Calligramme On the Cover of a Magazine

I wonder how many poems have made the cover of a magazine?  A calligramme I made of Marilyn Monroe’s face graces the cover of the latest Poets & Artists magazine (#31, January 2012).

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This is a collaboration issue around the theme “Icon” and I worked with the painter Judith Peck. Judith was game to entertain my Marilyn obsession/project, which forced me to write a new Marilyn poem–“M / Ghost M”–which in turn helped me explore why I ghost her voice.  And out of that grew a detour and a challenge to do a calligramme of Marilyn’s face.  It also returned me to all my art history texts about Byzantine Ikons, those flat gold fields behind the heads of empresses and saints, and inspired Judith to inlay her cracks of her portrait with gold.

One of the interesting things that came out of the collaboration was a comment Judith made about how difficult it was to paint Marilyn, how every time she went deeper and tried to add depth to the portrait, she lost Marilyn.  In discussing this with my partner, Michael, he summed it up best: “If it doesn’t look like a copy, it doesn’t look like her.”