Variétés Apollinaris, 1953
Joseph Cornell
She’s just a paper girl with her attention
on the ground before her. Birds flutter
around her and a basket at her feet.
On the floor a white moon nestles up against
a white planet. One white dove perches
on the empty basket. What does it mean?
I thought I wished to be inside the box.
Faced with the boy who stares from the sidelines
And the papered wall, I’m not so certain.
Signed up for the William Stafford Daily Writing Challenge https://staffordchallenge.com/, I find that I am never without a place to begin. I have a number of series of poems working. One is a group of ghazals about our color-rich world. Several series are related to the works of visual artists. Norma Cole, a professor at USF with whom I worked on my master’s project pointed me in the direction of Max Jacob, a poet and painter. (But more about him when I share a bite of prose poetry.) Joseph Cornell became one of those artists.
But how did Cornell first catch my attention? It was during the time I was working through Jean Valentine poems. (See also the blog on Speechless in Heaven.) In her poem “The Helicopter” he becomes a simile, making/ a shoebox universe to put it all in. . . . So I go off happily hunting the allusion, which included watching some documentaries and one of his films on youtube. His obsession with collecting ephemera and making it new intrigued me, in part because as a young librarian in training I interned one summer at the Bodleian in Oxford, processing collectible memorabilia.
She Turns Her Back to Me is the fifth poem written in response to his art. An image in the news sparked this poem. I felt an immediate emotional response to the girlish figure in a party dress. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/15/arts/design/joseph-cornell-national-gallery.html?searchResultPosition=1 His boxes are puzzles waiting for me to analyze the parts. I started with the title. An exhibit listing for Navigating the Imagination at the Smithsonian explains:
Cornell did not title or date most of his works. Many examples have been
published with generic titles derived from the names of his series or with
multiple versions of descriptive titles assigned by others. Titles for some
works in the exhibition will vary from previously published versions due
to direct observation and archival research. Titles given in italics appear
on the works, inscribed, typed or collaged by the artist.
Next I began to list items included and tease out the symbolism. I excluded some things as ideas about the poem begin to form. This raises some questions: If I don’t include everything, do I do the artist a disservice? Am I depriving the reader? If I include everything, do I risk crowding out or drowning the reader in detail? My response is a question: What serves my poem best? Do I have anything to say about the white wire grid across the top?
As I worked to describe the contents, I focused on the human forces there, the girl and a boy to the side, who I did not notice at first. Something about their positions, her lack of awareness of him made me uneasy. (I get the same feeling when I see people focused on cell phones, unaware of what is going on around them.) The figures in the box and the birds have nowhere eIse to go. I realized looking into the box made me feel claustrophobic. Once I realized that, the poem wrote itself.
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