Over the past year, I've noticed a trendlet (not even a real trend, yet) of galleries exhibiting poets & writers in their project rooms -- small, windowless rooms at the backs of the buildings. I get a thrill when I anticipate visiting these shows: I love seeing how visual & verbal modes interact in these exhibitions. Sometimes a poet's words are composed in visually arresting ways; sometimes writers are creating collages out of writing; sometimes a poet's collages have no words at all. And so, what are they all saying?
Let's start with Dickinson, that cloaked keystone of American poetry's past century. Last fall, during The Drawing Center's "Drawing Time, Reading Time" exhibition (an uneven yet fascinating survey of artists using language in their work, even when no letters were visible), the Center's back gallery held a fascinating little sideshow: “Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches.” I say the show was "little" because the pieces in it were tiny: Emily Dickinson's handwriting scratched loosely over envelope scraps -- sometimes whole, & sometimes cut or torn to make them even smaller. Here, I could imagine that her line lengths may well have been inflected by the spaces in which she wrote, much like I remember that some famous artist said in an interview that the paintings' sizes expanded when the family bought a bigger car. There was also the incredible immediacy of imagining her finding & using these bits of paper, & storing them in her desk...their smallness made them feel closer to her body because they could be so easily hidden in pockets or in books held in the hand. I don't know the entire history of these...shall I call them manuscripts, or artifacts? -- I haven't studied the deluxe compendium edited by Jen Bervin & Marta Werner, The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems. (Werner has reconsidered the term "envelope poem" as being too prescriptive; click <here> to read a Poetry Foundation interview where she explains her thinking.) These works add to the story of the "fascicles" of manuscripts that Dickinson bound together, in a simple suturing gesture that prefigures so many American women sewing the bindings of artists' books, a century later. (Or she carries on with a tradition of women working at anonymous positions, in book production industries.) In a New York Times review of The Gorgeous Nothings, art critic Holland Cotter asks, "Are they art? Sure. Why not?" & here I will restate the question: "Are they art? Sure. Why?" Because they are gorgeous.
In part, their visual appeal comes from off-handedness: Dickinson was pursuing a verbal goal, & this material medium was simply her launching pad. Yet the envelopes also look like lily pads, each with a color & quality of paper that seeps into the viewer-reader's experience of the poem-in-the-making. (And here, I'm thinking about the etymology of "poem" as a "made thing," which I wrote about on Day 1...)
The viewing experience gets both more & less complicated in the case of Robert Walser, whose tiny writings on envelopes look impossible to decipher. I wish I had taken more time to probe these works, which felt dense with thought. Here's a full image of one, & a detail of another:
Robert Walser, "Microscript 215, October - November 1928," detail
Robert Walser, "Microscript 419, 1927-28," detail
Part of the draw (so to speak!) of these envelopes is that I definitely cannot read them. Though with Dickinson's envelopes I can flip back & forth between reading & looking, here I must see the writing as fields of visual pattern -- or, in the case of the detail on the right, I can look at the entire piece as a visual composition. Walser's micro-code contributes to this, plus the fact that I don't speak the German he was encoding. Plus, sometimes Walser was drawing lines in addition to inscribing linguistically coded marks. These works take on a mind-mapping quality, creating visual frameworks for inner cosmologies. Apparently, these were drafts for later works...but how different they appear from my own handwritten envelope notes, messily jotted while I'm on the phone, only to get lost in a pile of papers on the desk! (To gain inspiration from how both Dickinson & Walser write on envelopes, the exhibition's entire gorgeous catalogue is free online: click <here> to view.)
A few months after the Dickinson/Walser exhibition, another Dickinson-themed show opened in Chelsea: Janet Malcolm's "The Emily Dickinson Series" at Lori Bookstein Fine Art. While Malcolm is perhaps best known as a writer for The New Yorker, she has not only written poetry but she has made art for years. And this exhibition is clearly based on poetry...its modestly scaled collages were mounted in the gallery's handsomely proportioned small room, diagonally opposite the entrance. This exhibition (the collage pictured here at left is topically entitled Language) also had a connection to the earlier one at The Drawing Center, in that Dickinson scholar-poet Marta Werner was again involved. Malcolm gathered the primary materials for her collages by writing to Werner in search of a copy of Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, an older book of literary history that Werner had written. Werner still possessed one copy of the book, & she sent it to Malcolm. Sometimes I felt confused about which part of the exhibition was more important to Malcolm -- the correspondence & sympathetic connection with Werner, which was well documented in the show's accompanying literature, or the work of finding visual expression through the collages themselves.
Lori Bookstein's project room has also hosted collage exhibitions by poet Mark Strand, who studied Fine Art at Yale in the 1950s. His assemblages of hand-colored pieces of paper pulp, which Strand creates at the Dieu Donné paper mill, have opened the Fall season both last year & this year. (He has also shown with the gallery before.)
Mark Strand collages, both "Untitled"
At first I thought the collages were composed with such elegance that they were too genteel. Even small bits of surprising color seemed carefully arranged to raise not-unpleasant tensions & then resolve them into polite visual harmonies. This was an artist who had clearly absorbed his Bauhaus-inspired training. (And the collages were so even, in terms of their visual mastery, that I found it hard to pick two to include here.) Could I see beyond the work's evident refinement, toward something more than formal excellence? It took me three visits, but Yes. I was tempted to look at the pieces of paper in Strand's collages the way I think about the swatches in some of my own: as analogues for the "sorts" of type in letterpress printing, packed together into a chase. But Strand's rambling compositions (including some proto-landscapes), & the variety of shapes & sizes in his torn & cut paper pieces, didn't have the strictness or rectilinearity to justify (!) a connection with printing. Besides, I would have found that solution unsatisfactory -- imposing the framework of letters would be grasping for low-hanging fruit.
Eventually, I saw something more fitting: competing energies contained within each piece. I mean both each piece of art, & each piece of paper: Strand's pulpy swatches had all kinds of movement in them, & these movements set up tensions when they were arranged next to each other. Also, the borders of the cut & torn edges contained the internal movements of each swatch. Altogether, the sequence (from small bit to entire field) of movements, borders, juxtaposed energies between paper pieces, & finally overall compositional elegance established a deeply satisifying alternating rhythm of wildness; containment; contrast; resolution. In this back-&-forth movement, I finally glimpsed the sense of humor that I appreciate in Strand's poetry. The collages wink at you from within a Stoic's richly (dis)passionate frame.
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