Artist, illustrator and writer, Janet Kozachek, will present a power point lecture March 3, 2022, on how her studies in classical Chinese language and poetry have influenced the structure and content of her published poetry.  Chinese poetry plays an essential role in Chinese visual art, with the two symbiotically intertwined into a cohesive whole.  Western art does have its own history of text and image, with illuminated manuscripts and seventeenth century emblem books, for instance.  Yet although the art of word and juxtaposed image continued to evolve in Eastern cultures, language and visual art went their separate developmental ways in Europe and the United States.  Indeed, in western colleges and universities in the mid-twentieth century onwards, words in art and art in words have often been the subjects of mutual suspicion.  Art historians were admonished not to “get their hands dirty,” by experimenting with studio materials.  Art students were often told to avoid visual representations that alluded to texts or stories.

In her poetry, Kozachek integrates image with text by drawing upon the etiologies of Chinese characters and structures her work by making use of such devices as antithetical couplets.  These and other poems will be explored in examples from her full-length poetry book, A Rendering of Soliloquies - Figures Painted in Spots of Time, to be released by Finishing Line Press this February.  Copies will be available for signing.

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Janet Kozachek 639 Wilson Street NE Orangeburg, SC 29115 www.janetkozachek.net