A friend and long-time inter-art collaborator, Barbara Nathanson, sent me an email with a link to an interview she gave recently about her art and career. The interviewer asks about her process, and in answering, Barbara explains:
"I like to work with the serendipity of chance. It keeps presenting new imagery to work with and an excitement of discovery. I layer a texture mix, let it dry, paint it, sand it, add another layer of texture mix, dry, paint, repeat until the imagery/surface “becomes” what it is meant to become."
This statement virtually jumped off the page at me! Accounting for the analogy of layering textures as a repeating process, I can say that Barbara describes my own writing process perfectly. So often in Wednesdays@One commentary, I and my fellow poetry writers confirm how a poem builds "until the imagery/surface 'becomes' what it is meant to become." Only, we don't put "becomes" inside quotation marks--we accept that poems will become what they become, that our skills and talents as writers of them lie mainly in our ability to nudge and prod, shape and direct, but otherwise get out of the way of that becoming. Our creativity has as much to do with "letting" the poem become as it has to do with "making" the poem.
All of this "letting," of course, says something about our relationship to art, and particularly to poetry. We are as much midwife as progenitor. (What should go without saying here--but I'll say it anyway--is that the more experience we garner as midwives, the better we understand the tradition of midwifery and its history, the better midwives we are.)
Barbara and I worked together from about 1993 until 2003-4 on a poetry-to-painting project that resulted in more than 150 poems and dozens of paintings. Here's how it worked. It began with a shoebox full of old plastic microfiches used to catalog a bookstore's inventory. (A bookstore in downtown L.A. was converting its inventory to electronic digital files from thousands of these microfiches.) Barbara, ever the enterprising worker of materials, wanted to repurpose some of these cards as an art installation for an upcoming show and asked me to create a "found poem" from some of the contents, that she might post as part of the installation.
Well, I failed miserably, after a weekend of trying to come up with something I'd feel comfortable sharing with an art public. I'd gleaned over 150 "lines" of text from these microfiches that just read like a list of words, hardly like lines of a poem. Sleeping on it, I realized however that what I'd actually created was not a poem of 150+ lines, but a list of 150+ titles of possible poems, poems to be written . . . somehow, someday. With apologies, I admitted my failure to Barbara but proposed a new project--to begin making poems from some of those titles, poems from which she might find inspiration for new paintings.
Lucky for me, Barbara a) had already given up on the first idea of an installation, and b) was intrigued by the idea of a longer-term collaboration. And so I got busy. And so Barbara got busy. And so a long and fruitful collaboration was born. I don't know whether Barbara maintains any of the original collaboration on her website (check it out under the link provided to right, in the "Take a Look" section of this blog), but you'll at least get an idea of the style and breadth of her art.
All of which leads me to a new project for W@1: collaborations. This project likely will take a while, so let's put a deadline on it of December 15, 2020 (in time to produce holiday gifts?). Find an art and an artist with whom you'd like to work and who'd like taking on a small art-to-art project. Propose a way of working together, such as exchanging existing work and responding to it via your particular art; prompting each other with a theme or an image; or some other approach.
The catch is this: your collaboration must produce something new on both sides. So, for example, you can't just go out to some friend's web site, find a painting, then write an ekphrastic piece about it. No, no, no, no, no! Both you and your collaborator must produce something new from the collaboration. (This is why we're giving ourselves the rest of the summer and all of fall to complete this project.)
You might have a collaborator in mind already and might be able to get a jump on things, and might even produce something by next week! But my suggestion is this . . . give it some thought. Take your time. Invite some back and forth between you and your collaborator--collaborate!--see what happens. Sometimes, Barbara's painting would respond to a single image, even a musical phrase in a poem I'd sent to her. Sometimes, after seeing a painting, I'd write a different poem influenced by color or line or image or material. A color might evoke a memory or a feeling or a sensual experience that would serve as the starting point for a poem, and the finished product would appear to have nothing to do with the painting at all. My poems were not "about" her paintings, nor were her paintings "about" my poems.
In an area like RTP, you shouldn't have any trouble finding an artist with whom you can work. Have fun!
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