What is love?

The story of "What Love Is: Book One" (part one)

What is What Love Is?  

The short answer is that it’s a long story.

A story that begins with a friendship that began more than a decade ago at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Florham Park, N.J., when I met fellow professor David Daniel.

I work the two-dimensional Studio Arts and David inspires the poets. We met while I was creating the first chapter of my graphic novel Long Time Gone and he invited me into his classroom to share my writing process with his students. Later, at work on the fifth chapter, I asked for his help with my verse.

Long Time Gone: Lost in Lotusland, is comprised almost entirely of poetic text, and I was a complete novice at the time. I still have my early draft page with his very gentle and supportive notes in red pencil.

I remember going to David’s office and showing this to him, nervous as can be as I had no idea what I was doing. He understood that I was clueless, yet determined to write verse for this chapter, and so he gently started with, “Well, usually, when a you begin a poem you start with what the form is, not write something and then try to find its form.” A revelation.

Fast forward to when David was preparing the manuscript for his second book of poetry, Ornaments, and he gave me a copy to read. I flipped out. David’s unflinchingly honest, funny, painful, joyous, reckless, and revealing poems blew away my ideas about what poetry could do (and do away with) for good. I remember joking to him that one day I’d make art to go with is poetry…

Upon publication of Ornaments, whenever I could attend David’s readings I’d go and draw moments from the event. These drawings would be made into unique artist books, which I’d later present to him in honor and celebration. Here are some pictures of one of the books now in David’s collection:

In return, he’d give me vintage guitars in need of repair… but that’s a whole other story.

The start of this story, the story of What Love Is, begins at the end of 2022 when David asked me to make art to go with his newest collection of his verse. Like when I was asked to make a new illuminated manuscript of Dante’s Divine Comedy (the publisher expected a half-dozen drawings and instead got art on every page), I don’t think David had any idea what he’d get when I said yes. Which was brave of him. But by then we enjoyed a deep friendship, founded in our mutual love for music (aka Bob Dylan), vintage acoustic instruments, poetry, art, books, and expanding our creative lives.

My work on What Love Is commenced in January 2023 with my first reading. The original manuscript contained thirty poems and over the course of a month I read through them all a few times, gathered impressions, and took notes. On February 19 I began the process of making art for “Honeysuckle.”

[Planning drawing for “Honerysuckle,” 2/19/23]

From the start I wanted to have my possible approaches to each poem be open, open to each poem’s suggestions. I felt that my job was to listen hard enough to the words to have a point of view of my own. Then to find its form. When we saw a three-page poem becomes a twenty-page graphic novel, David and I quickly figured out that we would have to divide the manuscript for publication into two parts. Thus, What Love Is: Book One.

David and I quickly developed a working methodology: text messages, phone calls, emails, and weekly in-person meetings on campus at FDU. Those Tuesday meetings, after my morning class and before his first class began, proved essential for hashing out every inch of my illuminations.

 [David mapping the route he walks in “A Walk with Robert Lowell,” to be included in What Love Is: Book Two.]

I’ve often said to David that I feel like I’ve been preparing for this project for my whole creative life, and that the threads that make the fabric of What Love Is can be found in my previous and ongoing work. Long Time Gone, my yet unfinished collaborative autobiographical graphic novel, made with my now twenty-one-year-old daughter Fiamma, tangles with the sprawling, messy intersection between art, life, and narrative verisimilitude. Images of our lives drawn from photographs mingle with abstract pages as the “true” story of a day in our lives unfolds as a comic book. In the images of real places, I drew them largely from my photographs. In chapter five, “Lost in Lotusland,” sestinas, villanelles, and sonnets were transformed into comics depicting my trips Duluth, Arezzo, and Rome. Here’s how the final version of “Villa Adriana” turned out:

There was one more poet I had to meet before I was ready for David.

Dante.

Please stay tuned for more of the backstory of What Love Is: Book One.

Thanks for reading!