A Struggle for Power Between Images and Words: Interview with Sarah Howe

The paradigms of poetry and the visual arts rarely collide, though TS Eliot Prize winner Sarah Howe successfully bridges the gap with a new series of poems, Six Windows, which she presented at the Asia Art Archive (AAA) on November 9. Howe’s first ripples in literary spheres were made with Loop of Jade (2015), a self-conscious and reflective book that explored both her mother’s life as well as her own. Born in Hong Kong in the 1980s, Howe moved with her family to England when she was seven years old, partly due to the intensifying political anxiety in Hong Kong. Years later, she would study English literature and complete her PhD, with a focus on the relationship between visual art and its poetic representations.

AAA invited Howe to explore its inventory of contemporary Asian art, which informed the creation of Six Windows. ArtAsiaPacific sat down with Howe to discuss the power of poetry and art, as well as the nature of the written response.

The title of your talk this evening is Six Windows. Can you explain the origin of this phrase?

I’ll start by explaining that I needed to find some way of not just engaging the archive here at AAA; I wanted to sample a cross section of Asian art much rather than look at specific areas that curators had put together. It occurred to me that the way to create that core sample of the archive might be to use their search box. It shows you what pan-Asian artists have been doing with an idea or a subject over certain decades. You can write histories in a different way, by seeing across international borders.

I think there were hundreds and hundreds of different works that had something to do with windows, whether it was generally or in the title, and it seemed to lead artists to think about art in a meta, abstracted way. WJT Mitchell, the art theorist in Chicago, calls them metapictures—pictures that are about what a picture is.

Was there a particular artist whose work you examined closely?

I began with someone like the Filipino artist Roberto Chabet, who has returned again and again over several decades to this idea of the window, whether in painting, or by putting an actual window on the wall of a gallery and hanging a hotel’s “Do Not Disturb” sign on one of the handles. That image actually ended up in my final six [poems] because I just love that idea—the transition from a door to window, the transition of those two thresholds. The expectation with one is that you can pass through, and the other is that you have to linger at that point and travel to the other side with your imagination.

Part of your talk this evening is about how written responses to visual art or poetry can construct new lenses for the audience to view art. 

My PhD was about how poets wrote about visual artworks, so I am actually very interested in how you might make that translation between different forms of media. I’m also interested in the power dynamic between words and images, because the particular area I studied was actually the English reformation [in the 16th century], when English became a very suspect yet powerful thing to be suppressed. I’m aware of a struggle for power [between words and images], which I even see when I read the labels for contemporary art exhibitions: how is the language of this catalogue or plaque on the wall changing the way I see this artwork?

Let’s talk about Two Systems (2014 – ), your erasure poems. Can you describe what an erasure poem is?

It’s actually a form that had its origins in the 1960s when the avant-garde struck on this idea of creating a sort of dialogue with existing texts where they would create a new poem that was excavated out of the language of an existing text.

The act of erasing words from a document can be seen as a visual art form instead of a poetic one. At what stage does it go from a visual act to poetry, or vice versa?

I find erasure poems most compelling when they actually engage with the materiality of the text, so I wouldn’t want to reprint two systems as a text file because the dialogue between an erasure poem and its root text is very important, and I struggled for a while about how to simultaneously represent the un-erased and the erased. I guess the other thing is erasure poems tend to feel, at least in part, like something that looks like nonsense. It might not feel like conventional poetry, but it takes on this new dimension, which has more to do with appreciating its visual aspect.

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