When Pablo Picasso was presented with the striking handwriting of Pierre Reverdy’s mysterious, antiphonal poetry—that is poetry with the quality of call and response—he remarked that “it was almost a drawing itself.” Indeed, when the editor and publisher Tériade asked Picasso to create illustrations to complement "Song of the Dead, Poems", the artist avoided any figurative imagery for fear that it might detract from “the curved quality” that the energetic flow of the text already possessed. Instead, he turned to making gestural brushstrokes of brackets, circles, and framing lines that flow across and connect the pages just as the text moves without pause between poems. The resulting synthesis between imagery and poems prompted Tériade to state, “It is as though they are having a conversation.”