“Receipt Poem #65,” 2025 Switcheroo
Collaborators’ Q&A
For the Switcheroo, Broadsided artists were invited to submit visual work that writers might respond to. We then asked Sara Tabbert, the 2024 Switcheroo artist, to choose a piece she thought would be generative for writers and would work in Broadsided’s unique format. Of her choice, she had this to say:
In selecting work for this “Switcheroo,” I was drawn to the variety and exploration in Regin’s work. I particularly loved his drawings and their confident, fluid, energetic marks. Those marks are still in evidence in this photographic collage, where swipes taken through one image reveal parts of another. Morning Mediation presents plenty of questions for a writer to consider—integration of being and landscape, crouch, tangle, a sense of an inadequate attempt to hide, the passer-by encountering a flash of an unreal or mythic being along a very ordinary, grey, rural roadway. —Sara Tabbert
What surprises you about the poet’s writing in conversation with your art? Did “Receipt Poem #65” refract any element of the art that made you see the piece differently?
Artist Regin Igloria: I was pleasantly surprised that the poet’s writing felt embedded in time, particularly the sense of slowness and patience. I sometimes forget that those ideas are principal to anything I make, and it was reaffirming to go full circle in finding meaning(s) in our work.
Tate, can you talk about the experience of writing your poem in conversation with Regin’s digital collage? What leapt out first from the art? A particular image? A mood? A line?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: I am currently composing an extended poetic sequence with a typewriter on rolls of thermal paper, and I found Regin’s striking collage in the middle of this project. The project, inspired by AR Ammons, is fueled by the somatic ritual work of CA Conrad and habitual quality of Larry Eigner. I want to invoke a quality I refer to as rigorous dailiness, which grounds my playful experimentation in now-moments of awareness. Since I’ve been working so singularly within this gimmick, when I came across Regin’s piece, I wanted a constraint to conduct/construct my engagement with it. What first popped out at me was the yellow and black guard rail sign, indicating that this was a road. I decided I would only look at the piece in brief passings, as if I were in a car driving past, and then type a flurry of notes using what I believed I saw. After some time passed, I would glance again and write more. Then, once I was satisfied with the amount I had written, I sat with the image and stitched the poem together from those notes. As you may be able to intuit by the way the poem progresses, it wasn’t until later that the human-like form leapt out at me. The leg hair is what clued me in.
Regin, what inspired Morning Meditation? Did you have any specific memories, phrases, or anything else in mind as you created the piece?
Artist Regin Igloria: I have been thinking deeply about bodies in particular landscapes, and, naturally, I reflect upon my direct experiences: driving commutes and runs, roadways and paths that are clearly marked for traversing as well as those not so obvious. I draw inspiration from the routine we follow and draw parallels between training and mark-making. With the series of “Morning Meditation” collages, I always refer to street-related imagery which is part of the monotony of daily travel.
Did anything shift for you or come into new light once you saw the poem and art together on the page?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: I really appreciate the subtle coloring added to my poem in the title and the way it fades from grey to white, as if moving beyond its peripheries. It feels very complimentary to Morning Meditation and the way the collage seems to writhe against the landscape. It’s almost as if it’s the human form that’s uttering these lines instead of me, which is how it felt at times.
Artist Regin Igloria: I was immediately drawn to our relationship to time, specifically how ephemeral our encounters can be. There’s a back and forth in our experience of the elements, and I particularly appreciate Tate’s references between mundane man-made objects (of which I am always keen on) like tires or road.
Have you ever created a piece of work that was inspired by another medium of art before? What was that experience like for you? Why were you inspired to do so?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: Definitely, my tape writing often begins standing in or moving to and from other creative works. Sometimes I unfurl into the work and other times I merely admire it. My space is cluttered with photos, paintings, broadsides, stamps, silk printings, magazines, and clippings of things. I am forever searching. In fact, ekphrasism is the cohesion of my first collection What’s Left (Finishing Line, 2023), which follows the death of my father and the discovery of his avid, amateur nature photography in boxes around his house. In the case of his photography, I felt it offered glimpses of a man I’d not met before and through them I was able to relate to him in more ways after death than I could in life. Izzy, my lovely wife, is also a talented and sensitive semi-professional photographer whose work constantly inspires me.
Have you ever had a writer respond to your work before? What was the experience like?
Artist Regin Igloria: I have worked in similar approaches in the past, some directly done like we do through Broadsided, but I also think about the more journalistic or curatorial responses, such as when an article or review is done about my work. The experience is always a bit anxiety-inducing, but also refreshing and educational. I’ve used it to begin new trajectories and step outside of the known, and to ultimately grow as an artist.
If this broadside were a type of weather, what would it be?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: N/early spring thaw: 42°F.
Artist Regin Igloria: I agree with Tate: definitely cold and overcast with lows and highs stuck in the 40s; a kind of unrelenting Midwest spring.
Do you have a prompt you’d like to share for readers that they might use to engage in their own artistic practices?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: I call this exercise a stenographomania: automatic listening. It’s a spin-off of automatic writing. Go to a public place, the more chatter the better, but make sure it’s a place you can easily tune in and out of as needed. I find trivia night at a bar to be ideal. Then, writing as fast as you can in a notebook, listen, overhear, and steal language for an hour. If you catch yourself writing complete thoughts, write faster. No summarizing; record what you overhear verbatim. Later, read your notes and underline anything of interest. Then rewrite those underlined portions on a blank page and listen for how they resist or attract one another. Then do you.
Artist Regin Igloria: I typically incorporate prompts in everyday tasks. One of the prompts I use on a regular basis comes from the tension I absorb through media, particularly the emotional drain of listening to the news while enjoying a morning cup of coffee and drawing in my sketchbook. I capture catch phrases and soundbites from NPR, in a type of calligraphic, written form of drawing, then proceed to mind mapping using very loose interpretations of the text.
Describe your dream “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: On the side of a city bus, or maybe on a cake or something. Maybe blown up huge and pasted on the outside of a library or on a billboard. Up on the fridge? Anywhere, I guess. I’m just stoked this exists!
Artist Regin Igloria: I would love to see the broadside posted in public transportation venues: train stops, on the bus or subway, etc., which may be the most obvious spaces they would connect. But as an outdoors person, I’d also love to see them posted at trailheads in National Parks or the like, where people can reflect on them before starting a hike.
Read any good books lately?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: In no particular order:
- Homeland of Swarms by Oriette D’Angelo trans. Lupita Eyde-Tucker (co.im.press, 2024)
- Doomstead Days by Brian Teare (Nightboat, 2019)
- friends with everyone by Gunnar Wærness trans. Gabriel Gudding (Action Books, 2024)
Artist Regin Igloria: Lately it’s been fiction of some of the writers I’ve encountered at Ragdale:
- Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima
- Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
Seen any good art lately?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: I’ve been wrestling with (and losing to) Elizabeth Murray’s hulking, surrealist body of work. I find a lot of self-reference in her paintings, a lot of meta painting, and that resonates me. I’ve also learned through interviews that we share a love of Thelonious Monk, especially while we are working. (And apparently, she was one of my grandma’s closest high school friends!) More people should know her art.
Artist Regin Igloria: I’ve been going back to popular films and television shows from the 80’s, particularly the ones I first experienced as a child. The classics resonate with me especially because of my age at the time, where the world navigated race and social norms, and when all of it made a deep impression on me. While most people might not consider it “good art,” I have developed an extremely wide breadth of resource material from the tone, style, and cliches of sappy plots and storylines.
Anything else you’d like to ask each other or say about this experience or your work?
Poet Tate Lewis-Carroll: Thank you, Liz, Autumn, and the entire Broadsided editorial team. The invisible labor you do to inspire and make accessible these intersections is seriously amazing! Regin, I would not have written this poem without Morning Meditation. It was such a fun experience and I look forward to exploring more of your work. Thank you for your kickass collage.
Artist Regin Igloria: I love what happens through Broadsided, and find tremendous value in the connections I’ve made with writers and other artists here. Much appreciation to Tate for your thoughtfulness, and to the Broadsided team for the hard work they do. Truly a joy to partake!
Editors’ Note:
In honor of National Poetry Month (April), we encouraged writers to turn to ekphrasis shortly after the release of our fourth biannual folio. Excited to subvert our process, we invited writers to respond to art, as we have done every April since 2007 in our “Switcheroo.”
In each new folio, we hope the broadsides echo off one another, intertwining words and art in ways that surprise you. In essence, that’s Broadsided, an entanglement of mediums, making Regin Igloria’s digital collage “Morning Meditation” the perfect piece for this year’s Switcheroo.
Regin’s piece depicts a tangle of limbs, branches, human and inhuman shapes on a road. As Sara Tabbert so beautifully wrote, the piece “presents plenty of questions for a writer to consider—integration of being and landscape, crouch, tangle, a sense of an inadequate attempt to hide, the passer-by encountering a flash of an unreal or mythic being along a very ordinary, grey, rural roadway.”
In response to this art, we received a variety of responses that drew inspiration from the largely grayscale palette and the concept of a road–its monotony, repeating signs, and endless asphalt marked only by guardrails and lanes. Many poets considered liminal spaces, where the human form is not yet defined, like upon waking, during meditation, or in memory. They also touched upon the mundane places where humanity becomes absurd, existential, or bleak, like in a corporate workplace, daily news headlines, or even the apocalypse.
“Recept Poem #65” stood out immediately for how its structure emulated a collage, with strange turns of phrase and patchwork lines that jump from one idea to the next, like “language is stubborn/ material, but clouds/ are decent negotiators.” Some lines seemed to tell truths that define human life or existence itself: “what’s/ made in months took/ centuries to create or you’ll/ go to sleep more times/ than you’ll wake.”
We appreciate how Tate opens and ends the poem with an image of the endless road, the lit highway and tires on the pavement. Those two lines place us firmly within Regin’s collage as we begin to tangle and untangle the image and poem simultaneously, taking on new forms with each passing line.
Thank you to everyone who took the time, as we did, to imagine what this world of limbs, branches, fog, and asphalt could be. We appreciate the effort and bravery that goes into every submission, and we hope you enjoy this collaboration. Remember, as Tate so eloquently wrote, “language is stubborn material,” so we hope you continue to be a cloud and negotiate with it.
In Collaborative Joy,
Autumn Bellan, Switcheroo Editor