The principle of non-repetition: once I begin to say the same thing over again, this blog will come to a halt.

Barbara Guest’s “Musicality” is a poem from the collection “Fair Realism.” But it is also a book, a collaboration with artist June Felter printed in an edition of 1000 copies. The text seems impoverished when printed as words alone, without Felter’s art-work. In “Musicality (the book) the phrase “levelled crusts” appears, all alone, opposite a pencil-drawing of a row of low houses that does in fact look like a “levelled crust.” In the pictureless “Fair Realism” version of this poem, this line might easily pass unnoticed. Needless to say it doesn’t get a page of its own.

Felter’s drawings have a “transparent” quality. They are both simple in technique and extraordinarily subtle. People reading this poem in its more widely disseminated version will never see these drawings, unless they are so taken with Barbara Guest that they order every possible available item listed on amazon.com. Of course, this collaboration between an artist and a poet is ostensibly “about” a third art, music. At one point, pencil outlines of trees are interpreted by the poet as “half notes.”

I’ve always wanted to learn how to draw. I went to the bookstore the other day to see if I could get a how-to book, but was put off by the illustrations in the books I found: I didn’t want to learn to draw like THAT. They were the exact opposite of Felter’s drawings, in that their technique was “busy,” over-complicated, in proportion to the relatively meager results obtained.