Eileen Tabios Meditates on Actualities: Norma Cole and Marina Adams's Recent Collaboration

Galatea Resurrects invites writers to engage with poetry books and projects. The newest edition, #25, features poet Eileen Tabios's thoughts on poet Norma Cole and painter Marina Adams's recent collaboration, Actualities (Litmus Press).

ACTUALITIES is the most organic collaboration between art and text that I have witnessed in at least three years (as far back as my memory allows) if not more. By “organic” I mean a natural relationship between image and word that transcends how the work was created as collaboration: the result seems created by a single author-artist rather than its two creators: poet Norma Cole and artist Marina Adams.

The effect is particularly arresting given the work’s abstraction — or maybe that’s why the coupling of art and text is so effective. e.g. this text and image (do forgive the poor quality of my Iphone photos—but I trust you get the drift):

TO BE IS NOT TO BE

As if we didn’t know, first jasmine and roses climbing over the fence, sort of a prison song, something I didn’t claim to know, said Veronique. First a window, then I saw them, hat pins, stick pins collar stays with monograms or hidden messages on them, plastic, brass or silver, tortoise shell or mother of pearl in order to look crisp, jump starts, “courteous” or “visitation” betrayed in his dark glasses.

While I note “couplings” between text and image in this review, I mean coupling only through a book format in which a particular text is next to a particular image. It seems to me that several alternative pairings would be equally effective as one switches around the order in which the visual and text are presented within the book. While this effect relates to abstraction, I suspect it’s also generated by the familiarity the duo have with each other’s work—in an Author’s Note, Cole mentions that the two have been in collaboration for about 30 years

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