Poem of the Week | November 10, 2014
Janice N. Harrington: “Topoanalysis”
This week we offer a new poem by Janice N. Harrington. Harrington’s Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her latest book of poetry is The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (BOA Editions). She teaches at the University of Illinois.
Author’s note:
“Topoanalysis” responds to an oil painting by the African American folk artist Horace H. Pippin. The words of Bachelard, “at the first poetic overture, the reader who is ‘reading a room’ leaves off reading and starts to think of some place in his own past, ” complicate the poem’s conversations.
I wanted to enact that moment when the reader breaks from the painting to look into his or her personal past. The poem strives to erase the lines between artist and subject, past and present, a work of art and its audience, and even words and paint. If there is a painted child who hears the painter’s step, then perhaps there is a child made of language who hears the reader’s step?
“Topoanalysis” also honors the life and work of Horace H. Pippin, a World War I soldier who fought with the famed 369th infantry, an African American unit that not only introduced jazz music to Europe but also fought valiantly on the frontlines of France. Pippin had every reason not to make art. He wasn’t wealthy. He lived in a segregated and racially-charged America. He didn’t have an MFA or the backing of the academy. His right arm was disabled as a result of a painful war wound. And yet he produced a magnificent series of paintings. I am fascinated by his work and continue to generate poems about his life and art and the relation between them.
Topoanalysis
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