“You can’t have it all,” Barbara Ras, American poet, read. The audience was full of people eating spanakopita and cheese cubes, sipping on wine. “But there is this.”
This is the final line from Ras’ poem “You Can’t Have it All.” Originally published in her award-winning 1998 poetry collection “Bite Every Sorrow,” the poem now stands alone in a new book that pairs the lines of Ras’ poem with paintings by Terrell James. This edition of the poem was published by Trinity University Press on Sept. 15, which Ras served as the director of from its revitalization in 2002 until 2015. Trinity hosted the reception for the launch in Ruth Taylor Recital Hall on Oct. 22.
“I think paying attention is something that will free the imagination, will give depth and abundance to a poem,” Ras said. “Often just paying attention to a single scene or a single image can, for me, get a poem started. And it may not be that single image that stays in the poem because I revise tirelessly, but the image can generate the feeling that you want the poem to carry through, and that you want to invest the poem with that feeling, and send it into the world.”
James and Ras met after Ras discovered James’s work in a book at the house of Sarah Fitzsimons, the host of the event. Ras said that she was smitten with her work.
“I think that Terrell’s art compliments this poem so magnificently because there are connections, but they aren’t literal and they might not be immediate, but there is a resonance between her paintings and the words on the page,” Ras said. “Our collaboration has been kind of magical.”
James’ works in this book are oil paintings, a medium that she has been working with since she was 10. Her painting on page 18 of the book consists of burnt orange, yellow ochre and pale green, partnered with the line “You can have the dream, / the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.” Though she is mostly an oil painter, James works with many other mediums, from printmaking to sculpture.
“One of the most exciting things about this project for me is getting to work with another art form, which is poetry,” James said. “Poetry has always been very important to me. I read a lot of poets. Often, my work is finished when I name a piece, and a lot of times I find the words for titles through lines of poems.”
Mary Katherine Schmidt, first-year art history and communication double-major, works with Trinity’s literary magazine, the Trinity Review. Schmidt spoke about the relationship between art and poetry.
“I think it’s a combo that makes sense, you have two cryptic things together and they just work,” Schmidt said. “It still is really neat seeing how humans can create things and be like, ‘Oh, this is very similar. I feel this way,’ even if it’s separate from one another. It’s like a universal theme that ties us all together.”
