Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poem

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poem is a project that presents a single piece of literary poetic text, a poem, in thirteen different multi-media visual formats. The project explores new ways of presenting poems, what I now call "literary poetic text," as multi-media art.

The first of these thirteen ways presents the text as a votive image in the form of photo-retablo, in which the text is merged with a still photograph, and presented in the style of a Mexican retablo, or tin painting.

In this version, as with the others in this project, the poetic text is intended to be inseparable from the image. The poem, instead of being text, instead of being text and image, becomes the experience of the final product. That is, the image and the text merge to create a visual and textual experience, and it is that experience that is the poem.

To produce this part of the project, I worked with several people. The project was directed and photographed by Rebecca Massey. Our model was Nyika Allen. The text in this version is in Spanish, and was translated with crucial help from Juan Massey.

Below is an early proof of our first efforts: