dm simons is a visual artist who also writes poetry. In an exchange of correspondence about this interview, dm wrote to me: "I hope my ramblings are not too oblique for you". On the contrary. It was clear to me as I read dm's responses that he had a very personal style, and a manner of writing, in which I wanted to intervene as little as possible. So, for your edification and pleasure, here is a conversation with dm.
dm: My whole life is been one of images/words, a bifurcation where they stand in for one another, exist with the other, without boundaries and are the same thing, become the same thing; each letter a character/figure, each word an image; images given to me, to us, that is all of us before we were born, in other words we yearn for that which we don't know but know. It is the yearning that is important, the
thinking, not the either/or. For me they are the same thing. To be quite honest
from the age of four or five words grabbed me first, images, perhaps a year
later. I always thought or preferred writing to painting. Obviously, drawing as
writing obsessed me, though even as a teenager I thought—as well as my
teachers—that I was destined to be a writer. I don't think in time, I think in
space, a sensed space. If this double life, this genesis of a double sun began,
it began as the space of being alone, that special cocoon of breath and
discovery, a decontaminated space.
 |
| "Bitter End', 2009, 57" x 66", pastel on sunset |
"Burnt tongue,
singed words
Thoughts numbed, a grief worn hard
Of sparse woven thorns, draped
Shroud snagged on threaded hopes
Warped
Needled regrets of memories woven
Unraveled breath flickering, frost sparks
Gulping long ago threaded clumps, found
As this grey-green phlegm is spat from
the clotted lung, the rasp-burned throat
Splattered upon the cold gray slab. Scream
Not heard long, that voice known,
Oval blushed lips pursed darkly open
A quivering body, quaked still. Quiet
Breathing to the gut, slaking of the old,
it falls;
A new season"
dm simons
Philip: What does
writing poetry offer to you that drawing doesn't? Or vice versa?
dm: Poetry and
painting/drawing are similar. I have been referred to as a conceptual
painter—perhaps. The emotion and idea are foremost in my head. Each one of us
has "habitus" which, though we are part of a field, makes us a bit
different. I am interested in space, rhythm, words that convey what an image
might not, an image that might have more effect than a word, to remove the
choker from my throat, to breathe sighs of whispers, to get at the pith in
another manner, to pick at it with another instrument, to pull apart the scars
of an alleged truth. (I don't make art: I tell lies because the truth hurts.)
Poetry, if that is what it is, is that instrument. The homology is the
instrument for both, bleistift und feder, pencil and pen, the same instruments
write, the same instruments draw, the difference is the intent, the shape, what
we recognize as drawing, what we recognize as poems, again not much of a
difference. To pick at the core and to orchestrate. Morty Feldman said that to
be a good composer, one has to know how to orchestrate. Sorry to be oblique,
but I find no difference. As I am working on a picture my journal is open on a
table two feet away, waiting always waiting. And if I am in the journal writing
the picture is always waiting. (We are a thread hanging on the barbed wire of
lies.) The composer Henry Cowell, who was the inventor of tone clusters,
arrived at his "Eureka" moment because of frustration. He had a sound
and an effect in his head which he could not duplicate in the usual manner at
the piano, which usually is the composers sketching pad. In this maddening few
seconds of being boulder blocked, he smashed his forearm on to the keys, and
that boulder was smashed into so many shards—that was the sound and effect
needed. He also passed on the use of chance and the preparation of instruments to
two of his students: Lou Harrison and John Cage. Poetry from a forearm smashed
into an instrument, one never knows.
Philip: Your drawings
have an arresting, somewhat unsettling quality - both closely observed, yet
bleached out, as if the object or the memory of it is about to slip from view.
How much do you guide or give free rein to the drawing once you embark on it?
dm: I think hard and
long about each piece. Before I start a new picture I have to know the path
needed. Lately there is a pitch dark nothing that has held me captive, perhaps,
over the last two years. It is the dark space between the door and its jamb. So
that is the pith. My work is not picture generation, it's probably a tangent or
post picture-generation, trope. I look at thirty or forty images, whittle down
the concepts to a few images, and surprisingly pick one that I was not intent
on producing. Then I hit it, hit it hard, I wipe out all visual noise in the
ground, focusing on the image, I want to make sure of its ambiguity, make sure
that it is a fragment of a story, (It needs a better story). When Dante wrote
his "Inferno" only fragments of Homer's Odyssey existed and it fueled
his imagination into what rings of Hell to place some of Homer's protagonists.
It was not till perhaps a hundred years later that all of Homer was discovered.
In the same manner by dwelling on the image, that is the image as fragment, it
compels the audience to use their imagination/memory to fill in the cracks, the
missing story, in the same manner as a the restoration of an eighth century B.
C. Greek Crater or Kouros that has been filled with plaster. I am not trying to
be clever, I am interested in a certain emotion, a vibration, an echo of
pre-social thought; again, all images, gestures, expressions and attitudes are
a given, they are exhausted, impotent and need to be decontaminated,
rehabilitated, resuscitated, perhaps given a vitality, a new agency within
another world, universe or multiverse. I am just trying to tell a better story.
The story is complete before I begin, the picture tells me what is needed,
through a compression. I adapt to what I am told, what I am given. At the end
it is a compromise and the story is a synthesis of the senses and body. There
is never a mind body duality, the double sun becomes a double sun. The cleavage
between the two suns is the interest. "One does not discover new lands
unless one suspends sight of all shores for an eternity"—Vilas-Mattas.
"Crack, snap, woosh,
thud
I didn't see it , I heard it
up those Inwood hills
a hollowed echo
if a tree falls...
I heard it, that last crack
hard winter, packed snow,
soggy Spring, heavy rain
trees will fall
some harder than others
buried by Summer
splintered silence
Fall coming
I keep climbing"
dm simons
Philip: Similarly, if
I asked you to state the first thing you notice about your creative process
when you are writing, what would that be?
dm: Space,
compression, fragmented language, sound, color and effect—all orchestrated
loosely sort of the way Ferneyhough composes ("The New Complexity")
but with purpose, with thought. It is funny with writing: at first
uncomfortable with what is there, thinking it junk-pile scrub, I open the
journal a day or two later and those lumps of coal seem to sparkle, it takes me
a while to see beauty in what I thought was plumber's lead, days before. Within
three or four pages if I can glean a few sentences or paragraphs, compress them
into what I was feeling, what I was after. It is not easy, a tortuous path.
Peripatetic in a certain way, a wending perhaps, but so it is with the
picture-making as well. All the stories have been warehoused in my brain,
dusty, waiting, when young, with impatience, a nervousness to get on with it,
to overcome a hyper-inertia to let it out, not as "diary-puke" but as
an existence that reverberates with the essence of what I am and have been.
Perhaps now more than before that the time for sharing is now.
 |
| "-icide", 2008, 30" x 44", charcoal/pastel with stumping |
Philip: You use words
in your drawings and paintings, too. In what way is this similar or different
to your creative writing?
dm: Again, there is
no mind-body duality. They exist as one thinking. After "Vertigo
Moon" in 2010, I decided not to include text in my work to see what
happened, to see if the work echoed and felt the way I wanted it to, it did and
that freed me, to realize I wasn't trapped, no one wants to set a trap and
become lunch, at least that is what I wanted to be sure of, that I had not set
a trap for myself. In the middle of the year I did "Homage to Roberto
Bolanò", written in my own hand "There is no turning back..."
and at the bottom a writing/drawing poem from his "Savage Detective".
Roberto, in my opinion is the best writer of the last twenty years. That
writing/drawing poem itself is an homage to the great poet Nicanor Parra. The
next piece used the complete short story of Augusto Monteroso, a tremendous
writer, "When I awoke the dinosaur was still there". It is supposedly
the shortest short story in literature. I forgot the name of the piece, but it
has a Concord jet in blur-motion on a blue field. Again the text is in my own
cursive. I am giving away my trade-secrets here, ha,ha,ha, however what it
reveals is that everything is connected, my painting, my writing, my reading,
my love of language and images, my intent to tell a compelling story, to keep
things interesting, fragmented, spatial. "Vertigo Moon" uses my own
writing, which is obscured in the piece. I will send you the poem separated
from the image so you may read it. The poem was written to go with the image.
There is no difference in my writing as writing, and my writing though
truncated with images. They exist as a whole. For example, "They'll come
for you, they'll come for you" stands alone, however it works with images.
I used it in three different images. It is not the length or number of words or
sentences, it is not if they were intended to stand alone or incorporated into
a picture, it is the potency that counts, the story, the tragic, the fear, the
anxiety, the whole ball-of-wax as language, words and images, words without
images that matters. I love it all.
Philip: Do you ever write immediately after working on a visual piece? Or pick up the pastels immediately after writing? If so, what takes your attention about your process once you cross over into the other medium?
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