So how to approach the text, that’s the big question and that takes a lot of experimentation and thinking. In the case of in the books I’ve done with poetry I wanted to keep it very graphic, in other words — another way of saying that might be that the images are flat there’s not a lot of deep space on the page so that it doesn’t conflict too much with the poem which sits right on the surface of the page.
If that makes sense. So that the poem adds a visual element, has kind of an equality with the visual elements that I create and they just visually are balancing each other rather than the notion of a poem existing in a kind of metaphysical ethereal space and we look past the poem and we see into a world that the poem is talking about.
I look at it more from a design sort of a view, I want the page to really look of a piece and kind of close together somehow. I don’t know if that makes sense. With my, with my own books for instance John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, that went through many, many different approaches and finally when I decided to let the sort of characters that I had created in an earlier version sort of stand in abstract characters of John Coltrane’s music that kind of started to work and that they would then overlap visually as they overlap in sound, in John Coltrane’s music. So to find that hook or — find that hook to hang the illustrations on it takes me a long time of just doodling around or well thinking, or walking, or sitting, or drinking coffee staring into space.
