A NOTE ABOUT ARTWORK (AND POETRY)

I love the “bounding line” of William Blake, as being both the defining outline or boundary of "form," and the linear, cheetah-like expression of unleashed, bounding energy—as well as “abounding,” “great in number,” “teeming” with generosity. The splendor of art is the macroscopic and microscopic richness of life’s abounding bounty, caught with the heart’s eye, personalized and universalized, with rhythm, color, light, humor and gravitas, all present in some happy measure.

But graphic representation is, for me, not a matter of some theoretical extension, but “recreational,” in perhaps its primal sense… a way of seeing God’s creation, or gnostically focusing on what’s here, through imaginative activation. And collages, in particular, are a release from starting with a linear rational intention to the joy of encountering scattered, fractally resonant discoveries, often through accidental juxtapositions that somehow jump into life with some uncanny spark. I love the element of surprise, which takes place for me both in poetry and graphic art, drawing or collage-making, where daring to leap into what is beyond us takes us forward. But between poetry and art, poetry is my life sentence, and drawing and collage-making my hours out “in the yard.”

Yet poetry is a life sentence I submit to with ecstatic expectation, a sentence extended into stanzas, paragraphs, linked meditations in both word and image that flow through book after book of poems, and color the collages and other art works I pleasurably see take form under my eye, where hopefully both become transparent lenses for some small intensity of the measureless divine light to shine through.

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