Book Review: Creative Connections Anthology 2014
Reviewed by Michael Northen
Ekphrastic poetry is nothing new. Poets have written about art for centuries, if not millennia. Neither is it any longer unusual to see people with disabilities involved in the creation of art, as the work of the various artists in Amanda Cachia's 2013 exhibition "What Can the Body Do?" testify. What is unique, though, is poetry written in response to artwork created by people with disabilities. Such a partnership is what the Creative Connections in Perth, Australia tries to accomplish.
Creative Connections is a partnership between three entities that deal with disability (Centre for Cerebral Palsy, Disability Services Commission and Nulsen Association), on the one hand and an association of Western Australian poets (WA Poets, Inc) on the other. Beginning in 2005, it matched able-bodied poets with artists with disabilities. As Maureen Sexton, poet, founding member and mother of a child with a disability, puts it, "We believe art and poetry are important ways for people to express themselves creatively and we wanted to give artists with disabilities the opportunity to do this and to connect with the community and each other. Working with local poets to achieve these aims has proved to be ideal." The collaboration resulted in art exhibitions and subsequent anthologies featuring art-influenced poetry, the most recent iteration of which is the Creative Connections Anthology 2014. Occasionally, one finds an artist/poet like Maryann Miller will respond to her own artwork with poems as they relate to disability, but the idea that the work of artists who in some cases do not speak becoming the springboard for the work of established poets has very little precedent.
The Creative Connections Anthology 2014 is organized in a fairly straightforward way. On each page, an image displaying a work by an artist with a disability is paired with the work of two poets who responded to it. In order to keep each of these triglyphs within the frame of a page, the poems are short, ranging from haiku length to a dozen lines. While in many cases, the paintings or drawings evoke responses that overlap in their reactions, one of the interesting features of the book are those cases in which the responses are very different. To Shelley Marcolina's untitled pastel on canvas board Virginia O'keefe responds with, "Sinuous."
A linear curve replicates and turns,
Provides us with mystery;
What lies beyoud that twist out of sight?
An S, a capital, a precursor of words,
A symbol of secrecy,
Sizzling start of summer. A stanchion, a sail.
A sunburst of stitchery for Shelley.
Quite different in tone and imagery is Jacqui Meckenshlager's earthy "Guy Gawkes Night."
Neighbours gathered, billies boiled, sausages sizzled
Enthusiast fathers emptied beer bottles in readiness
Children ignited the entertainment with glowing sticks
jumping jacks, sparklers and squibs, squeals and leaps
Big boys joined in with explosions of colour
As Catherine wheels pun on rickety fenceposts
and sky rockets, launched from beer bottles
excited the smouldering sky. Whee!
What is especially interesting about the anthology is the way that it allows the reader to consider in what ways the work of the artists, many of whom have difficulty communicating because of either physical or cognitive issues, are able to influence poetry through their work. While it is always dangerous to generalize by subsuming the work of poets under categories [Robin Williams], three sorts of responses seem to present themselves. In the first case, the poet seems to engage with the artist themselves, either directly or through describing their role in the creation of the art work, as Rosie Barter does in these lines about a painting by Kristen Cameron.
As Kristen dips, she sparks, she dashes
her urgent strokes all swarm in color
blue orchid, gold and crimson pea flowers
green twigs, a bud, bright velvet moss
see! her magic wand has rallied spring
Allan Padgett takes this approach even further by directly addressing Mattew Froud about his blue and white acrylic.
It would be too easy to glibly say:
Life can be turbulent.
But hey, Brother,
It can be.
And as with your art —
These tempestuous waves salute
You in their bold unfolding
As the rear and rumble
In a steel blue cluster
Upon a fragile, yet sturdy, shore.
In a second of response, the poet makes no reference to the artist but simply responds to the physical properties of the canvas. Liana Joy Christensen uses an acrylic by Warren Bass as such a starting point in her meditative poem "Perspective."
Little blue spots that come
To us all are rendered
Faithfully, but small
-in the overall scheme truly
Sorrow is but a single step
In the dance of life.
Joy sings through
these greens
like the memory of trees.
Mike Greenacre takes a similar approach with "Dance Hall," with Chris White's untitled acrylic as a jumping off point.
The vibrant lace of flowers
Rises in urgency towards the sky
In greens and yellows and
Whites they dance
With skirts twirling and
Partners' arms outstretched
the pianist's hands pounding
out rhythm and blues
as the night grows wild.
The final manner in which the poets seem to respond is to use the paintings in such a way that they are a mental starting point, but that no direct reference to the painting is necessary. Here is Mags Webster's "Dreams: The Director's Cut."
Sleep I the metteur en scene, unrolls
A screen where we project the movies
Of our selves, and deconstruct the plot lines
Of the day . Flashback, blur, shrapnel
Of colour, tilt-shift of synapse, special
Effects of brain. Sometimes, in the rushes
Of the night, we recognize ourselves,
Shy cameos, wearing a tactful green.
A walk-on part among those stars, those
Superheroes: crimson, canary, ultramarine.
Even divorced from the impetus of the Jef Loh painting, Webster's poem is completely comprehensible. Of the three forms of disability influence discussed here, this is the subtlest, creating something that lives within the poem while not necessarily visible itself. One can imagine the satisfaction of any artist — disabled or not — reading a poem in some other context and knowing that his or her work resides there.
Though the presentation of poems and artwork on the anthology's pages is fairly formulaic, the editors provide several features that allow readers to explore the book. An index of artists at the beginning of the book cross-indexes to the artist's profiles in the back so that, one might read in his profile that Chris White, "has an amazing sense of color and paints with his feet. Recently he has been working on canvas and sometimes uses a stick held between his toes to scratch into his work creating interesting markings." A reader whose interest is aroused would be able to find from the index that White is sponsored by the Nulsen Association and that his work is on page 14, where poets Mike Greenacre and J. R. McRae responded to it.
Another path to approaching the book is by way of the poets. The anthology provides both an "Index to Poets" at the beginning and "Poets Biographies" at the end. A reader who enjoyed Mags Wegster's "Dream's: The Dirctor's Cut" would be able to quickly locate the other poems that she contributed to the current volume and then find out more about her other work through the biography. Australian readers already familiar with many of the poets may want to head straight the index to see what their favorite poets contributed to this project.
One of the truly refreshing aspects of the Creative Connections anthology is its total lack of pity or condescension. It neither looks at the artists as occasions to demonstrate charity nor as Tiny Tim flavored "inspiration." In the main, the poets' approach to the art is genuine and the work beautifully presented. Two of the prime purposes of a literature of disability — or for that matter the literature of any other group that has been marginalized — are the introduction of new subject matter and a shift in perspective that allows for the creation of new literary forms. While there are few poems in the book that would qualify as disability literature under those criteria (especially inasmuch as the poets themselves are an able-bodied group), there are those poems that lean in that direction, closing the gap between poet and the artists whom the book's introduction describes as "People with an intellectual disability…often restricted in their self-expression by a lack of ability to communicate verbally." A few lines from Allan Padgett demonstrate:
The difference between us is as narrow
As the space between the comfort
Of wood shavings
And the warmth of sedimented sandstone
Layering itself for posterity.
If, as Padgett's poem suggests the art can infiltrate our minds, then all those who joined in the effort to make the Creative Connections Anthology 2014 happen, have more than done their job. Copies of the anthology can be purchased on the Creative Connections website,