Science and Art

 What is the effect of art on the brain? Read the article for one answer. The work of Quentin Massys, who painted this portrait, decreased blood flow in the test subjects. Bad rap, if you ask us.

Videopoem

We have a videopoem in the new Soundzine, live now. A special thanks to Sherry O'Keefe, the new editor,an accomplished poet whose work we both enjoy, for inviting us to submit.

Pandora's Box

The gathering together of NEW WORK

A Review of MULTIVERSE

What a lovely surprise, eh? Thank you, Grady Harp, from the Snell sisters!


Far More Than A Poetic Experiment, May 30, 2009
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

MULTIVERSE by Cheryl Snell is a short collection of poignant poems that edge the idea of a MULTIple universe replacing the concept of a simple UNIverse. But lest the reader be afraid that the scientific aspect of this premise is prevalent in this collection, it must be pointed out that despite the original 'idea' of the title, the poems in this collection are immediately accessible, very beautiful works indeed.

The flow and meaningful content of this book of poems by a seasoned writer is made even more seductive by the addition of expressionistic paintings by Janet Snell. Rarely have poems been so well 'illustrated' or at least so integrated as they are by the two Snells working in tandem. At the heart of these poems and art is a sense of home, of the sounds of and sense of night, and the radiant meanderings of on seasonal strokes. And yet Snell knows how to bring all of nature together, to include humans, in a touching manner. For example:

DYING SEASON
By the time our father bolted
from his sickbed to squeeze
the nurse's breast, we'd worked
ourselves into a frenzy of waiting.

When he fell back on the pillow,
He's sleeping, we whispered.
He can't hear our words' mad buzz.

Outside, a dragonfly, transparent
wings on a blue-tinged stick,
hovered above a broken cricket
dragging though the backyard thatch.

It rose up, sudden as a mind changing,
and the room sagged with breath
held against the last thing we wanted to see:
a pair of wings escaping, the world left out of reach.

This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE.
-Grady Harp, May 09

...in which the sisters are beside themselves

The author's copies of Prisoner's Dilemma came today. The BOX was heavy, the scissors were sticky, there was way too much tape! It went like this---

Fireworks threatened to take the top off.
Wet palms twitched under eruptions of happiness.

Judgments collected under the awning like rain,
hummed against the shell of her ear. Her skull
slammed in her head. Payroll hands weighed the options
like so much gold.

Runaway shoes piled up, laces tangled
like tongues caught in a lie. Checkmark wings
on canvas heels had been tools toward anonymity,
erasing footprints where they fell, driving zigzag dogs crazy
as they nipped at nothing.

Each day had been a map of dark topographies.
Turning into a skid would only postpone
whatever came next.

Every step along a lucky streak
uncovers a foreign place tricked out
with new lies and silences. Rising up
to meet the path of great good fortune,
she could have done more, if you want to know.

A Wall You Can't See Over

This is the story of how our new book, Prisoner's Dilemma, came to be:
It's 2005, and Janet unscrolls a stack of new drawings in pen and ink, charcoal, lithocrayon, chalk and pencil. What’s the subject? Cheryl wonders out loud. Heads, Janet says. That is, the semi-abstract human head in various states of mind, its psychology graphically shown and connected to the abstract background by its particular vulnerabilities. Those are depicted and distorted through the artist's vocabulary, anchoring it to the background and making the metaphor succinct.

One drawing in this set came about when one of Janet’s friends showed her the brace on his broken hand. It looks like something Helmut Newton would photograph on a skinny Vogue model, Janet told Cheryl at the time. But where would Helmut place it on the model’s body? He never puts anything in the expected place. Hmm, Janet said and began to think in images, because Cheryl never heard another word about it until she saw the drawing called Split.

I think in images, Janet says. I work like an expressionist, with the figure in the style of the German expressionists, and the space, abstract expressionist. To present images in a more definite space, I improvise in a spontaneous vein. I’m led around by the brush in an automatic way that allows for sensitivity. Subsequent decisions are then made from practice and experience. Executed premeditated meaning makes lifeless art—--no improvisation, no process.

The touch of brush or charcoal to canvas or paper leads in an intuitive direction. When I'm doing a painting that I've already sketched out, the painting doesn't exactly look like the sketch--fortunately--or the process would get boring, with little room for imagination or spontaneity. The meaning in my work is the poetry between image and space—implied rather than overt. Landscape is abstract and can be felt. The figurative elements are the elements I often start with, with the space improvised.

In my drawings, I make figures in a space suited to them. Using the figurative head in an abstract space focuses the relationship between the figurative and abstract elements and lets the viewer experience the psychology of the human figure. To connect the head to its surroundings, I add various elements to establish the psychological relationship between head and space. I am especially interested in what happens when the space becomes an image.

The Prisoner's Dilemma series was done all at once. The poems followed slowly, with much back-and-forth and revision. False starts and paper cuts. Theme emerged, and fought for a toehold.The big connector between the sisters' work is their shared sense of melancholy. Janet's characters are always trying to see, or to connect, and Cheryl puts a narrative to the image and uses it as a springboard for her own. That's probably the biggest difference, within all the similarities.

Lopside Press

Update on PD

Here is the updated cover for the new poetry/art book, Prisoner's Dilemma. It's at the printers now! If you'd like a preview, or to order a copy,CLICK THIS. If you'd like an autographed copy, send your postal address to prisonersdilemma2@gmail.com

Black Market Review

Take a look at Janet's latest PUBLICATION !

Prisoner's Dilemma, published!

My sister and I are pleased to announce the publication of our new poetry and art book,PRISONER'S DILEMMA. A few details about the work:

In game theory’s prisoner’s dilemma problem, two prisoners are given the choice between silence, and the betrayal of the other. The optimal choice turns out to be betrayal and therein lies the game’s paradox. In the work of the Snell sisters, the undercurrent of treachery winds its way through lyrical, narrative free verse accompanied by drawings of eccentric heads.

The book opens with depictions of three wounds—Tear, Cut, and Split—and examines reactions to physical and psychological hurt. In “Tear,” the drawing of a blind-eyed head with an endless tongue, done in charcoal, illustrates the poem’s central metaphor. The tongue extends into the brain and out of the head in spikes, making manifest the synesthesia of the moment: “the way you dragged your tongue/across the metal railing, /the snow irresistible, your brother/tugging you out of your skin,/with a devotion exquisite as pain.” The book goes on to delineate ways in which other corruptions-- by the body, time, luck-- influence our behavior. Who will rat on who? What is the final cost?

We meet characters like a disappointed former cheerleader who thinks she’s settling for a man who is “…building her a barbeque pit, trying to ignite the flame/that will stun her into loving him”; a woman whose desire to escape overtakes her at her garden of White Hellebore--“perhaps this is a metaphor for flesh.” In “Chase,” a man would “have followed her the way she wanted, /but night curves without warning, the stars/do not touch, the road stretches down to the sea.”

The drawing of an averted eye in “Absence” shows an empty socket with a line leading to the displaced eye. It scans its environment for the man who will “retrieve my muffled/answer, lips at my ear naming everything/you missed.” The mouth is drawn in pencil and smudged charcoal, erased slightly with a kneaded eraser, an effective way to portray the woman’s muffled answer to the man’s question, “Will you be alright?”

Sometimes things go from “Bad to Worse.” The drawing that accompanies the poem of that name shows a shadowed one-eyed face molded in white, stuck to the skull as if to suffocate it. In “Lover’s Lane,” a woman returns to the scene of a mistake, “a hatchback,/a string of yeses pulled from a no” to open “the door, though you’re in no mood for a ride.” And in “Good Cry” –and why shouldn’t we?—an onion comes apart in layers, “unlike your own skin, holding in its factories.”

The sequence of poems about leaving—one of the prisoner’s choices-- brings the narrative arc back again to a final wound. “The Persistence of Holes” is a study in grief, and ends the collection on a melancholy note: “Come here, she might have said. Hold me.”


"Richard Lovelace defiantly proclaimed that 'stone walls do not a prison make' but the implication is that we make our own prisons and they can be anywhere: a car, a house, your own body, a sunlit street. Cheryl's poems are letters from prison, from all these prisons and more, but the book is not confining. Over and over again, we are given hints about how to make the most of our stay.I spent a good deal of time wondering just what the 'prisoner's dilemma' might be.I never found a definitive answer, but the book left me with a strong impression that the dilemma is whether or not to accept one's sentence. Do you become Houdini or King Rat? Typical of a poet, Cheryl wants to be both at once, and in these pages, it seems almost possible." Don Zirilli, contest judge

Janet's video, coutesy Belinda Subraman

Multiverse

Introducing Cheryl's new chapbook, MULTIVERSE, a science-themed collection of poems with art by Janet.
The collection is published by Didi Mendendez, of MiPo fame. Thanks, Didi!
If you'd like a hard copy CLICK THIS.

New Pubs

The sisters make an appearance INTHEFRAY right here.
Thanks to Annette Hyder, editor of the Imagine section, who is a joy to work with.