by Monica Hayde
At a Foothill College writing workshop a few years back, Palo Alto poet April Eiler listened to her instructor talk about the four ancient elements of Fire, Air, Earth and Water and their figurative relation to poetry. "I realized I had lots of Earth and some Air in my poetry, but almost no Fire and Water," Eiler says. "Sandra's work is full of Fire and Water, and it has brought something new into my poetry."
Sandra is abstract painter Sandra Beard, selected last year as Cupertino's Artist of the Year by that city's Fine Arts Commission. Eiler and Beard have been collaborating on various artistic projects since a 1990 joint effort at the Palo Alto Cultural Center, when the two artists took up an invitation from the South Bay Women's Caucus for the Arts to exhibit side by side. Their mixed marriage of poetry and painting proved a happy and lasting one, with Beard's abstract, fluid images playing off and complementing Eiler's emotional, topical and ethereal words.
"I'm quite flattered that someone can apply words to my work because I'm actually at a loss for words myself for how to describe what I do," Beard says with a laugh.
Eiler, 51, says her training as a musician and dancer has helped her appreciate the emotional abstractness of Beard's paintings. "But I couldn't really relate to her work as a poet," she says. "I finally realized that that was what was 'wrong' with me as a poet." Since that first show, Eiler and Beard have self-published two books--textural works of art in themselves, with hand-sewn bindings and handsome covers of handmade paper from India. The 200 copies of "The Snow Queen" and "Seven Waiters Brought the Water" have all but sold out, with just a few remaining at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park and Chimera Books in Palo Alto for $15 each.
Instead of Beard creating a visual image of a specific poem, or Eiler writing a poem in response to a Beard painting, the women paired existing monotypes with existing poems--like matching cards in a deck.
"There is no way I could have read her poems and then directly matched them with a painting," Beard says. "Instead, I read through all her poems, put them aside for a while, and then went back and found images to go with each poem."
The end result, however, indeed suggests that Beard painted in direct response to the images evoked in Eiler's poetry. Paired with Eiler's "Film Version," a poetic comment on modern marriages, told with illusions to movies and "happily-ever-after" endings, is a Beard monotype that could suggest rows of seats in a movie theater. Accompanying Eiler's "Ice Dancing" is a black and white image of swirling, fluid lines that calls to mind the graceful moves of a dancer.
Sometimes the relationship between a poem and a monotype is not so evident or literal, but as Eiler puts it, "what goes better together than words and pictures?"
Eiler, who received a degree in performing arts from Sarah Lawrence College and cut her artistic teeth writing politically oriented poetry (anti-war, anti-death penalty) in the 1970s, says she is best-known locally not for her dancing, performance art or poetry, but for breaking 22 bones below the waist in a head-on car accident 24 years ago. "I was in all the newspapers then," she says with a smile. Her first child, born prematurely, walked before she did.
In the 1980s, Eiler, who is married with two children, taught dance and poetry workshops through the Poets in the Schools program. Nowadays, in addition to her collaborations with Beard, she has been firing off her poems to literary journals across the country, dabbling in Congolese drumming and preparing to participate in the March 13 installment of the Palo Alto Centennial Writers' Forum. Eiler will appear with other local writers in the Poets, Playwrights and Biographers workshop at the College Terrace Library. The theme of this six-part forum is the exploration of the influence of Palo Alto as a unique region in the work of various writers, and how the sense of "place" can inspire creativity.
Beard, whose works hang on gallery and museum walls in Denmark, England, France, Japan and Spain, says she had never considered collaborating with another artist before the Palo Alto Cultural Center exhibit with Eiler. In fact, she was of the school of artistic thought that prefers to let the interpretation of a work of art remain up to the viewer, free of any sort of context. For this reason, Beard doesn't title her paintings.
"It's been interesting working with April, though, because I feel very strongly about her poems; they are very powerful poems."
While Eiler prepares for the Centennial Writers Forum, Beard is getting ready to head off to Vermont for a six-week residency fellowship with the Vermont Studio Center.
Through April 16, Beard's works are on display at San Francisco's Meridian Gallery as part of a show profiling visual artists who have collaborated with musicians and poets. Eiler will read from "Seven Waiters Brought the Water" at 2 p.m. April 9 at the gallery, 545 Sutter St.
Poets, Playwrights and Biographers
Who: Palo Alto Centennial Writers' Forum
Where: College Terrace Library, 2300 Wellesley St., Palo Alto
When: 2-4 p.m. March 13
Cost: Free
Information: 326-0723 or 325-1370 "I'm quite flattered that someone can apply words to my work because I'm actually at a loss for words myself for how to describe what I do."
--Sandra Beard
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