BROADSIDED: 2012

May 1, 2012
"Cost Benefit"
Poem by Lisa Allen Ortiz
Art by Cheryl Gross

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Note: "Cost Benefit" is the ninth Switcheroo feature from Broadsided. What is The Switcheroo? We'd love to tell you.

Writer Lisa Allen Ortiz is currently an MFA candidate at Pacific University. Her poems have appeared in Zyzzyva, The Literary Review and Crab Orchard Review, and her chapbook Turns Out was published last year by Main Street Publishing Company. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Artist Cheryl Gross is a painter, illustrator, mini-documentarian, and motion graphics animator. She has an MFA in New Forms from Pratt, where she now teaches. She writes: "When asked about my work, I always equate it with creating an environment transforming my inner thoughts into reality. Much like an architect or urban planner, that reality and humor becomes the foundation of the work. Beginning with the physical process, I work in layers. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, my urban influence has indeed added an "edge" to my work. Coming from a totally vertical and intense environment, I now live in Jersey City, NJ." www.cmgross.com.

Image: "Best Friends," 12" x 17", handmade paper, ball point, graphite, India ink.
 

Collaborators' Q & A for "Cost Benefit"

Bsided: What surprises you about Lisa's poem in conversation with your art?
Artist Cheryl Gross: I'm always surprised when someone picks up my work and responds to it. I particularly like the fact that she can see things in it that I don't. Basically because I'm too close to it.

Bsided: This poem was chosen in response to Cheryl Gross's art—can you talk about the experience of finding words that were in conversation with the image? What leapt out first from Cheryl's art? A particular image? A mood? A line?
Poet Lisa Allen Ortiz: ...I had been mourning the loss of our home movies (accidentally put in a good will bag while cleaning), and the odd figures reminded me of distorted children's toys and thus of memories and what we lose with time. The receipt made me think about what memories are worth...

Read the full responses from Cheryl and Lisa.
 

April 1, 2012
"Delivering to the Client"
Poem by Paul Dickey
Art by Ira Joel Haber

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Writer Paul Dickey's They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in January, 2011. His poetry has appeared recently in Verse Daily, Rattle, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Mid-American Review, Free Lunch, Crab Orchard Review and online at www.linebreak.org, among many other online and print publications. A poetry chapbook What Wisconsin Took was published by The Parallel Press in 2006. Paul Dickey holds a Master of Arts degree from Indiana University, Bloomington in the History and Philosophy of Science. His poetry first appeared in leading regional literary journals in the 1970s. Dickey has written several one-act plays and one full-length play, The Good News According to St. Dude. Besides writing, Dickey teaches philosophy at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, NE. More information and notes on publishing activity can be found here.

Artist Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer and teacher who sometimes writes poetry and movie reviews. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one-man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Hirshorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In 2004 he received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.
 

Collaborators' Q & A for "Delivering to the Client"

Bsided: When you began this piece, was it color, shape, or some other aspect that you followed? Did that change?
Artist Ira Joel Haber: This is the first broadside that I've done that was a completely new work. For previous collaborations I've worked with existing art works and then played with them in Photoshop, changing them. But with this one I began by doing a series of collages based on the images that I picked up and out of the poem, and farms and nature stood out for me, so I based my collages on that.

Bsided: What surprised you about this collaborative piece?
Poet Paul Dickey: That the artist depicted quite accurately, I think, many other farm poems I have written and a theme in which I thought I had tired of and had avoided in this poem. Somehow perhaps he saw beyond the images of this particular poem to the unconscious essence in many of my earlier farm poems and which still informs the current one.

Read the full responses from Ira and Paul.
 

March 1, 2012
"The Ringmaster Answers the Phone"
Poem by Amorak Huey
Art by Meghan Keane

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Writer Amorak Huey recently left the newspaper business after 15 years as a reporter and editor. He now teaches creative and professional writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where he lives with his wife and two children. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Western Michigan University. His poem have appeared in The Southern Review, Oxford American, Subtropics, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review and many other journals. More information is available at his website: www.amorakhuey.net.

Artist Meghan Keane exhibits nationally and internationally and her works can be found in private collections throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe and Japan. Recent projects include a solo exhibition, "PROJECT NIHON / sustainable art travel," in Tokyo; a group exhibition, "Casa de Munecas" in Quito, Ecuador and "do it yourself candide," which Keane was invited to create for the New York Public Library (january 2010). Keane is the founding director of meghan.keane.studio (meghankeanestudio.com). She is also currently a teaching artist at Kentler International Drawing Space and a visiting alumni artist at the Brooklyn College art department printshop.
 

Collaborators' Q & A for "The Ringmaster Answers the Phone"

Bsided: When you began this piece, was it color, shape, or some other aspect that you followed? Did that change?
Artist Meghan Keane: I began these monoprints with repeating lines. There was something in the mesmerizing aspect of the poem, being trapped in a certain state, like the shark and the people in the poem, that kind of launched the work. Drawing square, within square, within square.... The color came after.

Bsided: Did the visual artist refract any element of the poem that made you see the poem differently?
Poet Amorak Huey: I was struck immediately by the tension—frustration? anger, maybe even?—on the right side of the page. I love the messiness of it, the scribbling-out of it,—and I also love the brightness of the red at the left hinting at something more vivid happening off the page.

Read the full responses from Amorak and Meghan.
 

February 1, 2012
"Omnivore"
Poem by James Arthur
Art by Se Thut Quon

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Writer James Arthur's first book, Charms Against Lightning, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. He will be in residence at the Amy Clampitt House in 2012.

Artist Se Thut Quon lives in Kentucky

Image: "Art for Omnivore," 8.5" x 11," Digital photograph
 

Collaborators' Q & A for "Omnivore"

Bsided: What inspires you in this poem?
Artist Se Thut Quon: I favor tales of excess over outlines for moderation. I have trouble throwing things away. The poem satisfies by mixing brutal opportunism with a righteous abhorrence of waste.

Bsided: Did the visual artist refract any element of the poem that made you see the poem differently?
Poet James Arthur: I think that Se Thut Quon's image captures the directness and the aggression of "Omnivore," and for me, those qualities have always been dominant in the poem—but I also think that Se Thut Quon's work brings forward "Omnivore"'s sexual subtext. For me, that was eyeopening.

Read the full responses from James and Se.
 

January 1, 2012
"2011 Haiku Year-in-Review"

NOTE: Inspired by Carrier's Addresses and a deep commitment to public art, the HYIR is a special feature that debuted this year at Broadsided. Four artists created work in response to an event that for them dominated a season of 2011. We placed an open call for submissions of haiku that did the same. The art and the poems selected as finalists were posted online, and we asked you to vote on the winning combinations. Details can be seen at HYIR 2011. Meet the authors and artists below.

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(488kb PDF)

WINTER
Writer Peter Kline's recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2010 Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He lives in San Francisco.

Artist Kara Searcy is a multi-media artist from Iowa. Examples of her work can be found at http://fallstraightback.deviantart.com/. She loves constellations, Jesus, and the word "ricochet."

SPRING
Writer Steve Brightman lives in Kent, Ohio. His poems have been featured in Pudding House, Origami Condom, A Trunk of Delirium and he was included in the Ohio Bicentennial Anthology titled I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems about Ohio.

Artist Caleb Brown is an artist who works on software interfaces. He lives in Groton, MA with his wife, puppy and two tween twins, See more at www.caleb-brown.com.

SUMMER
Writer Peter Kline's recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2010 Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. He lives in San Francisco.

Artist Jennifer Moses is a painter living in Boston. She is also a professor of art at the University of New Hampshire. She has exhibited her work throughout New England. More at her website.

FALL
Writer Jennifer Jabaily-Blackburn is a recent graduate of the MFA at the University of Arkansas. Her poems have appeared most recently in Unsplendid, Hayden's Ferry Review, and the Sugar House Review. A native of the Boston area, she lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts with her husband and their elderly hound.

Artist Kevin Morrow is a native of Wisconsin who received his MFA degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand where he studied in the Contemporary Maori Department (Te Toi Hou). Morrow now lives and works in New York. Images of other work at kpmorrow.viewbook.com/
 

Collaborators' Q & A for the 2011 HYIR

Bsided: Once you saw the art for your season, did it cause you to see your haiku in a different light?
Poet Peter Kline: I was surprised at how closely her vision of the tragedy matched the vision of my poem—both of our works simultaneously mythologize the wave and put it on a human scale.

Bsided: Once you saw the haiku for your season, did it cause you to see your art in a different light?
Artist Kara Searcy: I was surprised that the haiku brought attention to the largest and smallest things in the drawing, the wave and the sun, and then brought them intimately close with an action.

Bsided: How do you think the four art/haiku combinations create a conversation about 2011?
Poet Steve Brightman: All of the haiku finalists and the art—especially in tandem—really force you, as a human, to revisit the significance of the year. All of these things can really numb you when framed by the 24 hour news cycle. It's a barrage.

Bsided: Once you saw the haiku for your season, did it cause you to see your art in a different light?
Artist Caleb Brown: The either/or structure of the poem was a good complement to the picture—which can be "right-side up" for only one of the women at a time. Unless the image is viewed sideways.

Bsided: How do you think the four art/haiku combinations create a conversation about 2011?
Poet Peter Kline: Each season of the Haiku Year-in-Review seemed characterized by an interplay between human and inhuman forces.

Bsided: Why did this event inspire you?
Artist Jennifer Moses: I was mostly spellbound by the change in light, smell, and temperature that occurs even when the fires were relatively far away.

Bsided: Once you saw the art for your season, did it cause you to see your haiku in a different light?
Poet Jennifer Jabaily-Blackburn: I wonder if my poem sounds more plaintive next to the artwork, and that wasn't necessarily my intention.

Bsided: Why did this event inspire you?
Artist Kevin Morrow: You cannot avoid the protest at your front door. And you cannot turn away from the opportunity to document history.

Read the full responses from the artists and poets.