Double Vision: Images and Poems

Double Vision is a reimagining of materials selected from 57 years of the author's creative work. Ty Bouldin discovered his passion for the arts when he began taking art lessons in the first grade. Ever since he has explored his creative ideas through painting, drawing, music, and writing.

Born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1947, Ty was educated in the state earning a BA in English from Concord College. He earned his MA from Miami University in 1971, after which he taught for 16 years at West Virginia State College, and in 1988 completed coursework for a PhD in Communication and Rhetoric at RPI. He accepted a position with the Composition Program at The University of Arizona, where he co-administered the program and taught for 15 years. In 2003, he and his wife retired to their farmstead in West Virginia where they live with their dogs and abundant wildlife, and where Ty began editing and revising his books and images.

In Double Vision, what were originally written as stand-alone poems are now printed over visual images: drawings, paintings, and photographs. This fusion of the visual and verbal echoes the work of William Blake, whose drawn and painted images provide a reader with visual access to his more mystical lyrics. The images in Double Vision-including photos by Susan Bouldin-also provide visual analogues for the ideas, feelings and associations expressed in the texts. The poems, songs, and prose explore the impact of America's cultural transformations since the 1960's, tracing the poet's movements from his birthplace in an Appalachia that was (and still is) largely a national resource colony, to his social displacement in the desert Southwest, and his return to a West Virginia torn asunder by new technology.

The texts for Double Vision involve both prose and verse-including lyrics for nine songs adapting themes and stances from folk and popular music. For readers familiar with these traditions, the song poems provide yet another dimension of meaning. Two directly evoke folk songs: readers who know "The Wagoner's Lad" and "Handsome, Winsome Johnny" will be able to hear those songs as they read the poems that extend their folk themes to new contexts. The rhythms and wording of the other song poems may suggest their own tunes to readers with a musical ear, further extending the expressive capacities of the visual and verbal elements at work on the page.

But Double Vision is not just a random selection of unrelated texts arranged in more-or-less chronological order. Taken as a whole, the collection develops several interrelated themes interwoven throughout the sequence. The texts stand in resistance to the cultural authority of intellectual ideology, commercialism, misogyny, and technocracy. They forcefully reject the arrogant vanity of our alienation from the natural environment which sustains us. This is one of the implicit functions of the accompanying images, which allow the reader a meditative contemplation of visual sources of meaning to complement-and complicate-the limitations of the poems' verbal expression.

All in all, this is a book meant to stimulate the reader to meditative reflection on issues confronting us all in one way or another. To this end, it draws on a wide range of expressive media and techniques to stimulate the reader's imaginative participation in the construction of meaning.