Chicken, cheese, children, Chicago, and child labor. The sounds alone of these words form a small poem. With so much alliteration, it just can’t be helped. And then there is the textual chiaroscuro of the proper noun Madame Chiang Kai-shek, all the associations that spill out with that twanging name, followed by a description of Chile, “it clings to the Pacific Ocean side of the Andes Mountains, and covers about half the continent’s western coast.”
As I am slicing through the white space that forms a band of separation between these lines of text, the visual images invoked by the words resonate and morph as they are juxtaposed. These are the things that make up the background of the painting I started today. They are all cut from an encyclopedia printed in 1964, the perfect foil for the 60s fashion piece I just sketched out on the snowy white canvas.
As I sat in the doctor’s office waiting room yesterday, I read an interview with poet Michael Waters in a 2006 issue of Arts and Letters: Journal of Contemporary Culture. Waters talks about how the sounds of words in poems are perhaps even more important than the meaning of the words. “Any verse is weak when it is not attentive to sound work, to tactile qualities divorced from literal meaning.” He cites the same idea from William Carlos Williams who refers to, “the words themselves beyond the mere thought expressed.” The same theories of composition apply to art as well. Sometimes it is the arrangement of the parts that make such an impact. In the interview Waters relates a brief story about photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who takes a postcard of a painting to the museum, then turns it upside down in front of the painting to compare images. “You can see it more clearly this way,” he explains. The subject is no longer emphasized. This method of tricking the brain by changing perspective also works with poetry. Waters refers to Williams’ practice of reading backward to enjoy the sounds of the words out of context. He says he starts from somewhere near the end, makes his way back to the beginning, and thus finishing, finds his own sensual pleasure greatly increased. “I am much better able to judge the force of the work in this way,” he explains.
Waters agrees. He says, “I like to do this just to hear the sounds that exist on the page. I remain aware of the way words clamor against each other or with each other, the musical phrasings, the chiming effects that occur.” This is the very reason I like creating a word collage as the background of my new series of paintings. The field then becomes a serendipitous series of combinations—words connected in ways they would never have been connected. With all of the sounds pushing and pulling against each other, it almost created a quietly humming word-scape into which the prevailing image is couched.
Waters illustrates his word sound theory with comments by artist Alberto Giacometti who said, “One might imagine that in order to make a painting it’s simply a question of placing one detail next to another. But that’s not it. It’s a question of creating a complete entity all at once.”
As a visual culture, we have long been influenced by even the tiniest details of the fonts chosen to convey messages, by the way words are presented on pages and screens. But it seems we are losing that attention to detail. Many of our messages come generically and imprecisely packaged. For example, I find myself irritated by the streaming information that appears at the bottom of my TV screen. Not only is it invasive, it is filled with misspellings and presented in a sans serif type that offers neither visual elaboration nor the appeal of cleanliness and simplicity.
So when I am playing with my small strips of text, I think about how the letters are subtly joined together with the small lines used to finish off each letter, the way each phrase brings forth a response as I lay it down permanently with glue, the change that occurs as it is connected, sometimes parallel, sometimes end to end, with its word siblings. I think about how the sounds in isolation impact me, and in the near future, the viewer.
In conclusion, am including one of my poems below titled, "When the Stream of Consciousness Turns Downward." It is part of a series called Falling Bodies and was inspired by the writings of D.H. Lawrence. Please feel free to read it backwards.
shoulders shoulders shoulders
fingers twine then tighten soft
rough touch
to such a place
just out of reach
and then
that sweeping urge to power
down the line from hip to knee
the knee that gives then gives then gives
more
higher up
from hip to knee
that feather touch
just out of reach
just reaching
shoulders shoulders shoulders
chest two times
I long to
shoulders
open mouth
to knee
this urge
this higher up
just so
just
so
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