Poetry
can be lonely to write. One antidote? Collaboration.
A Mutual Muse steps out
when two artists, from different disciplines, work in tandem.
Each one can
sense the vibrancy of the other’s imagination throbbing, stalling, racing, lolling,
and napping. Intimate, yes. Sexual, no. But can untrusting and solitary souls
like poets actually collaborate with other artists? Join forces, team up,
cooperate, liase?
Here comes a week of answers to solo angst…
The Rose-Colored Chair at the End of the Mind
“Oh
I want that chair!” my friend the poet Phillis Levin said
to me when I emailed her Kara Kosaka’s collage of a dreamy pink wing-backed
armchair. Phillis is on a quest for a chair for her study. Kara Kosaka, an
illustrator located in British Columbia,
seems to have created a virtual model of The Perfect Poet’s Chair.
Kosaka
is now transforming a book project called Alphabetique: Tales of the Lives of the Letters
for McClelland and Stewart, Random House Canada. I am the so-called author of this book. But in fact the book
is a product of the Mutual Muse.
To say that Kosaka and I are “working”
together underestimates the power of her visual intuition. In fact, she seems to be reviving that once-drab definition of poetry as “word painting.”
I’ve never met Kosaka in
person and only visualize her from the photo, above. But I have walked the rooms of her imagination for five months now.
Every Thursday she takes off from her day job and, with her little girl Mae at
her feet, comes up with a visual response to one of 26 tales I’ve written. She emails it at midnight her time, and
I open it as soon as I get up. It
makes my Friday morning.
As
a writer in my seventh decade, I’ve been shocked at the twists and turns my own
creative life has taken. Alphabetique
began as a book of poems, then transmogrified into twenty-six brief imaginary
biographical tales of those shapes we call letters. Kosaka composed this
uncannily internally accurate response of a rosy chair to a tale called “Portrait
of the Artist as the Letter B.” Of course, the tale never mentions a
chair at all.
Now
back to Phillis, who is still searching for that ideal upholstered seat for her
office. “I want that chair!” she
repeats to me in one of our countless phone calls between Toronto, where I live
and New York, her home. Is Kosaka’s chair the seat of the imagination? Both
Phillis and I responded to it as just that: the mental place to curl up and write a small interior lyric—a
21st century poem composed in a chair so virtual it only exists in
digital form.
Phillis
and I are astounded to realize that we have exchanging poems for thirty eight
years. Inside this exchange we
occupy an imaginary playing space together. We couldn’t be more different as poets or as people. Yet we
meet in a room in the Mansion of the Mutual Muse. The room has a windy airiness
to it, and the curtains billow from the long windows that open to a natural,
but entirely storied landscape. It is a literary landscape. Yet we feel we can
touch it. And Kosaka somehow felt that mental vibe and transformed it into an
image we instantly recognized.
For
us there is a rose-colored chair at the end of the mind.
But for this blog
during the rest of the week comes starkly different imagery. Caricaturist John Sherfius on the
treachery of his art, and the knock-you-to-your knees new book of poems by poet
and novelist Anne Michaels in collaboration with visual artist Bernice
Eisenstein. Popup comments from poet Kathleen Driskell. Photographer Claire
Holt imagines the lives of poets with constructed photographs.
And
how about you, solitary souls? Have you ever turned your hermit’s
life into a collaborative creative hermitage? I promise to respond to all
comments, collaboratively, bien sûr.
–Molly