Ruth Bavetta

Our featured poet this month is a multi-talented, creative force in the poetry community. Visit the Blue Heron Speaks page to read three of Ruth Bavetta’s poems.

Ruth is also a talented visual artist who combines her artwork and poetry into a form she calls, Visual Poetry. Visit the Visual Poetry page of her website to view these works of word art.

In these hybrid pieces I combine my two loves, poetry and art. The idea is built on the poetry of “erasure,” eliminating words from a piece of prose to expose the poem within.

I’m heavily influenced by medieval manuscripts, with their gold leaf and multicolored embellishments. The pages are from old out-of-copyright novels, but because such books are printed on acid-laden paper, they are already yellowing and brittle. Even displayed behind UV glass, they would probably crumble after some years. To prevent that, I do not work on the pages themselves, but make a high quality scan of each page, which I print on drawing paper. I then work on these scans with a variety of media, including inks, colored pencils, watercolors, metallic paint, collage and indelible markers.

Ruth Bavetta’s poems have been published in Rattle, Nimrod, Tar River Review, North American Review, Spillway, Hanging Loose, Rhino, Poetry East, and Poetry New Zealand, among others, and is included in the anthologies Twelve Los Angeles Poets and Wait a Minute; I Have to Take off My Bra. She has published two books, Fugitive Pigments and Embers on the Stairs. A third book, No Longer at this Address, will appear in 2014. She loves the light on November afternoons, the smell of the ocean, a warm back to curl against in bed. She hates pretense, fundamentalism and sauerkraut. Learn more about this author here: http://www.ruthbavetta.com/