INTERLOCKING LIVES

Jed has recently addressed the 'fade' on this blog, so it seems natural to point out this book's creamsicle complexion isn't part of the design--it's sunbathed spine. One of my favorite collaborations between a visual artist and poet, Interlocking Lives by Alex Katz and Kenneth Koch (Kulchur Press, 1970) is almost square, just over nine inches. Like many traditional word and image collaborations in book form, the text appears on the verso and the line drawings appear on the recto. The book is composed of five suites: Interlocking Lives; The Bullfighter; Off to Mexico; Father and Son; and Jim as a Young Man. Each suite consists of about 20 pictures and 20 pages of text. Reading this book for the first time I took delight in Koch's zany story telling and the amusing correspondence between word and image--but things got really interesting in the second section titled "The Bullfighter." Most of the images are those that appeared in the first section of the book but the order has been scrambled and a couple of new images inserted. Where poems and pictures are typically put in a 1 to 1 dialogue (Edges, a collaboration between Robert Creeley and Alex Katz, comes to mind) Interlocking Lives essentially offers five different readings of the same images in different sequences demonstrating how poems and pictures interact and interrupt, as do the 'interlocking lives' of their makers.

--KS