Transferring the Grace Note: From Rita Dove's Poem to Glenn Ligon's Art

Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruitBlood on the leaves and blood at the rootBlack bodies swinging in the southern breezeStrange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant southThe bulging eyes and the twisted mouthScent of magnolias, sweet and freshThen the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is fruit for the crows to pluckFor the rain to gather, for the wind to suckFor the sun to rot, for the trees to dropHere is a strange and bitter crop

—LEWIS ALLAN, MAURICE PEARL, DWAYNE P. WIGGINS, 1937

My path in this article follows a sequence of three poetic and artistic responses to "Strange Fruit," first sung by Billie Holiday in 1939.¹ Linked by a pattern of dedicatory lineage, the three works also respond to one another in a process that ultimately leads to a cross-media exchange between the poet Rita Dove and the artist Glenn Ligon. At the point of departure, Michael S. Harper incorporates the dedication in his poem's italicized subtitle—"Where Is My Woman Now: For Billie Holiday." Rita Dove, in turn, acknowledges Harper in a separate line in italics—"for Michael S. Harper"—in the open space between her one-word title, "Canary," and the body of her poem.² Glenn Ligon's stenciled painting Canary (For Rita Dove) adopts both Dove's title and, in parentheses that embrace or bracket, Dove's name.

The final point in this trajectory from song lyric to poem to visual art stands out because the shift in medium as we move from Rita Dove to Glenn Ligon creates a break in the overall aesthetic continuum. This culmination changes the formal terms of the ongoing conversation and challenges us to account for the precise nature and effects of the interaction between verbal and visual, language and image, involved in cross-media exchange. In the following case study, I hope to contribute to the development of an approach broad enough to address this issue.

Glenn Ligon, Canary (For Rita Dove), 1991. Oil on wood, 80 x 30 in. Collection of the Gund Gallery, Kenyan College, Ohio.

Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Thomas Dane Gallery, London. © Glenn Ligon

Rita Dove. Photo: Fred Viebahn

Glenn Ligon at opening reception of Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 2011. Photo: Stefanie Keenan

Michael S. Harper's elegiac poem, whose subtitle identifies Billie Holiday as the missing woman, reiterates the title "Where Is My Woman Now" three times through the fourteen-line poem as a mournful refrain at lines four, ten, and the final line.³ The plaintive expression of loss is made more painful by the absence of a question mark; no punctuation is necessary because the answer is either obvious or unattainable. There is only the indisputable fact of a double loss: the lynched black bodies to which Billie Holiday's song bears witness and Holiday's own death. The poem's first line, "poplars lean backward," announces the connection to the world evoked by Holiday's voice in the final line of the opening stanza of the song: "Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees." Harper not only reenters the ironic, angry tone of the macabre "pastoral scene" of "Strange Fruit," but also appeals to a traditional redemptive version of pastoral elegy. The strategic insertion "like sheep" in line twelve obliquely restores a standard feature of the genre: the conventional metaphor of the poet as shepherd.

The elements of continuity between song and poem are evident in Harper's elaboration of the preexisting wind and rain and his reuse of the imagery of flowers and birds. Their effects are placed in the service of a strongly marked seasonal shift from "winter bark" to "spring muck." The "poppies," which replace the sickeningly misplaced "scent of magnolias, sweet and...