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Visuals, Poetics and the Artist
The Silver Braid Summer feature 2006 |
Mannequin Envy |  |
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Jill Khoury |
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 In Place of Speech Rebus While you slept, I drew a story on your back. It tells you what I cannot say aloud. See a body in motion, stilled. Inked limbs akimbo. Two bodies, interlocked. Eight-armed monsters rise from the pictogram. Our consonants mesh together in the mouth. Aphasia of ecstasy. Each word a holy name. Oil Here we look more like brother and sister— I, your shadowy twin. You are green gold, turquoise, translucent white. For me, paint in broad strokes: sienna, midnight blue, pewter gray. Use your fingers. Add pink, silver, with a detail brush. Practice first. This last part is harder to get right. If you step back, you can distinguish a palm, a breast, our eyes, your neck. Our hair swirls together like a sandstorm. Diptych We sleep like sarcophagi of queen and king. Stately, large eyes watching other worlds. We sleep like lovers laid in a double grave. On our backs, hands joined, bodies framed in ripples of burgundy. I am less afraid, knowing we will return to the same dust. |
 Kinetic Installation
We’re made of painted wood, suspended with wires. Gears click, lock, turn. There’s an equation to describe our movement through space. We are exactly the sum of our parts. We are sphere and bird wings, thorns, knotholes, electricity, fractured light. To the atoms that roll and shiver within us, our bodies are a universe. for Michael
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The Relationship between Poetry and Visual Arts |
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Poetry and visual arts have a natural connection in my mind. Both a
painting and a poem convey an idea in a concentrated, distilled
fashion. Both are self-contained, and yet the longer you engage with
the piece, the more layers of meaning there are to unwrap. My poetry
has a magic-realist sensibility, but there’s still a concrete nature to
the work. I feel it’s necessary for me to locate the reader in the
sense-world, no matter how improbable or strange the situation of the
poem might be.
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When I teach poetry, I try to incorporate a
visual art element into the lesson plan. It could be a field trip to a
museum or an exercise where I bring in postcards and found objects for
the students to see and touch. The students seem to appreciate the
importance of sensory detail more when they can interact directly with
art (i.e. the sensual world) than when it’s just a concept on the
lecture agenda that day.
I’m particularly excited about mannequin envy’s “poetry-visual arts” issue. Such unpredictable discoveries happen when the brain is told to form a connection between disparate details, like a poem and a photograph placed next to each other. |
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Sea Harvest
“She liked imaginary men best of all.” –Anne Taintor You were my first. I was a mer-child. Fisher of the deep seas, you slowly towed me to the surface. Your net was soft brown yarn, but strong enough to hold my body –flat-chested, scaled from hips to tail. I shivered on the floor of the boat. The wooden pail wouldn’t hold me. You slit the net. I poured out around your feet. Artifact from a fey museum, too useless to keep, too rare to throw back. Still, the pirate inside you made you lean closer. Did I feel, breathe, like a real girl? You touched the inside of my arm, where the skin was softer than sea moss. You took me in your lap and kissed me. My scales rained into the ocean like shattered glass. for S. L.
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Honey
Right away, she offers me the jar. It’s raw. Small crystals lace the surface. I try to gauge the face of my new neighbor. Her eyes are darkly luminous, like the centers of flowers. I remember her from art school. A body long and thin like a crane. A grace that seemed more than human. She kept fighting fish, dealt Ecstasy for pocket cash. We hover at her table, old wood with scars where she was careless. I pause at the rim. The need to crush that white foam against my fingers, to lick sugar off a pink nail like a child. It tastes like frosting, she says, I could eat that stuff for hours. My hand breaks the lace veneer. A fragile structure folds. I eat like an animal. Alive, livid, it wraps my tongue in a stinging tail of sugar. I wince, dumb, sick, retighten the lid. She repeats I could eat that stuff for hours. Her cupboards are stacked high with honey. Her carnal smile is so abundant, so sincere. |
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My Background I think of myself as a poet first, and then an artist. My path as a poet was always pretty clear, but when I began my artistic endeavors, my confidence was very low. I’m legally blind, and one generally hears of blind poets, but not blind artists. So I kept this particular passion to myself because I was afraid of not being taken seriously. I use a combination of photography, found objects, collage, acrylics (usually thickened with gel or adhesive), scans, and other digital manipulation. I call the finished products “paintings” though, to simplify. I started doing these paintings sometime while I was in college, going to school for poetry. I had wanted to take an art class, but was too shy. |
However, when I started graduate school (for my MFA in poetry), I took classes in disability studies, which is a cultural-theory examination of disability. After doing some research, I discovered that blind artists really do exist. This added knowledge gave my confidence a boost. I got some formal training and started displaying more work in public. It’s still only recently, though, that I’ve taken this very personal pursuit and moved it into the light. |