THAT FEEL is one of the finest collaborative books published by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell is a fine poet and her sister Janet Snell is a fine expressionist artist. In their previous books there was often the question of whether Janet was illustrating Cheryl's poetry or if perhaps each artist made her art and then combined it in the most suitable manner.Now it is obvious that the art that spreads across both sides of an open book is unified and equally involved in the nidus of expression. The poems and art of THAT FEEL seem to be more visceral than those that came before them - these are poems from the gut, art about alienation and longing and rapturous moments that fade too quickly (or were they even there?). For example in the combined expression of the following, the painting accompanying the poem is that of two faces distorted by reflection in glass or mirror or memory:

REFLECTIONS IN CRACKED GLASS

Each brush stroke had been its own allegory

and could not reconcile the break. I felt for

connection in blind corridors, whispering

Who's there? from within the room's glass

eye.

Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard

to parse and sometimes lied. I did, too,

confused by what my reflection showed. The

glass distorted it and the fissure widened from

a thin red line. It splintered our embrace and

again I was alone.

The book may be brief but it is a powerful one. The only criticism about this latest opus is the somewhat disjointed feeling of the varying fonts or typefaces the artists used. Those wide variations of print diminish the tone of the poetry/art like unwanted audience distracters. But that is a minor complaint in a book that further substantiates the excellent collaborative efforts of the sisters Snell. --Grady Harp

Add Comment
 
 
Despite the chattering masses insistence that we have left behind the shackles of monochromatic forms, most lovers of literature remain lodged within the confines of the printed word.  No pictures, no mixed media, no audio, no textile experiences invade the high and lonely silence of the mind’s contemplation of the slashes and curves that from a certain distance resolve into letters, and then lines of words, marching across pages bound for they know not where: oblivion certainly, sooner or later.

How strange then that this absurd comedy continues when it is so easy for the imprisoned to step outside of these confines.  No jailor prevents it, except, of course, for the jailor we call the mind.  The doors are all open to the foreign world that lies beyond but inside we stay as if cowed by possibility itself.

It is against this backdrop that Janet and Cheryl Snell’s Prisoner’s Dilemma is best read.

“Beauty is as Beauty does, I suppose, and of course

all rivers are beautiful, not necessarily

with the untouched beauty

of a head cheerleader at her beginning of things” 

                                                (from “Fire of the Cuyahoga”)

The diction here, precise and yet off-hand, coupled with the unexpected coupling of ideas (beauty – rivers – the girl who knows all the boys desire her) places Snell on intimate relations with the main currents of twentieth century American poetry, a landscape marked by masters such as John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Louise Bogan and Louise Gluck, to name but a few poets associated with the style Alan Williamson (himself a fine poet) dubbed the new American surrealism.  And yet Snell—or rather the Snells—for the ebook I am reviewing, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is a collection that alternates between Cheryl’s short lyric poems and Janet’s pencil drawings -- stands apart.

 The difference is hard to explain, so lets be blunt: in the best of Cheryl’s work, the style regains its vigor, enlivened by the poet’s deep sense of what it means to be caught up in life.  A digression on Freud may help here because we are on the subject of digressions.  Freud could never stop being fascinated by the notion that it is life that is the interruption.  Not death.  The immortal is the natural state.  But somehow we find ourselves shunted and routed out of the immortal and into the detour of the mortal for a brief go-round before flowing back into the immortal, back into death, and the beyond of death.  Cheryl Snell’s poetry, and Janet’s art, together illuminate this insight: that the detour into life is a circular whirlpool.  It has limitations that each experiences, and there is no fairness to those limitations, they just are, but every life will be lived within its formal constrictions.  And then those constrictions end.  But in between, how many of us take the time to convey a deep sense of the go-round?  Not many, and certainly not with the depth and richness that you encounter when reading Cheryl Snell’s poetry and looking at Janet’s art.

"There is nothing

To be learned from this, no lesson,

Just as there is no reason

Why you should turn inside out

Over a pair of gloves at the bottom

Of a box earmarked for the trash."

                                     (from “Lost”)

Lots of MFA trained poets can crank out lines sort of like this stretch.  The diction is precise and bracing, like cold ocean water.  The repetition, first at the level of idea (no learning, no lesson) and then at the level of refrain (there is no, there is no . . . ) reflects exposure to the severe music of Wallace Stevens (even if the exposure is second hand, that is no matter).  My mentor, the wonderful poet Tom Sleigh called these devices symbol clashes because those gloves explode in the attentive reader’s mind.  Most of the time, in most poetry, the effect is cheap: it hasn’t been earned.  The poet doesn’t know why reality should suddenly come undone there, in those lines.  They just bang symbols together because that is what they have been taught good poetry does.  But Cheryl, on the other hand, knows.  Her insight is hard won; the conveyance of knowledge as I read (and view) fills me with both respect for and gratitude to this team of artists.

In “Indigo Hour” Cheryl writes,

                                    "I run my palms

Along the edges of the headboard

As if a boundary can prove

That the past is not present here."

The metaphysical complexity of this image is to be taken seriously.  The past is present—more than that, the future is present here too.  Outside or within the eddy that is the mortal there is always the immortal.  That conflation is Cheryl’s true subject.  Her lyrics capture various aspects of it, of the real as “a zipper tired of meshing” (from “Tear”).  The tonalities of her poems go far beyond the little snippets I have typed here. The reader will find laughter and love and everything else.  Prisoner’s Dilemma is a book that repays repeated readings.  Art is not a contest.  But if asked to name my favorite poets working today, I would place Cheryl Snell very high up on my list.

1 Comment
 
 
 ...for saying all this about our calendar...

"This deluxe 2010 calendar should be on the walls of art-loving people. It's remarkable. The 12 images of Janet's paintings make you forget all about dates, even time. They make you stop. Time is staggered. Weird calendar!

I'm not going to talk in detail about each painting. Rather, these images stretch my mind...to find a general space in which to set them, in which to gain a tenuous perspective.

They all have heads, suspended in ambiguous space or set amid indefinite objects...slippery forms. Each work pulsates with intense primary colors. These hues are made brilliant by their contrast to murkier, darker shades lurking here and there. The play of form and color produces an almost hypnogogic effect, or maybe hallucinatory: you begin to force known things onto these shifting background shapes...the colors come at you like memories you've forgotten.

And the heads!

Human-looking, for the most part. But before I get to the heads, I want to offer something about style and genre. I tend to look for representational things in these paintings. I want to make sense of them. If there is a human head or a background object that seems familiar, I want to force a narrative. Piece them together. But I don't think that is what Janet's style is about. I think these paintings are expressionistic and too abstract for my compulsive attempt at interpretation. I don't think these works are meant to be interpreted. They are to be experienced. They are affective, not textual.

These paintings are poised halfway between the abstract and the concrete. And, damn!...that's what makes them so compelling. The days on the calendar become irritatingly ordinary. You want nothing to do with time for a while (yes, that's paradoxical). You enjoy being held in marvelous suspense.

But back to those heads. It could be the case that those human heads are floating in a paradoxical space: yes, obviously human (and all that that signals to us) but also pure moments of form. Cephalic shapes to circumscribe color-vacuums, lending force to the other “objects.”

Another impression jumps into my own head, beyond what I said above about...well, whatever it was I said. For me, I feel like I'm looking at a negative-image of consciousness. The subconscious? Maybe. And what's weird and cool is that those heads, drained of color and feature detail, seem to express more human soulfulness and depth than even a portrait by Rembrandt!

“Hyperbole,” you shout!

Well, buy the calendar and see if I'm exaggerating

Amazon
Scattered Light
Facebook

Add Comment