Speaker 1 (00:00): Coming up on Art Palace, Speaker 2 (00:02): He saw that everything is connected to everything else and he saw that the human world is intimately connected to nature. Speaker 1 (00:22): Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell eig. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Today's cool person is poet Louis Martinelli, who wrote Dreaming With Eyes Open Poems for Vincent Van Gogh. Why don't you tell me how this project got started for you? Speaker 2 (00:48): The Art Institute in Chicago had an amazing exhibit called Studio of the South and the exhibit featured work by Gogan and Van Gogh. And the intention of the exhibit was to explore the relationship between the two artists, the impact they had on each other's work. I came away from the exhibit inspired, but not inspired in the sense that I made a decision consciously to write a book of poem Speaker 1 (01:22): About Speaker 2 (01:22): Bingo. I came away inspired by his art, had always found his art interesting, but never had a chance to actually experience this many of his paintings. A woman named Deborah Silverman wrote a very, very interesting book about Gogan and Van Gogh called The Search for Sacred Art, and that book was there for sale and she saw Van Gogh and Gogan as the title of her book suggests, searching for a kind of modern, realistic sacredness in art, which I find interesting. So of all the things I've read in some ways that probably influenced me the most. Speaker 1 (02:15): How long between that experience and then when you actually started creating or writing poems about Van Gogh? Speaker 2 (02:22): I think it was about four or five years, four Speaker 1 (02:27): Years. Okay. So it was pretty big gestation period for you before it started like Speaker 2 (02:31): There was Speaker 1 (02:32): Hatching? Speaker 2 (02:33): There absolutely was. I remember reading a lot of books about bingo because my interest in his life, as much as his work was stimulated by that studio of the South exhibit in Chicago. The first poem I wrote, which surprises me now to look back and remember was the Elegy for Van Gogh. Speaker 1 (03:01): And Speaker 2 (03:01): It's chronologically very late in the book, in my book. So I think that was the first poem because it's probably the most emotional poem and it represents my trying to come to grips with this death that was probably from, I had learned from suicide, which is the popular understanding of his death. I was moved to write this cel, I sort of backtracked the next 14, 15 years, went back to imagining him as a child and then proceeded from there forwards, but not exactly in a linear way. Speaker 1 (03:48): Yeah. So I mean the book is organized somewhat linearly, but you didn't necessarily create the poems in that order, you're saying? Speaker 2 (03:58): Exactly. I didn't really set out in the beginning when I wrote the Elegy for Van Gogh and then two poems about his ear. I didn't set out to write a book. I just was inspired to write about B Gogh and this connection between his life and his work became increasingly interesting to me as time went by. It took such a long time to write the poems, I think because I was waiting for inspiration and didn't do a lot of revision. I've written a lot of other poems, but usually I'm a writer who revises and is a little more methodical than I was with the Van Gogh poems. Speaker 1 (04:45): Have you ever written other works inspired by art before or was this one of the first ones? Speaker 2 (04:50): This was the first Speaker 1 (04:52): One Speaker 2 (04:53): And pretty much the only one. And I've never asked an artist to help me understand art before kind of getting stuck in the middle of this project and then just running into a Cincinnati, a local artist named Calista Bachenstead who had a shop in Glendale, Ohio. And one day my wife and I walked into her shop and one thing led to another and I expressed an admiration for her art that was hanging on the wall. And I told her I was working on these poems and was kind of stuck. And so she invited me to share some with her and then that helped me get unstuck because she shared her perspective on Van Gogh, gave me a couple books to read about Van Gogh, but then also helped me understand art and get inside of the mind of an artist, which I had never previously done. Speaker 1 (05:54): Was there something specific you remember her saying that helped you get unstuck? Speaker 2 (05:58): What I remember more than any other single thing is when I visited her shop and read her some of the poems I had written to that point in time and I got to the halfway through the Elegy, she started to cry. And the fact that an artist, a good artist, she was a very good artist, would be moved by what I had written, made me feel that this project was worth pursuing wherever it led, whether it led to a whole book of poems, which eventually what eight years later it did or not, I felt like I must be doing some justice to Van Gogh. Speaker 1 (06:40): So it sounds like it was more that it gave you confidence in what you were already doing. Speaker 2 (06:46): It did Speaker 1 (06:46): It. Speaker 2 (06:49): That was a pivotal moment. I think another pivotal moment is what I learned from my wife Theresa, about what in Van Gogh's time was called mental distress, what we tend to diagnose now and call mental illness in a much more complex way than it was then. But what I learned from my wife about it is that very often depression is complicated or even just flat out misdiagnosed because what the person is experiencing is grief is loss and that loss can be complicated and therefore very hard to mourn. And that opened up Van Gogh for me probably more than anything that I had read about Van Gogh and it caused me to go back and look more carefully at what had happened to him in his life and then try to understand the relationship between that and what was called his mental distress, his instability, and also his work. Speaker 1 (07:58): Were there other ways, I mean it sounds like mostly just through readings that you kind of got to know the person, but any other sort of ways that you sort of dug into the person of Van Gogh? Speaker 2 (08:10): One awareness that came to me that I write about me afterward of the book is he saw that everything is connected to everything else. And he saw that the human world is intimately connected to nature. And I'm struck by that in his life and in his work. Speaker 1 (08:30): I kind of want to just talk to you a little bit about the sort of interesting different voices that kind of come into this work and it surprised me in a lot of ways and I think the first turn I wasn't expecting was when Emily Dickinson shows up. Oh yeah. And there's a sort of poem written as Emily Dickinson, and it's one of the first of many times where you sort take on other people's voices, which I thought was really interesting. And is this something that kind is typical of your work or something that you sort of brought out for this project? Speaker 2 (09:09): Well, that's a great question. That really is a great question. I think it goes to the heart of this book. I was and still am a playwright. I haven't written a play in a while, but I'm a playwright and I particularly like the form, the dramatic form of dramatic monologue where voice is very, very important of course. And I remember way back in the late sixties into the early and maybe even through the mid seventies, there was a program on public television that Steve Allen of all people the comedian had put together, written directed, and it was called Meeting of the Minds. And in this program he would have people from different periods of history come together and have dinner and have a conversation. For example, he would bring Emily Dickinson together with Henry David Thoreau and Van Gogh Speaker 1 (10:19): And Speaker 2 (10:20): Lyndon Johnson, Speaker 2 (10:22): And they would sit and have dinner and they would talk. And it's like even before I had ever written my first play, I thought that would be a very interesting way to approach making literature is to bring voices together across time in something along those lines. And I think that's in every play I've written, that's what I've done. And I think maybe I've done something like that in dreaming with open eyes. One of the things I did was I didn't send any of the poems to journals. What I decided to do was to just go and be bold and propose to read the poems I had written. And one of the venues, a bookstore in southern Minnesota, and I read the poems and there was a man named Larry Johnson who's a very good Minnesota poet, and he was sitting in the back and after I was finished, he raised his hand. He said, I have a question for you. Did you ever have the sense while you were writing these poems that you were channeling Van Gogh? And I said, yeah, I guess I did. Not in the sense that a medium channels people, but in the sense that maybe at times I was capturing his voice and then the voices of others like Emily Dickinson or Michelangelo or C or Sean Hornick his lover. I said, yes, I did have that experience at times. Speaker 1 (12:03): Well, it's like to bring it back to theater, it's like being an actor almost. It's sort of adopting the persona while you're writing. Speaker 2 (12:15): Exactly. Speaker 1 (12:16): I noticed the Yellow House in Al is like a recurring motif. I feel like it's one of the things I noticed coming back. You came back to a lot Speaker 2 (12:27): And Speaker 1 (12:27): I was just kind of curious why that left such an impression on you or what that was about. Speaker 2 (12:33): I guess because it's at the heart of Van Gogh's dream that there would be an artist colony in oral and in that house that for a time he and Gogan shared would be the physical structure that would initially house that artist colony. It seems too small to have housed a burgeoning artist colony, but it's a big dream. And I'm almost haunted by the image of Van Gogh in that house, particularly after GaN has left and Van Gogh's world continues to fall apart. It's one more failure and really one more I think traumatic loss for him. Evidence for which is that it caused him to cut off his ear. Speaker 1 (13:37): Yeah. Would you like to read some works? Speaker 2 (13:40): Sure I would. So the first poem, March 30th, 1853, A day begins in southern Holland. It is spring the 19th century, not yet tired of itself. Yolanda Van Gogh burs a healthy child. Vincent Willem named for the Lifeless brother stillborn on this day. One year ago, curse of replacement fate already weaving a future from the irredeemable past. Speaker 1 (14:15): I love curse of replacement. That was Speaker 2 (14:18): The curse of replacement. Speaker 1 (14:19): I wrote that down, I was like, that's really nice. Speaker 2 (14:22): Van Gogh is five years old, clings to his mother's arm as he baths, has bread and jam for breakfast. Wonders when father will be home from church, tries to remember his prayers, wanders aimlessly outside seeing everything the light wake span go, but he does not paint. It only wants to feel in his body the God from which it came. Van Gogh speaks of his technique in the pattern of weaving overlay, underlay, I found my mate cloth becoming paint a woman's hands moving the frame thread joining thread a strange light come into the room. Van Gogh addresses the blank canvas. I don't care how many times you whisper to me, you cannot like a wronged lover seeking revenge for some imagined affair, I will have my way with you. Bold stroke. By bold stroke, I will cover you with all the colors of my passion. Were we not made for each other to the fields of Provence? Van Gogh carries his easel, his wooden perspective, frame his paint thick as glue sits down among laborers and works good Protestant that he is. Speaker 1 (15:55): I like that one a lot. Speaker 2 (15:58): He was into the Protestant work ethic already. Speaker 1 (16:01): Yeah, there the connection that you're making there between the work of making art and that sort of work ethic I thought was really nice. Speaker 2 (16:14): Sometimes a divine sadness fills me. Van Gogh wrote perhaps thinking of the stillborn brother for whom he was named or the fragile earth he loved. In the flower paintings, color overwhelms melancholy perspective is replaced by an almost microscopic attention to detail as if the artists were inviting us to touch the bold strokes, to smell the oils he has labored to mix and layer to accept these gifts he has received from nature consolation for being mortal. You mentioned the Emily Dickinson voice poem. So I have to say before I read this, I argued with myself about including this or not four times I took it out of the manuscript because I thought, who are you to do this? And fortunately the publisher and the editor in chief liked it. Speaker 2 (17:20): He said, no, I don't take that out. Emily Dickinson muses on Van Gogh take away the madness. His life becomes a room. Tulip, iris, rosemary. A place for hope to bloom. Take away the sadness. There's nothing left to feel the sun's already shown Defect. The time chant ever heal, take away the paintings. The world shrinks like a death. Inventors cannot recreate the work of God's own breath. Samuel Beckett writes to Van Gogh fear nothing except certainty. Commit the heresy of self-love. Make art from desperation in the next life. Shun fame. Okay, I'll read you what I think are really my two favorite poems. Speaker 1 (18:19): Okay? Speaker 2 (18:21): If a poet's allowed to have favorites, these are my two favorites. Van Gogh writes to Shakespeare's wife, I feel toward you. A tenderness I've never felt toward any living woman. Eight years, your husband, senior, a country girl who herded cows, fed your lamb, practiced the arts of cooking, knitting understood the courtships on its written to gain your favor. It puzzles me how you've disappeared like a photograph and a fire, even your ashes reviled. But then you're in such company, those wives of great men of letters who nurse children and empty marriage beds as husbands proud the world in search of love, fame, inspiration. I think we could have been happy, Anne. After all, I didn't get along with men or make an art that causes kings to swoon. My crimes were failure and insanity. Yours being born too late and too soon. Elegy for Vgh, this man who fell to earth and drank its water. Who found another world in this one more brilliant than the sun who raised God from the dead with paint and brushes who preached a gospel of bad news of infinite grief, whose heart was a river whose hands were light? May he rest under the drooping heads of sunflowers. May he fill the black hole with history, with sight. Speaker 1 (20:04): Thank you. Speaker 2 (20:05): Thank you. Speaker 1 (20:06): So I thought we'd go look at some Van Gogh now lets, so we are in Gallery 2 27 and we are looking at undergrowth with two figures by Vincent Van Gogh, probably our most notable Van Gogh work. We did walk past the smaller piece, a few galleries away, but this is the one everyone wants to talk about usually. And I know you've been inspired by this work it it's talked about in the poems. So why don't you tell me a little bit about your kind of relationship with this painting? Speaker 2 (20:46): My relationship with the painting began before I started to write the poems and dreaming with open eyes when I was just drawn to it as the iconic Van Gogh painting in this museum, but also just in its own right, one of his last paintings and one of my favorites, an important moment in my history of experiencing this painting, have a relationship with it, was watching Pure Knutson who was employed by this museum as a conservator of paintings. And he conserved, restored this painting out in the open downstairs and you could just walk up and watch him work with his microscope. And his incredible skill, my understanding of his process was that he scraped, that's probably a crude term for what he Speaker 1 (21:53): Actually did. It was a little more delicate, Speaker 2 (21:55): A lot more delicate. But wax was put on the back of paintings too, and it was thought it would preserve them. And over time, I believe the wax came through would come through the painting and dull it of course. And all those rich, vibrant Van Gogh colors had been somewhat dulled over time. So pair's job was to restore the painting to its previous Lester. Speaker 1 (22:28): I noticed something in one of your poems that seemed to probably come out of maybe that experience or something, which is that you mentioned pink flowers at one point. And I know that was kind of a deep cut. I was like, oh, there's no actual pink flowers anymore. But there were when the painting was made. So that's sort of one of these things that we only know thanks to spectrometry that they can, they've figured out that some of the white flowers were at one time pink and he used a paint that just was not very archival and it just sort of destroyed itself. So it just faded and turned white Speaker 2 (23:10): P shared that Speaker 1 (23:10): With me. Exactly. I know you mentioned it several times in the book, but you have a poem specifically, Speaker 2 (23:17): There's three poems about it Speaker 1 (23:18): That Speaker 2 (23:19): It inspired. Speaker 1 (23:20): Do you want to read some here? Speaker 2 (23:21): Sure. This is one of what the longer poems in the book undergrowth with two figures for pure canoe to only weeks before bad family genes and syphilitic Spiro destroy most of what remains of his sanity, a broken heart in the inability to earn a living doing the rest. Van Gogh paints another masterpiece, a faceless couple imprisoned within lilac poplar trees, strangely cobalt blue, enough light penetrating the dense forest to show pink, white and yellow flowers. The tall grass, a luxurious green. In his 896 letter to Theo Van Gogh describes this intimation of his end, an imprisonment not in the asylum, but in the god of nature that he loved. Then says he is despaired of ever being married as the faceless man and woman lost in these woods seem to have despaired as they wait to be found or to consummate their love in another life. Speaker 1 (24:39): Well, were there any other thoughts you had about this painting or anything you wanted to say about it before we go? Speaker 2 (24:44): Just a quick story about Pear. The woman who I mentioned in Glendale Close Steadi who had an art and antique store there, decided to have a birthday party for Van Gogh a couple years after I had met her. And she had helped me understand Van Gogh and art better and she invited me to read the poems and she invited a woman who was a retired professional opera singer who lived in Glendale to come and sing Starry Starry Night. And then she asked me if I would invite P to come and bring a print of undergrowth with two figures and put it on an easel and then talk about his restoration process, which we did. And it was a phenomenal party. She had French food and hors d'oeuvres and there must have been, I don't know how many people there, it was packed. Her little shop was just packed with people who seemed to really get inside of this. And again, it was another one of those experiences where I had read poems that hadn't been published yet. They were, they were several years away from this recent publication in my book. So I have good memories of that party and I connected to Pair and to this magnificent painting. Speaker 1 (26:24): Do you want to let people know maybe about the upcoming library event? Speaker 2 (26:28): The upcoming library event will be November at 7:00 PM It'll be a virtual presentation and I'll be presenting some poems there and I'll be interviewed by two members of the library staff. Speaker 1 (26:45): I'll include any links to that in the show description as well, so people can find that there. Speaker 2 (26:51): That's great. Speaker 1 (26:52): Well, thank you so much for being my guest today. Speaker 2 (26:54): Thank you for having me. Speaker 1 (27:01): Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the Art Yourself. Special exhibitions right now are black and brown faces and women breaking boundaries. The museum is currently open during our regular operating hours, but please visit Cincinnati art museum.org to register for your free timed admission tickets. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and we also have an Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Fra Mu by Balal. And as always, please rate and review us to help others find the show. I'm Russell Irie and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.