PANDEMIC DIARY SERIES 2020-2021

#3 Despair

#4 Social Distance

#8 Isolation

#9 Too Close

#11 Freefall

#13 Uprising

#18 False Hope

#19 Viral Blues

#20 Antibodies

#28 Insurrection

#25 Half Life

Vaccination

FOLDING POEMS 2011- 2017

Muffled Afternoon video

Jellify

3 views: front, back and folded

Secret Alias

Dimensions:
7 15/16” X 7 15/16”
Folded dimensions:
4 7/8” X 4 7/8”

The idea for these folding poems originally appeared to me in a dream. I visualized poetry and painting in a template that would be foldable in multiple directions, allowing the reader to rearrange the words and images in acrobatic combinations. The language becomes more abstract as the poems are folded and new meanings emerge from the unintentional synchronicities of different word configurations.

The writing itself was channeled through a trance state, a practice I started in the 1980s. The words are hand-lettered and juxtaposed with abstract patterns painted in gouache on paper.

My performance of a folding poem "Elongated Muffled Afternoon" can be viewed on Vimeo:

Toy Mirage

Wakeup Call

BOOKS

Earth After Earth video trailer

Toni Simon’s Earth After Earth, like classic apocalyptic writing, not only offers oblique prophecies of what’s to come, but captures the present, through the perspective of its alchemical, twilight language and dreamlike art. This verbal/visual text portrays a midnight world full of psychic threat yet how beautiful its demons and angels, its “forest people”, “clairvoyant asteroids” and other denizens appear as they glow fiercely within its Dantesque, black lit landscapes. The end may be nigh, but it’s sublime

--Jerome Sala

In her little book Earth After Earth Toni Simon has created a universe that quietly reveals itself, as when in the solitude of dreaming we fracture emotions into condensed images and wake to interpret them, only to find that they've already changed shape. Each sentence is a revelation, as when in the mind of reading we imagine sentences forming that take us to another place. When mind, time, and eyes converge at a point of knowing then you can be sure that "even in the dark we know ourselves to be inhabited."

--Kristin Prevallet

Earth After Earth is an enigmatic prose poetry text which resonates with classic sci-fi futurism and oddness, yet when attended to closely, provokes and informs us by imagining the alternative realities of an altered present. Earth After Earth proposes that the other place and time is poetry--explored to the imaginal limits. Earth After Earth is illustrated with Toni Simon’s quixotic black and white drawings which figure as portholes to a dream.

—Kim Lyons

Surreal new-sentence prescient-sci-fi psychedelia

--Nada Gordon (Third Factory/Notes to Poetry 2012)

Contradicta: Aphorisms
by Nick Piombino
Green Integer, 2010, 167pp

With over 80 illustrations by Toni Simon

available from SPD @ $12.95

Contradicta Video

COLLABORATION WITH JOANNA FUHRMAN

PAPER SCULPTURE FOR DEAR AIR

How many Times? (video with Joanna Fuhrman)

Collaboration with poet Joanna Fuhrman:

In our mixed-media literary project Dear Air, Egyptian gods, stripped of their context and role, wander various New York City neighborhoods trying to figure out where they belong, how to make sense of what they have lost, and how to get along with one another.

In the first step of our project, I construct three-dimensional, small-scale figurines out of paper, modeled on Egyptian gods. I then paint them with abstract, graphic details. We then take the little gods out into different neighborhoods and take hundreds of photographs of them. We select eight to ten images, which become the basis for a series of poems written by Joanna Fuhrman.

We have created picture/poem serial combinations in Lower Manhattan, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Chinatown, the Reversible Destiny Studio, Red Hook and Gowanus.