sea with small steam ships (1946)

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Arthur Rimbaud, October 20, 1854 / 2022

(image: Arthur Rimbaud, Les Illuminations. Notice par Paul Verlaine, La Vogue, Paris, 1886, Edition of 200)

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Partial solar eclipse by John Adams Whipple, Harvard College Observatory, 1852

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rip Faith Ringgold

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Conques, abbatiale Sainte Foy, vitraux conçus par Pierre Soulages

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Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024, A Preliminary Report from Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP), February 1, 2024 (pdf here)

Plus: A Talk About Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, by ArabLit Staff, ArabLit & ArabLit Quarterly, February 8, 2024

(image: «This is what remains of my younger brother's home library. My brother is an extraordinary scholar of Arabic language grammar and was about to earn his PhD and who has introduced six books into the Arabic language rich collection of scholarly books.» – Mosab Abu-Toha)

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Torino, Italy. This picture has been shot at 6:52 pm on 15 December 2023, when the Basilica di Superga, the pyramidal profile of Monviso and the Moon were perfectly aligned. The author is Valerio Miniato and this photo has been awarded by NASA and Michigan Technology University as Astronomy Picture of the Day (25 December 2023).