Time, and Again
“You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.”
--Socrates to Phaedrus, while sitting under a tree, talking about love and speeches [1]
Long have the poet and the artist been stealthy bedfellows. Ekphrastic description, concrete poetry, Blakean illuminations—the fields of word and image have an intuitive connection, even while they live on in separate worlds. In Time, and Again, guest editor Cindy St. John seeks out the passages that connect these two ways of making. Rather than taking the poet and the artist as two distinct personae, however, St. John asks us to consider the artist who writes, the poet who makes, and the creative process of engaging with the world using all of the tools at one's disposal. The result is a series of small projects and essays that move between image and text to reflect on the parallel border between life and document, emphasizing the indeterminate threads that move between our experiences in the world and our attempts at communicating those experiences in whatever way possible. It’s here, in this search for invoking the ineffable, that the goals of poets and painters collide and unite.
In A Poet's Glossary, Edward Hirsch defined poetry as "an inexplicable though not incomprehensible event in language; an experience through words."[2] The same could be said of artworks, where colors, images, movements and lines evoke thoughts and encounters while keeping objective description and bright-light understanding at arm’s length. As evidenced in this issue, the artist and poet share essential methodologies that lead to such a reflective engagement with the world. Description, layering, narrative, juxtaposition: all are processes of implicating without pinpointing meaning.
This issue’s central work builds out of St. John’s collaborative project Headlamp, where she brings one artist and one poet together to produce a two-sided letterpress card. For Time, and Again, St. John reunites Kate Greenstreet and Cherie Weaver, whose new work for Pastelegram deals directly with the two-pronged resonance of the visual and the poetic. Kate Greenstreet, a poet who also works with video and painting, presents five one-minute videos that reflect on the passing of time through multiple visual frames—an approaching train, a conversation, the taking of photographs. A poem developed from the original Headlamp collaboration serves as an iterative soundtrack for each video, bringing the different frames into a legible though non-reducible coherence. Cherie Weaver, a visual artist who also writes poems and illustrates books of poetry, presents four collaged drawings that conjure historical narratives from found images and scientific texts. By drawing molecular networks over this found material, Weaver visualizes stories lost to time.
Beth Marzoni approaches a similar problem from the reverse. In her essay for Time, and Again, “Trace/Object/Quarry,” she uses ekphrastic description to verbally picture her encounter with Heimrad Bäcker’s Landscape M. A photographer and poet, Bäcker spent his life documenting the remnants of the Holocaust through its seemingly banal material traces. By removing the illustrations from her text and graphically representing them as voids on the page, Marzoni’s descriptions invoke the fragmentary process of responding to images densely laced with historical specificity—images that can only evoke or suggest rather than show or reveal.
Cindy St. John adds the issue’s final element—a series of four poems written with the intention of making process visible. Fed up with the aegis of capital ‘P’ Poetry, St. John turns to the immediate narratives of her poems’ making. Description takes the place of verse as bus rides, internet slang and picture texts become both their historical context and meaningful content. In this, St. John reflects on the way poems can serve as vessels of representation and pictures of experiences, all meandering from one mind into another.