Since a poem is composed of contrived form that interprets experience, and makes no attempt to simulate life, a visual illustration cannot explain a poem or make it intelligible. What it can do, through the artifice of visual imagery, is to function as a parallel text. With post-modernism, autonomy is a less precious commodity and interconnectedness permits new fusions of word and image, alerting us to both difference and similarity. Matisse, as an old man, voiced a precept which had guided his pictorial efforts all his life. To see is itself a creative operation, requiring an effort.
Vision begins with sight.
The eye wakes up. The challenge faced by painters and poets is to wake up the eye by stirring the imagination. The challenge faced by a poet and a painter working together is indeed great. In The Horn of Plenty a poet, Chris Mann, and a painter, Julia Skeen, have accepted the challenge of juxtaposing words and visual images to stimulate different levels of imagination. Rich in references, the images conjured by poetic words play across one's inner eye, as the physical eye explores the images on paper.