I've long noticed that the freshest, most compelling description in prose tends to be written by poets. They shove cliches aside, reach deeper, distill. So when I was proofreading our December calendar (some things should not be left to chance) and saw the Kemper Museum's free "chance poetry" workshop listed, I signed up immediately.
I showed up excited and nervous (classes still have that effect on me). At the entrance to the museum classroom, instructor Eileen G'Sell didn't point me to a chair or cross my name off a list; instead, she waved a hat full of colored paper squares. I rustled around and extracted a purple one. This sent me off, like Alice, to the Purple Checkerboard table.
I braced myself to summon spontaneous creativity. Instead (exhale!) we got to wander through the "Chance Aesthetics" exhibit, an intriguing collection of random artistic experiments--gunshot paint tubes, automatic drawing, inkblots--by Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock, and Max Ernst, among others. Our only task? Write down two words, the odder the better, that occurred to us as we looked.
Squid. Splurt. Boggle. Striated. Detritus. This was fun. I grinned, imagining my husband muttering his scathing, "I could do that!" in front of the puddles or blasts. He wants art to be intentional, well thought-out, solicitous of its audience, and carefully wrought. These works were intersections of fate and free will, and meaning was both irrelevant and all-important. (And never literal or predictable.)
After returned to our classroom for a free lunch (what were the odds of that?), we did free association, letting our exhibit words stream through our consciousness and land in unexpected places. Then, replete with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes, I settled into the next task: tossing a penny onto the checkerboard. To write each line of our collaborative, chance poem, my partner and I would have to follow the directions Stickied to the square where the penny landed. We took turns, and the line with "an image from the backyard" was followed by "a tree," "an event in history," "an adverb." That cheese sandwich would have been churning in my husband's stomach by now--such silliness! But I felt almost giddy: no deadline, no facts to check, no bias to guard against, no word-count to match. All we needed was a way to make Napoleon make sense in a weeping willow, and the results bore no consequences in our lives.
Except to give our brains a chance to play.
And to remind us that human beings can make meaning out of anything.
--Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
