The Open Corner: May #1
It’s always great when our artists decide to riff off each other. The idea for the month’s series came to Kasia after reading something our first Open Corner artist wrote. Check it out below.
May artist: Kasia Nikhamina
Title: SWARM
The New York Times | Thursday, May 3, 2012
From Kasia:
Emma Assin kicked off The Open Corner back in March with a sketch of a Victorian. She wrote, “My only gripe is that I don’t actually live in one of these beauties!” Me, too! Since Victorians are always crowding my mind, I thought I’d let them take the stage for my first installment here on The Open Corner.
I never buy the paper but I like to pick up others’ discarded copies, and I am often inspired by headlines. Last week I happened to have the Home and Fashion sections of the Times, so I cut out all the words in the headlines and arranged them into this poem.
As I was cutting out the words, I was thinking about the Dutch name for Brooklyn–Breukelen, which means “broken land.” Two weeks ago Ilya and I volunteered at Added Value, a farm in Red Hook, where I helped build a new bed for planting strawberries. I was struck by the neat straight lines of the bed. Newspaper headlines remind me of the orderliness of the farm. In the collage, I disrupt that order a bit.
Hope it’s as much fun to read, as it was to make!
About Kasia
Kasia Nikhamina writes The Mayor’s Hotel, a creative prose blog that has been mistaken for a real hotel by at least one well-intentioned Italian.
Kasia’s first play, Redbeard & Domicella, appeared at the Brick Theater in 2010. She is working on a new play, Nixon out of office, and “Pícaro,” a coming-of-age story. Her work is often performed at Hearth Gods, a reading series in the East Village.
She was born in Kalisz, Poland, but has lived in New York since she was five. She and her husband, Ilya, moved to Ditmas Park about five years ago.
What is The Open Corner? Find out here.
Interested in participating? Email Avi here.
And an extra little nugget from Kasia:
“In the spirit of collage, and found poems, tell me about the most memorable thing you bought or sold at a garage/stoop sale in the neighborhood. I may use it in next week’s Open Corner!”
So leave your tales of things memorable in the comments and check back here next Wednesday.
