What is What Love Is?

The short answer is that it’s a long story.

It’s a story that began more than a decade ago at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Florham Park, N.J., when I met fellow professor David Daniel. The two-dimensional studio arts are my domain and poetry belongs to David. We met while I was creating the first chapter of my graphic novel Long Time Gone and he invited me into his classroom to share my writing process with his students. Later, at work on the fifth chapter, I asked for his help with my verse.  Long Time Gone: Lost in Lotusland, is comprised almost entirely of poetic text, and I was a complete novice to poetic form. I still have my early draft page with his very gentle and supportive notes in red pencil. Fast forward to when David was preparing the manuscript for his second book of poetry, Ornaments, and he gave me a copy to read. I flipped out. David’s unflinchingly honest, funny, painful, joyous, reckless, and revealing poems blew away my ideas about what poetry could do (and do away with) for good. I remember joking to him that one day I’d make art to go with is poetry…

Upon publication of Ornaments, whenever I could attend David’s readings I’d go and draw moments from the event. These drawings would be made into unique artist books, which I’d later present to him in honor and celebration. In return, he’d give me vintage guitars in need of repair… but that’s a whole other story.

The start of this story, the story of What Love Is, begins at the end of 2022 when David asked me to make art to go with his newest collection of his verse. Like when I was asked to make a new illuminated manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy (the publisher expected a half-dozen drawings and instead got art on every page), I don’t think David had any idea what he’d get when I said yes. Which was brave of him. But by then we enjoyed a deep friendship, founded in our mutual love for music (aka Bob Dylan), vintage acoustic instruments, poetry, art, books, and celebrating our creative lives.

My work on What Love Is commenced in January 2023 with my first reading. The original manuscript contained thirty poems and over the course of a month I read through them all a few times, gathered impressions, and took notes. On February 19 I began making art for “Honeysuckle.” From the start I wanted to have my possible approaches to each poem be open, open to each poem’s suggestions. I felt that my job was to listen hard enough to the words to have a point of view of my own. Then to find its form. When we saw a three-page poem becomes a twenty-page graphic novel, David and I quickly figured out that we would have to divide the manuscript for publication into two parts. Thus, What Love Is: Book One.

David and I quickly developed a working methodology: text messages, phone calls, emails, and weekly in-person meetings on campus at FDU. Those Tuesday meetings, after my morning class and before his first class began, proved essential for hashing out every inch of my illuminations.

I’ve often said to David that I feel like I’ve been preparing for this project for my whole creative life, and that the threads that make the fabric of What Love Is can be found in my previous and ongoing work. Long Time Gone, my yet unfinished collaborative autobiographical graphic novel, made with my now twenty-one-year-old daughter Fiamma, tangles with the sprawling, messy intersection between art, life, and narrative verisimilitude. Images of our lives drawn from photographs mingle with abstract pages as the “true” story of a day in our lives unfolds as a comic book. In the images of real places, I drew them largely from my photographs. In chapter five, “Lost in Lotusland,” sestinas, villanelles, and sonnets were transformed into comics depicting my trips Duluth, Arezzo, and Rome.

There was one more poet I had to work with before I was ready, Dante. When I started in 2014, I couldn’t have imagined what it would be like spending more than eight years making a new completely illumined manuscript of the Divine Comedy. Having done it now, I hope to have deepened my understanding of how words, poems in particular, can appear on the page and what impact that can have on the reader’s experience and understanding of the verse. As I studied and often incorporated earlier artistic work inspired by the Commedia into my own version, I developed a certain interest in fidelity to the text, “getting it right.” Simultaneously, I developed a mildly contemptuous and often amused position when artists got it wrong. For instance, if Dante goes to all the trouble of telling you exactly where the flames were coming from (the feet, Inferno, Canto XIX, 27), why would you put them anywhere else? I don’t know, go ask Doré. But I digress.

Now I was ready for David. However, I’m not sure if he was ready for me. Was he ready to answer all kinds of questions about things he’d probably not thought of much at all? It’s like I took on some strange new roll - half movie director, half demented security guard demanding to see his papers: where does this poem take place? what street are you on? which direction were you looking? how big is the room? what did you look like when you were ten? what high school did you go to? what does it look like? what were you wearing? what music did you listen to at the time the poem takes place? who is the girl? who is the guy? what did they look like? can you get me their pictures?... you get the idea. I often found myself apologizing to David for my unrelenting obsession with trying to get the poem’s visual details right. A “Just the facts, ma’am,” approach to poetry on my part may prove misguided, but here I can work with a living poet, a poet more alive than most of us, and from whom we can learn so much about what love is. I want my illuminated spaces for David’s deeply autobiographical verse to furnish the reader with a visual experience of David’s poetic now. Stay tuned.