Reflections on dark ‘til dawn
Saturday, October 24, 2009
There was really only one thing that ever kept me from becoming a visual artist of some sort — a decided lack of talent. I don’t have a steady hand. My fine motor skills are, well, less than fine. I have never been able to put the pictures in my mind onto the page without recourse to words. Words, it seems, are the only chance I have at producing art. I have always felt it a pitiable lack in myself, that I did not have even a shred of talent that would allow me to enter the world of visual arts.
Because of this particular ineptitude that I’ve always known was mine, collaborating on the dark ‘til dawn series with Peter Zhou (周宇) of decollection has been a great pleasure. The project involved creating 30 designer lamps sporting Zhou’s paintings, with both the design and painting growing out of my haiku. Each lamp was to be a one-of-its-kind art piece, with a unique design and painting inspired by the haiku. The idea was to incorporate East and West, contemporary and traditional. It was a huge undertaking, and I am very satisfied with the job we’ve done, having just completed it this week.
The process began with poem selection. I went through my existing body of work, and took out several haiku that would form a basis for the series, including some that were previously published, like the haiku portion of the haibun “Blowing Smoke,” still available in the archives at Sloth Jockey. Haiku seemed to be a natural choice for the form of poetry that would suit the lamps, both for its brevity and for its emphasis on image and “the moment.”
As Zhou and I sat discussing the poems, me trying to translate the ideas into Mandarin for him, we found that the best approach was to first talk image, then move to feel, effect, and associations. It was an invigorating process, and also quite humbling. It is very difficult to pick apart one’s own poetry and put it into such bald, exposed terms (though I never mind doing it to the work of others). Zhou impressed me with how quickly he could capture the ideas and relate them to the pictures floating around in his own mind.
Our next step involved Zhou producing sketches for the paintings and lamp designs, while I put together a few more poems to flesh out the series. We ended up going through about 45 poems in order to find the 30 that we finally settled on. Some of the haiku were, typical of my work, first created as works of speculative poetry. Watching Zhou recontextualize these poems into a more traditional Chinese setting was amazing. For instance, there is one piece that was written as part of a longer poem, envisioning the view of Earth from space:
compelled by her hues
overlaid by swirling whites
her rich greens, deep blues
Zhou’s image of this poem is a scene of a river gorge cut between two mountains, with the clouds rolling over the waters in the middle of the valley. It is very typical of a certain style of traditional Chinese painting, and nicely places the words of the poem into a new context that I had not imagined for them. Similar work of situating the verses into new surroundings happened over and over with the 30 pieces, bringing Merlin into contact with Da Peng Niao, the phoenix with a Chinese sunbird, and meteors with Chinese astrology. It has been lots of fun watching all of this come together.
Zhou is an amazing artist, endowed with all of those talents that are necessary for one to be successful with the visual arts — a steady hand, a good eye, a cool demeanor, and a quick recall across the huge breadth of images residing in his mind. It has been a great pleasure to see my poetry being brought to new life by his hand.
By next week, there should be photos and descriptions of the lamps up on the decollection website. Check back if you’d like to have a look.
© 2009 Shelly Bryant
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My Fill in the Gaps Watch
Completed
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1.Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse)
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2.Woman to Woman and other poems (Agnes Lam)
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3.The 8th Habit (Stephen Covey)
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4.Mortician’s Tea (G. O. Clark)
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5.Poemcrazy (Susan Wooldridge)
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6. Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
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7. Velocity (Dean Koontz)
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8. The World is Flat (Thomas L. Friedman)
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9. A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs
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10. Rip Van Winkle - Washington Irving
In Progress
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➡Night and Day - Virginia Woolf
The Rest
The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury
The Kite Runner – Khalad Hosseini
The Lake of Dead Languages - Carol Goodman
The Sayings of Jesus - Anna Wierzbicka
A Walk in the Woods - Bill Bryson
Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl
Catch – 22 – Joseph Heller
The Plague, Albert Camus
Anansi Boys – Neil Gaiman
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
Candide – Voltaire
Ben Hur – Lew Wallace
Toilers of the Sea – Victor Hugo
Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
Finnegan’s Wake – James Joyce
Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
Sweeney Todd and the String of Pearls
Relativity - Albert Einstein
The Romance of Tristan and Iseult - Joseph Bedier
The Consolation of Philosophy - Boethius
Paul - Walter Wangerin, Jr.
Inkheart – Cornelia Funke
A History of the Middle Ages - Crane Brinton, John Christopher, Robert Wolff
Catch Me if You Can - Frank Abagnale
The Castle - Franz Kafka
Le Morte D’Arthur – Sir Thomas Malory
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Commentaries - Julius Caesar
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
The Twelve Caesars - Seutonius
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life - Walter Isaacson
Bush at War - Bob Woodward
The Truth About Jesus - M. M. Mangasarian
The Mark of the Christian - Francis Shaeffer
Prisoner of Zenda - Anthony Hope
Paradise – Toni Morrison
Tarzan of the Apes - Edgar Rice Burroughs
Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
The Decameron - Boccaccio
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
The Human Comedy - William Saroyan
Six Characters in Search of an Author - Luigi Pirandello
The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Startling Moon - Liu Hong
Scenes of a Clerical Life - George Eliot
Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Ragged Dick - Horatio Alger, Jr.
Streamers - David Rabe
The Graveyard Book – Neil Gaiman
Marco Polo Sings a Solo - John Guare
Nanjing 1937 - Ye Zhaoyan
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wings - Arthur Kopit
Bedknobs and Broomsticks - Mary Norton
The Dragons of Eden - Carl Sagan
The Stolen White Elephant - Mark Twain
Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All for You - C. Durang
Deltora Quest - Emily Rodda
Crimes of the Heart - Beth Henley
When the Gods are Silent - Jane Lindskold
The Thorn of Lion City - Lucy Lum
The Dining Room - A. R. Gurney
The Pickwick Paper – Charles Dickens
Brazil - Annette Haddad, ed.
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Painting Churches - Tina Howe
Daughter of the River - Hong Ying
The Orthodox Way - Father Kallistos Ware
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Tomorrow When the World Began - John Marsden
Atlantis - Greg Donegan
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom - August Wilson
A Descent into the Maelstrom - Edgar Allan Poe
Holy Ghosts - Romulus Linney
The $30,000 Bequest - Mark Twain
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
An Ideal Husband - Oscar Wilde
Zhao the Orphan - Ji Junxiang
House of Many Ways - Diana Wynne Jones
The Waters of Babylon - John Arden
Ancient Skies - oino sakai
Attack of the Two-Headed Poetry Monster - Mark McLaughlin and Michael McCarty
