The Starkville Area Arts Council’s Poetry and Art Exhibit explores the gap between poetry and visual arts, two seemingly different art forms. The display opened Sept. 1 and is both online and in person at the SAAC office until Oct. 31.
For this exhibit, 13 artists worked incredibly hard to form a creative overlap between poetry and art.
Christie Collins, a lecturer in the Department of English at Mississippi State University, reveals how she and her collaborator, Erna Kuik, view the gap between poetry and art.
“Poetry and art each offer what the other can’t fully express on its own: poetry gives words to artwork; artwork provides a concrete, specific image for the poem,” Collins said.
Collins describes how ekphrastic poetry — poems written about works of art —often offers multiple interpretations to one piece of art.
“With ekphrastic writing, you’re not trying to merely describe the artwork but rather offer a new way of seeing it, creating both a new [poem] and a new understanding of the preexisting artwork,” Collins said.
Each artist displayed a unique art piece tailored to their own personal styles. Some artists used an expressionistic style, others a cartoonist style, some used oil pastels and magazine scraps, some wrote their poems by hand and others used a variety of mediums to achieve their desired result.
Erika Renee Land, a professional artist and writer from Norfolk, Virginia, expressed her poems in her own handwriting as opposed to print. She explained how this handwriting revealed several of her attributes and added to her emotional attachment to her pieces.
“I like the feel of pen on paper. I think it adds to the piece because you can literally see differences in my mood by how neat or messy the handwriting is, or if I had a change in thought, misspelled something or didn’t like a particular word,” Land said.
Land’s poem “Cushion,” which was inspired by a breakup with her live-in girlfriend, reveals her heartache and pain during the time. When reading back over the poem years later, Land says that she critiques the words she chose in the piece, but she believes there is still beauty in that imperfection.
“When I read it now, I critique the words I chose and the metaphor of my tears being ants, but life is imperfect right, and that’s the beauty of having a handwritten first or second draft. It’s raw,” Land said.
Another artist, Zoe Ishee, a junior psychology and cognitive science major at Mississippi State University, used oil pastels, micron pen and magazine scraps to craft her art pieces.
Ishee’s piece “Sweet Baby” was inspired by the energy she encountered while doing her solo artist residency at MacGown Art Residency.
“I created this piece with the intention of representing honesty of the mind: improvisation, thought rambles, naturally capturing visualization as it occurs. This goal reflected the inspiration surrounding me at the residency,” Ishee said.
Ishee revealed how the creative freedom she had at the residency helped her bridge the gap between poetry and art and form her piece, “Armillary.”
Rather than judging the piece, Ishee chose to accept whatever came of her creation, both poetically and artistically, as she focused on capturing the visualization of art as it forms in her brain.
These artists bridged the gap between poetry and art, and their works can all be found on the Starkville Area Arts Council’s website. The exhibit will remain displayed in-person and online until Oct. 31. Artists will gather Oct. 27 for a reception and poetry reading from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the Starkville Area Art Council’s office in downtown Starkville.

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Noah McCord | The Reflector

Submissions for the Poetry and Art Exhibit varied in artistic styles.