After my last rant, I took a break and dove into the #100DayProject. Supported by Lindsay Jean Thomson, the goal of the project, which began on February 23 this year, is to choose a project and work on it for 100 days. While Thomson’s focus is about art, I don’t think it has to be. The main purpose is making the commitment to creating something everyday.
My project this year comes out of twin desires: to become more skilled at gel plate printing and to read more poetry. I am tracking my progress on Substack, as that is where the main project community is housed. I am also posting pictures to Flickr.
I was considering using Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope” is the thing with feathers next. The Poetry Foundation included the poem in a collection of poems of hope and resilience, created in 2017. I found Claudia Rankine’s poem, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: “Cornel West makes the point…”, a powerful meditation on life as a black person during George W. Bush’s election. She references Dickinson:
“I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life can not matter. Or, as there are billions of lives, my sadness is alive alongside the recognition that billions of lives never mattered. I write this without breaking my heart, without bursting into anything. Perhaps this is the real source of my sadness. Or, perhaps, Emily Dickinson, my love, hope was never a thing with feathers. I don’t know, I just find when the news comes on I switch the channel. This new tendency might be indicative of a deepening personality flaw: IMH, The Inability to Maintain Hope, which translates into no innate trust in the supreme laws that govern us. Cornel West says this is what is wrong with black people today—too nihilistic. Too scarred by hope to hope, too experienced to experience, too close to dead is what I think.”
Claudia Rankine, “Cornel West makes the point… (pp. 21-23)” from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. Copyright © 2004 by Claudia Rankine.