This chapbook contains both poetry and the paintings the poems were written for.

Merging: Ink and Word

In 2004 I received a grant from the Vermont Community Foundation Arts Endowment Fund. This grant gave me the opportunity to explore ways of integrating my poetry and Chinese brush painting.

I studied art as an undergraduate at Bennington College and then obtained a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry from Vermont College. My poems are based in the imagery of the land. They are lyrical in nature and often quiet. My poems share a feeling that is also present in my paintings; the paintings are just like my poems, but without words.

After becoming fascinated with the often poetic layering of images which make-up Kanji characters, I studied Chinese calligraphy and began brush painting. Brush painting tied together my early love of painting and my more recent commitment to poetry in a way that felt natural and spiritually regenerative. Brush painting has been governed for centuries by precise rules that succeed in leaving space for the accident and spontaneity that gives life to painting.

My project brought these two art forms, poetry and painting, together in my own work for the first time. Of course, the two art forms are often related in the Chinese tradition. My practice involved creating poems in Chinese using the Kanji characters, and then experimenting with modern and traditional ways of using this poetry in my painting.

During this process, I discovered that the paintings I created felt more wholly myself than any I had created up to this point. Within the paintings, I juxtaposed English, Chinese, painted images, and panels of color. Due to the needs of the materials and initiative, I discovered a process which employed the method of collage. I mounted rice paper, using the traditional wheat glue, onto watercolor paper. This allowed me to write the English onto the underlying paper with a pen nib. I could then mount the painting, color panels, and Chinese calligraphy onto the scripted paper. The rice paper is so thin that the underlying writing is visible yet muted. This creates a subtle effect in the paintings that matches well the tone of my poems.

For this project, I wrote poems using several techniques. At first Kanji characters inspired me, and the characters themselves drove the creation of the English poems. These poems, unsurprisingly, are more image based in the Chinese. Later, I used a method of translating back and forth between the English and the Chinese. In the Chinese, these poems are smoother, more modern. Yet, as my dear teacher and friend Yinglei Zhang reminds me, my poems are not Chinese poems. Chinese poems follow very strict rules. In Chinese, my poems set characters together with meaning.

I am grateful to both the Vermont Community Foundation and Yinglei Zhang, for making it possible for me to bring forth this work. Yinglei checked my translations to insure their integrity. She also honored me with candid criticism and great kindness.
I present within this chapbook the most successful pieces of my work for this project.

Karla Van Vliet — 2005