Tuesday Collab #1

 

I have long been interested in collaboration between writers, and even more so between visual artists and writers. When I was teaching, one of the schools I taught at was a non-profit directed by a talented visual artist who was also a musician. When she discovered that I was the Moderator of one of the most well known poetry groups in the area, we started talking about having her students and the poets from my group do some form of collaboration. We did it for five or six years.

One year the poets would write poems about any topic they chose and these were distributed among the artists who then responded to whichever poem they chose. The following year the artists would submit something they had done in any genre, and then the poets would respond to the pieces hung in the gallery. We would then celebrate by having a reading and reception in the gallery itself.

The walls were hung with plain newsprint and the artists’ works were then hung on the covered walls. The day of the reception, we would put out chalk, colored ink pens, even charcoal, and the audience would be invited to join in the collaboration. It was a huge success on all levels.

Since moving back to my home town, I have missed that exciting communication between the different art genres. Last month, I used the Soul Cards, created by Deborah Koff-Chapin, as a prompt for the poem a day challenge of NaPoWriMo. Those poems may be found on my main poetry blog  http://soulsmusic.wordpress.com/  and are listed in the archives under April of 2011. Shortly afterward, Jinksy emailed me and asked if I’d be interested in responding to some of her digital art. I had recently started doing some of my own, so wrote back and asked if she’d like to do a swap. I will do it here on Tuesdays, while she will do it on her sites on Thursdays.

Jinksy posted the first collaboration last Thursday and it can be found here:
 http://havantaclue.blogspot.com/2011/05/seeds-of-change.html#comments   as well as here:
http://pens-poems.blogspot.com/  Both Jinksy and myself are interested in what you think about these first attempts at collaboration. We are open to other ideas. If you’d like to respond to the art, please let me know. I can be reached at lilka1946@yahoo.com.

This is one of my images and the verse is what Jinksy found in the image. Hope you enjoy.

ELizabeth Crawford

 

                    Life Cycles

A frosted breath from dying year transforms
this forest, paints with firelight hues a page
of autumn’s calendar. In crystal light
a rich and glowing tapestry is stitched
with needle sharp precision, weaving threads
whose burnished gold embroiders warp and weft,
outlines foliage and bark-clad bole.

Thermal energies of summer sun
flowed through cobweb veins to rooted store,
so winter will not find them unprepared.
Trees will hunker down, resigned to brave
both coldest blast or deepest snow-bound chill,
before, at burgeoning of spring, new life
will once more resurrect from winter’s grave.

Jinksy  5/10/11

• Posted in: Tuesday Collab #1
• Tagged: collaboration, digital art, genres, Jinksy, poetry, Tuesday Collab