The Collaborator
[Note: This essay was written to coincide with Trevor Winkfield’s Pageant, currently on display in the Poetry Foundation gallery. The exhibit includes Winkfield’s book covers for poets Charles North, Miles Champion, and Larry Fagin, limited-edition books created in collaboration with Harry Mathews and John Ashbery, and original designs for literary journals. Also featured are Winkfield’s portraits of Douglas Crase, Peter Gizzi, and Ashbery. Peruse the slideshow above for images of some of the work in the show. The exhibit will be on view through March 13.]
Growing up in postwar, pre-television Leeds in the north of England in the late 1940s, my childhood was typical for the time, almost prosaically so. But I remembered it, or rather that part which had to do with storytelling. Sitting on my mother's lap, she'd read to me from illustrated books. While she read the stories I looked at the pictures above. That's when I first assumed that word and image always went together. They were meant for each other. 'Every picture tells a story' was my childish conclusion, which is no doubt why I became a narrative painter (not that there are many five year old abstract painters, of course, unless they've succumbed to finger painting).
Later, in my school exercise books, I was always inserting a crayon drawing next to every text I scrawled. And it wasn't just the usual schoolboy doodles, but full-fledged compositions, taking up as much space as the words. The concept of poet and painter collaborations had to await my adolescence, and then it occurred in a way I myself didn't understand at the time. I'd been given a book on Picasso for Christmas. One of the chapters described Picasso's collaborations with various poets, including Paul Éluard, Max Jacob, and André Breton. On the flyleaf of the book I neatly inscribed a poem by Apollinaire that I'd found in a library book. It was the only way a fourteen-year-old schoolboy could collaborate with Picasso and Apollinaire. Presumptuous, no doubt, but it set me on the path to collaboration which only blossomed many years later, when I moved from London to New York in 1969.
What drew me to New York back then was the realization that New York had become the new Paris, a really fascinating hive of activity where painters were illustrating books by poets, designing sets for strange plays and underground films. Readings were held in artists’ lofts, sculptors went to dance performances. Life was so cheap artists could afford to live in poverty. Most of the poets I met were hell-bent on collaborating, not only with each other but with painters, in the form of books, pamphlets, flyers, and posters. Very exciting. A good many poets were married to painters, and poets were some of the most intelligent eyes looking at painting.
Crucial to any collaboration, in whatever field, is mutual respect. More than that, I loved the work of all the poets I partnered with. I wasn't merely a brush for hire. Ron Padgett I'd known as a pen pal back in England. He even contributed to an early issue of Juillard, a small magazine that I edited through nine issues (editing small magazines is an ideal way of meeting people). I don't think I've ever collaborated with a poet whose work I didn't know inside out, so there was no warming-up period necessary (it also helped that, like me, Padgett had a sense of humor and a love of French literature). The first book we did together, How To Be A Woodpecker (1983), set the formula for almost every subsequent collaboration. First I made a couple of drawings (I was always the initiator—amongst other things, it allowed me to determine the page size and whether the book should be horizontal or vertical), which Ron then responded to. After studying (and laughing along with) the words he'd written, I went on to do one or two more drawings, which miraculously triggered more words from Ron. It was a bit like a serial unfolding: neither of us knew what was going to happen next. But it's important to emphasize that it was a collaboration. I wasn't functioning as a mere illustrator. Both Ron and I were equal partners in the project, unlike the times I designed covers for poets ... there I acted as a hired hand, though never constrained by either publisher or poet.
Of course, things didn't always run smoothly. After Ron and I had finished our first book, we went on to a second, and then planned a third. Alas, Ron was not inspired by the drawings I handed him, much to my amazement and chagrin. But “waste not want not” being one of my mottoes (my everyday life is based on clichés), I put the drawings aside and then used them, several years later, redrawn, as starters for a book I did with Harry Mathews.
My collaboration with Harry (whose first book of poems, The Ring, I had published in 1970) differed somewhat from my other collaborations, insofar as I presented him with all the drawings at once. He took them back to Paris (which made this my first trans-Atlantic collaboration) and over the next few weeks wrote a story that alluded to my images without describing them, but in the process he managed to capture perfectly the world of my paintings, not just the drawings in front of him. It remains one of the best texts written about me (collaboration turned out to be one of the quickest ways of allowing me to see myself as others saw me).
Which pinpoints the main characteristic of my collaborations: we two participants work apart from one another, not in the same room and not at the same time. This is in contrast to the usual New York School method of collaboration: sitting side-by-side, poet and painter adding to what each has created minutes before. My own drawing technique is painstaking, and as far from spontaneity as one could imagine. The drawings can take an entire day, or longer, to finish.
Now I've just finished my third collaboration with Ron Padgett. As the serials promise, To Be Continued.