Perhaps it was when I had more titles than paintings. I had always scribbled in sketchbooks. So why did I switch from painting to writing. Or did I? Perhaps I’m painting with words. Perhaps because it is lighter to write. Not as physical as paintings that end up stored in painting racks. The heavy canvas stretched across stretchers are space taking things. With writing I could carry my notebook and pen in my bag and have a studio on the go.
If someone asks, I say I write prose poetry. I either get a frightened quizzical reaction, or perhaps worse, a oh that’s wonderful and I want to run. If there were another word for what I do I would use it. The poetry word is so weighted with the past and often preciousness. A kind of preciousness that for me is oppressive. In response to this I dispensed with line breaks and condensed language in ironically justified rectangular formats much like my paintings. Small, pressurized units. I am a field writer much as I was a field painter. I write a surface of words from the fragments collected in my ever-present spiral notebook: climate, emotions, agitations, trees.
Thus, the medium changed but not my habits. My so-called blind-painting led to blind-writing. Working up close immersed with little regard for context or circumstances. Then drawing back to reflect and observe what exactly had taken place. In the case of painting to my paint-smeared easy chair to hold a hand mirror up to my painting wall, to let the painting sink in. In the case of writing printing up pieces and sitting on a paint-free couch to edit and contemplate. These attempts to catch the paint or words unaware in a fresh light. It would seem as I look back that I had to paint in order to commute to writing. In order to loosen up the grammar and worn patterns of language. To treat words with less reverence to let them wander.
Again, why did I shift to writing? Painting began to seem, at least my abstract paintings, too vague and self-indulgent. The cover-ups, drips and scraping downs: these revelations no longer held danger for me. Words, however, seemed threatening and precise. Their contradictions, paranoia and complete unpredictability. The challenge then was to put together the borrowed parts and isolated clumps into a kind of a voice. To not exactly write these pieces but let them emerge from multiple micro moves and deletions, their stops starts rewinds fast forwards.
And so my questions. How precarious can a written thing be and still hold together? Does it exist when I’m not looking? Does it make reality go in and out of focus? To me any more stable object would seem like propaganda and a lie. Still, we attempt to fly. Mid-flight barely able. Momentarily congealing into a flying thing. Our search for the perfect airport. To be dislocated transformed. Awkward stuttering wingless.
Karin Randolph is the author of Either She Was (a Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize Winner, judged by David Shapiro.) Most recently published in New American Writing 38 (2020), 39 (2021) and 40 (2022).