When we commemorate Poetry Month with poems by Massachusetts-honored artists, we’re really commemorating all art forms. By artists everywhere. With poems.
My proof? Well, I don’t really have proof – can such a statement be proved? – but what I have, as Exhibit A, is Kristin Bock (Poetry Fellow ’06), who said in an ArtSake interview that the origins of her poetry could be drawn to her father, a still-life painter:
His paintings made me aware of texture, the qualities of light, and the language between objects at a very early age. They facilitated my understanding of symbolism and metaphor and nurtured my love for dark imagery. In short, art taught me the vocabulary of poetry.
Here is Kristin’s poem Pastoral, from her collection Cloisters.
PASTORAL
Fanned out in the night, I hear
the windmill give its life to the wind.
A satellite drifts by, recording
my inner dials.
I think I’m not alone.
All over the world, people lay down
in fields and wait for the sky to open.
Somewhere, our devotion
is being compared on an infinite chart.
Somewhere, we resemble spoons
laid across a table.
Kristin Bock is the author of Cloisters, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award.
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