I was involved with a project entitled the Poetic Dialogue Exchange. For this project, I was paired with the poet and writer Kevin Prufer. We were tasked to create a collaborative project. Below is an excerpt writtern by Kevin describing our process:
The trick was to come up with a way in which one of us wasn’t simply responding to the work of another. An ekphrastic poem is a lovely thing, but we were interested in something that had a little more back-and-forth. At the same time, writing and making art are solitary endeavors and we are separated not only by sensibility but by about a thousand miles of distance. So we came up with this plan: Zach would begin by sending Kevin a piece he was working on, a current project that might be fruitful for poetry. Kevin would respond by looking closely at the artwork and writing a poem. The poem wouldn’t be about the artwork—Zach’s work is pretty abstract—but grow from it somehow. (The pairing was made especially interesting by the fact that Zach’s work eschews narrative and representation while Kevin is almost entirely a narrative poet, accustomed to creating characters and scenes and stories in his work.) Kevin sent his poem to Zach, who responded to it with a new artwork which Kevin then used to revise his poem. Thus, a new artwork grows out of an earlier one, though filtered through the lens of a poem…which is changed by the new artwork. Neat.
Below is the first drawing which I provided to Kevin, followed by poem his final poem and my final drawing. To give a bit of insight into my drawings, they were created by lightly scribbling (with graphite) and building up the surface until forms and images began to emerge.
Untitled (prep drawing), 7" x 12", graphite on paper, 2014
American Race Poem
Aliens are not like you. They have no arms. No hearts.
The gaseous pressures flatten them to ciliated disks
slipping through their planet’s nitrate mists.
Or, eyeless on an ice-encrusted moon,
they feed on carbon from the deep sea vents.
At the picnic table, a child draws one,
giant-headed with claws, mouth like a crater.
The sun showers her with glitter
and she shines. Perhaps they’re from a planet
like our own—blue air and complicated oceans.
Perhaps they hide their fleets behind the sun.
The girl draws in fangs, darkens its skin.
She adds another and a third. A family.
Someone photographed a smoking, alien wreck once,
far out in the desert. It glimmered in the sunlight.
The girl draws in a spaceship, nosecone and fins.
It lurks and hulks behind them, a black threat.
They are numerous, perhaps disguised
as neighbors, children, as anyone you’d see
along the street. Strange thoughts, alien of thought—
crowding by what you admire: a nice girl in the park
holding up her finished picture
as sunlight slips past the black branches.
– Kevin Prufer
Omen, graphite on paper, 17" x 22", 2014
to finish, here's a joint statement describing our working process:
The initial drawing that Zach gave me to work from looks like a dream-like, alien landscape. Menacing figures rise from the ground—are they plants or strange beings? Are they architecture? And what of the solitary cloud floating naively above them?
And what’s the opposite of this landscape? A pleasant park on a spring day? A picnic table at which a little girl draws pictures with crayons?
Both pictures, side by side in my mind, were unsettling—even the girl, whom I discovered was drawing an alien landscape of her own.
After a while, I began to imagine the person who was describing these scenes to me, who tells me, Aliens are not like you. I didn’t much like him. The more I listened, the more he became small and frightened, terrified of anyone unfamiliar and, therefore, menacing. I imagined him sitting on a park bench watching that girl draw pictures … and, without knowing it himself, thinking about race. (As I wrote, there were riots in Ferguson, not far from where I used to live. That, too, disturbed me. Maybe the poem takes place in Forest Park?)
Of course, the little girl has to hold up her scary picture for his admiration, and of course the sunlight slips past the black branches. Zach’s second drawing, which was in response to my poem, looked to me like dark figures and the shadows those branches might cast.
It’s lovely how the second drawing he created from the poem seems almost to participate in the poem’s surface narrative. It could almost be an alien spaceship casting a harsh light on a cloud-covered country far below it.
I brightened up my language a bit when I saw it.
– Kevin Prufer
In American Race Poem, I was immediately drawn to the opening line “Aliens are not like you.” Since I was looking at grainy images of UFO’s and old Dust Bowl photographs for my drawing, there was an immediate connection.
But as I read on, I saw that Kevin wrote a bigger poem than that. Why title it American Race Poem? What are these aliens that the nice girl is drawing? They are dark with fangs. They have no hearts; they are flat. One-dimensional, perhaps? Yet maybe they are like us or maybe someone is telling her that these aliens are not like her? There are two worlds; two realities and we are only getting one side of the story with only a fearful glimpse of the other.
I wanted to make a drawing that would remind the viewer of something. An alien abduction? A moment of transcendence? Maybe that something was simply a memory and never really happened?
Secondly, I wanted to create a sense of persecution and paranoia. A white light shines down. An alien tractor beam? A helicopter shining its spotlight? The clouds are ominous. Something is on fire. I never want to come out and say exactly what is happening in my work certain that it is better to allow the viewer to project their ideas onto the piece. Hopefully I’ve done my part.
– Zach Mory
