I would call the word “correspondences” a cousin to the word “ekphrasis” in the way I’m thinking of it. In Charles Baudelaire‘s great sonnet, “Correspondences,” he writes “Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se rĂ©pondent,” translated in various ways, but I like Richard Wilbur’s:”All scents and sounds and colors meet as one,” as well as a more literal one: “Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.” I think when we are looking for connections between writing and art, we are really looking for correspondences. So that when I want to respond to a work, either my own or another’s, whether writing or art, I try to find something that echoes, corresponds, connects in some meaningful way.
Covers are interesting to think about in that respect. With most of my books, I’ve been able to have input on the cover, often choosing the artwork myself. I like to use the art of a particular artist for my covers, and choosing that art means I’m trying to find some kind of correspondence between that work and what I’ve written in the book.
For Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, I wanted a Louisiana artist since many of the poems reference cultural influences I experienced growing up in New Orleans. I chose a piece (that I now own) from southern Louisiana artist Francis Pavy:
I responded to the musical references in this piece as well as the ominous smoking man in the background. Many of the poems in Roux are rooted in landscape and music, and offer meditations on the ways in which the darkest shadows and can form part of a seductive landscape that is both nurturing and destructive. I love the Zydeco diva in the center of this piece, dominating and electrifying the sky–or is it barbed wire that is trapping her?
For Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, my editor recommended the work of New Orleans artist Jacqueline Bishop, specifically her painting called Inga Tree, which you can find in all its vibrancy here. The photo, below, doesn’t really do justice to the beauty of the original as it flattens and darkens the work. In any case, the art felt absolutely perfect as the tree seems both nourished by and captured within its environment. The breasts on the tree suggest its connection to the female, and the skulls within its trunk suggest the ways in which death has shaped or fed it in some way. So the feeling I got from this painting is similar to the feeling I have about the nurturing I received in my birthplace, New Orleans, and from my family.
For a later book, The Small Door of Your Death, which focused on the death of my son from a heroin overdose. I used a painting from a former-girlfriend-become-good-friend of his, artist Morgan Everhart, that she had been working on when I contacted her to tell her he had died. She finished the painting, which she called “Gray” (my son’s name), and drove it from New York to Pittsburgh, where we then lived:
My husband, Teake, helping to hang the painting:
I loved the way she captured Gray’s sunny and dark, destructive moodiness in the painting. It felt genuine, an abstract expression of his personality, at least to me. It’s hard for me to look at this painting in an objective, formal way. For me it will always represent something honest and brave on the part of Morgan to say what she knew of Gray. So when Autumn House Press agreed to publish the book of poems I wrote responding to his death, I asked that this painting be the cover.
So in this case it was a connection I had with the artist, her connection with the subject matter, and the feeling the painting inspired in me, all “correspondences” that led me to use this work.
For my most recent book, 50 Miles, I chose the work of Bill Gingles, another Louisiana artist I had known through his work with the poet Darrell Bourque. I had become interested in abstract expressionism, and loved the way he and Darrell worked in several books to showcase correspondences between art and writing (see previous blog post on ekphrasis). For 50 Miles, a collection of wide-ranging lyric essays that address addiction and recovery, travel, crafting, gaming and teaching, all with the underlying theme of movement to hope after disaster. I didn’t want anything literal. I wanted something that might reflect the various paths one might take, or fall into, with respect to substance abuse and healing. I chose this one for the cover:
I was drawn to the loops that suggested round-about paths, the roughness of the canvas and its use of simple shapes to suggest something more powerfully complex. The movement from darker shades at the bottom, to lighter at the top, also suggested a kind of hope for me, something I intended my book to provide.
