A Companionship of Lines:
Take two on poetry as a collaborative art…
How
do you stay in touch with poetry when you’ve had such enormous success as a
novelist that all the winds in your life blow you toward the sentence and not
the line? Poet and novelist Anne Michaels, the author of Fugitive Pieces and The
Winter Vault, has found an answer in a fascinating collaboration with
visual artist Bernice Eisenstein, herself the author of a graphic memoir I
recommend to all: I Was a Child of
Holocaust Survivors. The line is literally the source of their enterprise
together.
Correspondences (McClelland & Stewart/Canada; Alfred A. Knopf USA) their new book, is not an ordinary volume in any
way, not in its feel, or the way it opens, or how the pages turn.
Michaels and Eisenstein knew the form
“right from the beginning,” Anne said to me in a telephone interview yesterday.
The two, who always wanted to work together, came up with an accordion-style
format and even went so far as to make a mockup of the book near the start of their
collaboration. The form they devised determined that Michael’s poem would
unfold from one side, and that Eistenstein’s portraits of 20th-century
writers and thinkers (along with minimal quotations from their works) would unfold
from the other. The drawn line, prominent in Eisenstein’s portraits of figures
like Fernando Pessoa and Charlotte Salomon, works in conversation with the
variable lines in Michaels’ poetry.
“Bernice
always wanted to create something with me, and I wanted to work with her, too,” Anne
said. (Both women live in Toronto.) “After my father died, I knew I wanted to
write some kind of elegy,” but not a traditional one, certainly not a story.
Instead, she was interested in her father’s “invisible life, the inner
conversation he had with the ideas of writers and artists” he admired, and who
were so much a part of the wrenching times he lived in. (Isaiah Michaels fled
Poland and eventually settled in Canada.)
Once
Bernice and Anne determined the format, “all the ways of interaction were there
from the start.” The limitations of the object determined the length of individual
sections. “I knew each page had to be a certain size.” Anne continued. Dimensions
both created and became lines. “Physically, we wanted the book to contain the
inexpressible.”
The
attempt to find words for the ineffable—that’s a definition of the impulse to poetry.
“I
had a long-standing conversation with myself about language and poetry,” Anne
murmured. “I wanted to bring the language down to a rudimentary place. We have
biological rhetoric and eulogizing language, but not the language for death.” As
the poet searched for this language, her friend Bernice’s visual instincts
offered another expressive alternative.
Inside
the Old French root converser is the
idea of “verser,” to occupy oneself. But in converser, two occupy
themselves together. Verser also, of
course, refers to the turning lines of verse. As the poem summons up conversations
in the past (my favorite being the first meeting of Paul Celan and Nelly
Sachs), the drawings limn the circumstances. Because North American publishers
McClelland and Stewart/Random House Canada and Knopf USA have followed
Michaels’ and Eisenstein’s initial mockup (helped by the deft hand of designer
C.S.Richardson), the visual art attains an almost psychic sync with the poetry,
and vice versa.
The
end result is a majestic solemnity achieved by fluid interplay. Yet there also
lingers a simple sense of two artists at play. Michaels’ lines range from two
words to the long stretch across the page. Eisenstein’s lines define the angles
of gazes in the multitude of portraits from Kafka to Akhmatova. As a material
entity, I’d call it a 21st-century book, one in a new stream of cherished
built-book-objects (think Anne Carson), branching off the river of books that
soon will simply be e-. Poetry, with
its limited but shining audience, as well as this audience’s insistence on a
tactile, indeed, a kinesthetic reality, strikes me as the place where such 21st-century
book innovations will flourish.
Correspondences is covered in a sleeve
of a somber but velvety charcoal color that reflects the rich sobriety of the
poem and portraits. One cover contains Eisenstein’s portrait of “Tereska” a
refugee child photographed by Chim. The other is embossed with these thematic
lines from Michaels’ stately elegy:
not
two to make one,
but
two to make
the
third,
just
as a conversation can become
the
third side of the page
“I
think what this particular collaboration did,” Anne mused, “was to allow a
conversation. It was company. Companionship.”