In message <Pine.GSO.3.95-960729.971202125937.2553B-
[log in to unmask]>, [log in to unmask] writes
>On Tue, 2 Dec 1997 [log in to unmask] wrote:
>> Thanks for your response, Tony. Doesn't answer, though,
>> my question of how these artists use language, work
>> "poetically", and if they don't who do.
>
>I guess I'd like to know if there are any examples of real poet-artist
>collaboration in recent times: I can think of occasions when one has come
>along and utilised a pre-existing other, but that ain't collaboration as I
>understand it (and as, for instance, poet-musicians collaborate in
>performance terms). 
>
Is this a fair comparison? Poet-musician collaborations depend on the
immediacy of sound, poet-visual artist collabs on the materiality of
work on paper which essentially implies precedence of one or the other.
Even so, in the first case generally text or music is pre-existent.

Response to one of my word-visual collabs with Kelvin Corcoran, Saturday
Night in the Bardo, seemed quite telling. K wrote the poems in response
to my visuals & the title page says so: 'Collage-drawings by AH
illustrated with poems by Kelvin Corcoran.' But most reader/viewers
nevertheless saw it the other way round, or so we gathered: as if the
word has some kind of natural precedence. Maybe that's because they're
all addict poetry-readers. (The fact that all those visuals include
words might be an additional complication? Sometimes when I do that kind
of work I think I might be collaborating with myself; and, yes,
collaboration is a difficult thing.)
-- 
Alan Halsey


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