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| Vol. 18, No. 27 | April 15, 1999 |
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| Vol. 18, No. 27 | April 15, 1999 |
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Art and language have always been closely linked for poet Gibbons Ruark, English. But, perhaps, never more closely than now when his poem, "The Window in the Room," is included in the catalog of paintings by family friend and artist Betty Watson of Greensboro, N.C.
Watson's painting, "Golden Figures," inspired "The Window in the Room," which Ruark wrote in the late '60s. The poem is well-known for its play on words:
"Robert Watson, who is a well-known poet, and I taught together at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro," Ruark says. "In 1968 when we were getting ready to move here, my wife and I wanted to bring one of Betty's paintings with us as a connection to the people and the place. We went to her studio and bought "Golden Figures." In it two nudes, a woman and a man, are walking in front of a window. There are other houses in the background and a banister in the foreground. It looks as if they are getting ready to go upstairs. Betty painted it in Provincetown where the Watsons spent their summers at the time."
In Delaware, "Golden Figures" was installed in the living room of the Ruarks' first Newark home--faculty housing on East Delaware Avenue.
"I kept looking at it and I decided to try to write something about it," Ruark says. "The painting seemed like a window to me--it opened up the room, added another dimension. Looking at the painting takes you into another room and there is a window there."
Quite accidentally, Ruark says, the first stanza ended up in terza rima, rhymes that have to do with three, a formula made famous by Dante in The Divine Comedy, where the middle line of the first stanza has the same sound as the first and third line of the second.
Years later, in 1974-75, Ruark found himself living just outside Florence, Italy, in the area where Dante flourished.
"I was in a church in Florence where the 15th-century painter Masaccio has frescos, and one of them shows Adam and Eve, being banished from the Garden of Eden. I realized from the positioning of the figures--so like the ones in 'Golden Figures'--that this must have been Betty's inspiration. Both pieces had that sort of golden autumnal look associated with the fall. When I wrote my poem suggesting that the two figures in Betty's paining were connected to Adam and Eve I didn't even know this painting existed," Ruark said.
The year in Italy, Ruark said, was a very visual one for him. Not speaking the language, he relied on his eyes to tell him stories of the locale. "A number of images from that year have ended up in poems of mine--just bits and pieces of remembrances of what I'd seen," he said.
"After Florence, I was more inclined to see the possibilities of writing poems about painting and other visual arts."
Since then, Ruark has been inspired to write poems about Monet's paintings of water lilies, Alfred Sisley's painting of women walking in the snow and a Chinese tapestry entitled "Horse and Willow Tree in the Moonlight" that hangs in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Recently, a curator at the North Carolina Museum of Art included Ruark among noted writers asked to write something about a specific work in the museum's collection. Ruark agreed to participate in the project and chose to write a poem about the painting, "Swamp Mallows," by Ben Burns. The painting of the backwaters of Assateague inspired Ruark to write about his own experiences fishing with his father when he was growing up in the 1940s.
The poem is included in Ruark's new book, Passing Through Customs: New and Selected Poems.
--Beth Thomas
