Nancy Kuhl’s poems invoke an electrically charged landscape and the people inhabiting this landscape are themselves storm clouds, forming between cold and hot masses of air and discharging violently as lightning. Here is a stormy tempestuous night, a love letter from which only fragments remain, shards of passion cutting open (in Sisyphian fashion) a wound again and again. The atmosphere is charged with a dangerous, thrilling energy; the attraction is violent, irrational, and Dionysian. Someone may end up getting a head ripped off.

I’ve created these images as digital collages in Photoshop by merging images of Lichtenstein figures, lightning, and auroras with the faces of people just about to kiss. Lightning and the subsequent Lichtenberg figures are fractal patterns. This quality of being a recursive pattern to me seems apt for representing an emotional landscape, for depicting the incremental & minute aspects of a poetic exploration of passion.

 

thought

Struck

push | a surge | unforgettable
green air | a torrent | ignite
the house | dress me
in a shirt of fire | came from
the clouds | there came |
lightning | surge, the push
of it | flood of flame | in her
house | in this bright this
fervent embrace | house alight |
alight ablaze afire | her house
a red sun | a house fixed and
radiant | a storm a sudden
declaration | a star, a burning
August moon | cloud and
blaze | it came | electric and
unlike any other sky | a stream,
a flood, light-splash | sudden
and crimson and certain | it
came | a ship’s mast | alight |
fire a length of rope | a braid
| down the chimney | a smart
clap of thunder broke upon
the house | a whip | glowing
red | memory of sun | Fix
my eyes upon the glowing
sparks | the house where it
stood | a smart clap | strike
radiant | a devouring instant