James Blackwood is inaugural Poetry Scores’ Writer In Residence

Introducing: Poetry Scores’ Writer In Residence Program
James Blackwood is inaugural resident writer

Poetry Scores – a St. Louis-based arts organization that translates poetry into other media – invested $96 this year into renting a prop shop to store its accumulating mass of movie props. This prop shop, located in a very unique local garage, was soon developed into a movie set. Most recently, it has served as a set for the intake office of Lost Almost, our fabled version of Los Alamos in the movie we are making, Go South for Animal Index.

As an office intended to look timeless, or at least old-fashioned, it has a plain, old desk with a manual typewriter positioned on it. It has started to look like a quiet, secluded place where somebody could do some serious writing.



From this happy coincidence comes a new Poetry Scores program: the Writer In Residence Program.

Poetry Scores translates poetry into other media, so as such, we have no direct stake in the production of poetry or any other writing. However, if the pursuit of our mission, in terms of translating poetry into movies, results in this kind of special space for writing in this hectic world, we feel compelled to make it available for writing.

And so we announce the inaugural and 2011 Poetry Scores Writer In Residence: James Blackwood.

What does our Writer In Residence get? A key to the prop shop. A shelf to keep the work written there. A book shelf to keep books needed to write what needs to be written there. Privacy, within the constraints of movie shoots and prop movements and dressing sets.

What do we ask? We ask that our writer take advantage of the uniqueness of the space. A writer can have a laptop and the internet almost anywhere anymore, but in our prop shop there is nothing for writing but a manual typewriter*, paper, pens, and pencils. We ask that our writer use only these manual tools for writing. Also, in this age of portable documents and writing pods, a writer can work on almost any document at almost any time. We ask that our writer pick up and leave their work for this residence at the prop shop.

We will provide a shelf to store the manuscript or drafts or whatever the writer wants to call it. We just ask that what is written in the prop shop, stays in the prop shop. That is, until the writer is ready to publish or perform, in whatever medium, in which case we would expect to be thanked, of course. We agree to respect the writer’s privacy and not go rifling through his or her work, though it’s also acceptable if the writer bring or devise a way to keep the work in progress locked away within the shop.

“There is a great sense of honor in this assignment and I intend to live up to that or to do my damnest at the very least,” said James Blackwood, inaugural (2011) Poetry Scores Writer In Residence. “I've been most comfortable in an imagist format and I intend that to be the mechanical theme of my work: short concise poems and prose sketches.”

Blackwood is a Poetry Scores veteran, first showing up as a volunteer to work the door at the first event the organization staged in St. Louis, the art opening for Crossing America, the group’s first poetry score. Currently he is a board member, though there is no conflict in the board’s awarding him this position because it has no monetary value and comes with no stipend. It is worthless, unless the peace of mind and isolation to write is worth anything.

“In addition, I'd like to use the space as a host for conversations with other folks. Art needs them, especially off-topic conversations. It'd be great to have visual artists come and consider the work in progress and maybe sketch some responses or other things for me to take in,” Blackwood said.

“The ‘maker’ culture that's come to life over the last decade or so is fascinating to me, not least of all because of the inherent irony of its name. While its community is nominally based on building things, its core is understanding them and that most often starts with deconstruction. It's a logical descendant of the hacker spirit that has continued along the bleeding edge of technology. It plays. It breaks. It learns. It builds. And now it is reflecting back past the technology that incubated it, to all parts of our lives.”

The writer is reminded that Poetry Scores’ core mission is translating poetry into other media, and any use of the prop shop to further that mission takes priority over the writer’s use of the shop as a writing shed; but in practice, the shop sits empty and open for long hours, days, even weeks on end.

The Poetry Scores Writer in Residence position runs from the Poetry Scores Art Invitational (second Friday in November) to the next Poetry Scores Art Invitational. The Poetry Scores Board of Directors chooses the Writer in Residence and its decision is final; the application window is the month of October for any calendar year, though the board reserves the right to choose a writer who does not apply. The board’s choice is subject to veto from the prop shop landlady. The new Writer In Residence will be announced annually at the Poetry Scores Art Invitational.

For information, contact Poetry Scores creative director Chris King at brodog@hotmail.com.

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* The current Woodstock in the prop shop is on loan from Bill Sawalich and may or may not be the manual typewriter made available to the Writer in Residence.

Kim's quirky, material culture twist on Muldoon's "Incantata"

Kim Humphries is a frequent contributor to the Poetry Scores Art Invitational, and we are delighted to have him back for the Incantata invitational (6-9 p.m. Friday, Nov. 11 at Mad Art). Kim's work often encodes a story worth the telling, so we asked him to do some telling about "Lucozade" (the image above is of the commercial artifact, not Kim's piece, which is in progess).

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Kim Humphries writes:

Initially Muldoon’s “Incantata”—a tribute to artist Mary Farl Powers—intimidated me. I saw it as a complex, roiling charge into an allusive and at times elusive roller coaster ride that included tunnels too dark in which to truly see, running at a speed that created blinding blurs where only the captured bits added up to anything truly tangible. Once I became comfortable with that—the experience that was the poem—with the words and sometimes gibberish that were painted with an intoxicated confidence leaving much to fill in, and imagine, or to not bother to imagine at all. It was then that I was able to begin mining the work for some way to contribute to the visual puzzle the “Poetry Scores” artists would be creating.

Not being one to reiterate or echo another’s work I looked for something to grab onto that would amplify and respect some small portion of the work—something that spoke to the nature of this beast. Frankly, I had to look up Lucozade. I rolled past it on the first couple of reads. Lucozade—it sounded primordial like a rare stone, like an element. To my surprise it is a sports drink from the UK. Blood and water are cited in the poem and this marvelous drink, like those, becomes an essential element of life. That was just the quirky twist I was looking for, something to have a bit of fun with as Muldoon seems to have had writing this quirky, colorful piece. As my work often speaks through bits of material culture this was a perfect match.

I procured a dozen bottles of Lucozade and am in the process of creating a well-engineered (the company is a Formula One racing sponsor, after all) presentation box for one bottle that will sit on a shelf at the appropriate location within the gallery. This piece will be part of the silent bid auction. The remaining eleven bottles will become a limited edition group identified by an artist’s label. They will be for sale in the gallery for immediate purchase at a reasonable price throughout the evening. 100 percent of the proceeds from the sale of the boxed and editioned Lucozade will benefit “Poetry Scores.”

The cross-disciplinary roots of “Poetry Scores” are truly impressive. This season’s panel discussion, live performance at the Touhill Performing Arts Center and the gallery exhibition / benefit cum Exquisite Corpse promises to be fantastic undertaking building on the multi-year—this is the 6th poetry score and invitational—history of this set of unique, fertile collaborations.

Kim Humphries
10/5/11

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Kim Humphries at Bruno David Gallery

"Not just a lament, but a dissent": Stephen Burt on "Incantata"

I asked Paul Muldoon who he thought should write the liner notes for our score to his poem Incantata, and he suggested Stephen Burt of Harvard University. Steve -- a literary critic of the highest order -- was very kind to consent. With his permission, we post his essay in advance of the premiere of Barbara Harbach's commissioned score of the poem (3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theatre in the Touhill Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of UMSL).

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ON “INCANTATA”

By Stephen Burt
Harvard University

 During the early 1980s Paul Muldoon kept up a tumultuous romance with the Irish artist Mary Farl Powers, known for her colorful and disturbing prints of curvy, biomorphic forms. Powers died in 1992 from cancer she refused to treat by conventional means. “Incantata” (1994) is his memorial to her; it is also his longest non-narrative poem. Acclaimed as raw, intimate, vulnerable, compared to his cannier, more guarded norm, “Incantata” nonetheless harbors the intricate patterns and puzzles his readers expect: those patterns make the poem not just a lament, but a dissent from Powers’ own fatalism, and from any larger moral claims about patterns that we might find in the world.

For all its complex details and allusions, the poem breaks neatly in two: the first 23 stanzas, each a complete sentence, follow anecdotes and memories from the years of their romance through to the months of her illness – almost, but not quite, a life story. The last 20 stanzas, though each one concludes with a period, belong grammatically to a single, overextended sentence beginning “That’s all.” The long catalog of things lost, of lines starting with “of,” modulates into the doubly negated comparisons (“from which we can no more deviate // than that … than that … than that”) among which the poem ends. The two parts suggest a division between life, with all its variety, and death, which unites everybody and everything. Where Powers insisted, with Beckett, on fatality, Muldoon insists as well on randomness, on the unpredictability that remains for us, in this world, as long as we live.

Muldoon’s rhymes are typically unpredictable: in the first stanza, “barrow” (a trench or grave, not a wheelbarrow) rhymes with “Herrera,” “Inca” with “pink,” and “nautilus” with the Irish hero-god Lugh. Muldoon takes his stanza (rhymed aabbcddc) from W. B. Yeats, who used it for his gravely ambivalent elegy “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” and again in “A Prayer for My Daughter." (The Irish a leanbh means literally “my child.”) Yeats’s poem “All Things Can Tempt Me” pursues his dual compulsion to keep writing, and to cease “this accustomed toil,” “this craft of verse”: when young, as Muldoon and Powers were once young, the poet sought vivid inspiration, but “would be now, could I but have my wish, / Colder and deafer and dumber than a fish.”

This first in a bevy of quotations and allusions set Powers up in a national tradition, one that becomes international fast. Yeats gives place to Beckett, the expatriate who settled in France, whose art of repetition and reduction can seem both fatalist and materialist, reminding us that all atoms reach the same end. In such a cosmos geantrai and suantrai, “love songs” and “lullabies,” are similarly temporary consolations. “In everything there is an order,” but that order has little to recommend it: sexual adventure ends in a ditch, all life in one or another barrow, and Christian resurrection is at best as remote as the metamorphoses of insects. The Book of Kells and the “High Cross at Carndonagh,” representatives of old Irish piety, are at best overfamiliar, at worst tourist kitsch.

On the other hand, they have survived. Powers and her mother, working together on one of her last lithographs, enact at once the secular promise that art can survive, and the also secular promise of generational succession. Powers, however, died childless, so that she can survive only in memories or in her art, an art full of worms, of travesties (like Beckett’s immobilized characters) of the human speaking form. Perhaps all art is “a potato-mouth in a potato-face,” a vegetable form that says nothing of its own.

The talking potatoes, the marauding worms, the other reminders of violence and decay, from the Irish troubles to the “submerged” towns destroyed by the Quabbin reservoir, anticipate the claim that seems to govern the second half of the poem, the claim that death makes everybody alike, turns all nouns and all names to “quaquaqua” or “quoiquoiquoi,” “what what what” (with an overtone of “why why why?”). It is a claim that the fatalistic Powers, in her illness, appeared to accept (though she pursued her herbal remedies), and a claim that the energies of Muldoon’s cascading phrases defy. His first defiance falls flat: “art… builds from pain, from misery … a monument to the human heart / that shines like a golden dome.” Such architectural, impersonal survivals, associated with public works and with institutional religion (the Golden Dome of Constantinople, or Istanbul) seem brassy, insincere, impersonal, closer to late-1930s Auden than to the oddities that we expect from Muldoon.

And so the poem grows odd again. Muldoon restates Powers’s own materialism (“nothing over / and above the sky itself, nothing but cloud-cover”), which he shares, and her fatalism (“nothing’s arbitrary”), which he does not share. He feints towards it nonetheless as he introduces his chain of repetitions, his epochal final sentence: “That’s all that’s left….” He will not come to a grammatical closure for 160 more lines.

The story of a life, which must come to an end, has turned into a list, which need not end at any particular point. This list sorts memories, and it seeks variety, in its use of the bodily senses (andouille, “the Cathedral at Rouen,” Calvados, Vivaldi) and also a variety of emotion, from “self-reproach” to sexual satiety. Its exuberance, “all composed of odds and ends,” seeks a centrifugal force, an unpredictable variety, to set against the centripetal pull of the syntax, and of the central fact, Powers’ death. “That daft urge to make amends / when it’s far too late” joins the catalog too, foreshadowing the final, more emotionally various, stanzas in which Powers’ father (the fiction writer J. F. Powers) visits her “sickroom,” where “of … of … of” gives way to “no more than ... than … than that,” where properties from the opening lines return.

Muldoon takes this chance to dissent again from Powers’ fatalistic cosmology, this time without making grandiose claims for art: “that’s all that’s left ... of the furrows from which we can no more deviate … than that we must live in a vale / of tears,” “than what we have is a done deal.” We all die – no divine “herbarium” can help that – but we are not destined to die at such and such time, nor in such and such way. Political violence, cancer and even floods (like the one that created the Quabbin) may all arise from some mix of natural law, blind chance and human endeavor, the same combination that generates the tangled wonders in the Book of Kells, in Powers’ potato-prints and lithographs, in Muldoon’s poem.

The bravura ending encompasses chiasmus after chiasmus: the cddc rhyme, the anagrammatic “row / of … worms,” the “ink-stained hands … hands stained with ink,” and the pairs of hands (Muldoon’s, Powers’, Powers’, Wahl’s) that span almost the entire poem, though now these hands can join “no more.” (The Irish language in the final line repeats, in Irish, the beautiful names of the ineffectual herbs.) The last stanza uses the same rhyming sounds as the first, reversed: aabbcddc becomes ddccbaab, “barrow” and “Herrera” (the initial a rhymes) mapped onto “row” and “arrah.” The same transformation occurs throughout the poem: the second-to-last stanza reuses rhymes from the second (“arm” and “worms” corresponding to “Hermes” and “herbarium") and so on; the middle stanza, to which the whole pattern must point, includes the Beckettian meaninglessness of "acacacac." (Several critics, such as Iain Twiddy, examine this pattern at length.)

If there is a hidden pattern built into our lives, it must be a pattern as absurd, playful, apparently arbitrary, and hard to detect as this skein of off-rhymes: a pattern that tells us only about itself. Muldoon remains sad, and he still wants to hold her hand: his poem has not brought in the doctrinal, nor the emotional, consolation of older and more famous elegies. Instead, that last line, with its heartbreaking counterfactual, tells us what Muldoon’s poem has accomplished. Into the welter, the quiddities, of all these memories, the poet has brought an appreciation, an ironic ornament, a colorful resistance to the monochrome of fate, an order not found in nature, but made by hands.

© 2011 Stephen Burt. Commissioned by Poetry Scores.

An interview with Barbara Harbach, composer of "Incantata"

As previously reported, Poetry Scores will premiere Barbara Harbach’s poetry score to Paul Muldoon’s Incantata at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theater, part of the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Missouri–St. Louis. The concert, co-presented by Women in the Arts at UMSL, is free and open to the public, with plenty of free parking.

Poetry Scores spoke to Barbara Harbach about her score to Incantata.

How did you like working on this commission?

Barbara Harbach: It was a very fascinating ride, a good journey. At first I was very fascinated by the poem, “Incantata” by Paul Muldoon. I became very wrapped up in all the literary, musical, food and drink associations. It was just fun to read. I think that in a way it’s a eulogy to Mary Farl Powers, but on the other hand it’s a very strong love story, all these items rolled into one. I was inspired and wrote the four movements in order.

The 1st movement is titled “Powers,” a play on Mary Farl Powers’ name and a woman’s powers, the power of nature, the power of the world. The 2nd movement, “Nocturne,” is a reference to John Fields’ nocturnes, which are mentioned in the poem, and there is a little place where the piano part sounds like Fields. I was striving for beauty and nostalgic atmospherics and something a little eerie. Then the 3rd movement, “Composed of Odds and Ends,” was built from several Irish tunes. It’s a lot of fun. One source song is “The Humours of Whiskey” – you can’t get any better than that! It’s Irish and American altogether, with several quotes from fiddle tunes and a few gestures toward early Irish folk music. The last movement, “Bitter-sweet,” has a kind of sadness and resolution of acceptance with a few quotes from the other movements to round it out.

The poem is very allusive, mentioning a great many artists and works of art. Did you feel your composition needed to be similarly allusive?

Barbara Harbach: I felt no restraint in trying to stay within any framework the poem might suggest or his style of poetry. There are so many syllables per line; there is a very formal plan to the poem. I do realize there is some kind of global structure to the poem. If there is any kind of structure to my compositions, it’s my own forms. I use a loose rondo form, a lot of different melodies put together, fugues and canonic imitations.

Were you tempted to play with the poem's pop musical references, like Van Morrison and Dire Straits, “The Sultans of Swing”?

Barbara Harbach: I don’t know much about either one of them, so to superimpose on my composition their styles might sound forced or silly. It would be fine if another composer took another way around writing music for the poem – you might totally go that way.

As an artist you have done a lot of collaborations. Have you ever worked with poetry in this way before?

Barbara Harbach: No, I haven’t worked with poems or poetry in this way. There is a libretto to Booth! and my opera O Pioneers! written by Jonathan Yordy, a librettist now at Lewis University. I’ve set to music poetry by Emily Dickinson, 16th and 17th century English poets, and biblical works. So working with poetry is not new, but this endeavor using no words from the poem is new. This is the first time that I’ve put poetry completely into music – this is all instrumental music.

I had a ball doing it. It was a great deal of fun. There will be eight instruments and a conductor at the premiere. It’s going to sound like a chamber orchestra in there! It was a lot fun to do. I was really energized to go and write!

For more information on Poetry Scores, visit www.poetryscores.blogspot.com, email brodog@hotmail.com or call 314-265-1435. For more information on Barbara Harbach, visit http://www.barbaraharbach.com/. For directions to the Touhill, visit http://www.touhill.org/.

Ray Brewer's General ashes on Hitler's face

Prop newspaper front of Hitler smudged by ash and scorched by stubbed-out cigarette smoked by the General (Ray Brewer) in his last scene in our movie, Go South for Animal Index, shot Sunday night on location at Atomic Cowboy (signed by Ray and me).


On Sunday we finished shooting Ray Brewer for the movie we are making. The movie is called Go South for Animal Index, a fable of Los Alamos, and Ray plays the General who runs the military side of Lost Almost, our fabled version of Los Alamos.

I wasn't really ready to wrap Ray on the movie, but he has a new acting opportunity and needs to shave the little moustache he grew for the General. We wrapped with Ray, in fact, before we got to the bomb shop and bomb test scenes, which is a shame, but not everything goes your way in the amateur movie business (and our shoot has dragged on more than a year).

Since our fabled version of the night watch before the first successful test of a nucleur bomb (and the Trinity test itself) will now be shot without the General, I needed to come up with an impactful way to wrap up his character's storyline.

I remembered a scene we shot with Ray and George Malich playing the Military Chaplain, when we had to rush wrap George before his sudden brain surgery. Wanting to tie their characters intimately, and mirror a funeral scene they play together early in the movie, we shot the Chaplain confessing the General. We played the scene like the General has to be there, it's his duty, but he doesn't think he has any sins he needs to confess -- he is trying to kill Hitler, who deserves to die; no apologies.

It ocurred to me to play that confession scene very late in the movie. I knew we'd wrap up George's Chaplain -- again, with him away from the Trinity test, since George would not be available to act in that scene -- with an alcoholic meltdown we had shot on our first day of shooting. The Chaplain hides from the final proof of the killing bomb in a bottle. That meltdown is set up, in part, by his failing to confess the General.

I liked the mirroring effect of having the General leave the confessional and, like the Chaplain, experience the completion of the bomb alone. The Chaplain turns to his secret bottle, and the General returns to his cigarette, which he has been trying to smoke all movie but been made to put out over and over -- you can't smoke in the nucleur physics lab, you can't smoke at the funeral, you can't smoke at the confessional.

At the Lost Almost cantina, he can smoke. He smokes and ashes his cigarette on Hitler's face, displayed on the cover of a newspaper displayed throughout the movie. After the successful bomb test -- which we dramatized, shooting on location at Atomic Cowboy, by flashing two bright lights on and off -- the General turns back to his cigarette and stamps it out on Hitler's face.

My childhood friend Richard Skubish, who plays the scientist who dies at Lost Almost (at whose funeral the General is not allowed to smoke), insisted that Ray and I should sign one of the false Hitler fronts for the newspaper we used in the three-take shot; so we did.

GEEKY POST-SCRIPT
There also is some inter-textual fun going on here for me. In our first movie, Blind Cat Black, Ray plays The King of the Zombies. Though he is paid to take out the hit on our hero/ine, The Absent-Minded Tightrope Walker (Toyy Davis), when the deal goes down and the zombies snuff him/her, The King of the Zombie is sitting alone at a bar (CBGB) drinking a goblet of blood. Much like the General having the solitary smoke at the bar when the scientists finally finish the deadly bomb.

Poetry Scores to premiere Barbara Harbach’s ‘Incantata’

Poetry Scores to premiere Barbara Harbach’s ‘Incantata’
Chamber orchestra will perform poetry score to Paul Muldoon’s elegy
Free concert Sunday, Oct. 30 at The Touhill
Lecture Oct. 27, Art Invitational Nov. 11

Poetry Scores will premiere Barbara Harbach’s poetry score to Paul Muldoon’s Incantata at 3 p.m. Sunday, October 30 at the Lee Theater, part of the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Missouri–St. Louis. The concert, co-presented by Women in the Arts at UMSL, is free and open to the public, with plenty of free parking.

Harbach’s score to Incantata will be performed by an eight-member chamber orchestra (Flute, Clarinet in Bb, Bassoon, French Horn, Trumpet in Bb, Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello) conducted by James Richards. Sequenced around the four movements of the chamber piece, Eamonn Wall will perform Muldoon’s poem, an elegy for Mary Farl Powers and a celebration of the poet’s love and life shared with her. Chris King, creative director of Poetry Scores and producer of Incantata, will briefly introduce the performance. The entire program will run less than an hour with no intermission.

Poetry Scores is a St. Louis-based arts organization dedicated to translating poetry into other media; Incantata is its sixth poetry score. Paul Muldoon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet from Ireland now based at Princeton University. Barbara Harbach is a St. Louis-based composer and publisher of many works, concertizing musician and professor of music at UMSL. Eamonn Wall is an Irish poet and professor of Irish literature at UMSL.

Paul Muldoon’s poem “Incantata” was published in The Annals of Chile (1994). It is often cited as one of the best poems written in English by anyone who currently is alive. Muldoon is collaborating on the poetry score, and his performance of the poem will appear on the Poetry Scores CD once Harbach’s composition is recorded. A live performance of the premiere will be recorded by Adam Long, the multiple Grammy-nominated sound engineer based in St. Louis.

“I was drawn to the many feelings and emotions in the poem, the cry of heartbreak, enduring love, humor, pathos, giddiness, allusions to music, literature, art, liquor and food,” Harbach said of her score.

The premiere of Harbach’s score will be prefaced a few days previously with a lecture on “Paul Muldoon’s ‘Incantata’ and its Sources” by Guinn Batten, a professor of English at Washington University. Batten will speak 12:30-1:45 p.m. Thursday, October 27 in Room 331 of the Social Sciences & Business Building at UMSL. The composer, Harbach, and producer, King, will join Batten for a discussion. The lecture is free and open to the public, though a parking permit is required; call 314-516-7299 or visit umsl.edu/cis and click REGISTER.

Poetry Scores’ work with Incantata will conclude 6-9 p.m. Friday, November 11 with its 6^th annual Art Invitational at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12^th St. in Soulard. Some 50 visual artists are making new work in response to Incantata. As always at a Poetry Scores Art Invitational, all work is titled by the artist after language taken directly from the poem, then the work is hung in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears. “In that sense, the poem itself hangs the show,” said King, who is curating the invitational. All work will be for sale on silent and live auction (many payment forms accepted), with proceeds split evenly between artist, gallery, and Poetry Scores.

For more information on Poetry Scores, visit www.poetryscores.blogspot.com, email brodog@hotmail.com or call 314-265-1435. For more information on Barbara Harbach, visit http://www.barbaraharbach.com/. For directions to the Touhill, visit http://www.touhill.org/. For directions to Mad Art Gallery, visit www.madart.com.

"That’s all that’s left of the voice of Enrico Caruso"

So Poetry Scores' 6th annual Art Invitational is coming up 6-9 p.m. Friday, November 11, at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in Soulard. This year, some 50 visual artists are making new work in response to Paul Muldoon’s poem Incantata.
Muldoon's poem is an elegy for a girlfriend who died of cancer. The beloved, Mary Farl Powers, was a visual artist, and from the evidence of the poem, she and her poet boyfriend carried on an exciting artist-lover dialogue and journey. Not only creative art (in all media), but also food, liquor, history, politics, geography -- they seemed to share everything, and Incantata appears bent on remembering it all.

I'm not a visual artist, but I play one at our Art Invitationals. As creative director of Poetry Scores and curator of our Art Invitationals, I tend to slip myself quietly onto the artist list to pad out our numbers (and because I can). I'm a doodler desperately hoping to be taken for a sketch artist or caricaturist. I like to draw people's faces. Since a Poetry Scores Art Invitational requires that work be titled using a quote from the poem, I look for names in the poem we are scoring and pick a face to draw.

In Incantata, I have a lot of names and faces to choose from, because this is a serious name-dropper of a poem. It's as if the poet were desperate to write down one more time any name either he or his beloved ever spoke aloud to the other. Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry, Camille Pissaro, Andre Derrain, John Field, Enrico Caruso, Spinoza, Amelia Earhart, Airey Neave, Mountbatten, Joseph Beuy, Van Morrison, Rembrandt -- these names are all direct quotes from the poem, and therefore usable titles for a work submitted to the Invitational.

Tonight I ate an ice cream and attempted to enter Dunaway Books, in search of a book about Airey Neave, or perhaps Pissaro; but the place was closed. I feel like I am still looking for my subject, though the other night I took my first stab at a sketch of Enrico Caruso. In addition to being one of history's great voices, Caruso was a very theatrical and photogenic ham, so there are many evocative images of him to sketch from. As an inside joke, I sketched Caruso sketching -- a caricature of the opera star drawing a caricature.

There is talk of adding a children's art component to this year's Invitational. I'm working this out with new Poetry Scores board member and South City Studio & Open Gallery (SCOSAG) honcho Amy VanDonsel. I am typing this out now, in part, so I have a list of those dropped names to draw from later. I plan to find and print good images of all of these people, and have fun drawing faces with SCOSAG kids.

You know the jail cell in Mad Art, on your way into the main gallery space? We're thinking to hang the SCOSAG kids' art in the jail cell, along with mine, their mentor as a sketch artist, a'hem. We plan to put the kids through the same process as the other Invitational artists, in terms of putting their work up for auction and splitting proceeds three ways: artist, gallery and Poetry Scores.

Fun!