Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Porter

Touching only at points is a soldierly way to describe collaboration: contact without surrender. Peter Porter’s line pushes back against the lazy hierarchy that often governs mixed-media work, where images are “just” illustrations and text is “just” a caption with better manners. He’s arguing for a third arrangement: two autonomous forces moving in parallel, meeting briefly, sparking, then separating before either can annex the other.

The phrasing is dry, almost procedural - “in a kind of relationship” - but the emotional payload sits in “touching.” That word softens what could be a purely formal claim into something oddly intimate, even vulnerable. The subtext: the most honest partnerships aren’t seamless; they’re negotiated. If you’ve spent your life in military structures, you know the difference between alliance and occupation. Porter’s ideal is closer to a coalition than a chain of command.

Context matters, even if the sentence sounds like later art theory. Porter lived in an era when print culture was booming and the illustrated book was becoming a mass object. The default expectation was clarity: picture clarifies poem; poem explains picture. Porter wants friction instead of clarity, a space where meaning is created in the gap. “Only at points” implies that ambiguity isn’t a failure of craft; it’s the method. You’re meant to move between mediums, feeling for correspondence like a reader tracing a map: not to confirm what you already know, but to discover where the borders don’t quite line up.