Pin it on a wall

Five years ago, I began sticking my poetry to a wall, forsaking frames and pinboards in favor of nails or a clipboard. See —

(sculpture, drawing, and painting by Robert Littleford, Rachael Adams, and Patricia Thornton)

A poem on the wall probably seems like an inconsequential shift in presentation, but I was surprised at how out-of-sorts it made me feel. When I unpicked that feeling, I realized I had attached considerable significance to the book format and the sense of seclusion within its pages. I liked tucking things away, namely myself. I liked a sequence, and some of my most intimate poetry was buffered by other less revealing, safer poems. So, placing a poem on a wall exposed it as an isolated entity that broke established norms and revealed how I had succumbed to many unspoken rules. This makes sense because there’s an inherent clash between the external conventions of decoding information, the evolutionary purpose of writing, and the exposure of one’s inner self. The act of writing is curious and paradoxical. Writers use a system of standardization to give shape to and interconnect their most intimate ideas and create shopping lists and instruction manuals. I think the all-encompassing applicability of words, spanning the gamut from the banal to the arcane, has given the writing process a strict set of regulations that writers unknowingly follow. Breaking away from the rules of physical format is just as liberating as the more common breakaway of style and grammar.

I know that placing text on a wall is nothing new in artistic circles, though it’s often in short form; as a novelist, placing a few tricky passages on the wall and contemplating them from the perspective of a visual artist changes how I feel. Moving beyond the confines of the traditional page and book helps me understand how my words might work in other environments. As writers (and artists), we must experience as many environments as possible for our work because after it’s released, it lives outside of the given format and the fluctuation of people and place. Work that endures has the ability to flex into any moment of time. So, pin it on a wall and take stock of what happens—enough with your damn rules!

All the best,

Gretchen