Why Is the Measure of Love Loss, a collaboration between artist Diana Schmertz and poet Alyse Knorr, explores the nature of time and memory after the end of a love affair. The project’s original manifestation is as a set of three books, each containing a series of poems etched on tracing paper in the poet’s hand and layered over the artist’s drawing of a moment of contact. Steel covers protectively encase the three books, while a cord of soft suede skin, affixed by magnetic clasps, wraps delicately around the metal. Each book opens in a different direction and demands a different reading itinerary from the viewer.
The project creates an archival chronicle of multiple encounters side by side and evokes an accumulation of memories. Together, the drawings and poems examine the tension between tangible experiences and intangible language, between the body and the mind, and between a moment and the memory of a moment. The work interrogates the ways that, through their depictions of love, artists and writers can re-imagine reality and reconstruct a lost past.
Some of these poems first appeared in Ballast (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019); BOAAT; Dream Pop Journal; DREGINALD; Gigantic Sequins; Hobart; Leveler; NightBlock; Nimrod; Press Pause Press; Stirring; The Figure 1; Touch the Donkey; Whiskey Island;WWW∑ Word For/Word; and Year of the Dog.
The text responds to or collages lines from William Blake, Olga Broumas, René Descartes, Emily Dickinson, Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, Sigmund Freud, Lorine Niedecker, Thomas De Quincey, Adrienne Rich, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Stevie Smith, Jeanette Winterson, and others.
“Why Is the Measure of Love Loss” is the first line in Jeanette Winterson’s book Written on the Body.
Each book is 10x11 inches @2017