Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick is a friend, fellow writer and recent graduate. She writes long compelling poems. She also has a lovely blog called Ways We Are Lost where she wrote a little bit more about the impact this experience had on her http://wayswearelost.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/lost-in-the-met/. It is really a blog worth reading regularly. Her poems and thoughts are below.
In The Museum, A Schizophrenic Among Angel, Voice, Nail
Spiral, saints, painting of someone’s
Torturer—children ask, What does that
Mean? As though the way to heaven
Is through a flagged red heart of a burning goat.
*
Pull your hair out, said the widow of Seville.
All of it?
Yes. I need straw—
Gates from which to enter the world.
I want to eat your lamb,
I said, then your hands.
*
Pull it out.
Pull it out.
body, hair.
*
Noticed swans, their necks gripped
by women, thought of Seville, how one jumps
In fountains fully clothed, folds exposed—
This reminded me of the tortured man’s stomach,
so I stopped looking at the goat.
*
After leaving the museum, the widow of Seville followed me
Down the street, into shadow of leaves. Satellite woman—
She said, have a sandwich. I said, No, I must keep trim.
*
I came, come for the burning goat, his bones.
I came, come for the living-speak.
I come, came, pulling a strand from my head.
I came, come, hungry—side-split ache of dead for the living.
*
You can have my hair—
The world outside contains me.
The people walking by? My food.
Observations
It's interesting, a definite change of pace for me, to write from the museum. I felt bombarded by many different voices. The notebook I wrote it allowed me, or gave me permission, to write without thinking too much about line breaks or worry about erasing what I immediately thought was cliche, or bad writing--usually on a computer word document, I will quickly delete whole lines in seconds, but from my notebook in the museum, I just had to keep writing.
When I got home and transferred what I wrote in my notebook onto a word document, it was like I was coming at the writing on a whole new level, an extra step in the writing process that I don't usually have. I was recalling the place and sensations, paintings and images, again in my mind whole trying to take the first draft to a second and third on the computer. In my mind, I was back in the place where the inspiration happened. I was back in the museum. However, the words I wrote in the museum, once transferred onto the computer, seemed like new words and images. Something long divorced from my experience and yet remembered, but from a different perspective.
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