Ocean Crossing: Nancy Cunard

n a n c y c u n a r d
in a flame-stitch
of water

I had heard of her. I did animation for another work. It was my favorite, but it didn't fit the piece. I had called the series of images Ocean Crossing. It was developed for a section in which the heroine and her love cross the ocean. She shocked the world. I had used a black woman discus thrower but the picture was morphed and unintelligible. Nancy Cunard covered the Spanish Civil War. Chunks of pink crystal with gold dribbles-hanging from her ear lobes. Her work on behalf of Negro rights. It looks like veins of a leg but vaguely like part of a breast, with the sucker of some kind of sea-life attached. Water, visible in sprays, in froth, spreads over the frame. One side is black and white. The other color. Quite suggestive but nothing you could pin down. I woke up and decided on a subtitle: Nancy Cunard. The lovers, dressed as fawns, were drunk on the lawn. Olive green. I had heard of her. Perhaps it was just the name of the liner that inspired me. She shocked the world. Could be the same family. I'm researching her. She was wealthy, a poet,

not represented in women's anthologies or new anthologies honoring poets of the 30's-40's. She had a press called Hours. She fell in love with a black musician. Was he a saxophone player? She traveled across the sea in many ways. She was English, lived a wild avant-garde life in Paris. She threw costume parties at her luxurious home. To ravage her. Where are those poems. Her papers are in Austin at U.T. I woke up and decided on a subtitle: Nancy Cunard. Another waste land, I read she wanted to create one. She shocked the world. Anaïs Nin saw her printing Spanish Civil War pamphlets, remarked on her cadaverous state-olive green, her large-scale jewelry, her work on behalf of Negro rights. Nancy was a journalist. Where is the poetry? Slid into the ocean. In Austin. Frothed over. How well the image fits my idea of Nancy Cunard. Except for the missing jewelry, the large uncut stone of amethyst, the barbaric coins and the missing poetry. And then there's a frame of a flame stitching water. She traveled across the ocean to Harlem, where she lived. Olive green. An amethyst existence. A cadaverous state. Remarkable. Luxurious. No anthologies. Was it so terrible or was she really so good, she was terrible. She shocked the world. Wasted, decadent, printer, journalist, befriender of blacks and artists and, they say, a poet. Died at 69.