Radio Free Nebraska: Two Way Interview Between Brent Terry and Lorette C. Luzajic

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Lorette C. Luzajic: You are passionate about music and often write about it. Music turns up frequently in your ekphrastic poems after visual art, too. Do you see ekphrasis holistically in terms of encompassing multiple kinds of art? How does music speak to you as a poet outside of the ways that visual imagery speaks to you?

Brent Terry: Music. Holy Hannah, where to begin? Music is my alpha and my omega, the prime ingredient in my blood that makes living possible. It's a magical place that lives inside me and in which I live. Music is the first art form I fell in love with. My earliest memories are just fleeting pictures and a heavenly soundtrack. There was literally nothing before there was Music. My beloved grandmother, Halcyon played me songs on the piano, recited poetry, and thus the marriage that would decades later define my existence. There was always Music playing in our house when I was growing up: The Carpenters, Mamas and Papas, Carole King. Herb Alpert, Ferrante and Teicher. My mother and younger sister played piano. I tried, but my brain, ears and fingers were not on the same page. So I became a choirboy and sang in groups until I went off to college. As I child I would put on a record or the radio and disappear. I think my parents were worried about me. And rightly so! 

Nothing has changed. Music is still a place I escape into. I begin most days by girding my loins with song, and end most days playing something I can drift away to. Music was my way into other arts. Painting, for instance is the same sort of portal into a secret, more vivid, more real world. The fact that certain bits of music made me see colours in my head, and that certain pictures made me hear notes, blew my little brain. 

The first time I went to MoMA, twenty years ago, now, I sat nearly alone in a room of Jackson Pollock paintings. And they sang to me! I burst out in silent weeping. A woman walked by, looking concerned. I asked her, "Can you hear them?" Then she looked really concerned! I didn't tell anyone else. It was life-changing to discover that although I was hopeless with a musical instrument, I could make music with words, which had always come naturally to me. Fast forward to what, five years ago. Serendipitously, I was asked to submit a poem to an anthology for which you did the cover. I looked up more of your work and my brain burst into fireworks and poems and song. It was a beautiful synaesthetic train wreck. The rest is history! There are, if I counted right, sixty-two musical references in Radio Free Nebraska. And about a million more singing below the surface.

Lorette C. Luzajic: How did you choose which of my artworks would inspire your poems?

Brent Terry: I did not choose your artworks. They chose me. I'd be looking through your works, and suddenly, THWOCK, a feathered shaft protruding from my chest. 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: We both faced several serious illnesses during the years that we exchanged art and poetry towards the completion of this project. It is my own experience, one echoed by many others, that the arts have unique power to heal, restore, and bolster someone during trauma to survive. Was this your experience? How did your experience with brain surgery and cancer impact the work you did on this project, and vice versa?

Brent Terry: Art, both ingesting it and making it, is the most healing thing I know. Sure, writing through pain is sometimes painful itself, as is often the case with medicine, but it does the job, at least insomuch as it teaches me to understand what I am going through. Maybe it helps others understand what they are going through too. The cancer and brain surgery (and subsequent covid and emergency abdominal surgery) will flavour poems, methinks, for a long time. 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: You turned down a publication offer of this collection because the press wanted to proceed without using colour reproductions of the visual art, ultimately decided on self-publishing in order to include the collages that inspired your poems. It’s understandable that most publishers find colour imagery cost-prohibitive and don’t publish artwork. Still, turning this offer down was was not an easy decision. How did this feel, and how did you arrive at your ultimate decision to proceed independently?

Brent Terry: The decision to turn down publishers who just wanted the poems was actually a no-brainer. To me, the poems without your squares were amputations, disfigured, misshapen things. Okay, that might be a bit much, but they go together in a fundamentally organic way. That's the way they need to go into the world. 

Lorette C. Luzajic: How do you grapple with a world of limited inclination to poetry? It's a niche interest, written and read by mostly the same people. 

Brent Terry: Sure, I would love to sell out Carnegie Hall like Robert Frost or inspire hordes of aging groupies like Billy Collins, but what keeps me from despair over my lack of literary infamy is the idea that I am speaking through my work to one idealized reader who will find a particular poem indispensable. Mostly, that's enough. But would a gig at Red Rocks be too much to ask?

Lorette C. Luzajic: What is it about my visual art that appeals to you so much? Are there works in particular in this collection that move you more than others, and why?
 
Brent Terry: What appeals me about your work? Where to start?! I think the first thing is how kinetic it is. There's so much going on that I have to be feeling quick on my feet and ready for a do-si-do hoedown, a square dance (literally!) with all the many elements. Or else I have to be calm and contemplative, in a space where I can drift into the space of the work, let it do its stuff. I love the way that the disparate elements work together to create an elusive, but in the end organic and coherent whole. I adore the colors, the shapes, the textures. All my senses are engaged. Which brings me to the strongest pull of your work, which is more mysterious. Some of them just call out, "Hey sailor, wanna dance?" Something about a particular combo of elements triggers some weird, borderline synaesthetic thing in my brain that requires a whole-body baptism by fire. It's like a most wonderful drug. No negative effects, just a need to start slinging lingo!

I can't really say that some squares moved me more than others. Every single one held me in its grip pretty darn tight. That being said, of the ones that inspired poems, "The Yellow Car" and the gigantic "Be Kind, Rewind" have not lost one watt of their power. As for the squares inspired by poems, it's probably "Crazy," the Patsy Cline square inspired by the poem "Eye Fall to Pieces." At first I wasn't sure about the greens and pinks. Now it has set up shop in my soul.

Lorette C. Luzajic: Was there a particular poem in Radio Free Nebraska that was challenging to write? Why? How did it come together?

Brent Terry: Every poem was a unique challenge, but "Hello Dali" and "Ain't it Strange" were probably the hardest, because I just couldn't make them live up to your work. I agonize over those two to this day.

Lorette C. Luzajic: Which poems in this collection are your favourites? Why?

Brent Terry: At the other end of the spectrum, I kind of adore "Prom," "Eye Fall to Pieces," "Tears of the Moon," "Be Kind," and "Tinker Bell Gone Bad." I can't say they were easy to write, but I did kind of wrestle with them in an ecstatic fever that left me spent and satisfied.

A room in Brent Terry's home.

​Brent Terry: When creating a piece, how much do you know about what's going in and where it's going to go before you start? 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: Very little. Most of my works begin as a small seed of some kind. It could be a colour combination that appeals to me, and then I dig out pieces that fit the palette and appeal to me on some level. It could be a line of poetry that I “feel” to life on canvas. It could be a particular image that requires contemplation and attention, and then other images build around it. Most often, the work veers off in unintended directions. As a collage artist, I’m always juxtaposing incongruent imagery. I riff and improvise. I choose a piece because it is the right size or fit or shape or colour, or because a connection is made in some other way. I think in fragments and snapshots. Life is like this, eclectic, with disparate elements. Memory works this way, in flashes. Dreams are collages of joys and anxieties, with random, unconnected images coming together. A character in your dream might be someone you saw on the subway, with a theme coming from the Netflix you watched before bed, a visiting bird you noticed the day before in the garden, all peppered with an incident at the office you haven’t thought about in eleven years.  
 
Brent Terry: Your pieces are wildly different thematically, yet always recognizable as distinctively yours. The same is true, I think, in your writing. Is this on purpose, or more a result of "finding your voice" over time? 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: I don’t think it’s possible for me to be anything but myself. I change and revert and change again. I am literally curious about everything: my themes and interests and inspirations are eclectic, and that’s how they show up in my work, both visual and literary. My tagline is “eclectic curiosity.” I feel I am myself a collage, with bits and pieces of all of my experiences, of interests and connections, dabblings and explorations, coming together in random and not-so random ways. Everything I do is collage. It’s really even how I cook. My interest in art history runs deep, but it isn’t focused on a particular era or place: I want to know everything even though it’s impossible. I love old Orthodox icons, Dutch still life, abstract expressionism, surrealism, Mexican folk art, Navajo turquoise and silver work, African masks, the list goes on. One of the many joys of collage is that all of these inspirations can turn up some of the time in my own work.
 
Brent Terry: It's pretty clear to those who follow your visual work that certain elements return over and over on your work, often in surprising ways and odd conglomerations. Birds, cats, hats, pop-culture icons, religious iconography, are some that come quickly to mind. There are many others. How much of this is thought-out, and how much is instinctive? How does your process differ, if at all, when creating a "reverse-ekphrastic" piece than when starting from some other place? 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: There are always bits and pieces, icons, faces, and text that will appear once and probably not be seen again. But over the years, a kind of Lorette-language has emerged, with a variety of recurring symbols. We all have symbols, amulets, motifs that are meaningful to us. This is true on a cultural level and a personal one. 
 
Certain people inspire me tremendously and receive multiple tributes. For example, Marilyn Monroe is my eternal muse and I never get tired of paying homage to her beauty and courage. She represents herself, of course, but also stands in as a goddess of beauty. That combination of absolute glamour with her vulnerability and neediness intoxicates me and millions of others. She came alive for the camera, and I hope that my Marilyn remixes contribute in a small way to keeping her light shining. I view her whole life as a work of art. When I sometimes hear her gift being dismissed as “mere beauty” it hurts me. There is nothing “mere” about beauty. Marilyn created Marilyn, an alter ego, who was both her true self and a persona. She was very determined and worked hard, modelling and promoting herself tirelessly, transforming into a legend. Some say that Marilyn was crushed and even killed by becoming Marilyn. I would argue it is quite likely she would been diminished much sooner without her. So the recurring Marilyn motif is about eternal beauty, but also about transformation, courage, creativity, and reinvention.
 
Birds show up in my work over and over. They represent eclectic variety, flight, and freedom. They also show how there is beauty and comedy and personality in the tiniest soul.
 
The ampersand is very important to me. I adore it on an aesthetic level but it is even more important symbolically. It means “and.” For me, this represents how open-ended things are, how there are always more possibilities, more opportunities, more mysteries. Our stories are unfinished. 
 
The forget-me-nots show up over and over, too. They are my favourite flower. When I was wee, our yards were full of them and they grew over everything. They were so abundant that they were considered weeds. It always struck me that a weed could be so beautiful. And that is a profoundly potent symbol for me. There was something heartbreaking there, too, and I was the same paradoxical temperament then as I am now, always having been very positive, very jovial, very hopeful while at the same time deeply depressed and overly sensitive. The idea of something being forgotten really made me strive to notice everything and really see it, to appreciate the fleeting. And even though these tiny flowers grow everywhere, you can’t keep them. They die quickly if you pick them. So they also strike me as a symbol of temporality.
 
The sacred heart is another recurring symbol that shows up in so much of my work. It represents God’s unlimited, burning, eternal love and compassion. It also represents heartbreak and agony. The idea that God can be heartbroken reminds us to love without boundaries, regardless of what it costs us. I did not grow up Catholic. We were Protestants and the Protestants tried to purge art and imagery from Christianity. As a devotee of art history as well as of the Christian story, this symbol and other Catholic or Orthodox symbols represent my resistance of obliterating the image from faith and from life. Religion itself is profoundly imaginative. We depend on conjuring images and stories and poems or prayers to express things that are outside of our understanding.
 
There are lots of other recurring images. Hello Kitty represents nostalgia and a specific bestie to me. Johnny Cash represents the storyteller, as well as the spectre of addiction and how it can take down even the greatest. On another level, his image also connects me to my father. I always thought my Dad looked like Johnny Cash, and though they were very different, they were both very honest Christians and very authentic human beings.
 
The lover’s eye brooch is another symbol that comes up often. These brooches were popular in the late 1700s, meant as a portable emblem of a secret. We all carry someone in our heart and our mind’s eye.
 
I tend to repeat symbols that carry meaning for me whether I am creating from someone’s poem or making a custom piece or working from my own intuition as a blank slate. I tend to incorporate motifs drawn from the person inspiring the work or their poem as well as from my own well at the same time.
 
Brent Terry: I loved the long immersion with you in this project and was in zero hurry to finish! Did spending more than two years creating this wee beastie allow the process to be a more organic thing for you?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: For me, Radio Free Nebraska was really a visual-verbal expression of the process of building a friendship. We met through the ekphrastic world, and the project was fairly organic, starting with a single poem and your interest in my art. We began talking on Zoom, comparing notes about art, music, poetry, and the world. We went through Covid together. The whole affair was greatly delayed when I got sick, which only served to draw out the connection and make it deeper, as you kept showing up to support me patiently as I went through a trilogy of serious ordeals. We grew closer through peril and our shared interests in art and the hope it saves inside of us, the meaning it gives us. Then the tables turned; as I was slowly emerging from the fog you began confronting several severe illnesses, and it was my turn to show up for you. We were not in proximity so the support we offered each other was nothing in the way of practicality such as food delivery or a ride to medical appointments. It was simply being there and sitting with each other through it all, mutual cheerleading. Sharing poems and songs and paintings and dreams. We didn’t have a clue if one or both or neither would make it out alive. That is bonding stuff. We blew the dust off all that, and there we were, humbly immortalized in Radio Free Nebraska. 
 
Brent Terry: Is your approach to your written work different than to visual work, and if so, how?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: Not really. Writing is more focused and less spontaneous, perhaps. I tend to zoom in on something specific in a poem or story. You could say that each poem is a collage piece, and the whole body of work, or the collection, is the full collage. But even a poem is a composite of different fragments, different facets of my fascinations. The same themes and motifs inadvertently show up in my writing. 
 
Brent Terry: We both dealt with profound health issues during the process of creating this work. You asked me about how my issues affected my approach to this project, not to mention the finished poems. I'm going to flip that one right back at you!
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: I guess I answered this one above. Interestingly, “illness” doesn’t really show up in the project itself. It was a lifeline, the ray of light and hope. Interestingly, all of the processing I did, coming to terms with the fragility of the body, and the eye-opening experience of coming face to face with one’s mortality, showed up in my own writing, elsewhere. Somehow I felt possessed to write 72 stories about chronic disease and pain, and they turned into my book, Disgust. It may sound depressing and gross, and it was, but it’s actually a hopeful and even fun collection at turns. Illness is transformational. It made me more humble, more patient, more generous with others. And every day I have now in this bleak and chaotic world feels like I won the fricking lottery, and that’s a very precious gift to have.
 
Brent Terry: Were there particular poems that struck you more forcefully, made you excited to knock out a square? Were any squares particularly difficult to create? Why? 
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: My favourite of your poems is “You Are Here: (Poem for Robert Motherwell)”, which you wrote to an abstract square that was a homage to artist Robert Motherwell. This square was also on the cover of a textbook about the punk music scene in Mexico City, a bit of serendipitous connectivity with the passion for music your work in this collection expresses. I love the fact that this poem was inspired by an artwork inspired by art. It’s a stellar, juicy poem, stuffed with cosmic details that range from Mexico’s landscape to quasars. “God plays dice with the universe” might be the most interesting thing anyone has ever said about my artwork, and it captures perfectly the spirit of my work as a whole.
 
I found Free Form Radio particularly difficult to create and am not quite happy with the piece. It strikes me as corny and crowded, a place some of my collage paintings end up. There was no particular reason for this. The task of drawing inspiration from a poem (or a poem from an artwork) can occasionally feel daunting when you naturally want the artwork to reflect positively on its source, and I think this is all part of the process of creativity. Riffing off another artist’s work is a goldmine of inspiration, but not everything turns out gold. 
 
Brent Terry: Wanna do it all again sometime?
 
Lorette C. Luzajic: ​Perhaps we are already “doing it again.” Since we closed the fountain, both of us have continued to create from one another’s work. It’s always hard to say why I start something in any particular moment, and one day out of the blue, your poem “Jackrabbit Heart,” which you wrote after the collage Jack Rabbit, came into my mind strongly and I printed a copy of the poem while painting a canvas black. It was a large abstract work and I started scrawling lines from the poem across the painting in illegible graffiti. This one ended up on the book cover, faded out, but still present. You are an amazing writer and I don’t think there will be a point when I’m “finished” responding to that.
 

Jackrabbit Heart, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2025