Speak up: Poets and artists inspire fresh voices through collaboration
Friday, March 12th, 2010 by Lucinda M. Dugger
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Yesterday I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at the second Split this Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC. The first festival took place two years ago on the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq and served as a call to poets to use their inner voices for speaking up about issues of importance.
This year, festival organizers gather poets together as “our country faces a crippling crisis of imagination” in health care, joblessness, poverty, and war. And, as “our most creative citizens,” poets are called to become advocates for, find solutions to, and engage the public on so many of these issues that our nation – and our world – wrestles with.
Metro DC’s distinguished poets Anne Becker and Fred Joiner, along with Takoma Park, Maryland visual artist Sally Brucker, joined me on the panel Cross-Discipline Collaboration: How Writers and Artists are Working Together to Push Boundaries and Engage the Public to explore how writers, artists, musicians, and dancers can work together to produce new and exciting work and reach the public in different ways.
Collaboration between different types of artists is not a new phenomenon. In fact, in the 1950s and 60s at the New York School painters and poets collaborated often with each other, feeding off of each other’s creative energy and inspiring new works. Both the poets and painters socialized in the same places, and the galleries where many of the painters had their first exhibitions, the poets also signed their first publishing contracts.
The poet William Carlos Williams says about the relationship between artists and poets during this period in history, “No one knew consistently enough to formulate a ‘movement’. . . . We were restless and constrained, closely allied to the painters. Impressionism, dadaism, surrealism applied to both painting and the poem.”
As creative people, our beings are naturally ignited by the new, the raw, or the unknown. Our creativity flourishes when we find ourselves in a new place – perhaps overseas or at a new job – when we are presented with a daunting task or idea, or when we establish new partnerships.
New places, new ideas, and new partnerships make way for fresh conversations and bodies of work. But more importantly, they provide a way to amplify our voices as creators in a way that makes a sleepy and inundated public stop and listen.
Though new technologies have given writers and artists more opportunities to promote their creative works and connect with other creative individuals, it has also created more noise, making it difficult for artists to be seen and heard.
Our do-it-yourself marketing models and other technological tools are embraced by creators who have been plagued historically by art world hierarchies and gatekeepers that have stifled promotion and success. However, they have also forced us to spread our time and creativity further. To move away from our ultimate focus as artists: to use the voice inside us to create something of value.
And, at the end of the day, after our last Tweet has been posted, our Facebook pages updated, our new work added to our websites, we still find ourselves working alone as many writers and artists do, and we wonder – have we actually engaged in a dialogue?
In today’s busy and cluttered world, artists are seeking new and innovative ways to connect not only with each other, but with the public as well.
Collaborations across artistic disciplines are one way in which artists have been able to establish community, forge new creative territories, and reach the public. By connecting the written word with the visual or performing arts, both writers and artists benefit by relating their works differently to each other and to the public at large.
March 12th, 2010 at 2:22 pm
Lucinda,
As I listened to your panelists yesterday, and then the vigorous audience participation by all types of artists, I was struck by how much emphasis the artists put on the powerful and inspiring experience of collaboration in terms of going from that solo nature of being an artist to working with another creative — and likely strong-minded — artist or artists.
We hear a lot about how in this wisdom-of-the-crowds digital world, art now is taking someone else’s work and creating a derivative of it. Sometimes that process can result in something creative in its own right. But the secondary artist isn’t working with the original artist; in fact, the whole call to expand fair use is so that the secondary creator doesn’t even have to alert the original artist of the repurposing. Each “creator” is operating in isolation. They are “speaking” to the original artist through their own creative expression, but the powerful and moving spirit and resulting wisdom of collaboration I heard at yesterday’s event doesn’t exist in this derivative mash-up digital culture.
What a tragedy for those who have decided to devote their creativity to repurposing others’ works on their own. They’ll never know what those artists have known, the joy and creative spark of bending yourself to another in search of something new.