ECHOES: ETCHED POEMS, POETIC ETCHINGS

Over the centuries, poets have so often found inspiration in visual images that such poetry has become a genre unto itself: the poet takes in the beauty before his eyes, an object that troubles his heart to the point of a poem. Less often, however, does a painter reflect on the images a poet has created with words, and try through paint or stone to speak of the beauty he has seen there. In both cases, metaphorial vision informs the works, and at their best are far more than mere illustrations. In ECHOES, three good friends have come together in an artistic collaboration, a dial of inquiry and celebration. Like Chinese idiograms whose combined images create a reality not contained in any of the images viewed separately, ECHOES' visual and verbal images sing to each other, reinforcing and mirroring each other to create a new work of art. Like the imagists before them, they hold that art is not made with ideas but with images. This talent for seeing the resemblances in reality is the essential engine driving all art, the way our life is changed by certain people at the right juncture of our lives. In "Talking Back," William Meredith takes issue with his friend Wystan Auden's claim that "poetry makes nothing happen," an apt introduction perhaps to the images found in ECHOES:

 

...What it makes happen is small things,
sometimes, to some, in an area
already pretty well taken
care of by the senses. Thus, to
the eye, spruce needles fix the tufts
of new snow to the twigs so the
wind cannot dislodge them. They hold--
a metaphor. And in the ear,
the open, talking shapes, jet black,
is a snowbound brook, croon about
cold. And snow-foliage on the
high slopes dupes the eye, the whirring
spruces dupe the ear, and you think:
catkins, maybe, in February
or you think: whirring of doves' wings.
And ice underfoot is mica--
correspondences a man will
find, to his slight alteration
always, where he pays attention--
on a walk after powder snow,
in a poem. As you well know.