A Third Voice Emerges
Poets Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson on Collaborative Ekphrasis
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson, co-authors of the new poetry collection, Rendered Paradise, which explores the works of three major women artists: Vivian Maier, Agnes Martin, and Kiki Smith. The collaboration began with responses to Maier's photographs, evolved into sonnets for Martin, and culminated in a more challenging narrative tapestry for Smith. The poets discussed their process, the challenges of balancing harmony and dissonance, and using an intuitive approach to language in ekphrastic work. They emphasized the importance of trust, permission, and the willingness to relinquish control in their collaboration. The book is published by Apogee Press.
As the press says about the book: “The poets animate the artworks with their piercing questions and insights, inspiring candid encounters with each artist. This astonishing collection, with its decentered and imaginative approach to engaging art, breaks new ground for ekphrastic poetry.”
Susanne Dyckman is the author of the poetry collections A Dark Ordinary (Furniture Press Books) and equilibrium's form (Shearsman Books), as well as five chapbooks. She was a previous winner of the Five Fingers Review Poetry Award and a finalist for both the Electronic Poetry Review Discovery Award and the Ashahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize. She lives in Albany, California.
Elizabeth Robinson is the author of several collections of poetry, including the National Poetry Series Winner, Pure Descent, the Fence Modern Poets Prize winner, Apprehend, and Oh Ghosts which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Robinson has received a Pushcart Prize and Editor's Choice Prizes from Scoundrel Time and New Letters. Vulnerability Index is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.
Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read an excerpt from the interview. To hear the poets read from Rendered Paradise, check out the video.
A Third Voice Emerges
[Interview lightly edited for clarity.]
As the description states, Rendered Paradise offers both diverse and intense pleasures, along with rich problems to consider—including subject-object relations in art-making and women's experiences in the arts and society. That’s quite an undertaking. How did this project start?
Susanne: We began collaborating many years ago, with some successes and some failures, to be honest. But we continued because we enjoyed the process so much. At one point, we encountered the vivid Maier photographs and decided to write responses to them. That became a natural starting point, and we moved forward from there. I don't know if Elizabeth wants to add to this—how this all came about.
Elizabeth: Susanne and I have been close friends for a long time. Since we lived far apart—at the time, I was in Colorado, and she was in the Bay Area—it became a way for us to stay in conversation, a kind of creative dialogue, which was really satisfying. Vivian Maier’s work surfaced right around the time we were thinking about our next steps after previous collaborations. Her photographs are fascinating—she took thousands of them but never developed many. That raised compelling questions about art-making: If you work in a visual medium that no one ever sees, what questions are you asking?
She also lived a difficult life—she was quite poor and worked as a nanny. After working with her images, we found a lot of satisfaction in the project and started looking at other artists. We explored the work of Marosa di Giorgio, but it didn’t quite gel. Then we focused on Agnes Martin. We read a lot of her writing, and I think Susanne and I both read a biography of her. We traveled to Los Angeles to see one of her exhibitions. As an artist, she invited a different kind of response than Maier did. So we wrote a crown of sonnets, alternating stanzas in response to her paintings. But Susanne, I'll turn it back to you to talk about our third artist.
Susanne: Yes, then we came across Kiki Smith’s tapestries. We were already familiar with her work, but the tapestries themselves were extraordinary. Since we had already engaged with two very different women artists, we thought, Here’s a third—let’s respond to her as well and continue the project.
This part was perhaps the most challenging. The imagery in the tapestries is highly narrative, and we didn’t want to simply retell the story. This was true for all the artists we worked with—our goal was not to recreate the artwork in words but to respond to and understand it. But because the tapestries were so explicitly narrative, it was difficult to avoid just describing them.
We worked through that challenge, and we also appreciated how different Smith’s artistic approach was from the others.
For me, part of the joy of this book is that we’re not just engaging with women artists but with distinctly individual women artists. That distinctiveness shaped how we wrote—the form of our responses shifted for each artist.
Radha: It’s wonderful to hear such different tones emerging from the same project—slightly different angles, different minds approaching the same images. It’s fascinating how the poems are ekphrastic in that they stem from specific artworks, but they also go beyond simple description. They probe aspects of the artist’s approach, bringing it into a contemporary context and poetic space.
The middle section, dedicated to Agnes Martin, really resonated with me. How did you work with the source material? How does an artist’s work catalyze a poet’s mind for you personally?
Susanne: When we were writing these poems, we were also reading Agnes Martin’s writings. So our engagement wasn’t just about stepping into her artwork—something we had done with Vivian Maier—but also immersing ourselves in her philosophy and artistic vision. Her work is deeply meditative and, in some ways, quite complex.
Elizabeth: Some quotes from her writing are directly embedded in the poems. As I was reading about her, I felt a certain permission to incorporate her voice. In technical terms, she may have been schizophrenic—she experienced visions and heard voices. That idea of multiple voices gave me permission to let her voice drift into ours. There’s no strict regulation of whose voice is whose, which opened up an entirely new space for us.
She was deeply interested in ideas of perfection and abstraction, but her thinking didn’t always follow a conventional trajectory. That was liberating for us—it allowed us to enter a nebulous, unconventional space. Her voice, or rather her voices, flowed into our work, meeting our own. It was a bit mystical, this process of interacting with her presence.
Susanne: Yes, and it was about engaging with both perfection and imperfection, which—as Elizabeth just mentioned—also gave us permission.
Radha: I love how these works implicate the listener as the viewer. There’s something mystical about it—something that’s hard to describe when encountering a work of art or a poem. It’s external, and yet there’s this deep resonance happening somewhere between space and the body. I feel that so much in these pieces.
What was the process of collaboration like? How did you decide on the parameters for working together?
Susanne: Well, as I mentioned, the Vivian Maier section was fairly straightforward. We chose images, and we each wrote responses to them.
Radha: Did you set formal constraints, like a specific number of lines per poem?
Elizabeth: Not for the Vivian Maier section. But it changed with each artist.
Susanne: For Agnes Martin, we structured our responses as a crown of sonnets. And for the final section on Kiki Smith, we wanted to approach it differently than the previous two sections. We each wrote ten lines independently, then tried to weave them together.
It didn’t work very well at first.
Radha: That’s interesting—especially given that you were responding to woven tapestries.
Susanne: Exactly. The interweaving concept seemed fitting, but it was the most challenging part of the process.
I also want to mention that, aside from the first section, the later sections became really fascinating because, at some point, we couldn’t easily distinguish who had written what. This was especially true in the final section.
That’s part of the magic of collaboration—a third voice emerged. We had the artists’ voices, our individual voices, and then something beyond us that formed through the process. It became almost a symphony of voices.
Elizabeth: One of the things about those tapestries is that they are absolutely overflowing with images. In one of Susanne’s responses, for example, she focused a lot on eagles—but I didn’t like the eagles in that image, so I wrote nothing about them. When our pieces came together, there was potential for weirdness and dissonance, because the eagle imagery kept appearing in her work but was absent in mine. I’d describe the revision process as a bit chaotic—but hopefully fruitful.
We also adjusted our approach in cases where finding certain images became difficult. In one instance, we responded to something that wasn’t a tapestry, or we wrote separate responses and kept them distinct instead of interweaving them. In one poem we plan to read, we felt that the two sections didn’t need to be fused, so we simply placed them one after the other. I’m really happy with how that turned out. Each time, the material itself dictated our approach.
Radha: That makes a lot of sense. I think with artists—though I’m not deeply familiar with the works of these three—there’s always an interesting interplay between harmony and dissonance. Within a single piece, how much harmony exists? How much dissonance is possible—or even desirable? Sometimes, dissonance is what people don’t consciously realize they’re responding to, yet it’s the most truthful aspect of the work. Did you feel you had to embrace dissonance while working through this material?
Susanne: Elizabeth and I write very differently, which made this collaboration exciting—seeing how our distinct styles could come together in response to the same image. Sometimes it worked surprisingly well.
Radha: I was curious about that balance. When I work with students, for example, I notice that people have different appetites for harmony versus dissonance—some lean into juxtaposition and associative leaps, while others prefer cohesion. In collaboration, that balance shifts further, since two people are working around their individual instincts. It seems that you both have a real openness to each other’s differences, which is a beautiful thing. I don’t think a project like this could work without an acceptance of the elements that don’t seamlessly harmonize.
Elizabeth: Absolutely. Collaboration involves two key things: permission and loss of control. You can’t control the outcome because the other person is shaping it too, and that unpredictability transforms the work. I tend to write quickly and with a strong sense of what I want, so at times, I found myself thinking, Whoa—this feels uncomfortable and unfamiliar. But I see that as a positive. The seams aren’t always seamless, but hopefully, those very seams open up new possibilities.
View this and other interviews on the Poet to Poet YouTube channel.
Get a copy of Rendered Paradise.
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