Poetry Scores: On the prowl to recognize what Lyndsey Scott is worth

In search of lost texts, I did a major league email archaeology project this fall, tunneling all the way back to June 2008, deleting and archiving one personal email at a time.

You find a lot of things doing something like that. One of the things you find is that you have lost a lot of things. I found that I had lost touch with the artist Lyndsey Scott. I was struck by the level of personal engagements in the emails we used to trade that we don't trade anymore.

I wrote to her about this, and she responded as one would want the old friend to respond in that situation, with the assurance that we were always connected, even when we didn't have time to act like it.

Given all this, I was pleased to receive the other day from Lyndsey a message that shows her going through a similar process, and thinking of me in the midst of it.

I am totally enjoying the scrupulous bellybutton-gazing process of recollecting and remembering pieces of that which I've scattered to the wind for the past 3+ years in STL.... I am on the prowl to live what I'm worth, part of that is recognizing it -- which for me means a bit of backtracking since I typically didn't see it, record it, or embody it fully when it came through the first time. To that aim, I'm creating a website that helps me archive and process my work so far, in this juncture of "What next"..........

My computer ate the images of late 2008 --- so I don't have a good shot of "The house of God is also a black hole" - which I believe you own. Would you be willing to snap a fresh one and send it my way?

Lyndsey has been a regular contributor to the annual Poetry Scores art invitational, when we invite a mad pack of artsists to make work in response to the poem we are scoring that year, then title the work after a verbatim quote from the poem. "The house of God is also a black hole" was Lyndsey's contribution to our invitational for Nailed Seraphim by the great K. Curtis Lyle.

I do indeed own that piece, and I have indeed photographed it.

And a detail:

Tried shooting a detail with the flash:

Here is a slightly closer look at the eponymous "black hole":

I think it is fair to see some intimate contours of the feminine anatomy in this detail.

In that connection, any girl-crazy person would recall that Lyndsey (who is strikingly beautiful, apart from her many talents) really dolled up for this show. I would swear she was wearing eyelashes from the same set of material as she used for this intimate detail on the work of art I now own.

Back to our girl herself, from her "archive and process" email.

Also - I can't remember or find the title of the 2006 image?? I know that's asking a lot of archiving precision, but if anybody has that you do!

The 2006 image? That is asking for a lot of archiving precision. I thought it might be the goliath installation she made for the Go South for Animal Index invitational, but a little imprecise researching places that show in 2007.

That means 2006 had to be the invitational for Blind Cat Black, and how could I ever forget her piece for that show? It walked out in the arms of a man named Chad Ivins. It was while I was talking to this tall, craggy-faced man that I was told he was a filmmaker, and it was out of that chance meeting that Poetry Scores came to make a movie to Blind Cat Black and the name of Chad Ivins, aka Chizmo, came to appear in Turkish media about its screening in Istanbul.

We flat burned out old Chizmo in the process of making that movie, but I will circle around now and try to find him to ask him about Lyndsey's piece from 2006. I hope he still has it.

I don't have far to seek to find Lyndsey's contribution to the 2009 Poetry Scores art invitational, for The Sydney Highrise Variations by the great Les Murray. For that piece Lyndsey did an exquisite drawing exquisitely titled "They answer something in us," which also is my collection now.