About seven miles west of my
home in
This, as it turns out, is the
first drawing King sent to poet William Corbett, who responded with a poem,
printed counterintuitively in Return Receipt
on the left-hand page. Return Receipt
is the limited press edition (500 copies) of this collaboration between
poet & artists, 28 drawings, all done on hotel stationery, 28 short poems.
Corbett’s poem for this runs as follows:
ALL ABOARD!
NAZ-AR-ATH,
And don’t forget
Your pack-ag-ASSS
Canonballs for the boys
at
Road signs to
by way of BLUE BALL
and INTERCOURSE
The bottom of the page gives
the hotel’s address as Lancaster Pike – tho everyone hereabouts just calls it
either Route 30 or the Main Line* – and
Corbett appears to have associated this partly with the Amish towns of
Lancaster County, about an hour to the west, tho Bath is north of Allentown, as
is Nazareth. The hotel’s web site lists Valley Forge as being 19 miles away,
tho if you drove northeast up highway 202 – right outside the hotel windows –
you can cut that distance considerably.
The poem prepares us for the
journey of this collaboration & in doing so provides us with a sense of the
feel – to the degree one can pick that up from the names of towns** – of
Pennsylvania culture. The poem feels as tho it was written quickly – Corbett
suggests as much in a note that is holographically reproduced in the book’s
front matter, telling King to send him the drawings “one each day,” & that
“On the day they arrive I will write a poem responding…” – & clearly isn’t
intended to be The Cantos. But as the
initiation of this project, it feels exactly on key, extrapolating not just
from two mounds of cannonballs to
The paper King is using is a
theme in itself here. Hotel stationery is a very specific form – I’m writing
this literally at the Dolphin,
a Michael Graves-designed hotel at Disney World in Orlando, where the architecture
is willfully over the top, as is the stationery, most of which is a color
midway between pink & peach, with blue-grey borders on left & right
& a vaguely plant-like abstraction softening the page. Unlike the examples
King selects for his drawings, the Dolphin has virtually done away with the
heavy logo header that is the classic feature of the genre, simply placing
small graphics in the lower two corners (one for the Dolphin, the other for the
neighboring Swan), the largest type of all reserved for the URL.
Interestingly enough, hotel
stationery is an endangered form, thanks largely to the internet & in-room
high-speed web access. I’ve stayed at several hotels in the past few months,
including other Starwood properties like the Dolphin
& Sheraton Great Valley, that have abandoned the practice altogether.
As a
collaboration, Return Receipt is
a fascinating demonstration of the potential – and problematics – of the
process. At the outset, for example, King & Corbett don’t really know one
another, having been brought together through the suggestion apparently of a
dealer who thought that a collab would make for a nice addition to a
forthcoming show of King’s.*** Corbett of course has
written widely about painting, and the works here fit well within the parameters
of his mature art. His pieces operate both as poems & often as direct
communications with King, as in this piece, one of the longest in the book,
“illustrating” a setting sun image done on stationery from the Encinitas Inn & Suites at Moonlight
Beach, a Best Western Hotel:
Dear John King: When I last wrote
to your
it was to Dear Joe, Joe Brainard.
We turned 50 together in 1992
and soon, I hope, I will follow.
“Going like 60!” I hear my
grandfather say. He meant speed,
me racing around always eager,
having to get somewhere (nowhere?)
fast. I don’t feel slower. Well,
when my back hurts I slow down
and walk like an old man so that
young
your back?” “No, just slept wrong,”
I reply, stump-legged. This
has nothing to do with the drawing
it will be appended to or nothing
I can imagine from here, my MIT
poetry classroom, 12-102, the Physics
bldg., just having finished class.
It’s
for a reading.
at Balthazar and perhaps a walk
by 8 Greene where this will
one days find its way. Best for now –
Bill, whom you’ve yet to meet.
I wonder if “one days” is a typo, and if so, just whose typo it might be. The
poem here is a remarkable act to show up in the middle of a collab between
artists who are not, yet at least, close friends. Corbett is not only
implicating King in his own personal life here (using as his starting point the
literal coincidence that King now lives at the same address where Brainard once
did), but he is also conveying an entire vision of aesthetics: one that is
community centered & deeply personal & frankly could care less about
more falutin’ orders of signification. In
relationship to the long poem, say, it is as personal & minor an art as
drawing is when contrasted with the major canvases of Titian or Pollock. One
could trace influences in this poem back to Jimmy Schuyler (the line) or Paul
Blackburn (the specificity of personal data) but the poem is very clear that
this is not the issue here. Corbett might be anxious about King’s response –
tho I don’t hear that in these poems – but not about their place in history.
Most importantly, Corbett here is staking out his right to say ANYTHING as part
of the process, even if it “has nothing to do with” a given drawing.
I’ve been waiting for Granary
Books to print Playing Bodies,
*
**
No I don’t know why the Amish would name towns Intercourse or Blue Ball, tho
***
In fact, the book lists no publisher whatsoever and identifies King as the sole
holder of the copyright!
