Crossing the Liminal: Why Write Poetry About Art?

Abstract

cover feature Art Poetry Since the earliest days of civilization, art and poetry have shared a symbiotic relationship. In the following section, thirteen poets take their inspiration from post-1950 visual art. Featuring WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 35 With additional online exclusives by MARJORIE AGOSÍN & ANDRÉS SÁNCHEZ ROBAYNA Curated & introduced by LAUREN CAMP CIRCE MAIA 38 HEDY HABRA 40 RAVI SHANKAR 42 LOLA CRÉÏS 45 RITA MALIKONYTE MOCKUS 46 LAUREN CAMP 48 WAFAA S. JDEED 51 52 TATIANA OROÑO 53 RAMÓN GAYA 54 EDUARDO MITRE 55 ANDRÉS SÁNCHEZ ROBAYNA 56 MARIO ARTECA 57 JOSÉ MATEOS Fiona Hall, Wrong Way Time, 2012–15 (detail), © the artist. Courtesy of the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia. Image credit: Clayton Glen. 36 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 I account for large swaths of my life by the art I’ve seen. On a trip to Dallas once, I experienced a giant Rauschenberg “combine”—pattern, color, and image, all fearlessly cozying up together. I have no reason to remember the exact location, or why I was there. It was the art that mattered, and I stood beneath it, and let it talk to me for a long time. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, a ten-part Cy Twombly series scribbled out my more organized perspective. Somewhere else, Basquiat’s crossed-out, downtown drawings. In Taos, Agnes Martin’s plain and particular lines. In Marfa, Donald Judd’s boxes. The Rodin sculptures in Paris. I could go on. What affects us in art is deeply personal : a photograph, an illustration, a style, a color. Unfolding our predilections is like choosing the best donuts (crüllers or jellyfilled ?) or the best place to vacation (Club Med or the ancient Mayan city of Tikal?). There is no best. Likewise for the makers; they choose the media and techniques that offer the right amount of tension between the strain of succeeding and the skills they possess. The painter Georgia O’Keeffe avowed, “Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words.” She invoked cattle bones and flowers with her brushes, spilling out their gleaming and elusive details so we, her audience, would look more closely at each notable moment and shadow, and find new resonances in what we already know. Though her statement was true for her, many poets have taken her paintings further—using her creations as their initial canvas and crafting magnificent written pieces. I am both artist and poet, and have spent decades in animated exchange with each medium. In both realms, I color personal references, texture feelings, and find tangible movements for each shape and pattern. Despite my endless attention to them, the two forms of expression are still mystical to me. Poetry and visual art have the ability to highlight and shadow even the smallest intimacy . Both require an “unknowing” to proceed and, I believe, to succeed. Joining the two has the potential to build an intensely evocative new thing. It gives us a chance to ask questions like Why did the artist do this? Why have I never seen in this way before? The resulting poem may help an audience understand the work. It might give a deeper awareness of the artist’s process, the reason for creating the artwork, and the situation under which it was made. Or it may diverge from the painting and enter its own world. It may sleep in the warm space left by the painting, and rise with a bit of its scent. Aldous Huxley wrote in Texts and Pretexts (1932), “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. It is a gift for dealing with the accidents of existence, not the accidents themselves. By a happy dispensation of nature, the poet generally possesses the gift of experience in conjunction with that of expression.” At whatever point a writer decides to explore a work of art with words, he or she is striving for the same thing writers always seek: an alchemy of knowledge and surprise. The completeness of the experience begins with the attention the piece commands for the writer, a connection that might not make sense for even...