..in which the sisters discuss the urge to flee

Reservation


She enters the diner, a book
in her purse; sits down,
opens a menu. Tongues
on her sneakers
twist like the urge to flee.

She steals a glance at her wrist,
watch-face ticking in circles;
notices that the table has a head,
a chair with a back
and arms to rest her elbows on.

To knuckle her spine
against the chair’s ladder of slats
comforts her with some frame
of reference.

Carnations nod in a vase.
She fingers the blown glass,
its slender neck, the wet crystal lip.
The room begins to hum.


(from Prisoner's Dilemma)

Prisoner's Dilemma, bigger & better

CLICK THIS and you will find the new revised ans expanded edition of our book, PRISONER'S DILEMMA. Someone called it "part art object and part extended metaphor," and that's a drawing from it, above.

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

Facebook Prisoners

In a related story, we invite you to join our Facebook group for Prisoner's Dilemma. We'll have a good ol' time!

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

Sneak Preview

Here is the cover of our forthcoming book, PRISONER'S DILEMMA. Isn't she lovely?

Progress report

The images in our new poetry collection, Prisoner's Dilemma, are in the editing stages. The poems have been edited by a wonderful editor, Don Zirilli, who has a chap with Lopside Press. A reader wanted to know a little more about the book, so here goes:

The title comes from the prisoner's dilemma in math. The question of who will rat on whom is borne out in Janet's group of eccentric abstract-expressionist heads. The poems and drawings are sequenced with the opening three poems illustrating emotional wounds--Tear,Cut,and Split, followed by a series of flight or fight responses, finally circling around again to a reconciliation in The Persistence of Holes. The poems, though mostly in a narrative style, do not tell the story of the drawings, but rather use them as a jumping off point to extend the meaning.

What does it mean for a poet to collaborate with a visual artist? Poet Anne Waldman said in this article that “To conjure a particular knowledge you visualize an architectural structure and then you walk around and see the details that then bring back the words or the poetry or the line of thought”.

As an illustration, Kristin Prevallet offers the story from the Bhagavata Purana in which Krishna opens his mouth to show his mother the universe. “She wonders, is this a delusion of my own perception? She sees that her entire world is constructed with false beliefs. She questions her ego, and she suddenly sees herself as one among a series of cosmic particulars...The mother Ysoda, a poet in her own right, looked into a space and then filled it with the vastness of her mind. In doing this she altered the boundaries of herself in relation to the world."

That's worth thinking about.

Lopside Press

Our new ekphrastic poetry collection, Prisoner's Dilemma, won the chapbook contest sponsored by Lopside Press!The book will be out in July, and we couldn't be happier.