As a librarian who has worked with historic collections, dust has been a feature in my working life and finds its way into my poems quite regularly.
I’ve never seen anything quite as dramatic or sudden as this, though - building work in the basement of UCL’s Grant Museum threw up clouds of plaster dust at the beginning of the month.
Marcel Duchamp was also inspired by dust and its strange qualities. Man Ray’s photograph Dust Breeding shows part of Duchamp’s process in making his Large Glass - dust was allowed to lie on the glass for over a year, before Duchamp wiped it mostly clean, but fixed some to the cones that formed part of the work.
And ultimately, of course, dust is composed of little bits of us - of our dead skin cells, hair, other dry detritus - a little, though not exactly, like the tumble dryer lint in Gabriel Orozco’s Lintels.
For tomorrow’s prompt, either write a poem incorporating dust of some kind, or incorporating something random that features in your daily professional life.
