May 24, 1996
New York artist Eric Drooker remembers that he was 8 years old when he first became aware of Allen Ginsberg; riding on a cross-town bus, his mother leaned over and whispered in his ear that the man in front of them was a famous poet. "I didn't know what to think," Mr. Drooker says now. "What did this mean? What did a famous poet do all day--write poems?"
A few years later, Mr. Drooker came across a recording of Mr. Ginsberg reading his classic poem Kaddish. He recalls, "I didn't get most of it, but I liked it right away. I felt, here's a guy who's speaking a language I can understand, whereas most poetry left me cold. And I liked that he was so approachable, so accessible--a lot of the Beat writers ended up moving to Woodstock or the West Coast, but Allen stayed right here on the Lower East Side."
Now these two longtime Lower East Siders have collaborated on Illuminated Poems, a collection of Mr. Ginsberg's poems (two of them never before published) accompanied by Mr. Drooker's paintings and drawings.
The first time Mr. Drooker spoke to Mr. Ginsberg, he recounts, was at one of the Lower East Side's historic events--the Tompkins Square riot of 1988, when nightstick-wielding police on horseback attempted to clear the park of the homeless people who had been living there. Amid this chaotic scene, the two spent the night wandering around the neighborhood, talking. Mr. Ginsberg quickly realized that this young man was the artist who had produced the street posters that he had been collecting around Tompkins Square Park for years.
It was Mr. Ginsberg who first suggested the two collaborate on a work, but Mr. Drooker who proposed the idea of an illustrated collection of Mr. Ginsberg's poetry. Says Mr. Ginsberg, "I was flattered and inspired by the fact that such a young radical artist would be inspired by my ideas. I was also curious to see how he would interpret my work. And I thought that with today's lowered-attention-span TV consciousness, this would be a kind of updating of the presentation of my work for the 90's." Mr. Ginsberg gave Mr. Drooker access to all of his poems, from which Mr. Drooker selected the 36 included in the book; each poem is accompanied by one of Mr. Drooker's pen-and-ink drawings, watercolors or gouache paintings.
"They're very much his own vision," says Mr. Ginsberg. "To me, the megalopolis landscapes are the most interesting, that gigantic skyscraper vision. He really captured that sense of Moloch I was going for in the second section of Howl--'Moloch whose buildings are judgments!'"
"Actually, I was a little concerned at first," Mr. Drooker says about his work on the poems, "because I knew that it can be dangerous to try to illustrate a poem. One of the nice things about poetry is that it conjures up an image in the reader's mind--you're getting your own image, rather than simply some artist's interpretation of it. So I don't call them illustrations. I call them 'illuminations'--they're pictures that relate in some way to the subject matter. The pictures somehow vibrate with the words."
Before Illuminated Poems, Mr. Drooker produced a full-length work entitled FLOOD! A Novel in Pictures (also published by Four Walls Eight Windows), which received the 1994 American Book Award. Narrated almost entirely in pictures, the book depicts the wanderings of a young artist through the nighttime streets of the contemporary metropolis, observing all around him the signs of a civilization in decay--poverty, brutality, meaningless spectacle and everywhere a terrifying loneliness. As the rains fall and the flood waters begin to rise, the nameless hero fears an impending apocalypse while dreaming of redemption (indeed, the book ends with the image of an ark). Through its evocation of loss, dread, darkness, and rebirth, FLOOD! becomes a sort of modern folk tale, brought vividly to life by Mr. Drooker's wordless poetry.
Mr. Drooker worked on FLOOD! for some six years, using scratch board, a pen-and-ink technique in which the ink is scratched away with a razor blade creating a carved effect, like a woodcut. "I like working with a razor blade creating a carved effect, like a woodcut. "I like working with a razor blade," he says. "It's a visceral way to work, especially when I'm working on a political theme. It just seems right somehow that I'm scratching a surface, rather than just gliding over it with ink."
In producing FLOOD!, Mr. Drooker was consciously working in the tradition of German Expressionist artists like Kathe Kollwitz and George Grosz, as well as the Belgian artist Frans Masereel and the American Lynd Ward, who in the 1930s created the first visual novels--politically oriented works, drawn in that same woodcut style, depicting the hardships of life during the Depression. (In fact, Mr. Ginsberg himself was inspired by Ward's work in his writing of Howl 40 years ago, and Ward's subsequent illustrations of the poem's "Moloch" section appear in The Annotated Howl, published by HarperCollins.)