Book Description
With an introduction by Cornelia Homburg and essays by Johanna Drucker and William Gass, the Dual Muse catalogue features 68 illustrations of the artworks in the exhibition that inaugurated the Dual Muse Symposium held at Washington University in St. Louis in November 1997. The exhibition included visual work by poets Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and Derek Walcott; writers Breyten Breytenbach, Guy Davenport and Günter Grass; and works by artists who employ both disciplines in their art, as exemplified by Susan Barron, Joseph Beuys and Tom Phillips. The companion volume of Symposium Proceedings was published in 1999.

Excerpted from The Dual Muse : The Writer As Artist, the Artist As Writer by Johanna Drucker, William H. Gass, Cornelia Homburg, washingto. Copyright © 1997. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
Once upon a time, it was customary for educated persons to include both literature and painting in their studies, and to consider writing and drawing to be desirable skills. Some familiarity with a musical instrument was also expected. People communicated by letter, entertained at home with amateur recitals, and when traveling abroad recorded memorable moments in their diaries, or rendered notable sights through pencil, ink, and watercolor sketches. Music, painting, and poetry were graces expected of men and women of refined taste everywhere. The same hand might employ a pen or pencil to figure accounts, confess love, or depict a scene, and in most cases the hand's skills would have been learned in school as a matter of course. The hand was the carrier of music to the ear; it brought a thought out from the mind; it formed a figure for the eye. The pen and brush resembled one another, paper and canvas were as twins, and each were worked upon or directed by educated fingers no less than the flute, the recorder, or the piano were. -from William Gass's "La maison d'en face or that Other Art"