Words Off the Wall / Maybe it’s rare for a poet to dislike poems, but Evan Nagle–a poet himself–insists it’s only logical.

“A child or an adult can find enjoyment in building Lego castles while finding little enjoyment in looking at already-built Lego castles,” he says. “And some men, though few, I imagine, can find enjoyment in having sex while finding little enjoyment in flipping through a Penthouse magazine. My girlfriend and I love to play Scrabble, but we’re unlikely to buy a book full other people’s Scrabble scores. Ultimately, the pleasure of processing is separate from enjoying the completed output of a process. So, for me, you could say poetry is like eating cake. I like the process, but I don’t like the pounds it puts on.”

Nagle is one of nearly a dozen poets participating in Words Off the Wall–an experimental melding of the visual and literary arts at the Contemporary Museum of Art. Curator of Education Quala-Lynn Young organized the event to see how one art form affects the other.

“I’d like to bring the visual art community and the literary community into closer contact,” she says. “I feel that artists of different art forms have a lot to share and teach one another. Often artists participate very much in their own arena and that means they’re missing a lot. I believe that art forms presented in collaboration may give an audience a richer, more insightful experience than either art form could separately. If it’s done well, I predict the whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.”

Some members of the local literati were reluctant to get involved.

“I wasn’t inclined to participate, actually, as I don’t like writing to an assignment,” says Susan Schultz, publisher of Tinfish Press. “So I feel lucky that I found images that relate to my interests.”

Schultz’s poem Old Women Look Like This is inspired by Elizabeth Berdann’s portraits, which appear in the exhibition. Berdann’s depictions of old women are painted on copper, their faces cropped by heart- and diamond-shaped steel framing.

“My last book chronicled my mother’s decline into dementia, and I’ve continued to write about her and about old age,” says Schultz. “So when I saw Berdann’s portraits, I was hooked. I’ve seen paintings of old people before, but never paintings of very old people, those in their late eighties and nineties. That’s my mother’s age, and the ages of the people in her Alzheimer’s home. These pieces strike me as documentary, like photographs, and yet the way she frames them adds layers of whim and mystery.”

Contemporary visual artists like Fay Ku and Judy Fox explore how individuals inhabit the image they present and how images are projected upon an individual. Ku, current artist in residency, says she feels like the collaboration with the literary arts is an innovative way to connect artists of different mediums with art appreciators.

“I’m directly affected by the environment,” she says. “I can presume the same goes for poets. So if one enthuses the other, the collaborative result will most likely surprise us all.”

The first Words Off the Wall performance not only includes inter-related arts but also inter-generational artists. Two students from Mililani High School will perform alongside University of Hawaiʻi graduate students, professors and professional poets, thereby offering the audience different points of view.

UH PhD student Jaimie Gusman also chose one of Berdann’s pieces, “The Wall of Tongues.” The unconventional photographs suit Gusman’s avant-garde poetry and her perspective on the art form itself.

“As a poet, it isn’t so much important to have my work relate to the audience, but rather to include the audience as part of my work,” says Gusman. “T.S. Eliot said, ‘What a poem means is as much as what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely a reader in respect to his own works, forgetting its original meaning–or without forgetting, merely changing.’’’ Eliot was talking about the impersonal poet, but for Gusman, this means that poetry is temporal. “It becomes an experience for the reader as well as the poet,” she says. “I connected with The Wall of Tongues because like me, I think Berdann’s impulse was to create a temporal space for readers or viewers to inhabit, construct, make their own.”

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