Poetry and Art News

Several months ago I was invited by the Blanton Museum at UT Austin
to write a poem based on a work of art in their collection. Their mail described the project as...
a collaboration we are planning between Texas poets and the Blanton Museum of Art. Our collaboration, tentatively titled “Poetry at the Blanton,” will explore and promote poetry that responds to a work of visual art (painting, sculpture, or installation). These kinds of poems are known as ekphrastic poems; two famous examples are Keats’s "Ode to a Grecian Urn" and Rilke’s “Torso of an Archaic Apollo.” Modern examples include Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” both of which respond very differently to the same painting by Pieter Brueghel.

Finally, I decided on this painting,
Jan Brueghel the Elder and Hendrick van Balen
Diana and Callisto
circa 1605-1608
Oil on copper


It had been quite a while since the submission deadline, and I had not heard anything and assumed my poem had not been selected for exhibition, but last week I got this message:

Thanks so much for sending the poem, "Callisto Exposed." I'm very pleased to

say that the Blanton has selected it for a wall card, to be placed next to the

painting "Diana and Callisto" in the gallery in April. It should remain there, unless the painting goes on loan or is replaced temporarily with another.

The Museum has scheduled a launch for the Poetry Project on Sunday, April 6 from 1:00-4:00 pm. From 1:00-2:00, they will have a reception; from 2:00-3:00 a reading from some of the featured poets; and from 3:00-4:00 curators will lead tours focusing on the artworks that poets chose to write about. I hope you can

join us, or at least stop by the Museum some time after next week to see your poem as well as the others.

Again, thanks so much for supporting this project.

I don't know if I will make it down to Austin for the event, but I'd like to. I like the idea of presenting poetry and visual art together, something that my friend Michelle Rhea has done before with her poems and photography.

We also got some ART news in the mail last week. The photograph that my 10 year old has had on exhibit in a Texas government building gallery, also in Austin, for the last year has arrived back home, and there will be a ceremony for the student artists at the Modern Art Museum when they pick up their work.

River Reflections

Here's what she said about it:

This place on our land is very special to me because my mom owns it and shares it with me. This amazing place is so wonderful, and I like to enjoy that part of the land every time I get a chance. I like to explore the creek and camp out on the land. The sparkling creek is as pretty as it is in my picture.