“When I Wasn’t Vanishing”
Collaborators’ Q&A: How did this image come to be? Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata: I have been working on drawings of dandelions…I also wanted to keep it simple, like wanting to dance with someone, you don’t step into their place and take over, you just try to match their rhythm and continue their movements with yours, I look at it like being more guided by 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 Geffrey Davis: I’d hoped that the artist would pick up on the wind in the poem….His image brought back so many childhood memories of trying to blow a flower head clean in a single breath—which I’d been told could make your wishes come true. Daniel’s response has made me see how that forgotten ritual of hope was still somehow informing the poem.
Poet Geffrey Davis’s books include One Wild Word Away, Night Angler, and Revising the Storm. A recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches with the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing & Translation. Artist Daniel Esquivia Zapata is an Afro-Colombian artist and educator born in San Jacinto, Bolivar, Colombia. Daniel recently moved from Bogotá, Colombia to Alabama to teach and exhibit from his new home in the US South.