Where the Visual Meets the Verbal

Robert Miltner

continued . . .

Interdisciplinary Dialogue: Collaboration as Conversation

The process of collaboration creates a special kind of dialogue between artists from various fields, one which produces a kind of conversation about the arts which includes all arts in the discussion, a metadialogue of sorts in which a commonizing of the process allows comparison of the product. More than just the visual and verbal being equal, they form a separate, more inclusive unit, for, as Edward Hirsch observes, "Works of art initiate and provoke other works of art; the process is a source of art itself" (10). Though both poetry and painting have their own languages, at times these languages share affinities, overlap; "Painters make images, poets make images; the painter too has language" (178), observes poet Howard Nemerov, and this connection has historical roots which, he believes, comes from the branch during the development of painting which went "in the direction of language, of alphabet and the codifying of signs, ending in the magic of writing" (182). Thus, the poet uses the visual arts to engage in a study of the images present, of the ideas and words which the visual prompt elicits. Ekphrasis, using mere words to try to describe the complexities and intricacies of pictorial or sculpted works, evokes a complex interplay, a correspondence, a dialogue enriched by the "other." This ekphrastic process, described by Edward Hirsch in the Introduction to Transforming Vision: Writers on Art, occurs as:

. . . poets and prose writers seek to "translate" visual into verbal emblems, to find linguistic correlatives for what they are seeing. Description often initiates this activity . . . but is invariably transformed into interpretation, into a space where one work of art generates and interpolates another. (9)

The process of collaboration creates a special kind of dialogue between artists from various fields, one Though Hirsch acknowledges that responses of poets to painters arrive as "personal interventions and meditations, creative inquiries," they are even more so "acts of inheritance." But inheritance of what? Inquiry requires words, as does meditation, and interventions require both word and gesture, the latter suggesting a visual construct. What writers inherit from ekphrasis, then, are words and images which enrich their writing vocabularies. Yet these vocabularies are distinct vocabularies; form, content, and line, each used by painters and poets alike, have quite different meanings to each one, so in order to access this vocabulary, the poet must enter into the world of the painter, learning the language which is used for communication in the country of painters. The poet must cross over, then, and knowingly do so, for "there is always something transgressive in writing about the visual arts. . . . A border is crossed, a boundary breached as the writer enters into the spacial realm, traducing the abyss, violating the silent integrity of the pictorial" (Hirsch 10). What exists beyond the border is a new entity, some third party which is a synthesis of the visual and verbal artist.

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