Frames

A picture, they say, is worth... looking at, reacting to, engaging with, I hope. And every viewer has a point of view that frames the image they look at.

There's a kinship between the visual arts and the poem that goes deep. Every picture tells a story, they also say, but I think it's more that every viewer tells a story about the picture that they see. Images are in a way orthogonal to narrative in a way that a poem can be as well (which, of course, doesn't preclude narrative). It might make sense to mutter theoretical things about Lacan's ideas of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary, and to suggest that there are ways in which the visual arts and the poem align more closely with the Real than the other two orders, and let us get at things that linear language has difficulty with.

What we're hoping to do in this part of the Influency Salon is to explore the interaction of word and image. There's been a bit of discussion in the online world in the past while about ekphrasis, but that certainly isn't the only way words and image can interact.

Our plan here is to present an image and invite a poet to respond to it. What we're asking for is the poet's point of view, the poet's frame, the poet's Real. Let's see what that is, and what comes of this interaction.