This is a printer-friendly version of an article from Zip06.com.
08/03/2016 08:30 AMGray Jacobik’s upcoming show, Lines Spoken in Paint, in Wax, in Words, at Maple and Main Gallery in Chester will feature something new: an exhibition that showcases both art and poetry. Gray will pair her writing with her paintings, using works that represent compatible themes in different artistic forms.
The show runs through Aug. 31. Gray will read selections from her poetry at Maple & Main on Thursday, Aug. 25 as well as participating in a group reading at the gallery on Wednesday, Aug. 10
The poetry featured in the current show comes from Gray’s latest book, The Banquet: New & Selected Poems, which won the 2016 William Meredith Award for poetry. (The prize is named for the late William Meredith, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who taught for many years at Connecticut College in New London.)
“I was chosen out of the blue; I guess they found me because of my reputation. I was dumbfounded,” Gray says of this most recent award.
The Meredith prize is the latest in a string that Jacobik has won, among them a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Yeats prize, the Juniper Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Award.
But that’s not the way her poetry career began. She submitted her work to contests for some 17 years before she won anything at all. In the process, she even abandoned the use of her first name. It is Jane, but she adopted her middle name, Gray, because she says she wanted to guard against a bias directed at women writers.
“When I sent work out for publication, I wanted a name that sounded gender neutral,” she explains.
Often, publishers changed the gender neutrality themselves, sending her replies that reversed the middle letters of her name to Gary.
Gray explains that winning a prize in a poetry contest can be crucial to having a book published in an academic or literary press. Since poetry does not make money for publishers, they charge “reading fees,” to poets to enter contests and then publish the winners. When Gray started out some 30 years ago, the fees ran to $25. Now, she says, they can be hundreds of dollars.
For Gray, as she progressed as a poet, failure to win a prize was more than a bit awkward. She was already an English professor at Eastern Connecticut State University.
“I was an academic and to be promoted, to get tenure, you’ve got to be published in the literary press and the way to get published is to win contests,” she says. “It became embarrassing. I had been a poet in residence, a professor of poetry, and I didn’t have a book.”
Now she has five published books, among them Little Boy Blue, an account of a troubled relationship with her son, to whom she had not spoken for two years at the time she composed the poems in 2006.
“At the time I wrote it I didn’t know if I would ever see him again and I wrote because I wanted to tell my side of the story,” she recalls.
The two, she added, have since reconciled, though she doubts her book had anything to do with it.
In addition to her published work, Gray is particularly interested in a series of poems that have not yet been published, a poetic interpretation of key moments in the life of Eleanor Roosevelt. Gray became fascinated by Roosevelt after listening to No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. Gray listened to the book as she drove to work at Eastern Connecticut State University.
“I was riveted by Eleanor, impelled by curiosity to read more,” she says. “I read many books and became immersed in her life, not as a biographer, but as a poet, imaginatively.”
The framework of the Gray’s narrative is an interview with Roosevelt at the end of her life—”Just like what I am doing now,” she said to a visitor.
Gray did not start her professional career as either a poet or an artist. After graduating from Goucher College, she worked as an environmental lobbyist. Her art and her poetry, she points out, still take inspiration from the natural world. She painted on her own until her Washington, D.C. apartment couldn’t accommodate both painting equipment and family. Then she turned to poetry, not painting, for more than a decade.
As a painter, Gray uses varying media. The cover of The Banquet is an oil painting she did herself, a copy of a still life by Caravaggio. She also uses acrylic and encaustic, a technique that uses a blend of beeswax and resin mixed with pigment to create fused layers of color.
Her studio has a number of items that laymen do not usually associated with art production: an electric frying pan for melting the wax, a large hot tray to keep the waxy paint from hardening, and a heat gun to create different textures on the surface of the painting. She has some small wood shims so she can elevate one side of the work to have the hot wax drip down as well as carving and shaving tools to shape the wax. According to Gray, encaustic is a technique that has been used for some 2,500 years.
Today, at Gray’s home in Deep River, her art studio is next to her writing desk, but now there is enough room for both. In fact, she would like to use the upcoming exhibit of art and poetry as a way to bring words and images closer together in he own life, “so I don’t have to abandon one to do the other,’ she explains.
And she hopes viewers of the new show will appreciate the dual experience.
“If a reader of a poem or a viewer of a painting has a beautiful encounter, I will be happy,” she says.
Gray Jacobik: Lines Spoken in Paint, in Wax, in Words
Run through Aug. 31 at Maple & Main Gallery, 1 Maple Street, Chester. An opening reception is on Friday, Aug. 5 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Other events include the Group Poetry Reading on Wednesday, Aug. 10 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. and solo reading by Gray Jacobik on Thursday, Aug. 25 from 7 to 8 p.m. For more information, visit mapleandmain@att.net or call 860-526-6066.