I walked into the sculptor Bill Allen's studio near Maple City last year and in one breath said to him, "Let's do a project together. I want to write poems that bounce off your sculptures."
He had these wall pieces made of driftwood, bits of string, glass, leather, plastic, mirrors and even old dental X-rays, all spotted with bright colors. What held me, I think, was that they were so unself-conscious. They weren't trying to convince me of anything, or to be anything other than what they were.
I took a car-full of the smaller sculptures home with me, hung them one at a time on the wall by my desk, and wrote a series of little poems, each one beginning with some spark from Bill's work. And we reversed the process: I sent him poems he could use to begin a sculpture from. "Snowshoe" I wrote from his sculpture; "Cherries" I gave to him to get him started.
The word is ekphrastic -- one work of art created as a way to open up the other one so we can see it more clearly. Or, more broadly, one work used as inspiration for another.
Bill and I didn't try to describe each others' work. We wanted to somehow stretch its boundaries, to illuminate it in some new way.
The result you can see at our exhibition opening April 11 at the Dennos Museum and running until June 13.
We invited another genre into the project: filmmaker David Poinsett has made a video about the project. He's interviewed us, filmed us at work, compiled images of the work itself, and put all this into a dazzling work of art of its own, which will be in the media room at the Dennos.
And of course the installation itself is an art form -- where each piece is placed in the museum, how each poem is placed on the wall in relation to the sculpture, how one feels entering the room, what the total effect will be. All parts must speak to all parts.
Art begets art. The Renaissance happened in Europe because art, artists, scholarship, politics, all combined in a way that each nurtured each other. One person's good work raises the bar for the next person. In our case, Bill's work helped me learn how to make very small poems -- not something I'm used to doing. And sometimes Bill made a whole new sculpture in response to my poem that had been a response to his original sculpture! It's been a heck of a lot of fun.
Here are two of my poems. The first was in response to the wire frame of one piece that made me think of the shape of a snowshoe. The second I wrote because, after all, Traverse City is the Cherry Capital.
Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, past poet laureate of Delaware and author of "Driving with Dvorak," available now at local bookstores. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.
Snowshoe
We're headed for San Juan,
warm beaches, the brushed-on
air, the fleshly body, not this sting
of snow, this hassle of wrapping up
and stomping two feet above
what we barely speak of
till spring. It's crazy up here,
our minds loose
as if a piece of roofing
had flown off in a storm,
as if icicles were the only bones
that held us, and they list
in the wind, and some days they drip.
-- Fleda Brown
Cherries
Once the billion, billion stars
were tossed across their house
of night, red-shifted
by distance.
If I had my life to live again,
all this maneuvering through grief,
through the studded dark,
at last to become quiet,
why would I do it?
How many times
can a soul take on
that heaviness of fruit, even
to ease the great night?
Rather one word
burst on the tongue,
the others for the birds.
-- Fleda Brown
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