Mixed-media collage of poetry and handmade paper by
Ellaraine Lockie, and watercolor / embroidery art by Phyllis Ross

Copyright © by Ellaraine Lockie and Phyllis Ross. All rights reserved.
Work appears here with permissions from both artists.

Waterfalls
threading the millpond
of the mind

Poet’s Commentary

Pollage is a word I coined for the art pieces that combine my passions for handmade papermaking, poetry, and collage. I use lifetime collections of handmade papers, postage stamps, charms, milagros, buttons, shells, rocks, feathers, pressed leaves and flowers, rubber stamps, travel memorabilia, and magazine clippings to illustrate the embedded poems. I use no glue, only paper pulp to hold the items together.

Phyllis Ross

is a graduate of the School of Industrial Arts, now known as the School of Art and Design in New York City, and she has also attended the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is a fiber artist who has worked in the fashion industry for many years and has studied with Kaffe Fasset (color and design), Constance Howard, and Jacquline Entoven.

Ellaraine Lockie’s

pollages combine handmade papermaking, poetry, and collage. They have appeared in juried art shows around the country and have been the subject of a one-woman gallery art show and several online essays and interviews. They also exist in several private art collections and have appeared in: The Centrifugal Eye, Rio Grande Review, Homestead Review, Sein Und Werden (England), Prairie Connection, Ascent Aspirations, and Alchemy. Ellaraine’s book The Gourmet Paper Maker (how to make paper with the inedible parts of fruits and vegetables) is published in six languages.

She is also widely published and awarded as a poet and essayist. Recent poems have won the 2019 Poetry Super Highway Contest, the Nebraska Writers Guild’s Women of the Fur Trade Poetry Contest, and New Millennium’s Monthly Musepaper Poetry Contest. Sex and Other Slapsticks (Presa Press, 2019) is her 14th chapbook. Earlier collections have won Poetry Forum’s Chapbook Contest Prize, San Gabriel Valley Poetry Festival Chapbook Competition, Encircle Publications Chapbook Contest, Best Individual Poetry Collection Award from Purple Patch magazine in England, and the Aurorean’s Chapbook Choice Award.

Her poems have found their way onto broadsides, buses, rented cars, bicycles, cabins, greeting cards, key chains, bookmarks, mugs, coffee-sack labels, church bulletins, radio shows, and cable TV, as well as into hundreds of national and international journals, magazines, and anthologies.

Ellaraine has been awarded multiple residencies and fellowships from both Centrum and Summer Literary Seminars, and thirty of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She also teaches writing workshops, frequently judges poetry contests, and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine Lilipoh.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Ellaraine Lockie’s page at BookThatPoet!

⚡ The Mother Tree, Germany 1860s, First Finalist in The DavenTree Writing Challenge sponsored by KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019)

⚡ The Animal Inside, ekphrastic poem by Ellaraine Lockie + photograph by Alexis Rhone Fancher, in KYSO Flash (Issue 10, Fall 2018)

⚡ Pollage Number 77, collage of poetry and hand-made paper by Ellaraine Lockie with watercolor art by Phyllis Ross, in KYSO Flash (Issue 10, Fall 2018)