This past year I joined a game of Telephone! My poet friend Kortney Garrison, who always has the best gems of recommendations, clued me in and I promptly joined. All in all, over a thousand artists across the world used each other’s work as a creative catalyst for a new work, in many different disciplines. As a poet who loves the challenge of an ekphrastic piece, the entire idea was a delight.
Recently the collaborators behind Telephone released a fantastic site where you can track the progression of each artwork, from where it began to when it ended. I signed up late enough that I was the last one in a chain – which you can see from start to finish here. I was thrilled to discover that the words I intuitively came up with in the third line of my poem, “coal” and “ash,” were directly related to the original piece of art. Somehow, after passing through nine other artists, much of the original essence of the prompt managed to come through.
It was such fun to have this chance observe more clearly the connection between artist and poet, which had been so formative for me in the years of writing my last collection.
JennaKFunkhouser 