Reverberations Review

Thursday night the Foote Gallery in the Loveland Museum was alive with words, and I had to wonder if, in the Main Gallery above, the prompting artworks were listening.  And why not?  John Calderazzo, in the poem he composed for the event, holds two of Jacob Lawrence’s works in conversation with each other and with him.  Calderazzo was one of 17 writers participating in Reverberations, a poetic response to the visual art of Lawrence and Saude Mitchell, on display in the Loveland Museum (through December 31), and John Johnson’s photographs, on display virtually through the Smithsonian exhibit Black and White in Black and White.

The poems, wide-ranging in scope, reverberated with themes of dignity and suffering in the human experience as demonstrated by Hiroshima, civil rights confrontations and African American life in Lincoln Nebraska at the end of the 20^th Century.  Adding depth to the reading were projections of the art to which each writer was responding.    

I could highlight something striking from each of the poems read that night, but in keeping with the brevity expected in a blog post, here are just a few highlights.   

A new voice (to me anyway) Thursday night was that of Maria Fernandez-Gimenez, a local poet who is, by day, a Senior Research Scientist in CSU’s college of Natural Resources. 

Loveland’s Emily Rogers-Ramos engaged all in the room with language of ripping and scaring in her response to one of Lawrence’s paintings in his Toussaint L’Ouverture series.   This series seemed to have prompted the majority of the responses by the poets participating in this Ekphratic event.

Several of the poets chose to respond to the same work (each poet was able to make their own choice rather than being assigned a particular work).  It was interesting to see how widely they ranged.  Both Jack Martin and Juan Morales wrote impressively, but very differently, in response to “The Burning.”  Both noticed minute detail.  Martin commented on the use of shadow and depth on the canvas as it relates to the stark reality portrayed, asking “How does one explain perspective to a fire?”  Morales followed the process of screen printing (which Lawrence used) to organize his journey through the painting and its depiction of the violence of the 1791 Haitian Revolution, an event haunting in its similarities to the unsettled present-day Haiti.  The diversity of their responses reminds us that we each see through unique eyes. 

Interspersed with the original poems read by their writers on Thursday night were passages from four black American Writers: William Stanley Braithwaite, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Zora Neale Hurston.

Wish you had been there?  Visit the exhibit at the Loveland Museum before the end of the year: you will find a brochure there with the paired poems; reading them yourself is not quite as engaging as hearing them read by the composers, but it will give you another door into the many rooms of the visual art in this exhibit.