“Empty Pastoral”
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to bring your work to Broadsided?
Poet Emily Light: I’m a visually-oriented person and gravitate toward imagery in my poetry. Broadsided offered the opportunity to see my poem along with an actual visual, and I thought that would be very interesting.
What drew you to create a visual response to this poem, in particular?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: Emily’s poem carries a lot of emotional tenderness, and is so fitted to this time marked by waves of loss. The speaker feels helpless in the face of steady damaging, unsure what to do with all of the rot. Reading the poem several times, I keep coming back to the line “not every hole needs filling.” Maybe if we were more willing to sit with our grief, not fill it in too soon with “trees monarchs use to rest,” or with “asphalt,” we wouldn’t waste opportunities for growth. I love how Emily’s garden at the end suggests imagination can shield us from despair. And I love how the word “Pastoral” conjures a meadow and a sense that, ultimately, true guidance comes from within.
How did this poem come to be?
Poet Emily Light: I have a friend who had a tooth pulled and purposely did not have a false tooth put in. This sentiment, that “not every hole needs filling” made me think about the human tendency to build on every part of the land, to fill every space in a town. The part of New Jersey where I was raised constantly underwent these changes, where farmland became neighborhoods and strip malls, more and more buildings and infrastructure–it feels parasitic after a point. So when I read about the people filling potholes with trees, that felt both vindicating and tragic, the latter because of course people wouldn’t let those trees stay. They were just a tool for getting the streets properly paved, and once a land is paved over, there’s no going back.
How did this image come to be?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: I’ve been using glass beads to create miniatures of fruits, flowers, and vegetables for about a year now. I lean in close to do this work, stitching the beads to the fabric, one, two, or three at a time. The work is meditative, and intimate. The beads come in such delicious colors, and work beautifully with the longed-for vibrancy at the end of Emily’s poem. The blood red strawberry captures the poem’s mood of both loss and hope.
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 Emily Light: I thought an artist would pick up on any of the several visuals within the poem: the pea tendril growing out of a mouth, or the potholes filled with trees. These images were intended to have metaphorical depth as well.
Did anything shift for you or come into new light as you began working on your visual response? If this is a pre-existing piece, does it change your relationship to the image?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: Paired with Emily’s poem, especially with the ghost image which is so striking, the strawberry becomes almost surreal. It magnifies my own belief that beads and words are really quite similar.
When you consider the full folio of work from this issue, what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: The set is incredibly lush, overflowing with birds and saturated colors. Throughout this flittering vibrancy many ghosts appear, many losses, or impending losses—corporeality, hair, teeth. A chord of Dread infuses several poems, and a sense of Paradise Lost. The pairings are powerful, dynamic!
Poet Emily Light: There is a general feeling of disjointedness in many of the poems, a chafing. Many deal with emptiness, aloneness, lack of connection, fear of lost connection, which is particularly fascinating alongside the visuals that often feel disjointed from the poems themselves.
What question would you like to ask your collaborator? (we will print your answers, too!)
Artist to Writer: I wonder if you had a particular place in mind when you wrote this poem? It carries such a strong sense of longing for nature.
Poet Emily Light: This poem was inspired by real events–people were actually planting trees in potholes to make a statement about crumbling infrastructure. While I didn’t have a particular place in mind, the intersection between nature and people is something I think about often and usually causes me a lot of concern, so the trees being used in this way then discarded reflects the cavalier and wasteful behavior of people toward the environment.
Writer to Artist: I find your medium intriguing: it reminds me of a glossy bedazzled appliqué. What drew you to this particular medium for your art?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: A few years ago, I began making small rectangular artworks based on the phrases “playing the race card” and “playing the woman card.” I create Race Cards and Woman Cards using 5 x 7 inch masonite panels, gluing hand-painted and hand-beaded linen fabric onto them. The process is intentionally slow; the sewing takes a long time. I’ve probably made a couple of hundred by now. As the series has developed, I’ve used more and more beads per card. The strawberry is recent, one of the fruits and vegetables that I made specifically to accompany recipes by Malinda Russell that are featured in my multimedia collection American Graphic.
Describe your ideal “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: At the entrance of community gardens.
Poet Emily Light: I would most like to see this broadside posted in New York City’s subway cars where my husband often takes pictures of others’ broadsides and sends them to me. They’re always incredible poems, and to be among them would be the greatest honor.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: A drizzly day in the middle of April—”the cruellest month” according to T. S. Eliot.
Poet Emily Light: A sky that is three-quarters stormy and one quarter sunny.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: Do one creative thing every day to thwart the violence around us.
Read any good books lately?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: Prayers to a Small Stone, a poetry collection by Jo Brachman.
Poet Emily Light: I recently read Kayleb Rae Candrilli’s newest collection, Winter of Worship, which was fantastic, and Bianca Stone’s What is Otherwise Infinite. Stone’s is not new, but it’s a terrific collection.
Seen any good art lately?
Artist JoAnne McFarland: Meg Day’s installation at the Guggenheim.
Poet Emily Light: Not unless you count the art created by the students in the high school where I teach…then yes!