Reflection on Art and Poetry

I participated in a reading at Fig Tree Gallery in downtown Fresno at the invitation of the artist Marilyn Prescott--whose retrospective show was hanging. We had a great talk, and it reminded me how much visual art and poetry have in common. For one thing, they're usually both framed. The art piece by the frame and the wall around the frame, and the poem by the white space around it on the page. Both of them, to quote Kenneth Baker, art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, use those frames to "...capture the viewer's/reader's vagrant curiosity and hold it for awhile." Imagery on the canvas parallels images in the poem. The use of line, light, color, texture, and so on in an art piece compare to the choices a poet makes in terms of vivid language with all its associations in a poem.

Further, making a collection of individual poems is much like curating and hanging an exhibit of art. In both cases, how the order will move the reader (or viewer) through the journey of the book (or exhibit) is of paramount concern. How the poems flow, complement, or contrast, or clash with each other, are as much a part of the decisions when making a book of poems as they are in deciding the order, spacing, and juxtaposition of paintings in a gallery or museum.