The Making of Art: The Woman Who Began at the End

Barbara Chase-Riboud (center) with Dagmawi Woubshet and Salamishah Tillet

Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014

Good afternoon ladies, gentlemen, and scholars. I’m Barbara Chase-Riboud and I’m here to explain myself as the Woman Who Began at the End. Although I don’t quite know what more I can add given Callaloo’s superb BCR issue of 700 pages in 2007 that explained everything you ever wanted to know about me and treated me so well I could hardly wait to turn the page to find out more about what I was doing! It was a lovely praise song and I thank you for it.

So I don’t know what I can add to this except to tell you what has happened since 2007 and your publication and to congratulate you on your almost fortieth anniversary. The good news is I haven’t sued anybody lately or introduced any nasty American History secrets or controversies into our chronicles. And you know the saying about plagiarism, “If you copy one person, it’s plagiarism, if you copy everybody, it’s research …”

I am standing before you for three reasons: First, I have a new book—my collected poems Everytime a Knot is Undone, A God is Released, published October 14th by Seven Stories Press, NY, which is new and collected poems from 1974 to 2011, 400 pages, everywhere books are sold. There are 250 poems including those from From Memphis and Peking, Love Perfecting, White Porcelains, and Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra which won the Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize as Best American Poet. What is interesting about this collection is the homogeneity of the poems which span forty years. There are no “early” poems or “late” poems. They seem all to have appeared full blown yesterday. There is no way of dating them by style or theme. They seem to stand in a space and time by themselves. Which is the way they come to me—full blown and almost always the first draft written in a few days and in suites of two or three. I hardly ever write one poem. A poem engenders another poem and so on. It is a strange way of working, almost subconsciously or in a daze, always looking over my shoulder as if the very paper upon which I’m writing is about to be snatched away. And I always think while working that the last poem I’ve written is the last poem I’ll ever write. I don’t advise it, as a way of working, but it does make for surprising and interesting times.

I am probably one of the only poets in the world that has not committed to memory at least one poem—not “Anna,” not “Why Did We Leave Zanzibar,” not “Nude Woman as Cleopatra.” When the Muse shakes me awake in the middle of the night, I don’t jump up and cling to her skirts, she’s gone by morning and so is my poem. So young people when you come to my funeral, bring a few verses in your head, memorized by heart like the young Russians did for Akmatova instead of all my poems glowing on your iPad. I will keep writing them and not memorizing them hoping that this won’t stop them from coming to visit me.

Secondly, in conjunction with this publication, I am presenting fifteen new sculptures and fifteen drawings at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York City in my first one-woman exhibit in New York since the Metropolitan Museum of Art more than ten years ago. The exhibit contains five of the Malcolm X steles series of which several were exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art last year and the Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archives this year, several of which have never been shown in the United States, along with a new La Musica series that has never been exhibited anywhere. I will have a book signing at the gallery...