Voila

Our team (Team 1, I think: Robert R., Robert H., Seth, and Patrick) decided to make the subject of arrival our first topic of collaboration. Since we are a hybridized group, certainly in an hybridized community, we allowed our poem to be itself a hybridized form involving lyric, narrative, and prose. Seth is a native to the area, so his arrival is more of a coming to terms with a place, and a history. Our final resulting poem, situated in 4 stanzas, ended up covering a wide range of arrivals involving a wide array of image systems and interactions both visceral and ephemeral. We'll likelt try infusing more of our lines within one another in furture collaborations, but for this piece we decided how our own poetic voices would initially arrive at one another, and will eventuallt be worked into one another, as a a person would more naturally adjust to a new space. Form should always inform content, right?

Much Love,

Robert.

Billy the Kid

In my experience Billy the Kid is the ikon that most people from all over the world associate with Las Cruces and Mesilla. I find it ironic that this punk who was basically a murder has been commercialized so successfully in Mesilla and elsewhere into a harmless hero on a coffee cup. My piece juxtaposes images of this commercialized Kid with the current massacre that is going on just across the Rio Grande. There is also the amusing accident that Billy Garrett is now running for county commissioner (he is no relation to Pat Garrett who was commissioned to kill the Kid). I managed to distill a found poem from all these elements stirred in a pot.

Jeanine

Since our group is working with photography right now in various forms, I took some pictures around town on Saturday, namely landscapes and some great shots of the sunset. I decided to work with one gnarly picture capturing whirling clouds above the city as the sun went down. Being a transplant to the area from other urban realms, I've already learned a lot about Las Cruces and have a lot of ideas as to what to capture next and write about. Here's another cool shot from that evening.

Team 3: first week

Team 3 (Jeanine, Tim, Aaron and Adam) met up at Spirit Winds on Monday to share our work in progress thus far. We all brought photos we took from around Las Cruces or collages composed of multiple pictures. Our approach to the project is to take various pictures from around the area and write verse in accordance to it, especially in terms of internal/external landscape or just reflections stirred up by the images. As we compile images and poems, we will see if they start to form any themes or subcategories. We are also open to incorporating other mediums. So far, the project has been fun and creative for us and we look forward to developing our ideas further.

What remains (my response to photos of Mesilla)

What remains

Walk along these cobbles

drag yourself from

point to point in this well lit fort

know you are a transient

here for the now

and your now is simply

perception’s point -

look close

search for the air

breathed by

Pat Garrett

or Billy the Kid

or the Apache

whose land

is whose land

is whom

what remains

these stones

these brush strokes

to be filled in by tourist

or

I went to the plaza to see

but no one remembers -

the signs tell me things

but they are out of time

Things that reflect light

are left over

scattered

I do not know what these spaces are made of

What materials go into a place

this place

What refuse was buried here

before our truth is scratched

What can be seen clearly in the shot

is what was never there

it is our time,

haunted by your idea of image

conflated with

my need

to ascribe

meaning.

floydd michael elliott

Week One: Pockets of LC first glance

Alameda Depot ca. 1910

Alameda Depot ca. 2010

The Alameda Depot is my first pocket. It is fitting, as 2010 is the 100th anniversary of it's existence,  that I ruminate on a place that reverberates the past, the present, and potential future of Las Cruces on many levels. A hub of early Las Cruces that was a portal to and from, letting passengers shuttle off to ABQ or Santa Fe, El Paso and beyond.

The last passenger trains from the depot were in 1968 but its restoration is a reminder of what was and is possible. This Depot was the hub of expansion in the past, a vitalizer in many ways. Going forward I can't help but imagine, as maybe they did a hundred years ago the possibilities.

These pockets around town that we spotlight are, for me, all in some way related to high hopes, failed hopes, places we might escape from or escape to. Maybe the pockets simply raise questions of nostalgia versus modernity that could be pondered in Pioneer Park (that resides just a few blocks away from the depot) on a beautiful fall day. All have importance both communal and/or personal for varied reasons. For me this exploration merely shines the light on and maybe gives a little insight to these places. Less am I trying to nail any one place down but more to just say, "here are some thoughts... make of it what you will." That leaves its ultimate designation, its importance or lack there of up to the the individual who stumbles upon or hides in his or her Las Cruces pocket.

Documenting through the Senses: Our First Exercise

And so it begins...and so beautifully too!

For the first week, our group split into pairs. Two people went west to Mesilla Plaza and two went East to the Organs. ...or so we planned. With one group member falling prey to gravity, the Mesilla trip seems to be postponed. And surprise, surprise: the lovely Dripping Springs costs money to enter. As the sign boldly says: "No Exceptions!" So while Heather detoured to A-mountain to collect the sounds of LC from that beautiful location, I wasn't so smart. I blithely drove past the waiting fee envelopes and quickly clicked away with my trusty cell phone. The photographs, a few of which I included, don't begin to capture how breathtaking the fight between cloud shadow and sunlight was today on the boulders.

If you haven't been to Dripping Springs, the trip is worth it--even if you have to pay the fee. Still, when the white truck pulled in (I'm assuming to come after me for not paying, though I might just be super paranoid), I pulled out speedily, if reluctantly.

This afternoon we traded sound for visual, and we are off to write based on only one sense. I'll let you know how the writing part turns out soon!

Adam's Experience

After meeting with my group members, I feel confident that we are working on something special here. For my part, I was able to think of Las Cruces as a versatile environment--namely while being at Young Park, a beautiful park in a desert city. I focused on structure, nature, and somehow these translated into a strange conflation of body parts and park parts.

-Adam

First Day

Today in class we looked at a variety of approaches at writing about a place. I wanted people involved to think about a few things: material culture, Prevallet's idea of investigative poetics, how our home, Las Cruces and the border on which we live, is a contested space. An apt metaphor for this region might be the large equestrian statue at the El Paso airport, a 44 ft tall sculpture of Juan de Onate, a conquistador famous for abuse of native populations. The statue these days is called "The Equestrian" since, as the project dragged on, more and more information about Juan de Onate complicated the desire to celebrate him. Unveiled in 2006, it is a source of controversy.