“Botanical Garden”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Poet J.D. Smith: …Since the poem is based on an actual event, I have my own vivid and disturbing memory, and it has crowded out any specific sense of how the poem would be illustrated. Under these circumstances I am pleased and not a little relieved to let my work end and the visual artist’s work begin…A less insightful artist than Mr. Haber might have rendered the poem as a primarily decorative, perhaps Impressionist-inspired scene rather than taking into account the poem’s movement. His approach, though, has turned this broadside into a kind of diptych. Artist Ira Joel Haber: I liked the image of a home, of returning home and the soft recollections of nature.
Poet J.D. Smith has published two collections, Settling for Beauty (2005) and The Hypothetical Landscape, and in 2007 he was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Artist Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn.