There are poems illustrated with art by the poet himself (William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and poems as textual interpretations of art (André Breton’s Constellations (1958), which accompanied 23 gouaches Joan Miró had painted earlier) but Dime-Store Alchemy is something more unique and revelatory to me: a prose poem encompassing the life and work of an artist, in this case a sort-of poetic biography of Joseph Cornell written by Charles Simic.
I like Cornell’s work and I know a bit about it but the first I’d heard of this book was when it caught my eye at the Strand a few weeks ago. I bought it and read it and there’s something appropriate about having one artist profile another, as in the actor-on-actor interviews of Interview magazine. On the surface, such a collaboration could be considered a flaky “kindred spirits” match-up. Yet Simic’s story isn’t just an airy rumination, it serves as an ultra-compact biography of the artist, mingled with miniature dissertations on found art and collage, scraps from the artist’s own writing, parallels among the artist’s contemporaries and less likely spirits (like Emily Dickinson), imaginations and recreations of Manhattan in the ’40s and ’50s, and passages as clockwork beautiful and mysterious as Cornell’s boxes. What a marvelous concept and one I’d like to see applied to other artists.