Painted Words

Poetry Comics

An Animated Anthology

by Dave Morice

Teachers & Writers, 136 pp., $16.95

BACK IN THE 1960S, when I was in my twenties, it seemed that all my friends who were writers were married to painters. I never doubted then that, of the two callings, literature was the nobler and required more brains. Was there a Nobel Prize for painting? Painting suited the more earthy and sensual nature of women. The fact that there were so few famous women painters was an accident of history. Men were writers and women painters in the same essential way that all dogs are boys and all cats girls.

That was an error, I realize now. Writers are drawn to painters as yin to yang, sweet to sour, soft to hard. And sometimes–indeed, more frequently in this promiscuous age–they aspire not just to cohabit but to arrogate to themselves the attributes of the other art form. Picasso and Marsden Hartley and Larry Rivers published their poems and playlets, while Victor Hugo and D.H. Lawrence and A.R. Ammons put their paintings on the auction block. There is no official census of the poets and painters who have transgressed the boundaries between their arts, but it easily exceeds those who have been seen to do so in public.

I know this because I confess to being one of the transgressors. Twice in my life, first in the early 1980s and again, with even more abandon, this last year, I have left off writing full-time in order to paint. As a result I feel I have a Teiresian insight into the painterly life that most lifelong painters themselves have forgotten or taken for granted: chiefly, the sheer glory. Surely, it is no accident that so much of the earliest Italian painting is given over to angels and depictions of heaven, until all the domes and cupolas and barrel-roofs in Christendom have become one glowing Baroque cloudland of painterly joy. This is not the usual narrative of the “Progress of Painting” that one learns in Art 101, but I think it sums it up at least as well as the triumph of the laws of perspective and anatomy.

Publishers feel a similar impulse to unite the two realms, but their efforts at matchmaking are usually botched. A case in point, a thirty-dollar anthology of poems and color plates from Abrams, one of the mainstays of art publishing, called “Dancing in the Wind: Poetry and the Art of the British Isles,” edited by Charles Sullivan, a gentleman with a Ph.D. in social psychology who has edited ten other “anthologies of literature,” all published by Abrams. The book, not unnaturally, is dedicated “to Paul Gottlieb, my publisher.” It is a run-of-the-mill coffee-table book that mashes together a lot of old poetic chestnuts with an equal quantity of old painterly chestnuts: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,” for example, with Arthur Hughes’s “April Love,” the painterly equivalent of a Bette Davis movie. The editorial contribution is a brief note facing the color plate: “Owned for a time by William Morris, this romantic painting includes symbols of eternal life (the ivy) as well as love’s transience (the fallen rose petals).”

Another pairing, of a poem by Philip Larkin and a portrait by Lucian Freud, is glossed: “Freud portrays an interesting face, but he gives no hint of what the young man might be thinking.” This is a blandness scarcely worth the bother of reprimanding. Sliced out of the book and pinned to a bulletin board, the plates should serve the basic purpose that Horace refers to in his often-cited lines on the subject: As with paintings, so with poetry: Some are best seen close up, others from across the room. The across-the-room gestalt conveyed by a reduced image on glossy paper is all you can hope for in even the best art book, so it is easy to ignore the editorial piffle. Sullivan’s selections are commendably eclectic within the range of all that is curious, agreeable, and well behaved. But it does not in any single instance address the question of what poetry and painting may have in common, except insofar as they may be about an Irish fellow with an interesting face.

The Getty Museum in Los Angeles offers a much better-considered hybrid of art book and (if not poetry) a poet’s silken prose: “Seeing Venice: Bellotto’s Grand Canal,” an essay by Mark Doty, a pocket-sized study of a single painted view of Venice diced up into a little anthology of details, with a complementary sheaf of reflections on Venice and Bellotto’s artistry and life. On the evidence of this jewelbox of semi-precious pensées, Doty would be an ideal companion with whom to visit any painting, and if he sometimes swells with a Jamesian afflatus, that would seem to be the job the Getty paid him to do.

Still, Doty’s “Seeing Venice” tells us no more about the connection, if any, between painting and poetry than that a good writer can turn his eloquence to the praise and elucidation of good paintings. But even when done in verse, as in Auden’s well-known poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,”

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along,

such a tribute usually exploits the object of its art to draw its own, extraneous moral. Breughel’s painting is no better, or worse, for Auden’s adducing his moral, which in fact is only a half-truth at best: If the Old Masters are never wrong about suffering, and that suffering takes place before a largely indifferent audience, then what of all those pietàs and crucifixions that insist on the attention of the entire universe? About suffering young poets are so often wrong.

THERE IS ANOTHER and more customary way for a painting and a poem to connect, and that is when the poet is allowed the first move, and the painter then illustrates, elaborates, or ornaments the poem. This process has yielded Gustave Doré’s and Robert Rauschenberg’s Dantes, as well as mountains of the kind of kitsch that has made “illustration” a pejorative. A classic sample of the latter appeared in 1996 as “The Oxford Treasury of Classic Poems,” assembled by Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark, who attached the wan watercolors of some ten pedestrian children’s book illustrators to poems in a mix that should inoculate young readers against poetry for the rest of their lives.

Even artists and poets of attested competence can fail to play viable duets together, usually through simple laziness or lack of a compelling motive. Frank O’Hara “collaborated” with some of the best of the abstract expressionists, but often that meant no more than his scrawling a few words on fine paper and the artists’ daubing on some of their own ink around the “poem” they’d been given as a launch pad. One suspects that the artists were doing him a favor, their daubs having so much greater cash value than a poet’s words.

The other three founding members of the New York School of Poetry also had friends and collaborators among the best artists of the era. James Schuyler was virtually adopted by Fairfield Porter, and his visage is found in many Porter paintings. Perhaps no other poet of the same stature has sat so often and with such happy results. Kenneth Koch ventured on collaborations with both Larry Rivers and Alex Katz, who responded to the challenge with a wit and a whimsy to equal the poet’s, but there is also a whiff of arm-wrestling to their projects, an undercurrent of “Anything you can do, I can do better.”

Looming behind the painterly proclivities of the New York School poets is the ghost of the poet whose association with painters was to become the stuff of legend, Gertrude Stein. Stein did not collaborate with painters, but she did commission her portrait from Picasso and squeezed a masterpiece from him. No poet has ever owned such a quantity of famous art. But she also tried, in various ways, to accomplish in poetry what the Modernist painters of France were doing in oils–not just in the disjunctive disassemblies of “Tender Buttons” and the portraits of Picasso and Matisse, but also in the faux-naive artlessness of “Melanctha” (think of Picasso’s appropriations of primitive African sculpture) and “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.” In the latter, immediately popular work, she prefigured the “hard-boiled,” minimalist style that would soon dominate American writing. More than any other writer she engineered the regime change from the regnant rotundities of the Jamesian style to a plainness approximating the “clinical” look of analytic cubism.

THIS WAS the “Red Wheelbarrow” aspect of her art, an as-yet-unconcentrated version of William Carlos Williams’s famous little poem–or rather, manifesto–that begins: so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow. How much, in fact, does depend upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water? Is it enough to point one’s finger and say, “There, beside those white chickens,” and one has a poem, or a painting? To judge by the practice of both painters and poets in the twentieth century, the answer would seem to be a qualified yes, the qualification being that radical minimalism seems a more viable tactic for painters than for poets. Red wheelbarrows and white chickens have sufficed for representational artists from Matisse to Diebenkorn, but words seem to need to point to more than paint does. Witness the fizzle of the barebones extremes of Aram Saroyan (who would abandon his one-word “poems” of the 1970s with an embarrassed shrug) and the Language poets. By and large it has been “visual artists” like Jenny Holzer and Ed Ruscha who have taken up the task of emptying art’s red wheelbarrow of all superfluous meaning except the simple imperative of the aesthetic id, “Be Mine!” And the world has pretty much agreed: It’s theirs.

IMAGINATION is the y-axis on the graph of modernist art–but its x-axis is art’s service as a mirror. Pablo Picasso painted a famous painting of a man with a blue guitar, and Wallace Stevens subsequently wrote a famous poem that declares, Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar. What exactly that blue guitar is, and what its Orphic tunes can do, shifts from stanza to stanza of Stevens’s poem, but we have the author’s own assurance that his ever-shifting blue guitar has to do with “the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined.”

Or . . . whatever. For in the Protean flow of the imagination, in its flashes and flickerings, whatever we can think of has its turn in the continuum of eternity’s infinite slideshow. The skin of water on Hockney’s pools, the blasts of yellow and swoons of lavender across Monet’s lilypond at Giverny, the sumptuous roses and ochres soaking into Frankenthaler’s linens; yes, then there’s Turner, Whistler, and anyone else who ever visited Venice; Klee in Tunisia, Gauguin in Tahiti.

On the other side of the mirror, working with the other side of the brain but swept along in the same flow, we can hear in poetry the chattering of John Ashbery, the ever-expatiating drone of Emily Dickinson, the throngs of mute inglorious teenagers in their sullen bedrooms, strumming their own blue guitars. All that is formless, amorphous, cloudlike, and exalted: The vivid, florid, turgid sky, / The drenching thunder rolling by, / The morning deluged still by night, / The clouds tumultuously bright, as Wallace Stevens put it in “The Man with the Blue Guitar.”

THE POET who has most capably performed the duties Stevens set was A.R. Ammons, who was as ready as J.M.W. Turner to take on the ocean and the sky, which he has done in match after match. Not coincidentally he is also the most capable and ambitious painter among contemporary poets. (Happily, thanks to computer graphics and the Internet, his work can be viewed in digital simulation at the website of his gallery, Saltimbanque.com.) As a painter, Ammons must be ranked above amateur, but even his best work is not of museum caliber.

The work available for purchase (at modest middle-hundred prices) is chiefly watercolors deriving from color-field and minimalist painters of the 1960s and 1970s, his own mid-career years as a poet. They show Ammons confronting a Nature as abstract as that which he apostrophizes in such grand-meditation poems as “Corson’s Inlet,” a nature of torsions and boundaries and equilibriums more than of trees and wheelbarrows and white chickens. What his paintings mostly lack is the easy Whitmanian camaraderie of the poems, the punny playfulness and quicksilver wordplay, the sort of thing that Klee accomplishes in painting so gracefully without ever losing hold of “the larger picture.” As a painter Ammons has the stiff good manners of a student pianist whose eyes never leave the score.

Even with that reservation, Ammons has a better batting average as a painter than his nearest American rival as poet-painter, e.e. cummings. (You can judge for yourself by visiting www.eecummingsart.com.) Cummings has all the qualities one admires and envies in an enthusiastic amateur: brio and a willingness to imitate anyone at least once. His portraits and landscapes can be agreeable and expressive, but they rarely convey the aesthetic jolt that compels a second look. They have the earmarks of a familiar kind of failed art, a bohemian garishness that would like to be accounted bold. And they have the unfortunate effect of making one wonder whether his poetry is quite up to par.

Unfair as it may be, it is hard to resist using the one art as a litmus test for the other. Who can keep from sensing a tawdriness and fustian in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry after a survey of his mawkish and religiose paintings? Who is not inclined to pay closer attention to Blake’s prophetic books after seeing his engravings? Sometimes only a single painting or sketch can do the trick. I remember visiting the lately bereaved widow of John Berryman in Minneapolis in 1973. On the wall of the entrance hall was a large drawing of a tangle of woodland plants seen close up. At a glance it seemed as good as any of Ben Shahn’s illustrations for “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.” My esteem rose quite as though I’d seen a bronze statue of Berryman in the park.

I can think of few instances of the converse possibility: painters who have shown a gift for poetry. Whistler produced a book of epigrams, and other artists have collected their obiter dicta of varying degrees of pith and vinegar. Cellini wrote a classic autobiography, and Michelangelo did, indeed, write poetry that has stood the test of time. But more recently? Well, there is the American modernist painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), who did manage to have eight poems of his own squeezed into the same volume of the Library of America’s anthology of American Poetry that includes the work of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. But though I am easily cowed by an imprint so august, I cannot for the life of me believe Hartley’s poems have been included for sheer merit. It was the paintings that got him through the door. Genius has its perks.

IN ANY CASE, most part-time painters paint for the fun of it–fun, in the sense that the pleasure principle is in charge. This is borne out by the kinds of poets who seem most disposed to amuse themselves with other Muses. Their poetry and canvases may run the gamut of styles and schools, but they all tend to be prodigal and brimful. D.H. Lawrence was an excellent self-taught painter with an instant grasp of modernism’s primary lesson with respect to painting, “Anyone can do this.” He is also a hit-or-miss, slap-dash poet who accumulated a hefty “Collected Poems” in his moments between novels.

Perhaps a large percentage of all writers are visual artists, and we just never hear about it. But when I’ve asked various poets and novelists outright, their usual reply is an embarrassed demur, and when a pencil is put in their reluctant fingers the result is a stick figure so crude one suspects their klutziness is deliberate, a way of defending their fragile self-esteem.

A writer who screws his courage to the sticking place and lets the left hemisphere of his brain take charge is often rewarded with seance-like results. James Thurber’s cartooning is the locus classicus. Cartooning, indeed, has been the traditional side entrance to the realm of art for those who are intimidated by the stairs and pillars in front.

In the recent past, when newspaper comic strips and comic books were a part of daily life, most kids went through a phase of do-it-yourself cartooning. The last, juicy fruit of that era ripened in the 1960s, when “underground” comics appeared on the scene with their amalgam of pop art and artless raunch.

High on the topmost branch of that heritage grew Dave Morice’s “Poetry Comics.” It appeared originally in the 1970s as a mimeo magazine, as well as in the pages of the more unbuttoned little magazines. Assembled in a hardcover anthology from Simon and Schuster in 1982, it has more recently been recollected in a paperback from Teachers & Writers Collaborative. In “Poetry Comics,” Morice has joined the small but select company of cartoonists–Crumb, Spiegelman–whose work transcends its low-brow origins to become, if not high art, then at least art on a par with Saul Steinberg or the funkier pop artists. There is, indeed, a direct line of descent from the poets and painters of the New York School (Koch, O’Hara, Katz, Rivers), through its St. Mark’s Church-centered second generation (Berrigan, Padgett, Brainerd), and down to a third generation sprinkled in Iowa City and other writerly enclaves, of which Dave Morice is the epitome in his easy conflation of high and low, east and west, au courant and aw-shucks.

For example, there’s Morice’s treatment of Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi” as the dialogue of two stick-figure mice, Lippo and Lisa, in which Browning’s language vies with Morice’s drawing as to which is more elegantly faux. Or there’s “The Adventures of Whitman,” in which the great gray poet’s ego morphs into a superman, whose speech balloon declares (in the words of “Leaves of Grass”), From Paumanok starting I fly like a bird, speeding through space, speeding through heaven and the stars. Read in a less-than-reverent frame of mind, Whitman’s effusions can come across as a series of Bonk! Boing! pratfalls.

SUCH APPROPRIATIONS are said to be the hallmark of postmodernism, and looking at Morice’s treatment of one or another familiar quotation from the realms of gold, one understands why there have to be copyright laws. If there were not, then every windbag in that realm would be skewered like Polonius. What Morice has learned from Picasso (and Thurber and Crumb and Disney) is how to read old poems with an innocent, lateral vision that seems to make them new.

About painting–about writing poems for that matter–Morice has the right attitude. It’s nothing to be fussed about. We all do it in our dreams, don’t we? The trick lies in remembering how when we’re awake.

Thomas M. Disch is the author, most recently, of “The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry.”