Eve Anthony Hanninen

Visuals, Poetics and the Artist
The Silver Braid
Summer feature 2006

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Mannequin Envy

Eve Anthony Hanninen...

The human ability to empathize through exposure to images – those written, spoken or drawn –
allows us all to vicariously experience things and places we might not otherwise.

Eve Anthony Hanninen

resides in the evergreen Pacific Northwest, where the benefit of being able to enjoy both coastal and mountain region appears often in the themes of her art and writing. She is most interested in the effects of human experience, and how environment impacts individuals, and with exploring this in her poetry. Eve’s work has appeared or will appear in The HyperTexts, Southern Hum, Nisqually Delta Review, ForPoetry, The Reality Box, Red Letter Press, and elsewhere. She is also Editor of The Centrifugal Eye Online Poetry Journal.

Coastal Soup coastal_soup

The same broth will be had in Bellingham,
in Agate Beach, or Ketchikan,
a pale and yellow lake
with artichokes and mushrooms
sunk like crescent shadows
of last year’s fallen moons.

Tonight my spoon makes a shallow pool,
wherein reflection ripples:
a lover’s mouth sips at steam.

Heat in my throat may be the rising
from a storm between my thighs; this broth
stirred when pacific breezes visit
muggy kisses down my neck, hip
and backs of knees.

I serve you soup in one oceanic bowl;
tip it into the sea and wait for the currents
to carry the recipe home.

Mrs. Dog Sniffs The Door

I’m no beagle of habit,
predictably asleep
across your feet,
yet now I’m unsure
if even my responses sound
all right— if the pitch
is still that one you equate
with loyalty. Or do
my measured words strike
dully as a thump
against your knee?

When did I begin to answer
your call in short, sharp barks?
When did I first pretend to not
hear your displeasure as I parked
my haunches in defiance –
a bitch who has abandoned
placatory gestures
– on the company couch?

And just today I forgot
to laugh at your glimmering
suspicion, allowed the silence
to surrender its fact
of my inattention. How long
before you figure
I want to go outside.

What Guile There Was In You, Stanley,

was desperation to hold the woman
tighter than she could bear, pinion
her arms to the bed so she couldn’t rise
in revolt, turn and reveal your lack–
adaisy and incomprehension by just pointing.
Your laughter without sound was cat–
like, mute and reliant upon the woman
to count to 10 or 100, whichever
was enough time for your mental chalkboard,
your emotional abacus, to materialize:
clik clik – s l i d e – scritchscratch
and then the laugh would gush out, giddy,
dribble and drip down your beard
onto her chest where it splashed, a melanoma.

Artist's Statement....

What writing and art have in common is their requirements for visualizing ideas. Both depend upon stylistic processes which provoke and entertain images. While one form may use text and the other use color or line, both spring from concepts, from impressions and perceptions.

Artists who work commercially create "visual notes" to aid in concept illustration. When art is about more than squiggles or blotches on canvas or paper or .jpg, there is very often complex relationships involved in composition. Movement, structure, contrast and even storytelling may be included in the visual tableau. In art, just as in emotionally successful poetry, feeling is not conveyed via osmosis through an artist’s brushstrokes, but cleverly, using techniques and details to convey the impressions of emotion. So, too, a writer in his way, wishing to evoke emotion, guides readers by employing literary devices and language choices which fashion vivid, mental pictures. The human ability to empathize through exposure to images – those written, spoken or drawn – allows us all to vicariously experience things and places we might not otherwise.

I count myself lucky that I never bought into the idea that I had to be inspired by an external muse to write or paint. The two disciplines have seemed intertwined ever since I can remember. If you start reading prior to grade school, you early-on discover that most books designed for children combine both words and pictures. I think illustrations and graphics stimulate the mind to associate images with words. Stimulate imagination. Both children and adults experience that inner-mind travel when they are curious about pictures; the eyes glaze, attention zooms inward. More images play out, words form, questions are asked and answered, often within a single blink or two of the eyelids.

red arugula

If you can imagine it, you can create it. I can’t remember who first said that, or if anyone actually did. But I believe it. I do it. I also believe that words and pictures most happily belong together. No, they are not necessary to one another, can survive and excite and gratify, each on their own, and garner millions of admiring supporters à la carte. How can that be? Why aren’t all books illustrated with pictures? Why don’t all paintings have descriptions beyond their titles? Some people believe that books for adults no longer need pictures. No art. And similar (maybe the same) people believe that art should never be explained, for where is the mystery in that? Aren’t artists supposed to be mysterious?

Yet, if we train ourselves to see a little differently, we discover that all books do have pictures, providing we have learned to visualize our own from the cues given by their authors. And we come to see that all paintings and drawings have stories if we spend enough time reading the imagery. For what are writing and art, but inverse reflections of the same mirror? Imagery. They ask us to engage in the same activity: imagination.

So why don’t all writers paint, nor all artists write?
Perhaps they simply never imagined they could do both.