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Excerpt from
IMAGINATION'S ARTIFACTS: ON THE ART OF KEITH WALDROP
BY ROBERT SEYDEL
Originally published in Several Gravities by Keith Waldrop, Siglio Press. Copyright © 2009 the author. All rights reserved.
The alliance of Waldrop's writings to his pictures and of his pictures to his writings is marked by meaningful cross currents, both as regards his procedures and his general artistic stance. Air in one is coeval with the air in the other. Borders and horizons sway; the unbeheld, a space of proximities and distances, desire above all, melancholy above all, mark both picture and poem. What is enunciated and what is withheld in one medium rhymes with the enunciations and absences in the other. I don't know that Waldrop would necessarily agree with this, or with the general tenor of these remarks. I have heard him say, for instance, "I turn to collage to get away from words."
And certainly Waldrop is that rare figure -- a poet's poet, inherently graceful in his utterance, in both poetry and prose, and somewhat hermetic, sage-like, very beautiful in his hesitations and quiet delivery of both self and poem. But his collages and other visual work share these traits and participate in the same alembic as his poetry, precisely as though, as one says, they are poetry by other means. Jean Cocteau famously wrote in Dessins, "Poets don't draw, they unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently." In Keith Waldrop's case, what is unraveled is not perhaps handwriting (though it is that too), but the poem as work of collage -- a kind of aerial feat that attempts to delineate the unbridgeable spaces between things through the construction of artifacts into form, both visual and verbal.
This binding of form from fragment, central to his art, is fascinating. It's impossible, as a matter of the related writings woven through Several Gravities -- as sign posts for the poet's thinking about the image -- to excerpt from his more strictly collage-type poems. They are of a piece and hold so tightly to their shaping that excision equates with subtraction and sunders their original, densely shaped intentions. Excision, that is to say, unbinds them. Poems such as "The Chapters Together" and "The Cake He Typed," indeed almost the whole of a book like The Garden of Effort in which these poems are situated, are radical works of collage held together as it were by a structure of tissue -- consciousness -- impossible to pull away from, lest the whole (their musics, both of sound and of meaning) collapse. What they affirm is, against wreck, as Ezra Pound wrote near the end of his life, "the gold thread in the pattern."
Sound and meaning as high construct, form as vision, have precise analogue in Waldrop's visual work, where tissue and other diaphanous matter shape webs and nets across the surface of the picture. His collage is a masked and floating thing. Scrawls, calligraphic and nearly linguistic, can resolve themselves into cracks of the tissue that delineate their atmospheres. Bubbles of shape that verge sometimes on the unformed, on no-form, or the barely legible, extend out from solid architectural fronts. Sky, that is rarely horizon, and across which being floats, is a webbed space full of ghosted impressions. His collages, visual as well as verbal, reveal quiet tensions, nearly biologic. Veil upon veil layers his work, composing its densities, all of which are paradoxically light. There is in this work occlusion, a smoky atmosphere; distances recede, objects float. The gossamer air in many if not most of his pictures is romantic and clouded. That the postal mark and the stamp, the fish and the duck, are key elements in his iconography, is all to the point. Being crosses space, through a variety of airs.
In collage, opacity is the norm, defining a solid architecture through a series of abutments. Certainly Waldrop employs this formal structure on occasion, but he more typically enunciates his picture through transparency. Ghostings, hauntings, veilings, falling and ascending figures, drift are central terms for Waldrop, all concerning the in-between, in part the unbeheld. "He craves an interval," as he writes in his recent book-length poem, The Real Subject, an opening, that is, between two (or more) terms, forms, or states of being. That may well be the defining space a poet-painter, as type, seeks in general, in his rejection of the determining accommodations the imagination must make inside the limits of any single medium. Constructed from multiple sourcings, Waldrop's art obeys its own laws of composition and is related in one sense to cottage industry stitching. The strand is determinative. This is the condition of collage generally but sums up Waldrop's in particular.
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