Notes on ‘Runes and Chords’

This book forthcoming, my first art book, has happened so quickly, as “written” and as published, that I can scarcely describe it. As I say in my intro, I bought a new mini iPad and an Apple pencil about a year and a half ago and immediately discovered I could make little works in the Notes app that are a combination of drawing and poem. I could then post them directly onto Instagram and Twitter. I did them—do them—spontaneously. It took me about nine months to take them seriously, that is until I was asked about publishing a book of them, though they were all serious enough. But they weren't collages, my usual visual form; they necessarily involved drawing. I began by doodling the way I used to do in the margins of my high-school notes. I specialized then in drawing an eye, a nose, and lips according to the instructions in one of those How To Draw books. In these works of my older age I began by drawing little scenes or faces or figures or flowers, especially flowers, and then writing down any words that came to mind. I would make one, then post on Instagram and Twitter. People liked them, so I started to feel obligated to the form—that was interesting, the Rule was to make it with images and words and then as soon as I felt that it was done, post it. If I didn't post it, that was WRONG, I couldn't not post it. If not enough people liked a particular one, I worried about it … It was like when I was a young woman and showed my new poems to people, though without much direct address back.

I took the form through the autumn of 2019 and into 2020. I can see traces in the works of a different manuscript—real poems—that I was working on; the continuation in the world of the Syrian nightmare; the arrival of certain holidays. I see that I'm often drawing myself cartoonishly as if I were a thousand years younger. I went to New York, I came back to Paris, I went to New York when suddenly there was Covid. I came back to Paris, where my health care is, to a state of lockdown, and the knowledge that being almost 75 I was in danger of not getting intensive care for the virus, if I were to become seriously ill with it. Like many other countries, France was haplessly letting older people die. This, all this, enters the poem/drawings. Then the strangest thing happened, I was contacted by an editor, Nicodemus Nicoludis, who was following me on Twitter. I had already (already!) had a few published in Hurricane Review and Sybil, but Nick proposed publishing an art book of them. I said yes. Of course I wasn't sure what it was that I was doing, but who could say No? Nick said he was editor for Archway Editions, a new imprint connected to Powerhouse Books, under the aegis of Simon & Schuster. When I told Peggy DeCoursey about it, she said something like, how could anything that obviously right happen?

So, that was in oh June, July 2020. The manuscript was wanted by the beginning of December. It would be 100 pages. It should have an intro, to explain what the hell I thought I was doing. I tried to give some thought to that, though I didn't precisely know. They look a certain way, and they have to keep looking that way, so far. They got to be more like squares after Covid, rather dense—to me they are sonnet-like in look, blocky, and perhaps less smart-ass (maybe not) than before. I tried to make them more beautiful. I was interested, as in all my poetry, in how a number of voices could enter a poem, not just the social I, the one you're supposed to be as in the mainstream poem of suffering or rote joy, with reference to the images and words we all supposedly share as if we were prose. I hate that. Different colors of things said seem to indicate different speakers, and occasionally they're not me. But with drawing involved I could destroy the linearity of poems and make the voices be speaking wherever the reader happened upon them. That is, a line of words could be anywhere on the page. I'm interested in the idea that once you’ve read a poem you know all its lines at the same time. I kept drawing flowers, I have always drawn flowers, and in a fit of nostalgia for my childhood in the Mojave Desert I once again began to draw desert flowers. I also rediscovered A Field Guide to Rock Art Symbols of the Greater Southwest by Alex Patterson and began to insert figures from Southwestern petroglyphs.

In September, I had the misfortune to be diagnosed with breast cancer again. Also, there was that hideous election going on in the States, but I must confess I was more interested in my breast cancer, my poems, what the world was going to do about the virus, and generally, metaphysically what the cosmos is that we are apparently (are we?) such tiny phenomena in. My surgery became scheduled for November 2, the day after Toussaint, the day before the election, and six days before my 75th birthday. What a week. I decided I would end the book on November 1st, so the last poem/drawing is an All Saints Day drawing. The book then, is a book, the way I always make my poetry “collections”—you know how everyone says they have a new collection?—be books. I have never not been able to make a book, the poems always point towards each other and construct some sort of narrative, either a fictive one or an esthetic one. This book is a diary, though I never tell what I did that day in the usual way. I'm still afraid to look at it too closely, but I know I really like it.

 

* * *

Postscript from Covidland in Paris: I have just been outside to buy newspapers this morning. I do this every day twice a day except on Sunday. I am a newspaper junky, still, and my daily interaction with Monsieur Abdoulaly, the proprietor of L'Equipe, keeps me sane. He is the only person in Paris that I see almost every day, and he is the one I tell when I'm about to go away, in case my plane crashes or I'm eaten by monsters. He was, as he often is, playing the morning prayers of Islam, on a device but speeded up, so that the effect is almost cartoonish but on the other hand not. He can play them one and a half times faster or two times faster than normal. The idea is to get through them before everyone arrives, but I'm often early. He has no idea, he tells me, what is being said, the Arabic is old and he mainly speaks French and Malagasy. He just likes the feeling that he's doing a little something for the situation—he's making some good happen. I thought I should tell you that, February 17, 2021, Year of the Ox. (Revised March 5.)