Ropes of Sand

Oh Heaven

At a film festival in Athens, Ohio, I saw a short competition film on graphic artist Jeffrey Brown, which prompted me to buy one of his books a couple of days later. At this point, certain pages in the book have become shorthand for certain feelings in our household and among our friends. My sister, for example, wanted to show her date a particular page in lieu of attempting to explain to him what she was thinking. She didn't. The point is that Brown's images have entered our little collection lexicon as though they were metaphors, which speaks to their density and potency. In short, he's a great poet.

Today I learned that The Poetry Foundation has paired Jeffrey Brown with Russell Edson in a match that strikes me as particularly astute. How often do good things like this happen? Here's what the foundation says about the project of letting graphic novelists loose in their archives:

As a way to help readers discover (or rediscover) our archive, poetryfoundation.org has invited some of today’s most vital graphic novelists to interpret a poem of their choice from the more than 4,500 poems in our archive, reaching from Beowulf to the present.

I'd like to post the image here, but I think it's too big, so I'll send you here to download your own copy of Jeffrey Brown's interpretation of Russel Edson's "Of Memory and Distance."

posted by SAS @ Thursday, June 07, 2007