“Leaving”
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to bring your work to Broadsided?
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: A lot of my work is written in dialogue with visual art, so I am grateful for the opportunity to have an artist respond to my poetry. “Leaving” is part a book of poems I am working on based on family photographs and images taken by Colombian photographers. While this poem does not reference a specific artwork, it did emerge from observation and learning from images. Having art next to it feels like a generous moment in the reciprocity between eye and ear, image and text. I am also drawn to the ways that Broadsided activates public space through art and writing. I am excited to see this poem on bulletin boards, sidewalks, and doors.
What drew you to create a visual response to this poem, in particular?
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: “I’ve been studying, these days, how things end” offered such an engaging promise. I loved the pace and transitions that followed. I loved the poem’s specific images. The last lines of the poem described a relief and permission that I’m often seeking both inside and outside the studio.
How did this poem come to be?
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: I grew up in Colombia and came to the United States at age eighteen, not realizing I would be leaving my country for good. More than twenty years later, I heard someone from Tacoma Community House talk about services they offer, including supporting immigrants as they mourn the country they have left behind. It stopped me in my tracks. I realized that I had never mourned my leaving, hadn’t allowed myself to be in the place I was. When I wrote this poem, I was also going through a lengthy divorce process. I thought about the women in my family, how it was always the men who left, and how much courage it takes to leave a relationship, a country, a home, a life. I wanted to write a poem that gave us permission to leave, to end, to start anew.
How did this image come to be?
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: The point of view is from my dad’s study in the house he lived in for almost 60 years. It made a lot of sense to me with Catalina’s 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 Catalina Ocampo Londoño: I began writing this poem by observing how things end in the world: how a fish dies, how a bridge ends. I wondered if an artist would pick up on those endings and appreciate that the lines in Helen’s drawing echo the unraveling in the final lines of the poem. The “landing” in this image reminds me that places of arrival are also places of departure, and vice-versa. There is an unsettled intimacy in this image, which lingers at the place and moment just before we step out into the world. That is what it felt like to write this poem.
Did anything shift for you or come into new light as you began working on your visual response?
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: I often get a bunch of ideas based on specific images in the poem, and part of me loves to take on that challenge, but came to believe it should be something personal to my own experience with endings.
What question would you like to ask your collaborator?
Poet to Artist: What is one ending (of a movie, an artwork, a relationship, a book, a project, a world) that you appreciated and why?
Helen Beckman Kaplan: The work I thought of that describes an ending is a self-portrait by Pierre Bonnard, the Post-impressionist, that he painted at the end of his life, which is often titled “The Last Self-Portrait”. It is a person regarding themself in a bathroom mirror, glowing gently and wistfully.
Artist to Poet: If you could know the solution to one mystery, historical or personal, what might it be?
Catalina Ocampo Londoño: (to come)
When you consider the full folio of work from this issue (see the “related broadsides” links on the left), what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: I love how “Poem about Vape” moves from the everydayness of vaping to the nicks, hurts, and loves that we carry. The image makes me think about how we bring those loves and hurt into our connections with others. There’s a shared desire here to be able to put relationships, places, departures behind us, even as we continue to carry their stories and histories with us.
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: I’ve been wondering how my age—being older—affects how I respond to individual poems at this point.
Describe your ideal “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: I would love to see this broadside posted on doors, passages, waiting rooms, portals, landings, places of leaving and arrival.
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: The Antico Caffe Greco in Rome, where Keats spent some time in his own end.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: It would be a weather front: the dynamic/unstable borderline where two distinct air masses meet.
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: Slow, steady, warm winds.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: Is there a photograph you carry with you or one that you no longer have but was important to you? Describe/draw what you see in the photograph. Describe/draw what is present in it, but invisible to the eye.
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: Use your “other” hand to draw the view out your window.
Read any good books lately?
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: I recently finished Don’t Come Back by Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, and was moved and shaken by her account of what it meant to grow up in Colombia at a time when it was difficult to escape violence. She gives words to the experience of longing for language and home, while feeling deeply ambivalent about both. It was an extraordinary read.
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen.
Seen any good art lately?
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: I have long been a fan of the work of Peruvian-American artist Rafael Soldi and was especially grateful for the recent installation of mouth to mouth at the Frye Museum in Seattle. At once image and text, the word-panels hung in the gallery were a gift to queer/cuir bilingual/Latinx communities. They are also a playful and defiant invitation to make space for our many languages and many ways of loving in this multilingual, English-dominant country.
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: I keep visiting Carlo Crivelli at the Met. These early renaissance paintings are strange, beautiful and emotionally perfect.
Anything else? (Here, we invite the collaborators to invent a question, add a comment, or otherwise speak to what the questions so far have not tapped about their Broadsided experience).
Poet Catalina Ocampo Londoño: Deep appreciation for this project! Thank you for bringing text and image, artists and writers into public dialogue with each other.
Artist Helen Beckman Kaplan: Just to thank Catalina and the Broadsided team.