Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis explores womanhood, art, and blackness, and how all of those relate to our histories. She writes early on, "We wonder together/about the history of history/The Brooklyn Bridge is folded up//inside my pocket." Later, she writes "By the end of it, I was on my knees. I'd enter a museum, drop to the ground, and ignore the art completely. I had learned. The art itself had taught me. Art made me kneel." (140).
She pulls from other poets throughout the text, but most importantly, the second section of the text comprises of a narrative poem made "solely and entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of Western art objects in which a black female figure is present, dating from 38,000BCE to the present. She lays out rules for herself below:
The poems vary in form, but often include sonnets and list poems, as well as couplets with 1-2 words each. Sometimes the poems read as a call-and-response, while others are interspersed with interrogations.
Buy the book: https://www.amazon.com/Voyage-Sable-Venus-Other-Poems/dp/1101875437
The New Yorker Review: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/rebirth-of-venus
No comments:
Post a Comment