Collaboration with Charles D. Tarlton and Ann Knickerbocker

Stereoptical Study XX: For Susan Howe, by Ann Knickerbocker. Contemporary.

Stereoptical Study XX: For Susan Howe
 
 
The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards’ listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving.  Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding.
    - Susan Howe
 

1
 
In some world beneath the surface, the actor becomes the acted-upon.  One possible solution here - the universe of gray, green, and black gradually overcome by the onslaught of red, blue, and white.  The imagination must make the leap, must see one coloured plane completing the painting in the other.  In a hot enough fire the iron in the hammer melts while pounding the red-lit horseshoe, and sparks fly!  Gray of iron; red of flames; chaque pìece de bois knows the sand that petrifies it, each color works its way into another, the insect in the amber, the seashell in the desert rocks.  There is movement among the colors and movement is change, animal to mineral, eukaryotic cells to sandstone.
 
once upon a time
on LSD I understood
the trees.  Saw myself
looking back from the surface
of a shiny, mica stone
 
all our messages
fragment that way. The sender
and the sent cohere
along invisible lines
boundaries separating
 
I objectify
myself, ruminate on how
I, me and myself
are simply one, examined
from fluid perspective
 
 
2
 
When I look at this painting I see movement and transformation, the right side resisting the encroachments of the left, the darker side.  But, in one place near the bottom the wall has been breached, but not as I expected.  It’s the lighter side, the word-literate side that has broken through. The torn and smudged notebook page over the menacing green orb. O optimism!  O hope! Bought at the price of blood!
 
no easier word
to say than understanding
long as it’s feeling
we’re talking about and not
candid verification
 
you might see it as
subject and definition
then we understand
the need for a line between
and different complexions
 
paradox reveals
our hunger to understand
even at the price
of cool rationality
violating truth to know
 
 
3
 
Constable clouds and a sailboat on a liverish and blood-red sea (on the right side), and on the left, dark subterranean burrowing, something organic that has rotted.  A Manichean fantasy, the struggle for the world personified and dramatized.  We like to think this way, to see evil as real and still remain phlegmatic.  The more precarious our passage, the greater it is, more piquant and lively.
 
there remains a law
in our logic that maintains
that something and its
opposite cannot exist
wholly in the single breath
 
you hear something strange
then peel ordinary things
away, hoping to find
some deeper truths, exposing
rather, the bleeding tissues
 
its probably better
to stay on the surface
note colours and shapes
accept impenetrable
reality, there’s nothing

Charles D. Tarlton

Charles D. Tarlton has been writing ekphrastic tanka prose for sometime, publishing several in Haibun Today, Contemporary Haibun Online, Atlas Poetica, Skylark, and KYSO Flash, Review Americana, Inner Art Journal, Prune Juice, Rattle, Blackbox Manifold, Undertow Tanka Review, and Fiction International.

Ann Knickerbocker is an abstract painter who has shown her work in New England, the West Coast and overseas; she has been a member of several galleries in Amherst, MA, Essex, CT., Guilford, CT, and Gallery Route One, in Point Reyes Station, California.  Ann chose the paintings for the project from her ongoing work (all of which, along with her resume, can be seen online at: Annknickerbocker.com.).