Officially introducing my poetry project: Handwritten Reveries

On Steemit I’m prone to post about an array of artistic things, such as poetry and prose, which are sometimes accompanied by original illustrations. If you’ve scrolled through my blog, you might have seen some (I usually label them with “illustrated poetry” in the post title). These are part of a new project I started recently: a series of sketched confessions, entitled Handwritten Reveries, illustrated poetry in which I depict one or two lines of an original poem, handwritten and illustrated with pencil, ink, and/or watercolor. It’s still early in the project, but I hope to grow it into something bigger - my goal is a collection of 100. I first started the project posting on Instagram (you can check it out here) in December.

The idea behind the series is to capture some small quip, snippet of a poem, or powerful statement in quote form, and express it as tangibly as possible. But it’s quite a challenge, after all how does one make words tangible and what qualifies an image as tangible when the final output is a digital post? You can say that is the ultimate goal of Handwritten Reveries - to investigate what it takes to make poetry tangible, tactile… how to make the reader feel as if they can reach out and touch the words and feel them physically in a visual sense. I think it stems back to my synesthesia , which is basically this quality where experiencing one sense can trigger an automatic, involuntary experience in another one of the five senses (touch, sight, hearing, sound, taste). In my cases, the senses often blend in a way such that when I see an image I have an immediate association with something visual or audible, and when I feel things, there’s an image in my head that basically tries to capture what that feeling is like. Sometimes getting the image out of my head and onto paper can be challenging though, almost like when you are waking up from a dream and you have a few split seconds to capture the events that were unfolding before they are lost forever.

So this series aims to do just that: capture those moments of what a feeling is that was felt and express the visual version of that feeling. My favorite Steemit critic @cryptosharon put it best in her own words, with an interest in “the acoustic image they create in my brain….they're like minimalistic extracts of beauty.”

Check out Handwritten Reveries on Instagram.

See illustrations from the series that I’ve posted on Steemit:

"Maybe I love you more…"
"I want to love like a wildflower"
"And there you were…"
"And if I can’t find the words to say…"
"I could be your eternal audience"
"This is what love looks like"