Front Cover: Augusta Read Thomas. Map of Selene. 2015. Mixed
media. Copyright © 2016 by Augusta
Read Thomas. All rights reserved.
The moon, with its mysterious
changing face and gleaming beauty,
has inspired poets and artists
throughout the ages. In “Selene,”
composer Augusta Read Thomas
celebrates the daughter of the
Titans, who in Greek mythology
drives her moon chariot across the
heavens nightly, in a musical work
that surprisingly combines a string
quartet with a percussion quartet.
It is an unlikely combination. A
string quartet in moonlight seems
fitting and appropriate—with
the smooth, lush, vibrant tones of
stringed instruments, but percussion
seems to run counter to the
shimmering of moonlight. Until
one thinks that drumbeats, like the
moon, mark time, and moonlight
communicates cadences clearly in
the changes of tides, the phases
of light, and even in the pounding
blood beats of tribal rituals
by night that can rouse, enrage,
entrance, or lead to madness. The
striking “Map of Selene” offers a
glimpse of multiple musical dimensions
through mixed media. Here
on one sheet we see the marks and
movement of time, imagination,
and history, and attention to the
timeless or eternal forms, including
notation of “formal concerns” that
are at the heart of artistic multidimensionality:
“braiding, twining,
twisting, encircling, interplaiting.”
No wonder that Thomas’s piece
inspired us to think in this issue
about mixed media.
Tampa Review 51/52 invites us to consider the ways that artistic forms and disciplines
can overlap and interact as artists seek to realize their distinctive visions and share
them with others. The front cover of this double issue reproduces a multidisciplinary
“map” by composer Augusta Read Thomas for Selene, a musical work evoking the Greek goddess
of the moon, written for combined percussion and string quartets. Across the middle of
the map, colored lines of orange, gold, and magenta form intersecting curves that graph degrees
of loudness, with notations on the tempo, tone, and duration of each section. An image
of the full moon appears top right, and Selene’s moon chariot, bottom left. Thomas explains in
an interview that the lines, words, images, and colors all contribute to her composition’s “big
picture.” Musicians can take it in at a glance, or they can zoom in on a particular moment in
the work to understand in greater detail what they are being asked to perform.
As we considered the ways that Thomas crosses boundaries of genres to blend visual art,
geometry, narrative, myth, and music, we began to select visual art for the issue that reflects
mixed-media thinking “outside the box.” We found this particularly in pieces by Lesley Dill,
Paul Huet, and Richard Kostelanetz. And Florida poet laureate, Peter Meinke, contributed an
apple-shaped poem (with worm), using visual elements for humor and multiple meanings.
Many of the writers in this double issue also acknowledge the value of crossing disciplinary
boundaries to give voice to thought and feeling. Poet Suzanne Parker’s homage to Portuguese
singer Fernanda Maria imagines transformation through the power of the Fado singer’s words
in artistic performance. J. Malcolm Garcia’s braided essay, “Providing,” describes the tangled
interrelation between Guatemala’s political machinations and the fate of abandoned children
rescued by deeply dedicated women. A history professor he interviews uses circles and connecting
lines to map “the ideological pattern” that continues, no matter who is in power.
Paula Brancato begins her Danahy Fiction Prize story, “Executive Spa,” with interwoven
visual, auditory, and physical metaphors that convey painful American economic inequalities
and conflicting values. Fact and fiction meld in her eponymous heroine struggling in a tenement
to the rhythmic “click clack click of roaches mating” at night; her naked ironing leads to a
burning scar because, “I was just pissed off enough at the world, at myself, to lean back into the
iron.” Near the end of “Ghost Town, Colorado,” poet Peter Serchuk casts features of the natural
landscape as dancers and storytellers to dramatize the struggle between settlers seeking gold,
Indians defending their land, and mining companies looking for profit. Nonfiction graphic novelist
Robert Landry combines word and image, fact and fiction, to illuminate his family’s murky
past. These and other works remind us that imagination and creativity weave complex fabrics,
revealing truth and beauty through unexpected and unlikely combinations.
