Tag: peabody essex museum

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The World in a Grain of Sand

mwinikates

As always, the Mass Poetry Festival was awesome. The sun shone on the small press fair and the Poetry Circus, the readers were in good voice, and it was fabulous catching up with friends. I particularly enjoyed the “embodied creativity” yoga & writing workshop and the poets who read their works written in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom. My thanks and compliments to everyone involved in carrying out the festival: the hard-working staff at MassPoetry, PEM, and the scores of volunteers.

As part of the festival, I had the pleasure of leading another workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum on connecting poetry to visual art, this time focusing on the idea of incorporating scale. I had a group of about 30 people and loved getting to introduce them to the Art & Nature Center’s current show, Sizing it Up: Scale in Nature and Art.

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Led to Your True Path, Joel Robison, 2014. Part of the Sizing it Up exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum

We started by defining ‘scale’ for the purposes of the workshop:

  • Visual (comparison to human scale)
  • Extra-visual (too extremely small or large for human perception)
  • Physical (in relation to your body)
  • Constructed (in relationship to your page or canvas)

To get our brains in gear, we did a ‘constructed scale’ poetry writing exercise, where people picked a piece of paper that was not their usual notebook size (register tape, index cards, post-it notes) and drafted a poem where the lines fit the size of the paper exactly, no line breaks too short or too long for the physical space.

Then we went into the gallery to read a few poems that use scale, next to visual art works that evoked the same feeling.

Searching for Goldilocks, by Angela Palmer, is an artwork that depicts all the exoplanets (planets found outside our solar system) including ones in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ that might contain recognizable life like our own Earth. (You can read more about planets in the Goldilocks zone here) Next to Searching for Goldilocks, we read “Kepler 62-F” by xYz, which is the pen name of Joanna Tilsley.

xYz kepler62F

Metropolis, by Vaughn Bell, is an artwork that allows up to four people to get their faces at forest floor level by stepping under and up into a series of connected terrariums featuring local plantlife.

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Workshop participants experiencing Metropolis.

Next to Metropolis, we read “The Scale of Things,” by Margaret Tait (originally published in The Hen and the Bees, 1960)

The Scale of Things
by Margaret Tait

There’s a whole country at the foot of the stone
If you care to look
These are the stones we have instead of trees
In the north.
Our trees all got lost,
Blown over or cut down
Long long ago, and some of them lie there still in the
peat moss
Or fossilized in limestone.
At the shady foot of trees
Certain things grow,
But at the foot of stone grow the sun-loving
wind–resisting short plants
With very small bright flowers
And compact, precise leaves.
The wind whips the tight stems into a vibration,
But they don’t break.
The full light of the sun reaches right down to the
ground,
And reflects obliquely and sideways in among and
under the snug leaves,
And settles on the stone too,
Makes a glow there,
A sufficient warmth and clarified light.
The stunning frequencies seem to get absorbed
And if you stare closely at the stone
It’s a calm light, not too blue,
Precisely indicating its variegated surface.
The great stone stands,
On a different scale, in a way, from the minute plants
at its base.
A proliferating green lichen
Grows on it
As well as round golden coin-patches of another
common lichen,
And only in the earth right up to the very stone but
not on it
Grow the crisp grass
And all the tiny plants and flowers
Which, together interlaced and inter-related,
Make the fine springing turf which people and animals
walk on.

Then I set the workshop participants free to spend about 20 minutes in the gallery brainstorming in front of one or more pieces of scale-related art, after which we shared our reactions and results. It was especially neat to hear which artworks drew people in, and how many participants felt the same dislocation as Alice or Gulliver, feeling themselves suddenly much larger or smaller than ever before. Several people also headed back into the gallery to spend more time with the art after the workshop, which felt like success to me.

You can download the handouts (writing exercise directions, poems, and more) here: The World in a Grain of Sand handout. I highly recommend a visit to the museum while you’re at it!

Finally, here are a few cool scale-related links I used in my research for the program, if you’d like to explore more:

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Sounds, scuba, and spine-tingles: MA Poetry Fest 2015 wrap-up

mwinikates

Headline Poets Read at MA Poetry Fest I have a fabulous time at the Mass Poetry Festival every year.  Every year I learn something new about writing, I am bowled over by a poet (or multiple poets) whose work I hadn’t before had a chance to appreciate, I get to spend time surrounded by people who love words as much as I do, and I come away exhilarausted, which is that peculiar state of wiped out and buzzed that comes from too much inspiration in too short a time period.

As always, the headline poets were fantastic. I didn’t make it to all the headline sessions, but both the Friday and Saturday night readings were interesting, featuring Nick Flynn, Adrian Matejka, Denise Duhamel, Rita Dove, and Richard Blanco. I was especially enamored of Rita Dove’s reading, and most particularly loved her poem “Maple Valley Branch Library, 1967,” linked below:

Full text of the poem can also be found here.

Scuba diving poet Marie Elizabeth Mali reads against a backdrop of her photography.
Scuba diving poet Marie Elizabeth Mali reads against a backdrop of her photography.

Other moments that caught my imagination included the reading of marine-inspired poetry to a running background of underwater photography, the highly entertaining “Digital Age Poetics” workshop from the lovely folks at Window Cat Press, and the absolutely fabulous “Writing Sound to Sound” workshop with Moira Linehan and Mary Pinard, which focused on exercises that build sound consciousness into your writing from the very start.  As someone who loves the music of language, syllable and rhythm, I found that session especially inspiring.  Overall, from humorous memes and ‘flarf’ searches to dictionary page and abecedarius poetry, I came away with a ton of new writing prompts and a few promising new poem kernels.

Dramatic Cat has found her role of a lifetime, courtesy of a penchant for puns.
Meme as digital poetics: Dramatic Cat has found her role of a lifetime, courtesy of a penchant for puns by yours truly.

I learned about Edna St. Vincent Millay, read aloud and listened to a great collection of winter and spring poems from my fellow long-suffering New Englanders, and had many a meal with friends old and new.  Finally, I was pleased to see that PEM continued to play with words and art, featuring Mad Libs Muse prompts featuring ‘erasures’ from famous poems, paint chip poetry focused on color and brevity, and even a giant Scrabble game.

paintchippoetrympf15

Thanks and congratulations again to Michael, Jan, and Laurin for putting together another spectacular weekend!

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Narratives Found: A day of surprise and serious wordsmithing

mwinikates

I have lots of thoughts about the last few days of the Mass Poetry Festival, so expect those in a subsequent post, but first I’d like to say ‘thanks!’ to everyone who attended my workshop “Found Narratives” on Sunday morning at the Peabody Essex Museum. I promised I’d put my presentation up online, so the slides are below, with a summary of the ideas that kicked off our writing session.

http://www.slideshare.net/mwinikates/meg-w-mapofest15foundnarratives

What is the role of curators in creating an exhibition, and how is that like (or unlike) the role of a poet?

Curators have a number of roles:

  • Caretaker/Historian/Preservationist – all exhibitions are a continuation of, response to, or rejection of previous history (art history, historical narrative, etc.)  By choosing to include objects, artworks, etc. in a show, curators demonstrate that they think these particular things are worth saving, displaying, and sharing.
  • Author/Editor – curators pick which exhibition elements will best help them tell the story of the person/place/time period/movement/historical event that they want to tell.
  • Interpreter – A good curator (through a good exhibition) poses questions, invites discussion, offers new perspectives, and has an impact on the viewers that gives them a brain-tingling set of new ideas and questions of their own.

Arguably, a poet has much the same set of roles:

  • Historian – all poetry draws inspiration from, responds to, rejects, or reworks the written (and oral!) canon and literary tradition that preceded it. Play and challenge are vital acts of the poet-as-historian.
  • Author/Editor – words are a poet’s tools, and which words you pick and which words you juxtapose, emphasize, etc. are the keys to creating a poem with impact.
  • Interpreter – “If it blows the top of my head off, I know it’s Poetry.” Emily Dickinson was right on, IMHO. Just like visual art, a good poem makes the reader think, question, observe, react, feel, breathe a little differently than before they encountered the words.

The power of both of these roles is in the choices that we make.

Blank walls, blank paper, blank screen. You can put anything there in any order, so where do you start? It all depends on the impact you want to have. Are you aiming for accessible or inscrutable? Mysterious? Open? Comforting or confronting? Your goal determines your choices as much as your natural voice does.

In the case of an exhibition, there are numerous voices involved, of course. Aside from the curator, there are exhibition designers, an interpretive editor, often an educator, all offering suggestions which will help highlight and shape the story the curator wants to tell.  The team’s choices form the bridges for the connections visitors will make when standing in the space.

Will there be long sight lines or lots of small spaces? Which pieces are in conversation with each other, whether in support or in opposition?  Do you hang them together or separately? What color are the walls?  How much extra information do you put on the labels/wall text? What style font do you use?

For poets, this correlates to choices about line length, word juxtaposition, rhyme and meter, form.  Where do you want your viewer’s/reader’s eyes to go next?

The Idea for the Workshop

All this discussion grew out of a collaborative project between myself and photographer Michele Morris, Palettes of Light, in which we paired images from two of her series and then I wrote a poem connecting the two. It seemed a natural progression to me that this would work with any pair of artworks, provided that the poet started with two pieces that resonated with them for one or more reasons.  Ekphrastic poetry has a long and proud history (Musee des Beaux Arts, anyone?), and this is a way to celebrate not only the creative efforts of the visual artist, but also the imaginative connective power of the viewer. (A workshop participant later described this exercise as ‘Next Level Ekphrasis’ and said she was going to teach it to her students, which made me very happy indeed.)

The Task: Find your Narrative

In preparation for spending time in two exhibitions, I asked the workshop participants to do the following:

  • Find 1-2 works in each of the exhibits that really sang to them, for any reason at all.
  • Brainstorm a list of words and phrases provoked by each work.
  • Take photos of the works to use for future reference.  (There was a hard limit of 10 minutes per gallery to make sure we had time to get back to the studio to write, and poetry and art appreciation both benefit from more time.)
  • Once back in the studio, find a connecting thread between the 2 works.
  • Write ‘the bridge,’ aka, draw out the connection and give it support using the inspiration from the two artworks.
  • If they hated everything from one exhibit, they could pick 2 from the same exhibit. (No one who chose to share their work at the end chose this option.)

How do we get there? The Source Material

Using Visual Thinking Strategies, we spent a few minutes in each gallery as a group looking at one art work.  I asked only three questions (“What do you see?” “Why do you say that?” and “What else?”), and let people build upon their own and others’ observations to discuss the work in front of them, then let them go to explore each gallery.

Stop 1: Duane Michals, Storyteller

I picked this show because Michals often treats his photographs as a storyboard: there’s a lot of narrative, sometimes with his own reflections, stories, memories, and poems written directly on the surface of the print. He has a playfulness to a lot of his work that I find appealing, and many of his themes tie easily into poetry (time, mortality, desire, wonder, discomfort, humor).

Stop 2: Branching Out, Trees as Art

This show focuses on the way artists use trees as both artistic material and as inspiration.  There are many more abstract works in this exhibition, and lots of themes about the ways humans relate to their environment.

On their own time, I encouraged participants to explore the rest of the museum as well and try this exercise again.

foundnarrativesmpf15

Possible Connections

There are a lot of ways to find a bridge that connects two seemingly disparate artworks.  The following list I had up on display for participants to consider as they began their writing:

  • Theme
  • Emotional reaction
  • Visual similarities
    • tone
    • texture
    • composition
    • color
    • movement
  • Resonances or dissonances
    • personal memories
    • references to artistic/literary tradition
    • using one artwork as a metaphor or frame for the other
    • timelines (cause and effect, before and after, etc.)

Participants then had about 15 minutes to work on their poems, and time at the end of the session to share their favorite lines (or the whole poem if it was short).  About half the workshop chose to share, and I was really impressed with the vivid language, the fantastic imagery, and the unusual connections they made.  I was also pleased, amused, and a little surprised that a few people chose an interactive element (an amadinda, similar to a log xylophone) instead of an artwork for their second piece.  I had, after all, asked them to find a piece that ‘sang’ to them–a few took me quite literally!

Do you find visual art a stimulus to your writing? Would you try this exercise or share it with your students/writing group? Have you tried it and do you have a result to share?  Add your thoughts to the discussion in the comments below!

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May 1-3: Poetry, the sea, and me

mwinikates

masspofest15logoThe Massachusetts Poetry Festival is this weekend, and I’m geared up and ready to go! If you’ll be in Salem for the festival, here are places to find me:*

Friday

1:15 pm – “Because, the Internet” workshop
3:30 pm – Poetry meetup at Howling Wolf
7:30 pm – Headliner reading with Denise Duhamel, Nick Flynn, and Adrian Matejka

Saturday

9:30 am – “Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Massachusetts Poetry” workshop
11:00 am – “Writing Sound to Sound” workshop
sometime between 11 am – 2 pm – Poetry Carnival
12:15 pm – “From Zero to One” panel
2:00 pm – “Narrative Poetry” workshop with Naugatuck River Review
3:15 pm – either “Flatline Poetry” or “Aloha, Winter. Aloha, Spring.” readings
7:30 pm – Headliner reading with Rita Dove and Richard Blanco

Sunday

A view of Branching Out: Trees as Art from the Peabody Essex Museum
A view of Branching Out: Trees as Art from the Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Meg Winikates.

10ish am – Paint Chip Poetry and other art activity drop-ins at PEM

11:30 am – “Found Narratives” workshop led by me! The workshop is currently sold out, but there’s a waitlist available, and it’s always worth turning up day-of in case there are no-shows.  Hope to see you there!

1 pm – either Rita Dove reading or “Shakespeare’s *itches, a Poetry Musical”
2:30 pm – Headliner Jorie Graham and Stephen Burt reading

If I’m not where I’ve said I’ll be, I may be hanging out at the art activities, or walking down to the waterfront for a brain break, because when the ocean’s that close, why not take it in?

salemwillowssunset
A view from the Willows in Salem, September 2014. Photo by Meg Winikates.

*As with any festival kind of event, a schedule is more of a guideline than actual rules. I reserve the right to be a poetry pirate and sail off on a different tack if that’s how the wind blows on the day.  🙂

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A Change is as good as a Line Break

mwinikates
Leading up to the Line Break room at PEM, installation by Colleen Michaels and Lillian Harden
Leading up to the Line Break room at PEM, installation by Colleen Michaels and Lillian Harden

You know that a public space is inviting if there are people in there every time you walk by.  When that space is a quiet area in a back corner of a museum set aside for poetic contemplation and respite, you make invisible fist pumps of joy and plan to come back later when you can abuse your staff privilege of getting in there before it opens to the public.

This is exactly what happened with Line Break, an installation at PEM for the Mass Poetry Festival.  (Read more about the background of the two artists and plans for the space here: Line Break on masspoetry.org)

When Colleen and Lillian first approached my colleague and I about a poetry installation during the festival, we were eager to try to make it happen, but neither of us suspected, I think, how successful they would be at creating the atmosphere they described: the soft hum and click of an old slide projector, the feeling of floating as you lay beneath the hammock of words, the wordless invitation of blank books and pure white pencils.

(Blank books always call to me, I always answer.)

Poetry hammock catches lines in Line Break
Poetry hammock catches words in Line Break

My favorite lines I saw float across the net/hammock were:

“if your net
were knit
by bloom
would it feel
like raised hands?”

And, based off another quote from a few lines later, I wrote this poemlet:

Transformations

Almost feather, almost fin
almost heaven, almost in.
Almost always, almost lost–
What’s the danger?  What’s the cost?
Almost sorry, almost wise,
almost perfect in your eyes.

line break room view
Really, the floor cushions were the part my inner child liked best.