Catching the spirit--

Study for the jacket/cover by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
The final jacket has a warm, peachy background
and also contains A Novel, skittering around
the dragon's spines. Design work by
Burt & Burt.

Comments from Clive Hicks-Jenkins on making the cover art for Glimmerglass, taken from a comment on his Artlog:

I read Glimmerglass three or four times before I made the cover and the interior decorations for it, and I really loved the novel.

Marly is a friend of mine, and making covers and chapter-headings for her books really feels like a collaboration, which is not at all the way I hear many illustrators feel about commissions to make covers. Marly gives me free-rein to take the ideas where I think best, and is always gracious about the outcomes. I think it takes remarkable generosity on her part to give me that kind of freedom, as she must have ideas of her own, and yet she understands the processes of creativity so completely that she only ever offers positive responses. In fact I think she quite enjoys being taken by surprise!

detail, rear jacket

For my own part I never attempt to ‘illustrate’ the covers of Marly’s books, but try to create ‘moods’ for them that will have allure for anyone spotting them on bookstore shelves or in window displays. That’s my job, to catch the attention long enough to arrest the gaze of a potential purchaser, hopefully to the point of picking up the book to look inside. I have to be true to the spirit of the book, rather than try to reproduce in a picture what Marly has already achieved so beautifully in words. I attempt to make a setting (the covers) for her words (the novel). I see the image as being an accompaniment, like a pianist accompanying a singer, though I realise that might sound a tad fanciful.

Book-tour-and-collaboration friends--

Marly with Nathan Ballingrud at Malaprop's. Photo by Paul Digby.

Here are a few of the promised pictures from the August book tour--one from my reading with Nathan Balingrud at Malaprop's in Asheville, and several with the Digbys in front of my family home in Cullowhee. My mother made a splendid lunch for us all.

Lynn Digby and Marly. Photo by Paul Digby.

Lynn and Paul drove all the way from Alliance, Ohio to go to the reading and meet in person. We ate at an Indian restaurant with Nathan and then moseyed over to Malaprop's. A great stop, especially reading with the hometown boy! 

Paul Digby and Marly. Photo by Lynn Digby.

I've been e-friends with composer (and more--what doesn't he do?) Paul and painter Lynn quite a while, and I'm grateful to Paul for the lovely youtube videos he has done (and will do) of my poems--so grateful that I dedicated Thaliad to him (and to one other who has also been a friend to my work, John Wilson.)

Paul, Lynn, and I are collaborating on a work called Requiem (well, my part I'm currently calling The Gold Requiem) that will culminate in a gallery show with paintings, music, and poems. I'm looking forward to more music and paintings!

Paul took a picture of his plate! The small empty one at left
was a cold, lemony eggplant salad with Indigo Rose tomatoes.
Here he has onion tart, fresh creamed corn, butter beans,
corn bread with cracklin', white acre peas, and okra and tomatoes.
Very Southern. And much from my mother's garden.

The House of Words (no. 26): Being in cahoots with other artists

More Bontasaurus wisdom soon! Today's post reflects on yesterday's theme of collaboration and how it has surprised me along the way...

* * *

One thing that the web has brought me is friendship with artists in my and other fields and collaboration with them. If you are lucky, certain friendships can even be inspiring. Here are a few examples of how I have mixed up the media with friends!

Makoto Fujimura, opening of the "Charis" exhibition
Photo from facebook.

My first extended collaboration project was with Makoto Fujimura. He issued a challenge on the web for artists to write essays about the ten commandments, filtered through the lens of a chosen medium. He also leaned on me a bit! Having a pronounced tendency to do something a little different from what I am asked to do, I wrote not an essay but a story for Mako in nine parts (two commandments being combined.) He made a series of paintings in response to the story, and then we did several joint talks-and-readings-with-tiny-show at a Yale Divinity School conference. We’ve talked about making the project into a little book some day. And some day I am going to go visit his International Arts Movement writers--I couldn't make the last date suggested, but it will happen some day.


Clive Hicks Jenkins in his studio at Ty Isaf
 with Jack a.k.a Jacket Koppel.
"Green George" is one the easel.
Photo by Peter Telfer, from Clive's website.

Another collaborator of mine has been Clive Hicks-Jenkins. I met him after writing about him on the web some years ago. I’ve written prose and poetry for two books in his honor, he has made covers and division pages for my past and upcoming books, and we have generally inspired each other. Right now I am also planning to do some collaboration with his friend Graham Ward. And I just had the fun of visiting Clive in Wales and doing all sorts of things--a poetry reading, attending his restrospective exhibition (more on that later), meeting artists and writers and makers and producers of film.

Here Paul is at home in Ohio.
He looks happy in his work, doesn't he?
Photo pilfered from facebook--
no doubt taken by Lynn Digby.

Paul Digby is my most recent major collaborator. Paul is a multi-talented man has composed music and made films for four of my poems so far, and he has more in the works. He loves doing these; I love what he does and feel lucky. His generosity is something that means a great deal to me and benefits my books.

Makoto Fujimura grew up in the U. S. and Japan and lives in Chelsea, New York City. I knew him through a 3-year national working group sponsored by Yale Divinity School under Miroslav Volf. Clive Hicks-Jenkins lives in the Ystwyth Valley of Wales. I met him in the aether. Paul Digby is from the UK and now lives in Ohio (with Lynn Digby, a painter who I knew before I knew via correspondence before I met Paul. Some day perhaps I'll meet both in what is called "the real world.") But they all talk with me right in my own little writing room because of the wonder of the internet. For an artist living in an isolated and often weather-bound place like upstate New York, such communication is wonderful.

This very series is an example of collaboration with people from all over. I asked a few of my friends, and a few more people popped up and volunteered. I salute them all! Thank you. We all gain from playing together. We gain "larger life" from good company, just as we gain it from reading the best books or dwelling on beautiful works of visual art--another kind of good company.

House of Words (no. 25): Dave Bonta and the internet, 6

Dave Bonta, "Brush Mountain under ice,"
February 2011

MY: One thing I notice about the online part of what publishers call "presence" — particularly through Facebook and sometimes through my blog — is that I meet people who want to collaborate. I don't always have the time for this, but I have met wonderful artists in various fields this way. They have given me far more than I can ever give back, except through the simple fact of going on and doing work that they like. You are involved in a number of ongoing collaborations. How did they begin, and how do they make you more fruitful or help (imp the wing!) your own creativity?


DB: They definitely help. They come about naturally enough, because if you have a daily writing habit, you're always looking for material. For example, when the nature blogger and photographer Jennifer Schlick approached me last month about writing poems in response to a series of 16 macro photographs of spring wildflowers, I jumped at the opportunity. Ekphrastic poems are fun to write, and I love wildflowers. The fact that the poems will be featured in an artists book associated with an exhibition in upstate New York, and possibly in a print-on-demand book if we can figure out how to do that — that's gravy, but it wasn't my primary incentive.

I like these eyes in a beech bole...
Dave Bonta, "Beech grotesquerie," February 2010

Similarly, Luisa A. Igloria's now daily responses to my Morning Porch posts began almost by accident, on Facebook, where I automatically repost Morning Porch content. A very busy writer and academic, she has just enough time (and brilliance) to write a poem in her spare time each day, but not enough time to chill on her front porch as I do and watch the world go by until a poetic subject turns up. So she gets a daily prompt and a new audience, and I get stellar content to re-post to Via Negativa, plus the opportunity to watch a master poet at work. Her energy feeds off my indolence. I love it.

There are just so many opportunities for collaboration now — I don't see how any serious writer can fail to be excited by that. I think poets need to move away from the mentality of always writing for the next, single-author book, or if that's too much of a stretch, at least stop thinking about collections of poetry solely in terms of print.