This time-lapse video of Seamus Berkeley creating a portrait of Ashley might teach poets a good deal about the writing process.
Seamus and I were involved in a project that surfaced last October at The Rane Gallery in Taos (see the second event mentioned here). The event was called “Interwoven Illuminations,” and it involved poets writing in response to works of art, with artists in turn creating art in response to poems—all in sequence, starting with a painting by Bill Rane. Neither the poets nor the artists knew whose work they were responding to. Written in response to this painting by Dorothy Lampl,
my poem goes like this:
Give and Take
He had no desire to share
your bus bench—this youth
who prefers his solitude.
He’s happy with his space
on the cold sidewalk, happyto hunch against an adobe
wall’s soot-stained pink
roughness, squinting
into the Marlboro smoke
that coils up under the billof his cap, reading a book
culled from his backpack.
Maybe he was drawn there
by the wall’s graffiti, a scrap
(if your cobwebbed memoryserves) of Nietzsche. Maybe
those very words are what
he’s hunting for, page
by page, in the winter light.
And isn’t he, in fact, youthirty-some years back?
Alone and liking it, alone
with memories of a father’s
blunt fist and blistering curses:
fuel for the journey. It’s nowonder you want a glimpse
of his reading matter now.
You imagine cracking a joke,
striking up a give-and-take
with this incarnationof your gone self—as if
telling him all about books,
about what untrustworthy
walls they make, might help
you both. But look at him:beyond reach. In the end
one loves one’s desire
and not what one desires.
You wouldn’t have listened,
and neither would he.
From my poem Seamus produced this painting, a self-portrait entitled “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Tagger”:
Seamus and I had not met each other before the event, and we’ve only exchanged emails since. But the watching him paint in high-speed time-lapse makes me feel even closer to him, because his process seems to mirror my own as a poet, moving from a vague sense of possibility, through layers and layers of elements added, adjusted, blurred, buried or effaced, to a finished thing with a life independent of—and yet mysteriously rooted in—the sources of its inspiration.