(Or, go straight to the work)
This piece is an experiment which considers the fusion of visual and textual elements – a synaesthesia which I thought was interesting in looking at Beth Ames Swartz's paintings. The piece is a counterpart to the pieces I wrote for the The Word in Paint book, and uses similar fragmentary techniques as a basic composition method.
Of particular interest to me when writing these poems was the potential recombinant nature of their composition through translation. That is, due to the translation process of the original Du Fu poems into English, the translations were necessarily abstracted or disjointed to some extent, with certain ambiguities as a by-product of the process. Far from being a problem, this struck me as an opportunity to respond both to the paintings written in relation to them, and to the process itself, which produces moments of clarity and continuity, but with these ambiguities resisting absolute closure in interpretation. This condition of the language seemed to fit in with my reactions to Swartz's paintings, which encouraged me to focus on parts of text in relation to their visual surroundings. As I took in these paintings, I was aware of the synaesthetic nature of my experiences with them, with exchanges of visuality and textuality between the painted shapes and landscapes, and the literally shaped texts which interact with them. In addition to the printed texts I produced for the book, I wanted to respond with my own synaesthetic approach, this time from a textual perspective, moving towards visuality. The result can be found below.
The 'raining' texts and the 'river' texts are split into 4 discrete groups of vocabulary, selected from various Du Fu translations and fragmented into linguistic units. These were then allocated to one of the 4 groups of vocabulary according to how they might fit together. The rain and river text then selects at random one of these linguistic units, the idea being that the visual texts will, at points, create momentary meanings or imagery in their friction with one another, and in turn affect other glimpses of vocabulary, to form combinatory readings over time in which ambiguity and open-endedness are welcome and indeed integral to the reading of the work.
Special thanks to:
Jewell Parker Rhodes and Beckian Fritz Goldberg for inviting me to participate in this project.
Beth Ames Swartz and John Rothschild for their support. In particular, thank you to Beth Ames Swartz for permission to use her paintings as backgrounds in this online piece, and thank you to John Rothschild for providing me with huge amounts of information on where to find resources and research materials on Du Fu poems and translations. It was an education – thank you.
– John Sparrow
This work requires the latest Flash player, which you can download for free here. The Flash file is 1000px wide x 550px high. If you are having problems viewing the embedded flash work using the link above, try using the following direct link to the Flash file (in resizable window):
click here to view swf directly in new window (recommended for screen resolutions below 1000px wide)
John Sparrow is a multimedia poet researching for a PhD in Digital Poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London. His website is at http://www.itchaway.net.