Joan Miró, Painting, 1933, oil on canvas mounted on board, 61 15/16 x 77 5/8 inches (131.9 x 197.2 cm). Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. University Purchase. KendeSale FundMildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. © 2008 Successi— Mir—/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo courtesy MOMA.org.

Today BURNAWAY is pleased to present a creative piece on art and poetry by Heather Christle for our monthly column, Authors on Art, curated by Blake Butler.

1.
An artist seems always to know the materiality of her medium, but a poet sometimes forgets she is an artist.

2.
When was it I began to think. Of this. December 2008, visiting Joan Miró at MOMA, and meeting for the first time his paintings from collages, along with the collages themselves. First he’d collect and cut out “photographic and drawn illustrations cut from wrappers, posters, catalogues, technical magazines, and newspaper ads,” then affix them, contextless, to paper. The images he chose were “propellers, plumbing…industrial parts…optical devices…small machinery…combs and ladies hosiery.”

3.
Miró, to a reporter: “I want to assassinate painting.”

4.
Next he’d use the collages as studies for the paintings, in which the amputated machine parts swell into round, sometimes comic figures, into bodies and instruments, and to spin out into thin black lines.

5.
Removed from their natural habitat, the commercial images become uncomfortable, and give up their secrets to Miró.

6.
Their secrets, I think, are funny.

7.
I wanted secrets, and I wanted to laugh, so I snipped letters from my head and sorted them by shapes: those which slant, those which curve, those which face left or face right.

8.
I made words from the collected letters. These were my collages.

9.
Then I looked at the words until the shapes swelled into figures I could approach or describe through phrases or sentences.

10.
WALKMAN

people are
huge & drunk

11.
someone

a long line
to wait in

12
xerox

almost
impenetrable

13.
The poet Jack Spicer, in one of his letters to the (now and then) late poet Garcia Lorca, wrote:

I would like to make poems out of real objects. The lemon to be a lemon that the reader could cut or squeeze or taste—a real lemon like a newspaper in a collage is a real newspaper. I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real, disclose it, to make a poem that has no sound in it but the pointing of a finger.

14.
I point at this.

15.
And I point at this.

16.
Spicer, as he was dying: “My vocabulary did this to me.”

17.
Spicer, continued: “Your love will let you go on.”

Joan Miró, Collage (study for Painting), 1933, printed paper and graphite on paper, 18 9/16 x 24 13/16 inches (47.1 x 63.1 cm). Fundaci— Joan Mir—, BarcelonaFundaci— Joan Mir—, Barcelona. Photograph: Jaume Blassi. © 2008 Successi— Mir—/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo courtesy MOMA.org.

Heather Christle teaches poetry in the Creative Writing program at Emory University. Her first book, The Difficult Farm, was released earlier this year by Octopus Books. A second book of poems will follow in 2011.

Check BURNAWAY for Authors on Art curated by Blake Butler on the second Monday of every month!