Poetry and Art History

My first love was poetry, the reading and the writing. I had thought in my days of middle school that I would become a literature major. Then came the discovery of Spanish followed by other languages and I thought I might do comparative literature of some stripe. Once in fact in college I heard many, many writer friends complain of their literature majors as something that dried up their love of writing, so of this I was wary.

Then I discovered art history.

My major ended up Medieval Renaissance Studies (because interdisciplinarity is fundamentally how I roll) but my years as a graduate student were devoted to art history.

It is fundamentally a kind of translation – and this of a dead language, not even a discursive and verbal but a language of pure and absolute metaphor. How might one take a dead and nonverbal language of image and render it into another that is comprehensible for readers alive in the here and now?

When I defended my dissertation in yet another language the jury told me my use of my adoptive tongue was a poetic one. This, it seems to me that is the only answer to the above question. Only poetry allows for a worded interpretation of a visual means of expression.

And so I have come full circle.

My dissertation in a haiku:

How to paint perfume?

With oil or gold, a mystic

whore’s blood, flesh, hair, tears