Alien wonders, beckoning
Diary of a collaboration
The title of our publication comes from the following quote that Mike posted a couple years ago on a blog we both occasionally wrote for:
Gordon Parks, photographer, musician, writer, film director, 1912 – 2006. “Like souls touching, poetry, music, paint, and the camera keep calling, and I can’t bring myself to say no. All those things have become like alien wonders, beckoning. And finding no need to ask pardon of myself, I pursue them. Their mystery is as inescapable as air is from the wind.” [from his foreword to “Arias in Silence”, 1994]
Taking the name of our publication from this quote made sense to me as Mike and I share interests in poetry, music, painting and photography (among other shared interests). Also, the project we are collaborating on will go back and forth between poetry and photography (and quite possibly music, painting, video).
We intend to use Alien wonders, beckoning as a place to diarize/document the progress of our project by sharing thoughts, research, behind the scenes stuff: anything that comes to mind may be posted. Posts will not be added on a strict schedule but will come whenever one of us feels the urge to share something.
About the project
A few months ago, my wife Elena and I were talking about “weeding” the bookshelves in our living room. Which made me actually take a good look at what was on the shelves. My eye fell upon “The Photographer’s Playbook” containing several hundred assignments and ideas - prompts if you will - collected and edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern. It had been on the shelf for a number of years, and other than idly flipping through it once or twice I had never actually put it to use.
The book fell open quite randomly to page 109, which had an assignment titled “Visualizing Poetry” contributed by J.W. Fisher. Fisher is currently the Department Chair of Art and Studio Head of Photography at Lewis and Clark College in Portland Oregon. This assignment is one that he gives to his intermediate photography students.
Fisher sets up the basis for the assignment in the first paragraph:
“Puke on the page!” exclaimed my former poetry professor, Charles Simic, during a reading he gave of his poems paired with paintings by Philip Guston. Puking on the page as well as embracing one’s failures have always been in the forefront of Visualizing Poetry…
The assignment as given in the book is intended for a class of students, who begin by doing a deep dive into two essays by Louise Glück. To paraphrase what follows, the class takes a broad look at poems as a group, continually narrowing the focus down until each student has become intimately familiar with a single poem. A specific process is followed to arrive at a list of twenty words that prompts the listing of ten picture ideas. An iterative process of picture making, revision of the list and further picture making follows with the goal to arrive at ten final photos that support each other and present a clear voice. Then two students exchange their poems, word list, and idea list and make another ten photos based on what was exchanged. I was intrigued by the possibilities.
I immediately thought of Mike as a possible collaboration partner, snapped a photo of the page in the book and sent it to him. Mike liked the idea, but suggested we tailor the process to make it less of a classroom exercise. He suggested some slight modifications that made the exercise focus on the call and response aspect. As members of the VI Photo Group, we had lots of positive experiences using a call and response approach to producing a number of collaborative zines.
We began by exchanging poetry books: Mike gave me “A Fool’s Errand” by Dermot Healy and “The Weather in Japan” by Michael Longley. I gave Mike “Toxic Flora” by Kimiko Hahn and “Confluence” by Samantha DeFlitch. We went off to commune with the books, immerse ourselves in them with the goal of choosing one book to use as a source of poems for our collaboration. Ultimately I found that “The Weather in Japan” vibed with me more strongly than the Healy. I’ll let Mike tell you which book he chose and why.
We are starting with one poem from our chosen book. The poem to begin with was determined by a random roll of dice to determine a page number. I’ve been pointed to page 48 of the Longley book. More on that in a subsequent post.
We will largely follow the process Fisher proposed in his assignment. When it comes time to exchange, we will exchange our poem, words, ideas and one to two of the resulting images. Then our collaboration diverges from the Fisher assignment. Based on what each of us receives, we will look for a poem within our chosen book that seems an obvious point of extension of the call or point of departure and then continue the process. In this way we are not only setting up a conversation between each other, but arguably also a conversation between the two poets.
That’s all from me for now. I’ll let Mike tell you about his side of things, and also give him the opportunity to clarify anything I got a bit wrong in what I’ve written about the project. Next time you hear from me, I’ll have more to say about the Longley poem I’m starting with and how the process is unfolding for me.