Gallery Series #3 Interview with Cory Hutchinson-Reuss and Giselle Simòn

Interview by Margaret Yapp, October 5, 2022 in Iowa City, Iowa. Edited for length and clarity. 

ON HOW THE COLLABORATION CAME ABOUT:

Cory Hutchinson-Reuss: I had never done a collaborative project with a visual artist before. Nina Lohman (a former PromptPress editor) approached me and asked if I wanted to be involved with Gallery Series #3. She told me that this time they wanted to start with the text, rather than the images. Nina asked me if I had an artist in mind that I wanted to work with. I was like ahh… no. I thought they would need to find somebody for me, but then I was in RSVP (Iowa City) one day and saw Giselle’s work behind the counter. I didn’t know it was hers, I didn’t know Giselle! The work struck me. I was curious and wanted to get closer to it. I really wanted to touch it, but I didn’t. 

Giselle Simón: It’s actually kind of interesting because I hadn't displayed my visual work like that in Iowa City before. I’m very involved in my daily job and it takes up a lot of my capacity. My visual work is really a side note. So, when I get to actually make things, it’s during a very specific time. Most of the work you see here is work that I did at a Paper and Book Intensive, which is a two week sabbatical that I help organize every year. That’s when I get time to work on my things. That I actually had a few pieces accumulating was rare. So I think that this is all very serendipitous. 

ON “[seed purse / didn’t the days]” 

C: Well, that's the poem that I wrote in response to your work. Most of the poems I had already written. The final poem, “[seed purse / didn’t the days],” is my response to Giselle. I wanted it to be in a traditional prose poem bloc, but I wanted these little dashes to feel like perforations or gaps. Something I love about Giselle’s work is that I can find order and I can find randomness. The tension between intentionality, order, and pattern and chaos and randomness … I wanted something like that in the poem. I wanted the poem to hang together but feel a little bit like it could be broken apart. 

G: I do feel like every puncture and every hole is is an intentional one. But I don't want it to seem like it's too rigid. The hole is not machine made - the hand is in it. 

ON SHARED VOCABULARY:

C: I felt like there was some kind of shared vocabulary between our work because of the way [Giselle] uses material that relates to the kinds of images that are prominent in these poems. For example: a body as a container, containers with lots of punctures, or holes, or wounds, or having something embedded within the body, or feeling thinned out or translucent. I felt like I could sense some sort of correlation between Giselle's work and various bodily experiences I was trying to give language to. Like when I got to touch Giselle’s work, and I was holding it up and looking at the light shining through it. They aren’t X-rays, but there is some kind of X-ray-like quality to holding the work up and letting light come through it, and then seeing the objects embedded in the paper even more clearly. 

G: You're describing paper, paper making, and all of the qualities of paper! And to me, hole-punching is a way of mark making, a way of making a pattern. But you’re the second person who’s talked to me about the holes being wounds, and that is so interesting to me. It’s interesting to me, partially, because of the fact that my day job is being a conservator, so I’m fixing things. And in this work, I’m taking material away. It’s a sort of deconstruction. In your descriptions are things like mirrors, containers, chemical interactions - so in some ways, the poems are talking about these layers that you can actually see in the translucency of the paper. In these pieces, I used five different kinds of fibers, all of them allow you to see the layer underneath it for the punching or pulling out. 

C: The punctures do leave a beautiful pattern and texture. And in writing about my own experiences of wounding, I can see the patterns I was trying to make as well. 

[seed-purse/didn’t the days]

Didn’t night silt into mineral-scent & wet rock - didn’t I oxidize - didn’t diagnosis silence my ego’s opera - convert it to a scrawl - wasn’t I ordinary - didn’t trees bud & shatter into pink - didn’t I make a metaphor of everything - a double take - a cargo carried to the other shore - didn’t I stop plotting stories - sit with ferns instead - curled & embryonic like those green heads didn’t I feel fledgling - sapling - a little thing espaliered & fruiting - wasn’t I here - all my lives crammed into one house where the sisters turned my name on their tongues - broadcast it to all antennas - weren’t we a mudra - an energetic gesture - together - eating brioche - feeding crumbs to sparrows & starlings - didn’t afternoon suture me into its moss - each preparation for sleep capsize me into painted waters - wasn’t uncertainty mine to carry - wasn’t I heron blue & gazing over flooded grasses - refracting wind - listening for submerged life - wasn’t I here - didn’t I dream myself sitting at a desk, wearing someone else’s hair - didn’t that wild girl save me at last - didn’t she multiply - weren’t the days full of themselves - wasn’t I elemental - chemical - didn’t my muscles shudder like a tree being abandoned by a flock - didn’t I keep my patience for once - didn’t the days press me with their questions - truth wriggle out of place - God shed some skin - didn’t I slough the cells of at least one self - didn’t the air smell like rising bread - didn’t I rove & amble - the hill greener than ever - the kids’ hair whipping in the wind - wasn’t it a feral edge - a wake - didn’t the deer mistake me for their mother - each beloved’s eye become my horizon - wasn’t I here and nowhere else