consorting with Nathaniel Hawthorne
The photographs merge the subject of “self” with an overlay of images of silk funerary arrangements as a “vanitas” depiction of excess, grief, egotism, and the particular humor that must accompany despair.
I encountered the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1977. The dense and seductive plants in my paintings were like the fantasy fruits of Rappaccini’s Daughter. I was 27 and he was 173, an unlikely pair, the young feminist and the romance writer of wondrous misbehavior. I wrote these poems through a self-devised game of chance by plundering one word at a time as I read each story. I selected a few words from most paragraphs, would not read back to search for better choices, and allowed one shift of verb tense and pronoun per poem. I bargained that my poem had to conclude by the end of each story. The words are his, but the content of the poems is mine.
I edited nine of the poems to excerpts and selected images that borrow from a gothic narrative structure to enhance Hawthorne’s seductive prose and my oblique descriptions of love and loss. A three-chapter story line, “Nooks,” “Rites,” and “Signs” describes pleasure, sensuality, betrayal, murder and resolution.
PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE FOR POEMS
