Helen Pruitt Wallace – Poet

 

What I love about collaborations is that they take separate artistic expressions and by combining them (and asking them to play off each other), they create an entirely new expression–a resonance if you will, that goes beyond what either singular construction could conjure. The creative act is expanded into new energy that spills beyond each individual artist and/or medium.

I’ve been lucky to collaborate twice with the artist Katee Tully, once for a Fantastic Ekphrastic event at Soft Water Studios, where I wrote a poem off of her amazing installation entitled The Dig, which was then read aloud by the terrific actress, Bonnie Agan–so a third collaboration!

A couple of years later Katee and I collaborated again for The Pink Event: The Pink Beneath Our Feet, a fundraiser for the SunLit Festival. In this collaboration–hosted at the office of Behar+Peteranecz Architecture, whose fabulous digs added its own vibe–Katee’s artwork played off lines of my poems selected from my book, Pink Streets.

(Or maybe it was the other way around? That’s what’s cool about collaborations).

You can read the poem inspired by Katee Tully’s Dig, here.

For the past few years I’ve curated the collaborative poetry category for the annual surrealist Exquisite Corpse Games, directed by Ann Marie Cash. In addition to the participation of visual artists, musicians and dancers, 9 different poets each write one stanza which is spontaneously put together with 2 other poets’ stanzas to form 3 separate poems. Always fun to see how they turn out!

Lastly, I’m honored to be collaborating with artist Mark Aeling by writing a poem to encircle the base of his large September 11, 2001, commemorative sculpture which will be unveiled at the ArtsXchange later this year.

Helen Pruitt Wallace is the City of St. Petersburg’s Poet Laureate
and hosts a regular Poetry Series at The Dalí Museum –
Find out more at helenwallacepoetry.com