Poems: July 2004 Archives

Ten years ago I began a collaborative project with Barbara Nathanson, a painter living in Northridge, California, just north of Los Angeles. In short, I have been writing poems and sending them to Barbara in small batches of 15 to 30 every so often, and she has developed paintings based on her reading of the poems, at least some of them. Just this week I completed the last of the poems "set aside" specifically for this collaborative relationship.

It started in early 1994 while I was still living in the LA area. I had met Barbara one afternoon while stealing some time away from work, on one of my frequent walks around "downtown" LA. (This subject is worth another entry. LA city, is a great place for walking.) I stumbled into an artists' cooperative in an old storefront at 7th and Flower. Barbara was "sitting" it for the day.

We hit it off (partly because I'd met precious few non-finance types in downtown LA to that point) and talked about working together at some point. That point came when Barbara wanted to create an installation using discarded microfiches from the bookstore next door. She's classic in that way--scrounging for material and thinking up ingenious ways to reify or re-visualize the world's discards.

She eventually gave me a shoebox of about 500 microfiches with the idea that I might glean some of the language from their title bars that she could incorporate into the installation, thus creating found poetry from found objects. I spent an entire weekend randomly sorting through the cards. Actually, there was at least some method to it: I had an old oak table I'd bought years before in Wilmington, North Carolina. I "tiled" the top of it with microfiches and then picked cards up three at a time (always 3 for some reason or other). I then assembled locator words from the title bar, again at random, into short lines or phrases, intending to string them together into some kind of found poem.

I got carried away with the project, though, and began to understand that what I was really doing was creating titles for poems that might be written in the future. This idea really appealed to me. After all, it gave me a somewhat defined task (150-160 titles); it was entirely future-bound; it was, paradoxically, built upon outdated, even antique technology; it had the potential for a much deeper dialogue between Barbara and me.

What I didn't realize at the time was how this project would thoroughly change not only my writing process but all poetics related to the process: voice modulation, acquisition of subject matter, attitude toward the poem, understanding of what a poem is or can be. This last issue was perhaps the most important for me, as I learned with the project to approach the poem, the writing of a poem, purely from this perspective: what can this poem be (as opposed to what should this poem be)? It marked the first time in my life that I thought of words truly as the material of poetry, instead of as poetry's referent. (I had been stuck in this referential thinking even after writing a dissertation on Aristotle's Poetics!)

Barbara was surprised, and, I imagine, a little disappointed when I returned her shoebox of microfiches with this new idea in mind. But she could see my excitement, no doubt, and agreed to the collaboration. Something that was to have taken maybe a weekend and result in a one-time installation became a decade-long conversation between me and this painter.

As I wrote the poems and shared them with her, Barbara began reading and absorbing them as only an artist can--as verbal material converted to "made" things. Just like paintings and pots. (None, or virtually none, of these poems is nonsensical. Each is crafted, shaped, directed, and, I hope, singable in the way that all lyric poetry is; that is, available to the voice.) And as Barbara asbsorbed certain poems, she too changed her approach, developing whole new paintings instead that were based on images and lines from the poems. Sometimes, a line from the poem became--de Chirico-like--the title of the painting.

Over the years, a number of the paintings have been sold and some of the poems have been published. So our dialogue has found its way, in pieces and parts, to a more public venue.

Microfiche to poem title to poem to painting to poem line. It has been a most rewarding exchange for a very long time!