“Verse & Vision”

A writer and critic (me) tries his hand at word-driven visual art, and ends up reading poetry in public.

Painting by Thomas Banks, words by your correspondent.

Until last week, I’d never had art of my own show. I’d always wondered how it would feel to see something I’d made on the wall of an exhibition space, in silent dialogue with the work of other creators, looking (hopefully) cool. I still don’t — “The Dissolving Day,” the first Tris McCall-associated thing ever to hang in public, does not contain a single brushstroke of mine. Instead, it’s a collaboration with a real painter: Thomas Banks, a talented McGinley Square-based artist who asked me to contribute some lines of verse to a piece he was planning to do. I’d write the poem, and he’d make it part of the picture.

Or the other way around. Thomas had an idea for a piece he wanted to do, and he was looking for some writing to fit the mood of the piece. I was a writer, and I seemed convivial enough; would I be game? The finished work would appear in “Verse & Vision,” a group show at the Crema Cafe (695 Bergen Ave.) that’d feature collaborations between poets and visual artists. I knew that Crema proprietor Mariana Rodriguez Morete was also a curator, and she’d always been serious about hanging local artists on the walls of her corner restaurant. Poetry in Jersey City is booming — there are open mics, writers’ circles, a newly wreathed Laureate, an entire subculture devoted to the stylized performance of a particular kind of spoken-word piece. It was inevitable poetry and painting would get mixed up with each other. I told Thomas I’d do my best.

So I did what I always do. I invented a character and placed him somewhere on the map. (Also I gave him a bicycle, because there are always bicycles in my stories.) Because Thomas’s painting felt rural and Middle American to me, I put him in Central Indiana. Once I had a feel for his appearance and his surroundings — this is often instantaneous for me — I gave him a name and interrogated his motivations. Then I attempted to write from his perspective, taking particular care to ensure that it wasn’t coterminous with my own. My first try was far too long, and I knew it. There was no way Thomas could fit it on the canvas without crowding the picture. The second try was a little better, but still too bossy to accompany a painting. Finally, I jumped on the suitcase and condensed it to five tight lines.

Too brief; too elusive? Maybe. But I hoped it would resonate with the painting. As it turned out, Thomas found a way to work it into the image twice: once at the lower left corner of the painting, in white letters like the old song identifying text on MTV, and then with its words inverted, scattered, and shuffled at the edges of the picture. It was as if the poem was a pile of papers blown into the air by a gust from the office A/C unit. I met Thomas at his place to sign the back of the frame with him, and then he brought it over to Crema to hang on the southern wall of the café, right be the biggest table in the house. And that, I thought, was that.

It wasn’t. To my surprise — though I shouldn’t have been surprised at all — I learned that the contributing poets were expected to read at the opening. I’d never done that before. Mariana and Thomas included me on a bill with about fifteen other contributors. I was aware that there were particular conventions to poetry-reading that I should acknowledge, even if I didn’t necessarily have the skill or experience to adopt them and apply them to my own writing: cadences, approaches to the microphone, subjects to avoid, ways to show appreciation. I tried to think about all of that as I practiced my five lines of verse, oh, roughly a thousand times.

Yet the nice thing about Jersey City is that no matter what you’re doing, you’ll be surrounded by too many oddballs and characters to truly feel out of place. Even if you think that your contribution falls on the far side of expectations, there will always be some other participant who has chucked the script in the garbage can so emphatically that you’ll feel conservative by comparison. A poetry reading can be as belabored as the poet allows it to be; Thomas’s suggestions ensured that my performance would be pretty brief. It also allowed me to operate from memory. At Crema, I located the character, recited his lines, felt the enthusiasm from a crowd that had come to have a good time, thanked Mariana and Thomas, and had a seat.

Did I belong? Mostly yes. I’d been invited by Thomas and welcomed by Crema, and I can be vaguely poetic when I want to be, even when I am as prolix as they come. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that nobody else approached the verse the way that I did. None of the other poems were written from the perspective of invented characters. They were meant to be direct expressions of the poet’s experience. Many of them had the confessional quality of a memoir — one grounding the narrator in a particular family dynamic, class status, and ethnic identity presented as a mirror for the identity of the speaker. As a big fan of emo music, I certainly know about that.

But emo music is music: the words exist in a relationship with sonic and compositional choices made by the rest of the band, not to mention a melody selected by the singer. There’s plenty of metaphor offsetting the flatfooted personal narration. I’d assumed that without a song to hold things together, the poet would have to embark on some flights of imagination in order to achieve the depth and density of association that I regularly encounter in visual and musical art.  

I’m not sure I got that. Yet Jersey City loves poetry, and I love Jersey City, so if I want to be properly attuned to my town, it’s on me to figure out how this form of expression works around here. Matching the poems with pictures felt like a step in the right direction: the paintings often amplified or simply reinforced the themes of the spoken word pieces. That’s what I hoped to do in my collaboration with Thomas, but I’m not sure if I achieved what I was going for.

For my first presentation in an exhibition, I’m pretty happy with it — but that’s mostly because of Thomas’s excellent painting. For my first experience at a poetry reading, it was neither a revelation nor a disaster. Next time I go to one, I’ll make sure I’m not reading anything. I’ll just be there to listen and understand better, and tune my own receiver with a little more precision than I did.