Interview with Kurt Eidsvig: Drowning Girl

Drowning Girl, by Kurt Eidsvig (Unsolicited Press, 2024). Click image to view or order at Unsolicited Press.)

The Ekphrastic Review: Drowning Girl is a sweeping, monumental, experimental, indefinable act of ekphrastic creativity. What is it, in your own words as the creator? Tell us how this book came into existence.

Kurt Eidsvig: I’d been thinking about writing my own version of a road adventure story, or a contemporary Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for quite some time. Basically, I hoped to create a story that followed a journey and had many side-stories and different explorations into genre. Twain does this in Finn with plays, satire, adventure, and different forms of writing. I’m a big fan of playing with forms and using different formats of language we take for granted as a vehicle for a larger story.
I’d already used Roy Lichtenstein’s art as a launching pad for a few of my own visual art projects. In one, I recreated a painting of his using X’s and O’s instead of Ben Day dots as part of a large installation and performance piece in Boston for the Fort Point Theatre Channel. In another, I used a paper hole punch, collected the remnants in an envelope, and titled it, Variations on a Theme by Roy Lichtenstein. 

But the major confluence that got Drowning Girl the book going was the curatorial placement of the Lichtenstein painting at the MoMA at the time I started writing this project. The fact that it was reflecting off the steel elevator doors and treated as an afterthought for many visitors got my creative wheels turning. Here is this absolute masterpiece of painting being ignored by people. It made me wonder about place, placement, and journeys. All of this is at the heart of the book.   

For those readers who don’t yet know you, tell us a little bit about your creative practice as a whole. You are a visual artist, poet, and writer. Connect the dots for us.

I’ve flip-flopped between visual art and writing from the time I was a child. I am fortunate to be a classically-trained artist and studied drawing—from still life to portraiture and beyond—for years in high school before training at MassArt, UMASS/Boston, and Northeastern. I lived and worked in the Fort Point Arts Community in Boston for over 10 years and have been lucky enough to be featured in numerous shows and exhibitions for my visual art.  

This connection to visual approaches informs my writing in terms of practice through my use of collage, appropriation, voice, tone, and expression in both. The use of “line” in art and “line” in writing as basic building blocks for tone, rendering, and expression isn’t lost on me. 
 
Also, I am an art historian and critic, and the language of artists is ever-present in my work. There are always parallels between visual art approaches and literary approaches, and I believe great art, whether literary or visual, takes the ultra-specific and makes it somehow universal. There is a tension between these two aims in both my writing as well as my art.   

Tell us about your interest in pop art, which fuels both your painting and poetry. How did you become interested in pop art? What kept your attention? How does this kind of art inspire your own?

I describe my own visual art (when forced to) as pop-expressionism in that it often strives to challenge the traditional reserved qualities of Pop and combine them with the emotive power of expressionists like de Kooning or Pollock. That said, I think I came to appreciate Pop late. One of the pivotal moments of looking in my visual art practice was encountering the huge James Rosenquist painting The Swimmer in the Econo-Mist at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) in the 90s. That work appropriates pop imagery and does so in a very expressive narrative. 

What’s best about Pop is the common language it starts with. By using visual fodder as building blocks for works that are familiar the audience has a foothold into the work. Rather than being put off or intimidated by the trappings of high art, fine art, and the art world, a painting steeped in Pop can bring in an audience and then challenge them once they are “inside.”

I think we are all told how Shakespeare’s work was vastly popular at the time because it operated on so many levels: It was fun, funny, and approachable to contemporary audiences. But there are layers. Pop Art operates in a similar manner; it is both inviting and approachable and then nuanced and difficult upon return engagements. The longer I engage with Pop the more I see the connection between Ellsworth Kelly and what the early Pop artists were doing. 

One of the books I am currently reading is Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch. I am constantly engaged with Haring. His ability to take a line and create a visual vocabulary that is distinctive, original, and steeped in layered meaning is extraordinary. He is a guide in my approach to work. 

Your approach to poetry is unusual. Can you share some of your perceptions, insights, and influences with us?

I think poetry is the concentration of music into language. In that respect, my approach includes “hearing” different uses of words and their sounds when placed against one another and/or silence. 
As with visual art, I am always looking to escape the trappings of traditional poetry and bring work to people that is inviting at first glance but rewarding on repeated engagements. People like Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara are huge influences on me. As is William Carlos Williams and his constant drive to find the music and poetry of actual American English. 

Martha Collins, Ada Limón, and Sandra Simonds are all poets who influence my work as well. But, as is apparent in Drowning Girl, the closed captioning on a muted TV, a text message, or a street sign can all spark a line, a poem, a series of poems, or a book. 

The different registers or tones of a footnote versus an exclamation, a survey response or a overheard conversation are all musical to poetry. Each is explored in Drowning Girl.    
 
How do you choose the artworks that you write about? Do they choose you? Let us into your ekphrastic experience.

I write about art a lot. I am an art critic and have been fortunate to feel invited into the greater discussion of art and art history and would like to give other people that same gift. This is something I do through words and discussions, bringing common ground and abstract revelations to a wider audience. 

To back up to the influences question: John Donne. One of the things that often happens in my writing about art is using a Donnean conceit or extended metaphor as a vehicle to bring people into the experience of looking at an artwork. 

For me, the emotional response to great art is almost impossible to put into words. So I have to try. It is like comedians who challenge themselves to write jokes about things that are impossible to joke about. I feel the same about some art: It is impossible to talk about.

These types of experiences are the ones I want to capture. Or try to. The Rothko Retrospective at the Whitney in ‘99. The John Baldessari exhibit at The Met (which I still haven’t been able to write about). When a painting or artwork “freezes” me, in that my feet are stuck to the ground, I find myself breathing through my mouth, and losing all semblance of time; those are the works I often write about.   

What were some challenges you encountered writing Drowning Girl? Were there any surprises along the way?

 The whole thing was a surprise. I had no idea I would write this book. In fact, I was very taken with the Jasper Johns paintings Tantric Detail I, Tantric Detail II and Tantric Detail III during that fateful trip to MoMA. But this book just kept bubbling out of me.  

I think the challenges were in the lines between poetry, fiction, and memoir. I had a teacher, the great Patricia Goedicke, who once told me “Never let the truth get in the way of a good poem.” This book is made up, revelatory, real, imagined, abstract, concrete, etc. 

Somewhere in the middle, I was the woman in the water. I was the Drowning Girl. I was writing and wondering when it would end. If it should continue. What was going on. 

Then one day, it was done. It finished itself. I was on the shore.  

What’s next for Kurt Eidsvig?

I’m just wrapping up a new novel that is based in magical realism, imagery, and sound. In addition, my latest series of poems is trying to extend into a book. I call them the “Artificial-AI Poems” as they are work that I don’t think a computer could write. Yet.  

On the visual art front, I’m working on a series of square pictures. These tense to try and become portraits, or mirrors, and then flex to become narratives. They combine text and pictures and seem right at home with the rest of my work. 

I’m also working on a piece of writing comparing the Rothko Chapel to the scene in Goodfellas where Eric Clapton’s "Layla" is playing and all the wiseguys end up dead. Pink Cadillacs and Rothkos; why not.  

Plus, I’m working on a sunburn. Happy End of Summer!

Thanks so much. 
 
**

Read Kurt's work in The Ekphrastic Review:

Are You There, God? It's Me, Andy
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/are-you-there-god-its-me-andy-by-kurt-cole-eidsvig

The Estate of Ideas
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-estate-of-ideas-by-kurt-cole-eidsvig

Porky's Obscura
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/porkys-obscura-art-week-miami-2022-nina-chanel-abney-turning-the-artworld-upside-down-at-ica-by-kurt-cole-eidsvig

Sample Pages from Drowning Girl: