Pairs Well with Poetry

PAIRS WELL WITH POETRY

By Mike Ankelman

This is a story about how the Rube Goldberg machinery of stealth serendipity often drops a breadcrumb trail across our paths, and if we follow the crumbs for a few steps with attentive, receptive minds, whole new universes of opportunities and possibilities can open up for us. Digital artist Byron Sletten employs powerful 3D software to render hyper-real objects as they would appear in a world governed by the physics of light, and he’s exhibited in over 40 national and international shows over the last 30 years.

Earlier this year, Sletten was reviewing his ever-growing menagerie of digital works focused on archetypically common objects and thought, “Maybe these images would pair well with the written word, maybe poetry.” That’s when the fickle finger of providence stirred the guacamole dip during the Super Bowl broadcast this year as Sletten’s wife, Michelle,

shared the poem, Walking on Tiptoe by Ted Kooser, with him. Michelle’s yoga instructor had read the poem to her class, and Michelle was so drawn to it, she bought Kooser’s book, Delights and Shadows. Kooser deftly assembles distilled, concise clauses to viscerally illustrate his observations of everyday life, often focusing on everyday objects that he coaxes into fountainheads of symbolism for our universal emotions and experiences.

A couple of states away, Sletten was doing the same thing with his art. The intriguing notion of marrying Kooser’s literary imagery to his own artistic images motivated Sletten to that point so many artists reach when they let their creative optimism take the wheel: They hurl a Hail-Mary pass to the universe to see if anyone out there will catch it. So, Sletten decided to scour the Internet to find Ted Kooser and connect with him.

One problem: Kooser wasn’t just some guy blogging his amateur poetry out to forums on the Web. In 2005, Ted Kooser had received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Delights and Shadows. He was named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress to serve a term from 2004, through 2005. Also in 2005, he was appointed to serve a second term as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. And even if Sletten could connect with him, what were the chances Kooser would be willing to let Sletten appropriate some of his poems?

Sletten thought he gleaned a sensibility about Kooser through his poetry and assumed Kooser was down-to-earth enough to warrant the Pollyannaish golly-gee-just-maybe effort of at least trying to contact him. After all, no art ventured, no art gained (right?), and that’s where this story cues up the Disney song, It’s a Small World After All. (Feel free to sing along.)

Sletten found a Kooser email address on a website and fired off a letter of introduction about half a dozen times, with no replies. Then Sletten did some IT sleuthing and discovered an errant link in the website code. In July, he shot off an email to the corrected address and received a tepid response from Kooser, who explained that his past experience with collaborations had led him to swear off ever writing on assignment again.

Then there was this: By way of email conversation, Kooser and Sletten discovered they had both grown up in Ames Iowa, and both had graduated from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, so there was an thread of commonality that precipitated an element of trust between them, and Kooser agreed to offer Sletten the use of some of his unpublished poems he had already written.

When Sletten received Kooser’s poems, he was gobsmacked that many of his already completed art pieces paired so well with them, given that, at the time he created the artwork, he’d never even heard of Kooser. And to this day, he hasn’t actually spoken with Kooser — all correspondence has been by email.

Kooser was also pleased with the initial pairings. Subsequently, Sletten has created 12 unique pairings, all of which celebrate, as Sletten describes, “Archetypical objects, universal patterns or motifs with which we all have some degree of common experience,” often referencing Swiss psychologist Carl Jung’s assertion that the root of an archetype is in the “collective unconscious” of mankind.

Everyone loves a success story, and Sletten and Kooser’s collaborative project continues to grow with the potential for ongoing synergistic creative work, and it was all triggered by a yoga instructor’s decision to read a poem to her class. (Thank you, Kitty.) So next time you notice the planets in your personal universe aligning in favor of creative potential, recognize it as opportunity knocking, then get up and answer the door.

A Yellow Rope

by Ted Kooser

A rowboat in snow, a half inch of light snow already fallen, onto the oarlocks, the side rails, onto the oars lying over the benches, snow falling onto the slats on the bottom, a dreary gray river beneath, lifting the boat just a bit out of the water, holding it up to the snow, and magical balancing act, a knife-edge ridge of white stretched all along a yellow rope leading taut to a post on the bank, tying the snow-covered boat to the rest of the snow.

Ted Kooser's poem The Yellow Rope is reprinted (with the permission of Ted Kooser) from Kindest Regards; New and Selected Poems, published by Copper Canyon Press.

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