UnWoven Between the Disciplines: Poetry and Art

The ekphrastic collaboration between the figurative + Afro-surreal painter Andre Barker Jr. and the incendiary poet Ola Faleti in Unwoven Literary & Arts Magazine served as both a catalyst and touchstone for this workshop. That is, both the workshop and the magazine sought to reimagine how the arts and humanities are conversing within human experience—the medium of that conversation, endeavoring to explore the entanglements and frayed threads of discipline relations. In this workshop, we conducted a movement of thought that sees ekphrastic production and interdisciplinary conscious production as co-creative. 

Initially, we discussed two definitions of ekphrasis, by The Poetry Foundation and The Academy of American Poets, which moved us from the classical interpretation of ekphrasis anchored in the description of a work of art to a definition offered by contemporary poet Ankita Sadarjoshi: “ekphrasis does not only describe but also responds to a work of art.”

The workshop participants had completed homework, which consisted of three steps before the workshop.

Step 1: Choose an artist + artwork for an ekphrastic poem to be started in the workshop 

Step 2: Pick three frameworks 

1. Embodied histories: How is history carried here? 
2. Emotion: What is here as raw feeling, but also as motivational, prompting action; what is generated in the piece, and how are you led to feel? 
3. Landscapes: Politically/culturally/socially and physically, where are we? Also, what traditions are we conversing with? 
4. Craftsmanship: How was this made? Remember the connection “poiesis” has to “make.” 
5. Materials: What is used in this piece? Such as canvas, stone, barbed wire, dust, and so forth, in such a way as to constitute objects. Any transmutation into representing objects of thought? 
6. Textures: What is the feel, appearance, or consistency of the surface or substance? Both literally and figuratively. 
7. Energies: Is there excitement here? Nervousness? Acerbic Melancholy? What is radiating, and how? 
8. Techniques: What are the methods and skills used (one dimension of an artist’s relationship with their medium)? 

Step 3: Compile research on your artist and artwork using the three frameworks you have chosen to investigate the piece. 

Engaging with Barker Jr.’s work of art “It’s Just Hair,” by describing the piece (through our senses both interpretively and associatively working through memory), we spoke of how description inscribes perspective and point of view. We answered, “How do you uniquely see what is there, what is implied, and what is not there?” Participants were then given time to open up to their chosen artwork and write creatively. After which, with the frameworks from the homework (Step 2), I asked if anyone could tell me how “It’s Just Hair” made them feel. Regarding whether responsivity can exceed strict description, we found that in the hybrid zone of ekphrastic production, two threads untwine, the openness of the singularity of one’s encounter with the work of art and the frameworks we bring to bear on ourselves + the work of art. Participants shared the beginnings of their ekphrastic poems. 

In a beautiful language reminiscent of Otobong Nkanga’s artwork "The Weight of Scars,” we reflected on how discipline relations are often a stunning battlefield wherein we enact and resist the norms governing our fields, enabling and constraining our intentions, thoughts, and expressions. However, the singularity, or irreducible uniqueness, of our encounters with a work of art can alter our perspective, foundation, and articulation within our creative pursuits. 

Returning to Barker Jr.’s “It’s Just Hair” and poet Faleti’s “The Uncursing of Medusa,” which animates and elaborates “It’s Just Hair,” we considered how interdisciplinary collaboration can be unwoven into our ekphrastic poetic practices. And just as significantly, through the frameworks and artist interviews, we looked at how Afro-surreal defiance resonates in the painting “It’s Just Hair.” How it is transformed into “eschewed respectability” in Ola Faleti’s poem. And how the surreal of the real and the real of the surreal interpenetrate within the Black experience. Faleti’s hiss of incantation could be heard as the transmuted nuance of the “It’s Just Hair” wet-on-wet painting style. In this light, one can see how Faleti moves beyond description in her response, creating a dynamic where the speaker blooms the irony through the simile’s disjunction between actions and reality. Faleti writes, “They call me a monster like they don’t want me.” 

Two dimensions become significant: consider how each piece interrogates the historico-cultural racist tradition of imposing on Blackness a cursedness, a monstrousness. Then, contemplate how, within this interrogating space, the imposition is refused and interrupted by the lolling tongue of Barker Jr.’s subject, whose self-authorized reversal of the tradition’s terms speaks out seductively in “The Uncursing of Medusa.” 

In the final exercise, participants were shown questions Unwoven asked Barker Jr., to begin to imagine an interview between themselves and the artist of the artwork they’d chosen. The questions and answers were to be poeticized speculation or the personal imaginings of the participant. This sparked discussion on how the artist could be viewed as yourself. But also how developing a persona became an exercise in animating research, developing lenses different from those offered by one’s traditional disciplinary affiliations.

We’d previously developed our theoretical armature by discussing Roland Barthes’ definition of interdisciplinarity in “Image Music Text.” Interdisciplinarity, as Roland Barthes explains, “is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively … when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down … in the interests of a new object and a new language neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation” (Barthes 1977: 155). A participant zeroed in on and renewed the possibility that the term mutation can be used over and against the poststructuralist critique of the new. 

If we apply this definition, in our encounters with Faleti and Barker Jr’s visual-textual fusion, we found the contours of a “new object,” uncursing and the inflections of a “new language,” the seductive tone of self-authorized reversal of racist tradition, and the experience of unease between the “solidarity of the old disciplines” that characterizes Barthes’s interdisciplinarity. Through the workshop, our ekphrastic work harnessed the potential of interdisciplinary conscious practice, creating daring, rich, and responsive poetry.