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  • Node 5:Ekphrasis and the Question of Perfect Equilibrium
  • Gregory Pardlo (bio)

This kind of classification is . . . every bit as futile as the division of mankind into brachycephalics and dolichocephalics. My typology is far rather a critical apparatus serving to sort out and organize the welter of empirical material, but not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight.

C. G. Jung, Psychological Types

Late in 2002, as a relatively recent MFA grad, I was invited to read at the Studio Museum of Harlem with two poets whose work is, or at least I considered it to be at the time, experimental, which to me meant something akin to speaking in tongues. The reading, sponsored jointly with the organization for African American poets, Cave Canem, was in observance of a solo exhibit of work by artist Gary Simmons. I didn't know who Simmons was. I now know to associate him with that important cadre of black artists for whom the curator, Thelma Golden, and artist Glen Ligon coined the term "post black" to classify their work (although Simmons's work was not included in Freestyle, the groundbreaking 2001 exhibit Golden curated to inaugurate the school). I don't know whose charitable or misguided efforts resulted in my name being added to the bill (I was woefully out of my league), but I was grateful to have been invited despite my fear of appearing unimaginatively conventional in the company of poets whose work quite possibly communes with multiple planes of existence, and in the context of art that participates in a conversation I wasn't aware was taking place.

To complicate matters, each poet was asked to write a poem in response to Simmons's work and to share those poems in our readings. On the surface, this was a simple enough request. It was a challenge most poets would have welcomed. But when the postman arrived with the hard cover catalogue of Simmons's work for me to review, I began to realize the complexity of the problem I was facing. I had never written an ekphrastic poem that I was aware of, and I'm not even sure if at the time that word was part of my vocabulary. I opened at random the book the museum had mailed to me and found, on page 57, a series titled "Sky Erasure Drawings." [End Page 584]


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The series consists of wavering pentagrams like what my daughter's second grade teacher draws on her homework, sky-written by a twin-engine airplane. The catalogue description lists the materials as "liquid paraffin on sky." I spent the better part of my adult life trying to compensate for having grown up in a town where those of us who were so inclined to adorn the expanses of drywall in our hallways and to offer pleasant focal points in our half-baths, acquired art at Pier 1 Imports. Even still, I wasn't prepared to be shoved, like a shy boy goaded by friends at the school dance, face to face with the intimidating abstractions of post-blackness1 and, (what to call it?) a kind of meteorological art. I had no idea how to proceed.

Simmons's work showed little interest in meeting me halfway. I wasn't expecting anything as accessible as Dogs Playing Poker, but I was hoping to encounter materials a little more conventional than liquid paraffin on sky. I had been expecting to cast myself agreeably into that field of popular sentiments in which identity expression is commonly grounded (as if what African American art and literary audiences needed were reassurances as to who we are and the struggles from whence we came). What led me to think a group of brash and overachieving cultural outliers such as those attracted to the SMH would be soothed by sentiments more appropriate to the Laura Bush White House was not only my ignorance regarding critical race theory; it was not only my ignorance of contemporary art. It was ignorance of my own craft and its possibilities for directed engagement. In a poem, I felt I could describe a thing well...

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