“American Floss”
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to bring your work to Broadsided?
Poet Philip Schaefer: We’ve had a good relationship for some time now, and I’m always honored to get to work with this publication.
What drew you to create a visual response to this poem, in particular?
Artist Sarah Odens: The variety of word pictures contained in the poem and the phrase “our laughter sounded like black winter / birds . . . .”
How did this poem come to be?
Poet Philip Schaefer: We’re always trying to arrive as if there’s a noun at the end of the journey. I lost a good friend a couple of years ago, and there’s no syntax with death. I think this poem is somewhere in between it all.
How did this image come to be?
Artist Sarah Odens: I started with a list of phrases from the poem that I found compelling, and then I went for a walk in a park with a trail that ends in a cemetery. By the time I got back to the studio, I had settled on “too sad for salad” and a picture I took of this same park trail from a couple of weeks prior—the sunset was bright pink and orange behind silhouetted trees still bare from winter beyond gravestones obscured by twilight. I started there on top of a blue background that reminds me of breathless windy days and added the text. From there, it was an intuitive process with suggestions of black winter branches, the motion of birds, and little voids and gravestone shapes alluding to the grief, current and anticipatory, that I saw in the poem. The bright colors match the bursts of humor that sparkle amid the gloom of the poem.
What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Does the artist’s response make you see the poem differently?
Poet Philip Schaefer: Not sure what I expected, but “floss” seems to do the legwork: frenetically, carefully, abstractly, and compositely. The image conjures fenced flowers, or flowered fence lines, some holy misnomer for wearing a face mask on your belly in the afternoon of a battlefield.
When you consider the full folio of work from this issue, what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Artist Sarah Odens: There are delicious moments of controlled tension, both verbally and visually. Perfect punches. How did y’all do it?
Poet Philip Schaefer: There’s a pillowed anger in this issue. Every cloud muscle feels tight, ready for sharp rain.
What question would you like to ask your collaborator?
Poet to Artist: Does the tension fall in the color or the texture? Is the heart of the work beating outside the body, or does it even matter?
Artist Sarah Odens: Color creates the tension; the pinks, oranges and reds are complements of the blues and greens—meaning that the wavelengths of light they reflect are high-contrast—and the white and black provide high value contrast. There’s also a sense of around and up diagonal movement from the directional lines of the branch-like marks and the letters. I also smeared several thin layers of paint in this around and up motion to create a sense of uneasy ephemerality.
Artist to Poet: Where did you get the inspiration for the layered images and ideas of this poem?
Poet Philip Schaefer: This poem began as a jumble of lines, images, and ideas that had been sleeping in the basement of my brain for some time. I’d recently read a line in a McCarthy novel (Suttree, I think) where he quickly and deftly compares aquariums to glass coffins, and that stuck–stood out as a complete image–the same way poet Rick Barot refers to coffins as wooden overcoats (one of my all time favorite poems). In any case, that image laid the foundation even though it wouldn’t appear until much later in the poem.
Did anything shift for you or come into new light as you began working on your visual response?
Artist Sarah Odens: Personally, realizing some motifs I wanted to continue from previous paintings. As for the poem, the mix of sadness and humor really crystallized for me while I worked.
Describe your dream “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Poet Philip Schaefer: As a forgotten bookmark replacing a mailbox flag in someone’s neighbor’s yard.
Artist Sarah Odens: A park noticeboard next to a community event calendar, posters for farmers markets and outdoor concerts, near a wooded trail.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Poet Philip Schaefer: Last year’s snow.
Artist Sarah Odens: Cloudy and cold with flecks of snow that weren’t in the forecast.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Poet Philip Schaefer: Spend five minutes with a stranger today. Let it drag on until it’s annoying, if not difficult. Go home and don’t write about it. Just let it simmer. Write through that the next morning, with a hard boiled egg and black coffee.
Artist Sarah Odens: Think of three things: weather that makes you wistful, something you saw outside that you keep remembering, and what color says yearning to you.
Read any good books lately?
Poet Philip Schaefer: Working on Cormac McCarthy’s latest book, The Passenger.
Artist Sarah Odens: Charlotte Brontë’s Life Through Clothes by Eleanor Houghton.
Seen any good art lately?
Poet Philip Schaefer: This issue is flush.
Artist Sarah Odens: Yes! I’m curating a summer show by Susan Klein in Biggin Gallery at Auburn University (my job) and getting texts of pictures of her work is a treat.
Anything else?
Artist Sarah Odens: I’m really excited to read the other artists’ and the writers’ responses to these questions; I usually respond to and incorporate words in paintings by poets I have no communication with (either because they are dead, or too well-known to care, or I haven’t brought an artwork to their attention because it feels very fangirl), and this more communal process was energizing.