Collaborators’ Q&A What is behind your choice of this piece of art in response to Ebola? Artist Maura Cunningham: Sometimes our shared breath/spirit is all we have. If there is one thing all beings have in common it is that we breathe in when we are born, we breathe out when we leave this form. Beyond that everything is a mystery—where we go, why we leave the way we do, and how this can only …
Collaborators’ Q&A What did you expect a writer to pick up on from “Another Portal”? Artist Maura Cunningham: I had not expectations really, just excited to see what was triggered and how that would be brought into written language. This poem was chosen in response to Maura Cunningham’s painting, “Another Portal”—can you talk about the experience of finding words that were in conversation with the image? What leapt out first from Maura’s art? A particular image? …
Collaborators’ Q&A Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Typhoon Haiyan? Poet Wesley Rothman: This piece creates a tone and an atmosphere: clouded, submerged, forceful, luminous. It’s an impression and I felt how relentless a typhoon and its aftermath can be, how there’s a visceral stunning in the devastation and resilience of being human, of dying and surviving at the same …
Collaborators’ Q&A What is it like to see both visual responses to the poem? Translator Roger Sedarat: The texture of the original source text slowed me down and actually got me looking at the Persian a little differently. The real difference, however, proved the flaming art behind the translation. I sort of credit my own imagination around the fire Hafez reiterates as getting the job done. However, seeing the poem itself house fire does make …