S/PLI/T: What is the relationship between your writing and the visual world?
Emily Kendal Frey: I see language as a way to photograph the mythology that we are inventing that is life.
S: What was your initial reaction to being asked to participate in this project, and how did you find the process?
EKF: Oooooh! First I thought: "Shoot! I'm too busy! I want to do this!" and then then I got really excited with the thrill of doing it anyway and then I looked at the images you sent me of Ryan's art and thought, "Oh yeah, I want to bend myself around this for a while."
The process was me staring at the images over a period of days, just kind of checking in on them from time to time. I'd line them up on my computer and see how they were talking to each other and listen to hear if they were reporting anything to me. I wrote one morning for a while, a lighter section of words. Then one evening I came home and wrote the bulk of the rest of the poems, kind of drilling down into to the images, beyond them, even. Ryan's pieces feel like electric boundaries that invite and also sting.
S: Many of your poems, especially in your latest book Sorrow Arrow, carry a tension between dreams or fiction and the achingly real. How do you navigate dreams and reality?
EKF: Guh. I'm actually pretty disappointed when I feel asked to make distinctions between dream and reality. This is one reason I love art and artists so much–I love the courage of those who are willing to plop into the middle of it all and swim around.
S: What are you working on now?
EKF: Yesterday I wrote for a while with a friend–we used prompts from this book on intuition from the 70s that I've been tearing and cutting up. The poems I wrote ended up being about childhood–how much there is I want to know about what it was like for you, for people, when they were young.
Emily Kendal Frey: I see language as a way to photograph the mythology that we are inventing that is life.
S: What was your initial reaction to being asked to participate in this project, and how did you find the process?
EKF: Oooooh! First I thought: "Shoot! I'm too busy! I want to do this!" and then then I got really excited with the thrill of doing it anyway and then I looked at the images you sent me of Ryan's art and thought, "Oh yeah, I want to bend myself around this for a while."
The process was me staring at the images over a period of days, just kind of checking in on them from time to time. I'd line them up on my computer and see how they were talking to each other and listen to hear if they were reporting anything to me. I wrote one morning for a while, a lighter section of words. Then one evening I came home and wrote the bulk of the rest of the poems, kind of drilling down into to the images, beyond them, even. Ryan's pieces feel like electric boundaries that invite and also sting.
S: Many of your poems, especially in your latest book Sorrow Arrow, carry a tension between dreams or fiction and the achingly real. How do you navigate dreams and reality?
EKF: Guh. I'm actually pretty disappointed when I feel asked to make distinctions between dream and reality. This is one reason I love art and artists so much–I love the courage of those who are willing to plop into the middle of it all and swim around.
S: What are you working on now?
EKF: Yesterday I wrote for a while with a friend–we used prompts from this book on intuition from the 70s that I've been tearing and cutting up. The poems I wrote ended up being about childhood–how much there is I want to know about what it was like for you, for people, when they were young.