BROADSIDED: 2008

August 1, 2008
"Ghazal for the Woman from Vitez"
Artist: Undine Brod (bio).
Writer Susan Rich lives in Seattle. She is the author of Cures Include Travel, published by White Pine Press. Her book The Cartographer's Tongue, Poems of the World won the PEN USA Award for Poetry and the Peace Corps Writers Award. Her poems appear in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, New England Review and Quarterly West. Susan has worked in Bosnia, Niger, and Gaza on behalf of human rights. "Ghazal for the Woman from Vitez" is published in The Cartographer's Tongue. Visit her at www.susanrich.net.
Image: 8" x 11.5"; paper collage.

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Collaborator's Q & A for "Ghazal for the Woman from Vitez"

Artist Undine Brod:
If the broadside collaboration were a food dish, what would it be?
Hmmmm, there are so many possibilites... I also think in the realm of a food dish that has a main component and then a covering similar to a tamale and I try to figure out which is what—do the poems contain the art or does the art become the containment because it gives the poem a place?

Writer Susan Rich:
Did the visual artist refract any element of the poem that made you see the poem differently?
...the woman from Vitez, the woman the poem is dedicated to, was in her fifties. In the broadside she appears as a young girl. I think she'd like that....

Read the full responses from Rich & Brod.
 

July 1, 2008
"Neighborhood Watch"
Artist: Douglas Culhane (bio).
Writer Anjali Khosla is 28 years old and grew up in Minnesota. She is an MFA graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. "Neighborhood Watch" is her first poem to be accepted for publication. Her poetry appears in or is forthcoming from GlitterPony and Global Widespread Panic. Her fiction has been published by the Stickman Review.
Image: "and ants"; 9" x 12"; material pencil on paper.

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Collaborator's Q & A for "Neighborhood Watch"

Artist Douglas Culhane:
What inspired you to "dibs" this poem?
There is an openness to this poem both visually and textually. It conveys that sense of thoughts taking shape just as the words appear on the page—something only poetry can do. Also, the ants.

Writer Anjali Khosla:
What surprised you about this collaborative piece?
The editors encouraged me to put off the syntactic slips early in the poem, postponing the first "are" to the second stanza. The poem's format has been altered, as well—...

Read the full responses from Khosla & Culhane.
 

June 1, 2008
"Under Construction"
Artist: Ira Joel Haber (bio).
Writer Leah Browning is the author of two nonfiction books for teens and pre-teens (Capstone Press, 2006) and is currently under contract for a third. Her fiction, poetry, essays, and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in publications including The Saint Ann's Review, Queen's Quarterly, 42opus, Halfway Down the Stairs, Literary Mama, Autumn Sky Poetry, in several anthologies, and as part of a series of postcards from the program Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf. She was born and raised in New Mexico. A slightly different version of "Under Construction" first appeared in Blood Orange Review, October 2006.
Image: untitled, 9" x 12," collage on notebook paper.

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Collaborator's Q & A for "Under Construction"

Artist Ira Joel Haber:
What first leapt out at you from the poem and what was your gut response?
I liked the title under construction. Aren't we all still construction?

Writer Leah Browning:
What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem?
I tried not to have any expectations. Still, though, I think I expected something compact, something very black and white and finite.

Read the full responses from Haber & Browning.
 

May 1, 2008
"Meditation on the Treason of His Body"
Artist: Alesia F. Norling (bio).
Writer Joe Wilkins lives and writes in Forest City, Iowa, where he directs the creative writing program at Waldorf College. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Northwest Review, Pleiades, Tar River Poetry, and Best New Poets 2006, among other literary journals. His essay "A Story and a Prayer" recently won The Obsidian Prize for writing about the American West.
Image: "The Treason of His Body," 2008, 14" x 10", mixed-media on antique book cover.

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Collaborator's Q & A for "Meditation on the Treason of His Body"

Artist Alesia F. Norling:
What inspired you to "dibs" this poem?
It just jives perfectly with my style of art—dark but subtle with lots of layers.

Writer Joe Wilkins:
Every time I try to draw something on the board, my students loudly remind me what a terrible artist I am; so I wasn't at all sure what a visual artist would pick up on in my poem! However, I'm delighted with the result. Alesia's print seems to me to radically deepen the poem.

Read the full responses from Norling & Wilkins.
 

April 1, 2008
"Among Trees (or) The Heart is a Bee Hive"
Artist: Elizabeth Terhune (bio).
Writer Cindy St. John is a native Texan currently living in Kalamazoo, MI, where she is completing her MFA in creative writing.
Image: "Among Trees," 2008, 6" x 8.5", Bister ink on paper.

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Note: "Among Trees (or) The Heart is a Bee Hive" is the third Switcheroo feature from Broadsided. What is The Switcheroo? We'd love to tell you.
 

Collaborator's Q & A for "Among Trees (or) The Heart is a Bee Hive"

Artist Elizabeth Terhune:
...it was really humbling to know there were people writing to engage in collaboration with my drawing and I want to express my appreciation and gratitude. A studio practice can be isolating. Thank you to everyone for taking the time to look at, think and write about a drawing.

Writer Cindy St. John:
This poem was written in response to Elizabeth Terhune's art—can you talk about the experience of finding words that were in conversation with the image?
I stared at the piece for some time and tried to write about it, but everything just seemed contrived and cheesy. I decided my connection to it was not about the images themselves, but more of an emotional connection. So, I wrote a poem that I felt reflected the same sort of urgency of the painting

Read the full responses from Terhune & St. John.
 

March 1, 2008
"Mayflies"
Artist: Helen Beckman Kaplan (bio).
Writer Roy Seeger: Roy Seeger recieved his MA in poetry from Ohio University and his MFA (also in poetry) from Western Michigan University where he teaches part-time. His poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, The Laurel Review, Cream City Review, Hotel Amerika, Verse, The Southeast Review, Green Mountain Review, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review as well as other journals. His work has also been featured on Verse Daily, and was the winner of the first Buckbee, A Writer Inc. "Sadness Writing Contest." His chapbook The Garden of Improbable Birds is available from Gribble Press. He lives in Kalamazoo with his wife and small dog. "Mayflies" was first published in The Southeast Review
Image: "Wing," 2008, 8.5" x 11", Gouache on paper.

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Collaborator's Q & A for "Mayflies"

Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan:
In what sense did the poem first present itself as a collaboration with a visual medium?
I was ultimately drawn to the idea of the delicacy of mayfly wings. I thought of trying to use the words in the poem to form the lines of the tracery of the wing, but then after fooling around with that for while...

Writer Roy Seeger:
What surprised you about this collaborative piece?
I guess I expected the artwork to be illustrative rather than conceptual.... The differences made me rethink my interpretation of the poem. Or more specifically it gave me another interpretation of this poem. Thank you.

Read the full responses from Kaplan & Seeger.
 

February 1, 2008
"The Prosthetic"
Artist: Elizabeth Terhune (bio).
Writer Joy Icayan: Joy Anne Icayan works as project assistant for a government agency. She lives and writes in the Philippines. She has a degree in psychology and does freelance writing and research for several companies. She has been published in 2River View, Philippine Studies, and elsewhere.
Image: "Anonymous House," 2007, 8.5" x 6", Bister ink on paper.

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Collaborator's Q & A for "The Prosthetic"

Artist Elizabeth Terhune:
What inspired you to "dibs" this poem?
Quite honestly, this poem initially felt like it was "too much" for me to handle emotionally—I held off....But this poem is a nugget of feeling and image and it stayed with me. I was particularly taken with its modesty and its quietness.

Writer Joy Icayan:
If your poem were a type of bird, what would it be?
Where I live, they paint chicks and sell them. The multicolored chicks are a treat to little kids. (And then the chicks die soon after because of the paint).

Read the full responses from Terhune & Icayan.
 

January 1, 2008
"Canned Food Drive"
Artist: Jim Benning (bio).
Writer Kathleen Lynch: Kathleen Lynch's collection Hinge (2006) won the Black Zinnias Press National Poetry Book Competition. Her chapbooks includeHow to Build an Owl (Select Poet Series Award, Small Poetry Press, 1995), No Spring Chicken (White Eagle Coffee Store Press Award, 2001), Alterations of Rising (Small Poetry Press Select Poet Series, 2001) and Kathleen Lynch—Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications, 2002).

Her work (prose and poetry) appears in several anthologies, including The Next River Over—A Collection of Irish American Writing (New Rivers Press), Times Ten: An Anthology of Northern California Poets (Small Poetry Press), and a college textbook, Criteria for Writing (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc). Her poems appear in many literary journals, and she received the Spoon River Poetry Review Editor's Choice Award, the Salt Hill Poetry Award, Two Rivers Review Prize, Peregrine and Sow's Ear prizes, several Pushcart nominations and a 2007 residency fellowship at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming.

She worked as Coordinator of Writers In Performance, and Writers' Workshops for San Jose Center for Poetry and Fiction, served as board member for the San Jose Center for Literature and Arts, taught through Poets in the Schools (all grade levels), mentors individual poets, and conducts Teachers' In-Service training programs for elementary and high school teachers. Lynch also publishes fiction, essays and reviews, and does free-lance editing. She lives in Carmichael CA.

Website: www.kathleenlynch.com
Image: "shipping or storage by request," 2 panels 12" x 18", pigment ink print

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Extra! Extra!:

Artist Jim Benning was doubly inspired by Kathleen Lynch's poem. He created two visual responses—one in the traditional Braodsided format and another that we've repurposed into an online presentation here.

Collaborator's Q & A for "Canned Food Drive"

Artist Jim Benning:
Can you talk about your dual visual response?
Originally I had this impression of the compartmentalization of people's lives and how they may try to ship their solutions off to other situations how ever different those lives may be...

Writer Kathleen Lynch:
What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem?
Possibly moonlight on kids' bicycles, sycamores as guards, shrub as fort, "big bellied planes," maybe a can or pile of cans.

Read the full responses from Benning & Lynch.