by Jeannine Hall Gailey
What is collaboration? For a poet, it is the act of working with another artist (or several artists) to create and produce a new piece of art. It could be a collage that incorporates lines of your poems, a piece of music interpreting your work, an interactive art exhibit, even a play!
Many people think of poets as being solitary types, but there are advantages to stepping away from the laptop and into conversation with other types of artists. Interaction and conversation with artists in a variety of media and genres can spark new ideas and build unexpected connections. The rewards of working in multiple art forms include reaching larger (and new) audiences as well as challenging yourself to think about your work in a new way and in a new medium.
While poetry often lacks a visual or auditory component, I think including all the senses in an experience helps people connect with a piece more fully. For instance, listening to the Star Wars score by itself is pretty stirring, but the John Williams piece is even more moving when accompanied by the sound effects, imagery, and dialogue of the movie.
Collaboration can be a one-way response, or a conversation where artists respond to each other. You may be familiar with book cover art or ekphrastic poems, which are composed in response to a work of art, such as Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” that describes the painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Those are examples of one-way responses. But collaboration can also be two-way, like a conversation between friends, in which there is an exchange of ideas and art over time. Collaborations can happen between poets and sculptors, neon or glass artists, painters, musicians, and filmmakers.
What are the advantages of working with other types of artists? It can be hard for poets to get outside of our little “boxes of words” and be vulnerable enough to share our work with others. The rewards include things like: seeing our work brought to life in a way we never imagined, making friends in our community, building support between different artistic communities, increasing opportunities to be inspired by other works of art and the fascinating conversations to be had with other types of artists (my personal favorite), and also increasing the audiences for your work. One of my best-selling readings was when an artist friend invited me along to one of her gallery openings to read poems to accompany the visuals of her work. Almost everyone there, mostly art patrons, bought a book!
I brought collaboration into much of my work as Redmond, Washington’s second Poet Laureate, because I thought it was important to incorporate and introduce multiple points-of-view and media types, and because, in a town known for its techie, rather than literary, population, it would be a way to introduce the unknown poetry with the more familiar say, art and music. I wanted to enrich our community’s experiences with a wider variety of art forms and show how poetry could be relevant to them. It was also a chance to show the often startling beauty of works emerging from cooperation between artists and art forms.
Similar opportunities can come to you through arts organizations, festivals, and art galleries at any time, so it’s good to consider with what type of artist you think you would most like to work.
When you think about poets working with visual artists, you might automatically think about cover art. I had a great time working with the cover artist of my first and third books, Michaela Eaves. She took the time to read early versions of my books and create concepts and hire artist’s models to pose for the scenes that eventually became the covers of Becoming the Villainess and Unexplained Fevers. We went on to collaborate on a series of images and poems interpreting Japanese folk tales for one of my Redmond Poet Laureate projects that were later used inside the second edition of my second book, She Returns to the Floating World.
Michaela Eaves talks about her experience with poet-artist collaboration: “The expected rules and boundaries are much looser when it comes collaborating with a poet. If you illustrate a straight-up prose story, the publisher, reader, and author expect certain level of illustrative representation. Here’s a story about a girl that likes to wear glass slippers, so you create a piece about a girl making the best of her bad footwear choices. Poetry allows you to loosen the reins and explore symbolism and intent, not just act out what’s on the page. The poet may mention slippers, but you are illustrating the feel of it rather than the facts. Working directly with the poet is great because you can get to the heart of what she’s trying to say by asking questions rather than just relying on guesswork.”
Visual artist collaborations can include more than just book covers or illustrations; it can include poetry used to accompany a visual art exhibition. Mary Coss of METHOD Gallery in Seattle paired poets with visual artists of different media for the 2015 show, TEXTure. Carol Milne, a talented glass artist recently featured in the Boston Globe, worked with my poems for the show, which also featured Northwest poets Sherman Alexie (paired with neon artists Lia Yaranon Hall and Cedar Mannan) and Daemond Arrindell (paired with fabric artist Maura Donegan.) Carol picked out two poems from my book The Robot Scientist’s Daughter and created a uranium-glass snowman with words like “Cesium” and “Uranium” woven into the pattern of the glass representing radioactive snow, and then I wrote a poem in response to her work.
Carol Milne, when asked to describe how the project came together: “Well, frankly, I’ve never been too fond of poetry. Most of it is too brooding and esoteric, where I lean towards the ironic, amusing and down-to-earth. However, I think it’s good to challenge one’s preconceptions, and I thought it sounded like a fun project. I browsed the meager Northwest poetry section of the library, and then, while surfing the internet for Northwest poets, I ended up on the Jack Straw website where I found Jeannine’s poem, ‘Cesium Burns Blue.’ It struck me with its visual beauty and dark message. I found a kindred spirit working in another medium. It was refreshing to come back to ironic work, making a political/environmental statement, through discovering similar work in written form. Jeannine’s work explores innocence and daily life with horrific undertones of environmental hazards. The contrast personalizes and drives home the horror of nuclear contamination. The power of the arts: to get you personally engaged without spewing statistics.”
Kelly Davio, the editor of The Tahoma Literary Review who collaborated with Redmond, Washington-area visual artists (and me) for the “Voices in the Corridor” project for VALA arts center offers another perspective on collaboration: “Collaborating with the visual artists in the “Voices in the Corridor” project was a wonderful chance to shake up my own artistic process. While I tend to be measured and exact when I write, the visual artists seemed to work intuitively, feeling the ways in which their pieces fit in and adapted to the gallery space. Riffing off their works and making my own process more flexible allowed me to write work I never would have produced otherwise.” And Jessica F. Kravitz Lambert, the founder of VALA and one of the two artists who came up with the idea for our collaborative project, said “Working with writers allows visual artists another opportunity to share the themes in their work with another set of artists that can interpret and dialogue with the artwork created, allowing the audience to have yet another way of “seeing” the artwork.”
One of the first collaborations I was even involved with was when I was contacted by a theater group called “The Alley Cat Players.” They had a copy of my first book, Becoming the Villainess, and wanted to use it as the basis for a series of one-act plays they would perform in Florida. I wish I had lived closer to Florida so I could have seen one of the performances!
Other types of collaborations include “videopoems,” in which filmmakers might collaborate with a poet to create a video that choreographs with a poem while it is being read, creating an effect similar to a music video.
Dance teams and choreographers can work to interpret poems as well.
Of course, you may have thought of poets working with lyrics (such as Wyn Cooper’s poem, “Fun,” that became Sheryl Crow’s pop hit “All I Wanna Do”), but have you ever thought of writing with a musician and songwriter? Bushwick Book Club is a group of collaborative musicians in Seattle. They interpret writings from Shakespeare, the Bible, and contemporary poetry and turn them into songs that they perform in a spirited venue with much joy and riotous musician-like behavior. (I’ve been to a few of these performances, and let me say, hanging out with a musician crowd, you can definitely tell which are the poets and which are the musicians—rowdier, more attractive, and better dressed.) Geoff Larson, the executive director of Bushwick Seattle, describes the process of collaboration: “The Bushwick Book Club Seattle process of writing original music inspired by others’ writings is a unique exercise that allows songwriters to chase any idea or thread the author’s work may spark. Like any writing process, it can be a pretty solitary endeavor, and emerging at the end of it to share the result with audience is a gratifying and interactive moment. When that audience includes the creator of the ‘source material,’ that interaction is all the more magical when two creative forces feed off of one another in a moment of mutual appreciation, each having generated something and then let it go into the world for others to receive.”
Joy Mills, who collaborated with me on one poem/song (“Sleeping Beauty Loves the Needle”) for a Bushwick Book Club project, describes her experience working with poets: “Working with Jeannine and other poets in the past has been such a gratifying experience as a musician because I consider poetry to be a foundation for so many creative forms. Poetry is music. The meter, rhythm, word play, rhyme and structure all lend themselves openly to being placed into song. With Jeannine, I much preferred to put her poem to music, rather than interpret it with my own lyrics. To use an already-existing piece and try to wrap the music around it allowed me to broaden my craft through collaborative approach. Poetry and music come from the same motherland in so many ways, allowing us to distill the vast world around us, if only for a fleeting spell.” It was truly surreal and a real treat to get up on stage and read my poem, and then hear Joy perform with her guitar the song she interpreted and created from my poem.
Several famous poets, including Yusef Komunyakaa, Margaret Atwood and Dana Goia, have collaborated with classically-trained composers to create operas from their work, in a practice of collaboration that dates back to the seventeenth century.
This could be the subject of its own article! Collaborating with other poets can result in wonderful work that yields often work that highlights the strong points of both writers. Denise Duhamel, a frequent and generous collaborator with other poets, highlights this: “I love throwing in with another poet and see where the imagination is ignited by the other. The poem becomes less a force of the will of one writer and a magic revelation full of surprises for the collaborators.”
For the previously mentioned “Voices in the Corridor” project for the city of Redmond, not only did Kelly Davio and I respond to the projects for four visual artists, but we also wrote haikus responding to both the Redmond landscape and did a kind of “call and response” to each other’s work.
In any collaboration, the conversation between poet and artist can enlarge and enlighten.
The risks are worth it, because the chance to include, improvise and bring a larger scope to your work is worth the occasional hiccup and increases your chances of reaching a greater and more diverse audience with your work. Branch out and take advantage of opportunities to exchange ideas and to collaborate. Watch a theater group transform your work with their acting abilities, or a musician take your work to a new level with the addition of a score. With inspiration and a little hard work, the results may take you far beyond what you might have achieved alone.
JEANNINE HALL GAILEY recently served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of four books of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter. Her website is www.webbish6.com.