Closing out National Poetry Month, our Spring Interns paired some of their favorite poems with works from our collection. We hope you enjoy!
— Jeffrey Alexander Lopez, Curatorial Intern, American Art & Arts of the Americas
Image: Suzuki Harunobu (Japanese, 1724-1770). Page From Haru no Nishiki, 1771. Color woodblock print on paper. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Peter P. Pessutti, 83.190.1
from Citizen: “Some years there exists a wanting to escape...” [Excerpt]
By Claudia Rankine
I they he she we you turn
only to discover
the encounter
to be alien to this place.
The patience is in the living. Time opens out to you.
The opening, between you and you, occupied,
zoned for an encounter,
given the histories of you and you—
And always, who is this you?
The start of you, each day,
a presence already—
— Halle Smith, Digital Collections Intern
Catherine Green (American, born 1952). [Untitled] (West Indian Day Parade), 1991. Chromogenic photograph, sheet. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 1991.58.2. © artist or artist's estate
Ode to Enchanted Light
by Pablo Neruda
Under the trees light
has dropped from the top of the sky,
light
like a green
latticework of branches,
shining
on every leaf,
drifting down like clean
white sand.
A cicada sends
its sawing song
high into the empty air.
The world is
a glass overflowing
with water.
Consuelo Kanaga’s black and white photograph captures a dazzling, yet fleeting moment from everyday life. Three textured glasses cast shadows whose patterns are almost kaleidoscopic in effect. We can imagine Kanaga passing by her kitchen table, as she is brought to a halt to take a closer look at, and ultimately to photograph, the simple beauty generated by the play of light and everyday objects. The close-up scale of this image emulates the singularizing framing techniques deployed by Surrealist photographers, who also took parts of everyday life and blew them up in the photographic frame, thereby encouraging their viewers to look at life around us from a different angle. It is a way of saying: Here, take a closer look. Viewing the world with wonder, along with the joy that this act brings, are encapsulated in Pablo Neruda’s poem Ode to Enchanted Light. The speaker observes the way light passes through trees and creates enchanting patterns. He not only observes, but feels the beauty in the simple details of life, from the way light falls from the sky, to the sheen of leaves, to the buzzing of cicadas. Approaching life through such a hopeful lens evokes a glass-half-full perspective. In fact, the speaker is so hopeful that he believes “The world is/a glass overflowing/with water.” I think Kanaga would have felt the same way.
— Kirk Testa, Curatorial Intern, Photography
Consuelo Kanaga (American, 1894-1978). [Untitled] (Glasses and Reflections). Gelatin silver photograph. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Wallace B. Putnam from the Estate of Consuelo Kanaga, 82.65.25
Easter Wings
By George Herbert
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
Easter Wings by George Herbet and Martin Bach’s flower vase from the Brooklyn Museum’s Decorative Arts collection reveal the interrelationship between form and function. In Easter Wings, Herbert strategically varies the line length to create an image that enhances the meaning of the poem; when you turn the poem on its side, it resembles the wings of a bird, of which are symbolic of the atonement of Jesus Christ. In doing so, the author is not only telling us his message, but he is showing it visually as well. Similarly, the vase takes the visual form of its function. Its floral design amplifies the meaning of the object, as the vase is meant to hold flowers. In both instances, we see how aesthetic properties of a work echo the meaning and function of the work itself.
— Amy Zavecz
Martin Bach (American, 1862-1921). Vase, ca. 1905. Opalescent glass. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. Alfred Zoebisch, 59.143.16. Creative Commons-BY
I am the Earth (Watashi wa chikyu) [Excerpt]
by Kiyoko Nagase, Translated by Takako Lento
I am warm, moist soil
I am a single supple stalk
I draw my life
all the way up into corollas of wild berries on the roadside
I am amazed at
a breast of water welling
to flow into the inlet of a muddy rice paddy
I am amazed at
myself being
hot steam blowing fire and sulfur up
from the bottom of the great ocean, deep indigo.
I am amazed at
the crimson blood flow
covering the earth’s surface in human shape;
I am amazed that it swells as the tides ebb and flow, and gushes out monthly under distant invisible gravity
…
I am the earth.
I live there, and I am the very same earth.
In the four billionth year
I have come to know
the eternal cold moon, my other self, my hetero being,
then, for the first time, I am amazed that I am warm mud.
The vivid imagery conjured up by Kiyoko Nagase’s poem is beautifully visualized by Emmi Whitehorse’s painting. The emphasis on deep Earth tones and abstract corporeality in both the poem and the painting really creates an intense metaphysical link between the environment and the self.
— Amanda Raquel Dorval, Archives Intern
Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo, born 1957). Fire Weed, 1998. Chalk, graphite, pastel and oil on paper mounted on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Hinrich Peiper and Dorothee Peiper-Riegraf in honor of Emmi Whitehorse, 2006.49. © artist or artist's estate
Seventh Circle of Earth
by Ocean Vuong
On April 27, 2011, a gay couple, Michael Humphrey and Clayton Capshaw, was murdered by immolation in their home in Dallas, Texas.
________________________________________________________
As if my finger, / tracing your collarbone / behind closed doors, / was enough / to erase myself. To forget / we built this house knowing / it won’t last. How / does anyone stop / regret / without cutting / off his hands? / Another torch
streams through / the kitchen window, / another errant dove. / It’s funny. I always knew / I’d be warmest beside / my man. / But don’t laugh. Understand me / when I say I burn best / when crowned / with your scent: that earth-sweat / & Old Spice I seek out each night / the days
refuse me. / Our faces blackening / in the photographs along the wall. / Don’t laugh. Just tell me the story / again, / of the sparrows who flew from falling Rome, / their blazed wings. / How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing
until the notes threaded to this / smoke rising / from your nostrils. Speak— / until your voice is nothing / but the crackle / of charred
bones. But don’t laugh / when these walls collapse / & only sparks / not sparrows / fly out. / When they come / to sift through these cinders—& pluck my tongue, / this fisted rose, / charcoaled & choked / from your gone
mouth. / Each black petal / blasted / with what’s left / of our laughter. / Laughter ashed / to air / to honey to baby / darling, / look. Look how happy we are / to be no one / & still
Ocean Vuong’s “Seventh Circle of Earth” has persisted as one of the great, affective moments of poetry in my life since I first heard Pádraig Ó Toama’s gorgeous reading and discussion of it on his podcast, Poetry Unbound. I decided to pair Vuong’s poem with Mary Coble’s Untitled 2 (from Note To Self) because both works are urgently immersive into the violence and experience of LGBTQ people in the U.S., and for how each work uses text and physicality to address presence, pain, and erasure. Vuong’s poem is actually footnoted to a quote from a news article about a gay couple murdered in Texas. The page is thus blank, absent of text. The reader has to sink below the main stage, the accepted space of word and story, to find the voices of this couple and the depth of their story’s tenderness, eroticism, and utter devastation. Coble’s piece foils the structure and effect of Seventh Circle of Earth by taking what was subverted by Vuong—text and the narrative of violence—wholly to the surface. Her photograph captures her own legs tattooed without ink with the names of LGBTQ individuals victimized by hate crimes. I cannot help but think of Franz Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony,” in which prisoners’ “sentences'' are inscribed by the needle of a “punishment apparatus” directly onto their bodies. I was struck by how the curator’s note for this photograph describes Coble’s artistic endeavor here as “harrowing.” The needle in Kafka’s short story is indeed called “The Harrow”. The noun harrow is an agricultural tool that combs plowed soil to break up clumps of earth and uproot weeds and clear imperfections. The verb to harrow means to plague, and in the story’s original German the verb for “harrow”, eggen, is also translated as “to torment”. Kafka and Coble conflate these definitions of “the harrow” in their respective works: they use a needled device, like the true noun definition, as an instrument of torment because of someone else’s idea of punishment and justice. Here, violence is brought to the surface, intimate in as much as we are brought right up to the artist’s skin and into the presence of her and her community’s pain. Together, one can see how each creator physicalizes their respective artistic space to tell the stories of LGBTQ people, of what is tender and harrowing, below the surface and written into the skin.
— Talia Abrahams, Provenance Intern, IHCPP
Mary Coble (American, born 1978). Untitled 2 (from Note to Self), 2005. Inkjet print. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the artist, 2008.10. © artist or artist's estate
To my daughter Kakuya
by Assata Shakur
I have shabby dreams for you
of some vague freedom
I have never known.
Baby
I don't want you hungry or thirsty
or out in the cold.
and I don't want the frost
to kill your fruit
before it ripens.
I can see a sunny place
Life exploding green.
I can see your bright, bronze skin at ease with all the flowers
and the centipedes.
I can hear laughter,
not grown from ridicule
And words not prompted
by ego or greed or jealousy.
I see a world where hatred
has been replaced by love.
and ME replaced by WE
And I can see a world replaced
where you,
building and exploring,
strong and fulfilled,
will understand.
And go beyond
my little shabby dreams.
This poem is featured in Assata Shakur’s memoir, Assata: An Autobiography. It details her hope for a better world that her daughter can grow up in. This poem is positioned in the book when Shakur is facing increasing prosecution as a result of her activism and affiliations with the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation army. Being written more than 30 years after this picture was taken, the poem summons me to think about the trauma that many Black women face and how much of that trauma gets passed down to their children. The black and white photo of a mother and daughter provides a nice visual to the poem. “The image of a Black mother and child sitting on their luggage reflects the little-discussed history of segregated transportation in the northern United States. Through the 1940s, Penn Station officials assigned Black travelers seats in Jim Crow cars on southbound trains” (Brooklyn Museum). The photograph of train passengers waiting outside of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station especially echoes the verse “I don’t want you hungry or thirsty or out in the cold.” The overall optimistic tone of Shakur’s poem alters our relationship to the image as we imagine the mother pictured above hoping for the exact same things
— Zaria W, Teen Programs intern
Ruth Orkin (American, 1921-1985). Mother and Daughter at Penn Station, NYC, 1948. Gelatin silver photograph, sheet: 13 15/16 × 11 in. (35.4 × 27.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mary Engel, 2011.22.3. © artist or artist's estate
I retch as a mass of sinew lies between my lips.
The sensation is unbearable.
Fortunately, the jar of flies has gone missing again.
Slowly, surely, and yet never sure at all,
the quiet of buzzing rings through the in-between.
It is a symphony wrought from blood and bone.
Saliva drips from bleeding, hungry gums,
And the crunch of glass echoes the grinding of molars.
If I proffered a sanguine smile, would masticated shards look like teeth?
Would they gleam just as prettily?
The flies ring,
and the rot calls.
— Kailyn Gibson
Edgar Degas (French, 1834-1917). Portrait of a Man (Portrait d'homme), ca. 1866. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum, Museum Collection Fund, 21.112
Excerpt from Autobiography of Red
A novel in verse by Anne Carson
7. If Helen’s reasons arose out of some remark Stesichoros made either it was a strong remark about Helen’s sexual misconduct (not to say its unsavory aftermath the Fall of Troy) or it was not.
8. If it was a strong remark about Helen’s sexual misconduct (not to say its unsavory aftermath the Fall of Troy) either this remark was a lie or it was not.
9. If it was not a lie either we are now in reverse and by continuing to reason in this way we are likely to arrive back at the beginning of the question of the blinding of Stesichoros or we are not.
10. If we are now in reverse and by continuing to reason in this way are likely to arrive back at the beginning of the question of the blinding of Stesichoros either we will go along without incident or we will meet Stesichoros on our way back.
11. If we meet Stesichoros on our way back either we will keep quiet or we will look him in the eye and ask him what he thinks of Helen.
12. If we look Stesichoros in the eye and ask him what he thinks of Helen either he will tell the truth or he will lie.
13. If Stesichoros lies either we will know at once that he is lying or we will be fooled because now that we are in reverse the whole landscape looks inside out.
This excerpt comes from Appendix C of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, a novel in verse. A translator and classicist herself, Carson mixes fact with fiction in her unconventional retelling of the myth of Geryon and Hercules, beginning with a roundabout introduction to the poet Stesichoros. Autobiography presents a captivating example of recent Queer projects that take up Classical material as their basis. A fascination with the Classical past has pervaded our modern conception of sexual identity politics, down to the very etymology of the word “lesbian.” In this fascination, I see the same desire to capture Classical imagery as cultural heritage which has also pervaded American museums, albeit with significantly different aims. The fresco pictured above comes to mind, which passed through many collectors and was even purchased by the museum before anyone pegged it as a modern piece—not an original Roman fresco. John D. Cooney, a 20th century curator of our Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art collection, wrote that “the unclad and somewhat winsome charms of the lady [probably] diverted objective glances.” Both in the case of the fresco and Carson’s novel, the “unclad and somewhat winsome charms” of the Classical past shape and reshape our understanding of history.
— Kira Houston, Curatorial Intern, Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art
Modern, in the style of the Roman Period. Part of a Fresco, early 19th century C.E. Clay, paint. Brooklyn Museum, Ella C. Woodward Memorial Fund, 11.30.
Late Fragment
by Raymond Carver From A New Path to the Waterfall,
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
— Shori
Diedrick Brackens (American, born 1989). when no softness came, 2019. Cotton and acrylic yarn. Brooklyn Museum, Purchased with funds given by The LIFEWTR Fund at Frieze New York 2019, 2019.12. © artist or artist's estate
Jaguar
By Francisco X. Alarcón
some say dicen que ahora
I'm now almost estoy casi extinto
extinct in this park por este parque
but the people pero la gente
who say this que dice esto
don't know no sabe
that by smelling que al oler
the orchids las orquídeas
in the trees en los árboles
they're sensing están percibiendo
the fragrance la fragancia
of my chops de mis fauces
that by hearing que al oír
the rumblingc el retumbo
of the waterfalls de los saltos
they're listening están escuchando
to my ancestors' el gran rugido
great roar de mis ancestros
that by observing que al observar
the constellations las constelanciones
of the night sky del firmamento
they're gazing están mirando
at the star spots las motas de estrellas
on my fur marcadas en mi piel
that I am and que yo soy
always will be y siempre seré
the wild el indomable
untamed espíritu silvestre
living spirit vivo de esta
of this jungle jungla
While the author of the poem speaks about animals, their words can also speak on behalf of the erasure of indigenous peoples in South America. Much like the jaguar, indigenous traditions and culture are very important to life in South America. Despite their marginalization, Indigenous peoples throughout the Andes used coca leaves to help with the altitude. The use and cultivation of coca are criminalized throughout most of South America despite it being essential to indigenous cultures. This vessel was used to contain lime which would activate the coca leaves. Much like the jaguar, indigenous traditions are also faced with endangerment despite being woven into the fabric that is Latin America. Through the opposite man and woman figures, the vessel shows the duality that is important to the Quimbaya people which is still relevant to Colombians today.
Aunque el autor del poema habla sobre los animales, sus palabras también comunican el sentimiento común de la supresión de los indígenas en Suramérica. Con la mención del jaguar, se puede entender en el poema que la cultura y las tradiciones de las personas que son indígenas son sumamente importantes para la vida en Sudamérica. A pesar de su marginación, los indígenas en Los Andes utilizan la hoja de coca para ayudar en la altura de las montañas. El uso y el cultivo de la hoja de coca fue criminalizado (penalizado) a través de Sudamérica, aunque su uso para los indígenas era vital y esencial para su cultura. Este recipiente que se utiliza contiene limón lo que activa la hoja de la coca. Similarmente al jaguar, las tradiciones de los indígenas siempre estaban en peligro aunque estuvieran entrelazadas en las telas de lo que sería Latinoamérica. A través del hombre opuesto y las figuras de mujeres, el recipiente muestra la dualidad de lo que es importante para las personas que son Quimbaya, algo que todavía hoy es relevante para los Colombianos.
— Jeffrey Alexander Lopez, Curatorial Intern, American Art & Arts of the Americas
Quimbaya. Poporo (Lime Container), 1-600 C.E. Tumbaga. Brooklyn Museum, Alfred W. Jenkins Fund, 35.507. Creative Commons-BY
