Part One: An Education in Space

I admired a Matisse painting of a bowl of goldfish. I put a poster of this painting on my wall and looked at it daily. I began to realize very slowly that this great sensualist was also an intellectual manipulator of space who misled us by his concentration on color… I was then working on a poem whose ostensible subject was three bodies of water: a pond, a swimming pool, and the sea. Giving the poem a title, “Water Kingdom,” I submitted it to a magazine and the poem was rejected.

With a sidelong look at the Matisse goldfish on the wall, I began to reconsider the poem. In the Matisse poster, the goldfish are placed in their bowl on the table. The table appears in another Matisse painting owned by the Museum of Modern Art. It is called The Rose Marble Table. I had cherished a fondness for this painting and had attached it to my life. Now I began to consider the table. I became more intimate with the painting and progress of Matisse. The poem is called “The Rose Marble Table.” [3]

—Barbara Guest, “The Shadow of Surrealism”

        “With a sidelong look” at these Matisse paintings, Barbara Guest composes alongside them, glancing at the goldfish as daily companions to her composition. She has “attached” these paintings both to her life and to her poems. Two similar rose marble tables appear in Matisse’s paintings, lending them a “reality” outside of the canvas. But these tables are quite different. One seems circular, and one seems both hexagonal and octagonal at the same time. On one table is a heavy goldfish “bowl” (although it looks more like a cylindrical vase), and on one is a basket. But Guest does not record the objects in Matisse’s paintings; rather, she employs ekphrasis to attach herself to Matisse’s methods and become intimate with them. In describing how she looks at art, she refers to Rilke’s writing on Cézanne: he looked at Cézanne’s methods “so that he might apply Cézanne’s discoveries to his own work.” [4] The paintings enter her unconscious, she writes, and she then asks if she can use their “process” in her own work. [5] After many days of looking at the goldfish, she realizes “very slowly” the method she might borrow: his intellectual “manipulation” of space. For Guest, this occasions an education in painterly spatial relations she can bring to her watery poem.
        “I with my hand / on the rose marble table,” she writes in “The Rose Marble Table.” She describes a tactile intimacy with Matisse’s painting, a form of physical attachment “with my hand.” [6] The final stanza offers another scene of attachment: “we pass hands upon its surface and embrace / the creative object, throbbing waves fly over.” [7] The hand of the “I” turns to “we,” hands that together embrace the “surface” of the “creative object.” These hands collaborate in motion—“we pass hands”—as the “creative object” and the “waves” interact in motion, in flight. Syntax occasions a “throbbing” relationship between these parts of the sentence, as “throbbing” qualifies both the art object and the waves in flight. Guest “embraces” plural ambiguous “creative objects”: the poem, the marble table, and the paintings, linking various media through one embrace. Of a physical relationship between media, Guest writes:

I grew up under the shadow of Surrealism. In that creative atmosphere of magical rites there was no recognized separation of the arts… all the arts evolved around one another, a central plaza with roads which led from palette to quill to clef. One could never again look at poetry as a locked kingdom. Poetry extended vertically, as well as horizontally. Never was it motionless within a linear structure. [8]

She figures this “creative atmosphere” through spatial relations: the “plaza” leads to “palette to quill to clef” as imaginative locales that “evolve” in motion “around one another.” The arts are not separated but linked by roads in physical space.
        I began with Guest’s writing on Matisse because it describes her relationship to painting as a form of spatial “attachment,” a word I will use to describe the concrete bond between words and paint in her collaborations with two New York school women artists: Mary Abbott and Fay Lansner. We can consider these collaborations among a tradition of New York school collaborations between word and image, like Frank O’Hara and Larry Rivers’ book Stones, which featured lithograph prints composed of overlapping drawings and poems. But unlike Stones, these collaborations address the distinct problem of ekphrasis. Guest and Abbott integrate their responses to the same artwork, a Grecian vase, on the same canvas, and thereby redefine ekphrasis both as a hybrid form of word and image and a collaboration between poet and painter. In Lansner’s collaboration with Guest’s poem “Tessera,” she enacts a form of reverse-ekphrasis in which the language of the poem is rearticulated in different graphic forms—stencil, colored pencil, watercolor cursive—so words become shapes. Rather than being left behind as inspiration for the artworks, the words of “Tessera” enter the canvas through paint strokes that interact with a painted palette. If in ekphrastic poetry, as W.J.T. Mitchell writes, texts confront modes of representation “alien” to them: “those rival, alien modes of representation called the visual, graphic, plastic, or “spatial” arts,” [9] these collaborations suggest there is no distance between verbal and visual media. They bring media into friendly, physical proximity: paint becomes words, and words become paint.

Part Two: Genial Space

        “Regard the poem as plastic. It is moveable, touchable,” Guest writes in her essay on poetry and the imagination: “Words of the poem need dimension. They desire finally—an education in space.” [10] We have already seen one instance of her poetry’s “education in space”: her slow concentration on Matisse’s manipulation of “space” through color. Her collaborations with visual artists further realize her ideal form of poetry as a “spatial” practice, a “plastic” art molded in space. She distinguishes poetry that sits inertly on the page with poetry that has “wings,” that takes flight as a material form with dimension, moving within and beyond the page. [11] “Plastic” poetry has both “physicality” and spatial intensity: [12]

It is possible that words may occur in a fixed space and sequence so that they are called “words of the poem.” We say the poem is made of words. And it is true that many poems are constructed solely of words. These are the words that sit on paper without vision. We all have read these poems and we know that after we have read them we feel curiously bereft. [13]

Guest renders poems as sharing the physicality of sculpture or painting. She compares the “flesh of a poem” to the flesh of a painting through “the vibrancy of its skin.” [14] A poem with a “dull sheen” takes its analogy from painting: “Nothing is more useless than a poem with a dull sheen that refuses to move, that is inert. This is the essence of dullness and our eyes run quickly past it.” [15] If a bad poem doesn’t “soar above the page” with “elevation,” the same could be said of paint that sits with an “inert,” dull weight on the canvas, that doesn’t invite the imagination into involvement, so that static paint too can become a “moveable” substance. [16]
        Her writing renders both poems and paintings as lively forms that take on movement through “vibrancy,” a vibrating motion. [17] An example of artworks that vibrate and take flight comes by way of de Kooning: “The artist de Kooning wrote that in the Renaissance drawing started to tremble because it wanted to go places.” [18] Like these “trembling” drawings, Guest idealizes poems that want “to go places,” to soar beyond an inert stasis as dead words. In her poem, “The Poetess,” written after Mirò, from Moscow Mansions, 1973, Guest writes:

                         the

Poetess riddled

her asterisk

genial!      as space [19]

In response to this poem, Charles Altieri writes: “For Guest, syntax becomes less a vehicle for ordering experience than a figure for what we might call ‘genial space.” [20] Guest’s syntax realizes how words in their plasticity can move between “sign and mark,” Altieri writes: “Literal verse turns into metaphors of verse, in which verse virtually takes on physical textures of paint.” [21] She pushes the words toward the “continuous replete space of painterly composition”: “Space, rather than time, becomes Guest’s figure for geniality” because “painterly explorations of spatial relations allow concrete modes of identification that are relatively free from the gender hierarchies that haunted Guest’s relations with her fellow writers and artists.” [22] If as Altieri suggests, “painterly” syntax offers Guest a way toward “geniality,” rather than hierarchy, so too do her collaborations propose a mode of nonhierarchical relation between women writers and artists, in which their artforms can enter a “genial,” hybrid relation with each other. If in her poems verse “virtually” takes on the texture of paint, in these collaborations, that texture becomes literal. Painting and poetry enter a friendly space, leaving no one behind.

Part Three: Attached to a Foreign Surface

        “Genial space” describes the hybrid form these collaborations occasion. They make canvases on which both the syntax of poetry and the physicality of mark making enter a friendly, “genial,” engagement with each other. Words and brushstrokes vibrate in genial space. The “concrete” forms of identification that Altieri describes Guest’s poetry borrowing from painting become more “concrete” when her poetry enters the physical space of a painting, so that poetry and painting “identify” with each other through a physical binding, in a composite form of collage. Guest’s collaboration with Mary Abbott was made in Abbott’s studio in 1971, after Guest had recently returned from Greece. She writes,

I was attempting to describe the artifacts I had seen in Greece, and to convey an atmosphere of the Greek Islands I had absorbed.

As Mary’s trapeze swung on the rafters above us, she brought out several art books on Greece, in particular one of vases, and the black surface of Greek mirrors. For weeks she drew and I wrote, and together we created our own artifacts.

She drew the vase, and then she asked me to write a poem about the vase. Looking at the vase prompted me to suggest she attach strips of paper, that she “collage” the sides of her drawings, by cutting out strips of paper on which I would write parts of a poem which she could then attach to the drawing. We called our collaboration, Honey or Wine?

I preferred this invention, rather than writing a lone poem “about” the vase. I wished the poem to look as if it were attached to the vase, as the studio had now become attached to a foreign surface. [23]

The collaboration begins with a conversational scene of ekphrasis: Guest tries to “describe the artifacts I had seen in Greece” to Abbott and to use language to bring the atmosphere she had “absorbed” into the studio. Witnessing the difficulty of this ekphrastic exercise, Abbott generously brings an art book on Greek vases, a medium that already combines images of vases with words describing them. They work alongside each other “for weeks” and create their own “artifacts,” works inspired by the Greek artifacts in the books, conjoining their art practices and making them happen “together.” Glue “attaches” the poem to the drawing. Guest’s admission that she prefers this collaborative “invention” to writing a “lone poem ‘about’ the vase” redefines ekphrasis as writing a poem “with” a work of visual art, rather than a lonely poem “about” that work.






Here is my transcription of the poem:

to pour from this vase

             Honey or wine?

             The slopes of Hymmetus are famed

        for both

At midday I know my wisest answer

As do the flies and that girl, Cyclamene,

greedy for sweets

             yet in the evening chill

on the upper mountain

What a bringer together of memories

                                                   is wine

how pure its liquid and the taste

             we recognize

as the conversation of pines

Despite this distraction of

              ‘making one’s choice’

               I will not pass over

the beauty of that curved back

               supporting this vessel

where the hand goes immediately

The poem that might otherwise be left to stand alone finds a companion due to its “attachment” to the vase in the drawing: “I wished the poem to look as if it were attached to the vase.” Strips of paper extend into the form of the illustrated vase, so that they are at once distinct parts of the composition and “attached” to each other. The composition renders inseparable the visual representation of the vase and the poem’s ekphrastic response to it. Their formal attachment provides a visual representation of the poem’s genesis in relation to the vase in the book. Whereas a “lone” ekphrastic poem gestures toward the absent object it describes, here, the object remains visually present, but at another level of representational distance from the vase in the art book. Whereas Keats’ ode is “on” a Grecian urn but separate from that urn, this poem is quite literally “on” the Grecian vase. Of her collaboration with painter Laurie Reid, Symbiosis, Guest writes, “When writers associate with other forms of art, symbiosis is established, as in Nature, where dissimilar organisms live productively together.” [25] In Honey or Wine?, Guest and Abbott experiment with a “symbiotic” form of ekphrasis, a collaboration that allows the verbal and visual media to “live productively together” as they address the same “vase.” The “dissimilar organisms” of honey and wine combine. If in the poem “wine” is a “bringer together of memories,” here the vase is a “bringer together” of poetry and drawing.
        The attachment of the poem to the vase parallels the attachment of reality to the “foreign” world made in an artwork: “I wished the poem to look as if it were attached to the vase, as the studio had now become attached to a foreign surface.” She rearticulates the autonomy of the artwork—the “foreign” space of art—as nevertheless “attached” to the productive space that occasions artmaking, the studio. The studio itself exists somewhere in between the “world” and the “foreign” surface of a painting, acting as a portal between the two. Likewise, the “poem” is not autonomous from the “drawing,” but their shared surface acts as a portal between them. This “vase” was not found on a kitchen table, but in a book, in a studio, so that it becomes another paper material involved in the messy locale of artmaking. The studio offers the materials for a collaboration between the written page and the painted canvas.
        Guest dedicated her novel, Seeking Air, to Abbott. The novel, addressing a “you,” unfolds through dialogic address, so that the novel seems to reach out to Abbott, just as the poem reaches out into her drawing. Its title responds to Gertrude Stein’s maxim, in her memoir Paris France, that “painting has no air.” [26] Guest composed the novel from an apartment designated for her writing, a kind of writing studio, the balcony of which provided space “when I wanted a change of air.” [27] A painting shares “air” with the studio, the air the novel “seeks.” Of the novel, Joseph Shafer writes, “we see hints of that which lies outside an artwork entering it, whether in a studio or a museum.” [28] In the opening pages of the novel, the narrator values art showed in a “studio” over art in a gallery or museum:

How often I have been enchanted with the work of a painter when it was showed at the studio, brushes in hand, the cup of cold coffee on the table and here and there the evidence of a struggle in the crumpled sketch paper or the postcard tacked on the wall or the notebook open to three scrawled lines.” [29]

In the studio, writing merges with painting: “brushes in hand,” “three scrawled lines” in a notebook. In scrawl and brush, she emphasizes messy process over final product. The phrase “evidence of a struggle” figures the way in which Honey or wine? leaves traces of the “studio,” “evidence” of its own composition. It shows the seams by which it was pasted together.
        Through its form of collage, the artwork composes an intimate address to the vase: the poem’s paper surface overlaps and intersects with the vase’s drawn edge. The collage glues disparate materials, written-on paper and painted paper, into a composite. In some parts, the strips of paper obscure the drawn verse underneath, as if the strips of paper have been slapped onto the composition after the vase was drawn. But in other parts, lines of charcoal appear drawn over the strips of paper, so that we are told that the illustration of the vase wasn’t over and done with before the poem was glued onto the surface. More vase was drawn after the entry of glued poetry, illustrating the dialogical back-and-forth between drawing and writing. The drawing of the vase borrows surface from the paper as the poetry borrows surface from the drawing.

      The canvas integrates different kinds of mark-making: charcoal line, handwritten word, painted brushstroke. The line blurs between drawn loops and handwritten poetry. The integration of both painted and written-on paper registers both the difference and unity between the drawn line and the drawn word. Moreover, the strips of paper often block our view of what appears to be language drawn on the paper underneath, drawing legible language and asemic writing into conversation. Here, we spot the same line of poetry drawn underneath the strips, in larger handwriting:






Underneath these strips of paper, the words “of Hymmetus are found” can be made out, partially blocked by paper on which reads the same language. But further down the canvas, we can’t make out the language blocked by the paper:







Words hide words. The obstruction of the collaged pieces of paper renders the loops and lines partly or entirely illegible so that they become visual matter. Legible language recedes into asemic writing. Paint hides words:






Strips of blue painted paper obscure black scribbles underneath. If not for the more sharply rendered language above, we might not recognize those black scribbles as words. I wonder, what poetry has been hidden under these blue strips? As words are obscured, we pay attention to the mark. Mitchell explains how “writing” is a medium in which the interaction of image and text becomes literal, as “writing” makes language “visible”: “‘Writing,’ as Plato suggested in the Phaedrus, ‘is very like painting,’ and painting, in turn, is like the first form of writing, the pictogram.” [30] Mitchell describes writing as visual in Blake’s “graphocentrism”: “his tendency to treat writing and printing as media capable of full presence, not as mere supplements to speech.” [31] We can describe Guest and Abbott’s composition in similar terms: writing becomes fully “present” in space. The “writing” in Honey or wine? draws our attention to how handwriting marries language and stroke. We register a parallel movement between charcoal line and painted brushstroke, different forms of mark making called to converse. The thick brushstrokes of blue draw our attention to the stroke’s movement itself as it curves and overlaps with other strokes, miming the movement of the charcoal loops.






Blue and yellow painted surfaces have been cut up and assembled on one integrated plane. The liquid stroke of the yellow patch meets a hard stop, but elsewhere it curves, following the path of the vase’s lip. The edge of the vase is a guiding line for the scraps of color that respect its curve. But sometimes color overlaps with the edge of the vase, revealing the slap dash process of collage. These lines describe the careful movement of the hands that collage:

I will not pass over

the beauty of that curved back

supporting this vessel

where the hand goes immediately

The curved lines of the vase are “not pass[ed] over,” as much as collage can allow. Sloping strips of paper attend to, rather than “pass over,” the vase’s “curved back.” The phrase “where the hand goes immediately” refers to many hands quick to work and respond to the vase: the hands of the poet, the painter, the hand that carries the vase, the hand that goes “immediately” to the curved back of a figure. Likewise, many hands follow the “curved back” of the vase, as various collaged surfaces overlap with it.
         The poem begins with a question, asking us to choose between two liquids: “honey or wine?” The question is a friendly invitation, a hospitable question we might be asked by our host. But the interrogative form comes as a surprise as it interrupts the infinitive syntax, “To pour from the vase / Honey or wine?” This jagged interrogative interruption renders the phrase “Honey or wine?” as a separate substance “poured” from the vase, a question taking on fluid liquidity. Are we to choose between two separate vases, or does this magical vase pour either honey or wine, depending on one’s desire? Wine pours out quickly and spills, whereas honey pours out slowly and sticks, and they wouldn’t be easy to mix. “Wine” drips over the vase in a couple smears of red. “Honey” appears as an angular block of painted yellow, spilling atop the vase, flowing but contained. The surface of the collage is a vessel, a medium, that can integrate “dissimilar” substances. We can forego the “distracting” choice between media altogether: “despite this distraction of ‘making one’s choice.” That “making one’s choice” is in quotation marks pastes foreign language into the poem, a phrase the poem carries in its vessel.
         “At midday I know my wisest answer”; the poem hints at the knowledge of a “wisest answer” to the question “honey or wine?”, but never directly “answers” it. Instead of proposing a definitive “answer,” the composition figures the “wisest answer” as a “conversation” between media and between artists, who “answer” to each other: “and the taste / we recognize / as the conversation of pines.”  The “we”—Abbott and Guest—have together illustrated their “taste” not just for both “honey and wine,” but for conversation.



Part Four: Hot Turns


Before we look at Lansner’s paintings, we can consider how “Tessera” stages a dynamic conversation between poetry and forms of visual artistry: mosaic and tapestry. The title, “Tessera,” refers to an individual tile of a mosaic, and derives from the Greek word for “four”: tesseras—the four corners of a mosaic tile. The poem is a singular mosaic tile, and the poem’s formal arrangement into four parts suggests each part is a corner of a tile. But the poem also composes a mosaic, integrating four disparate tiles into one fragmented and integrated work. Along with mosaic, the poem refers to the art of tapestry, by way of the Greek mythic figure Philomela: “Philomène brings up the brazier.” The daughter of an Athenian king, Philomela is raped by her sister’s husband Tereus, who then cuts out her tongue to ensure her silence. Seeking revenge, Philomela weaves a tapestry recounting the crime. Tapestry as a visual form of narration steps in after she loses access to language. Mosaic and tapestry are both artforms that make a “narrative” image through the integration of disparate materials: whereas mosaic arranges small tiles to make a composite image, tapestry forms an integrated image through woven threads.

1.

Sadness and felicity

you’re coming back

ghosts in your striped Greek dress.

Tears go into the urn

Philomène brings up the brazier

things heat up
water, wine, thistles in the jug.

2. 

Hot turns.

More.

I said to her, “Go away Inertia,

beautiful, fragrant, violet as you are

go away.”

She kept talking about letters, diaries,

quotations, explanations,

words linking me to sleep.

I said, “Go away Inertia,

even if you bear a Latin name.”

3.

Then it was dark on the quarries,

I had to hire a truck to load up.

My boxes. My images. My materia medica,

The driver arrived.

The truck was loaded.

I’m here in the land of sunbeams and

silk oak.

Very easy. But heavy

on the initials.

4.

Ghosts in stripes.

Thistles.

“I wish I were quieter,” she said

at Thebes.

What echoes from legends,

Or armadillos or bees. [32]

        Fragments combine. In the poem, “things heat up” in Philomène’s “brazier”: “water, wine, thistles in the jug,” like the mixture between honey and wine. Her capacious “jug” starts cooking something up, occasioning the “hot turns” that catalyze the poem’s physical motion: “Hot turns. // More.” The poem describes “more” spinning motion. But against the excitement of these hot turns, “Inertia” threatens a counterforce: “She kept talking about letters, diaries, quotations, explanations, words linking me to sleep. // I said, “Go away Inertia” – although there is no Greek or Roman figure named “Inertia,” the poem speaks to “Inertia” as if she is an anti-muse of the poem. “Inertia” is the tendency of objects in motion to stay in motion and objects at rest to stay at rest, describing a static lack of change or plasticity. The “inert” language Guest describes: “explanations, words linking me to sleep” define the danger of “inertia” in a poem, words that lack plasticity and haven’t learned how to take flight off the page.
        The poem then takes a literal flight. The poet packs up and moves: “I had to hire a truck to load up.” In contrast with inertia’s inert words, the poem proposes the “hot turns” of physically fluid language, poetry that proves its “education in space.” The poet moves away from Inertia with “My boxes. My images. My materia medica,” taking the visual with her. Materia medica are medical books that integrate word and image to describe the healing properties of plants. 















Lansner transforms “Tessera” into concrete poems. She experiments with different media across the series of artworks inspired by “Tessera”: oil paint, glitter, watercolor. But I want to focus on these two (“Hot Turns,” and “Sadness and Felicity”) because of their use of the stencil. Stenciled words, like Guest’s looping, handwritten poetry in Honey or wine?, further integrate painting and writing. Letters become thick shapes, painted in, taking on the shapely heft of other painted forms, like the thick stripes of blue that constitute the vase. In Figuring the Word, Johanna Drucker describes the “stencil” as a more formulaic form of writing, in contrast with the “personal” form of handwriting: “The hand-madeness of the marks in Ligno’s work is constrained by the dictates of the conventional forms of the stencils.” [35] In Lansner’s works, the constraint of the stencil contrasts with the free play of the words’ scatter across the canvas. Words are afforded plastic movement, as they twist and turn in different directions. The words spin in “hot turns.” Sadness is turned upside down, doing a handstand:





Like the vase in Honey or wine? two vessels appear across these canvases: a flower vase, and a palette. By way of the palette, the painter’s studio enters the “foreign surface” of the composition and becomes a surface for words. Words are like globs of paint on the palette, reminding us of the globs in the studio used to compose them.



      



The painter’s palette furnishes a vibrant conversational plane between words and paint. Scribbled paint starts taking on the quality of language, and the stenciled words seem to scramble, becoming illegible shapes, or pure color. A loop of paint, beside all these letters, looks like a floating “m.”






Recalling the unstable boundary between asemic loop and legible poetry in Honey or wine?, stenciled letter wavers between illegible paint stroke and legible letter. Painted vase overlaps with stenciled word, like the strips of collaged paper that extend into the drawn vase. The paintings produce a spectrum between letter and graphic gesture. In her portrait of poet James Schuyler and his painterly poetry, Guest writes: “The poem’s form seems to drop from Schuyler’s hand like those drops from a jug in a Dutch still life. It is an effortless shape, that jug, which consistently remains under control; the poet’s hand on the jug.” [36] On Lansner’s canvas, words also “drop” onto the canvas as if from a jug, both effortlessly and under the “control” of the stencil. In both collaborations, Guest’s poetry is “attached” to the vase and the palette, the artist’s painterly materials. Her hand is “on the jug,” in proximity to the vessels that integrate letter and brushstroke. All three artists help us see that the ekphrastic process can be one of lively and tactile embrace, the poet’s hand on the jug, and the painter’s hand on the word.







See here for a complete list of notes and works cited.

---