Portraits From Life

In this revelatory book, poet George Franklin describes his encounters with illustrious figures in the arts who taught, mentored, or inspired him, and provides extended commentaries on some of their most characteristic creations. Equal parts memoir and critical study, it illuminates the lives and works of artists he came to admire and in some cases to revere, in the process tracing the ways they informed his own sense of vocation as a writer.

His relationships with the great modern dancer and choreographer Erick Hawkins and the trailblazing composer Lucia Dlugoszewski prove as nourishing and illuminating to him as his interactions with such literary luminaries as Elizabeth Bishop, William Maxwell, Robert Lowell, Marie Ponsot, and Robert Fitzgerald. Franklin writes in his preface to this volume: "From all of these artists, I have learned of the importance of attending to that which even the most well-chosen, resonant words, the most expressive, exorbitant, and skillfully executed physical gestures, the most beguiling, enthralling, or overwhelming arrangements of notes, can never quite express, but which it is the burden and joy of the artist, nevertheless, to try to express."

Anyone interested in the arts, either as practitioner or as enthusiast, will find here much to delight, intrigue, and inspire.