Poets and printmakers

Visual artists layer their work with line and color and tone, shaping media into images that can be subtle, profound and provocative. Poets, too, shape verbal images, layering them with nuance and metaphor and every bit as much color as the painter. As students in a class called Matrix Redux discovered, when these different forms converge on the same page, the layered conversation can be very exciting.

The course, taught during the fall ’04 semester by poet Lisa Russ Spaar (English ’78, MA, Creative Writing ’82) and printmaker Dean Dass, invited eight advanced level undergraduate students each from poetry and printmaking to join this cross-discipline exploration of the relationship between art and poetry.

“The traditional notion of a class like this,” Spaar explained, “is the poets will bring the poems to the printmakers who will then be inspired by them in the printmaking. Instead, we were all inspired by each other in everything.”

“That was the premise from the day we conceived of this class,” Dass added. “Everyone was going to do both.”

Not only did the students “do both,” so did the instructors. Dass wrote poems and Spaar learned etching technique, and each of them taught one session in the other’s field. And everyone experienced the expansion of unexpected challenges. 

While one may assume that printmakers are familiar with putting words on a page, this is not necessarily so. Printmakers as artists primarily focus on creating a visual image.

“I had to figure out how to put text on the page with the image,” explained printmaker Maggie Sullivan (Studio Art ’06). “This was something I hadn’t really done before.” 

Sarah Stein (English ’05) was familiar with the ways in which dabbling in other artistic expression could fuel her writing, but this class took her by surprise. Stein felt her writing start to choke under the demands of learning this new discipline until the day she began thinking about the two as a unit.

“When I started to think about the whole thing conceptually — instead of write a poem or make a picture — then it started coming together a lot better.”

“On the poetry side, we learned a lot about what we leave out and how something that doesn’t seem to directly speak to something can illuminate it,” Spaar said. “So problems we were trying to solve in the print process ended up helping us make better poems.”

Despite her compatible double major, Erin Tabolt (English, Studio Art ’05) was neither a poet nor a printmaker. “I’ve been doing a lot of work with painting and poetry and the dialog between them,” she explained, “and I’ve been wanting to take printmaking.” When Spaar suggested this class, Tabolt was delighted; it meant she could delve into this new medium without having to take two semesters of prerequisites. 

“That was a gamble we took thinking they were conceptually advanced enough in the other area that it would work,” Dass said.

And it did work. Each student wrote at least 12 poems for the class, and all of them experimented with a variety of printing techniques, layering hand-set printed words with etchings, monotypes, collage and digitally produced images. 

For the final project, students were required to select one poem and use it to create 20 copies of a single folio (a printed page that, when folded in half, produces four book pages). These pages were combined to create an art book representing the efforts of the whole class.

Working in layers like this, “allows you to create a kind of depth that works like a poem without language,” Spaar asserted. “When you combine that with a poem, it’s just a really exciting process.”