Completely Earthy: Unique Collaboration from Anne Waldman and Noah Saterstrom Features 45-Foot Oil Painting Frieze

Anne Waldman and visual artist Noah Saterstrom have teamed up to create "Soldiering," which is partly a FORTY-FIVE-FOOT OIL PAINTING FRIEZE. You read it right. It was painted by Saterstrom and accompanied by a poem by Waldman. This baby is currently exhibited at the Poetry Center in Tucson and the exhibition will be traveling for the next few years -- we've also just heard that the collaboration is published in full by Blaze Vox Books under the title Soldatesque/Soldiering with Dreams of Wartimes. Waldman has this to say, for her part:

The Soldatesque/Soldiering text was inspired by an overheard conversation and the experiences of a student of mine, and evolved…becoming enhanced by – and entwined with – the work of artist Noah Saterstrom. These women observed and heard – two of them lovers – were all serving in the US military; I was taken with how young they were. I had given a poetry reading at West Point in the 1980s and then we were still fretting and dissecting the aftermath of the “American War” in Vietnam. I had met there a woman passionately involved with “soldiering”, it had been long in her family line, and this female desire had me both dismayed/enthralled. I have long been fascinated/appalled by the subjugation and discipline required of bodies-at-war.

Saterstrom indicates that the project's scope wasn't necessarily intended to be quite so grand. He says, "When Anne gave me the Soldatesque manuscript, it was with the invitation to create a few images to accompany the text....The resulting work is a forty-five foot long frieze of thirty-four oil paintings called Soldatesque, and a separate body of ten drawings entitled Dreams of Wartime. He tells us more about this form:

The frieze form is a reference to the epic Greek carvings of war narratives, and also a genuflection to the continuous narratives of 15th c. Sienese paintings. This chosen form lends itself to the creation of stable visual references within the context of a narrative that attends largely to the slippery and disembodied spectres of trauma that collect at sites of tragedy and violence. As described by a friend when he saw the work: “It is at once supernatural, but also completely earthly, what with all its war.

You can actually scroll through the visuals here at Noah's website, and learn more about the publication, which has already received enthusiastic words from the likes of Mónica de la Torre and Bill Berkson.