In early February, I went to a wonderful reading in Boston, of Bill Corbett reading from Return Receipt, a book he made with the artist John King. As I am particularly interested in collaboration, particularly collaboration between writers and artists, I found their project intriguing; they didn't write the book together so much as one after the other. King sent one drawing to Corbett each day for several weeks, and Bill would write a poem in response to each. So it was more a process of looking after-the-fact. In this case the image gave rise to the poems, as ekphrasis. This explains a lot about the nature of the poems themselves, which differ from some of Corbett's other work. These poems are leaner and meaner, tighter somehow, with less personal narrative or commentary.
During the reading Bill read from his poems and showed slides of these hilarious and eerie drawings done by King on various kinds of hotel stationery. I was really moved by how the two activated one another's work...both have a minimal, slightly whimsical and grotesque sensibility, where something recognizable and slightly cartoonish almost gets depicted but not quite, fighting with the flatness of the frame or background. One difference perhaps was that Corbett's work took a more sincere push toward "More emotion" though oddly displaced, "real like the newspaper / in a collage," whereas King's drawings are humorously suggestive in the sense that they often have a quality of irony or pastiche to them (one of my favorites depicts a 3-D carton of eggs delightfully drawn on top of the default stationery's illustration of suburban types on vacation.) Also, there is a great sense of speed and movement, or travel, throughout the poems. The ekphrasis in these pieces take its cues from responding to different aspects of the art, from the stationery itself (frame or implied context) to associate cues within various parts of the drawings. But the poems remain right there in their looking, focused and attentive while meanwhile covering great distances. As an example, the poem written in response to a surreal drawing of a toothy cave printed on Brandon Inn stationery goes like this:
Tongue depressor teeth
I'm talking chompers,
heavyweight noshers
cranked apart to disgorge
Brandon, Vermont's outflow.
It's the 802 area code
Stephen A. Douglas's birthplace
just down the road
and there the Otter River
rolls shallowly through Pittsford,
Proctor south to the Battenkill.
This starts with looking at the image, and then begins jumping around associatively, thinking about the place name and what that means. It's almost real, hey, Stephen A. Douglas is in there, but it's flattened out somehow and retains the initial surreal disturbance of the image in a way that I think is quite effective.
Ron Silliman has previously compared Corbett's work to Frank O'Hara's, but I don't really see this connection aside from Bill's interest in art and artists. O'Hara's work is expansive, zany, and flamboyant, lines throwing themselves about and drooping over one another. Corbett's poems are too tight for that, too chiseled down. In O'Hara's poems I get a wonderful sense of the cruelty in camp combined with an emotional openess that I believe. It's glorious -- no one I know has been able to imitate that mix of irony and sincerity. In Corbett's poems, I get a stronger sense of sound as a material substance. Corbett's poems are less "voiced" than O'Hara's unless they do their tough-guy noir routine ("I'm talking chompers"), because, as I could plainly hear at this reading, Corbett feels every syllable as weight and material in his mouth when he speaks it, and he goes slowly and intensely, unlike motormouth O'Hara. Anyway, that's my two cents.
Speaking of which, I'm looking for artists to collaborate with. Any interest out there?
