botanizing

Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man?

Washington State Magazine has a story about Nature Twice, the poetry exhibit that we have presented this fall in the Conner Museum of Natural History.  The story, written by DL, a friend and co-curator of the exhibit, focuses on our collaborations over the years that have bridged the divide in our university between the sciences and the arts.

 We had great fun at the photo-shoot for the article.  Designer John Paxson had picked up on Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and especially the poem “Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man” by R. S. Thomas as a set-up for photographs.   The two poems are among my favorites.

 Bob Hubner, the photographer, shot images of DL and me seated at a table in the museum, while I read from the exhibit guide.  Later we unscrewed the glass front of a museum case to remove some of the blackbirds.  Bob put the blackbirds on the table to make photographs of them.  The result, after some Photoshop work by John Paxson, was the photograph above, in which blackbirds look at DL and me reading about poetry.

The photograph is delightful, and its narrative (punning? poetic?) sense helps me to feel even more involved in two of my favorite poems.   

Nature Twice: A Poetry Exhibit

The idea of a poetry exhibit made me smile.  That’s where we began about a year ago.  As we were discussing exhibit ideas for the Conner Museum of Natural History, which I direct at Washington State University, I mentioned to the curator that I was thinking about doing a poetry exhibit.  I next brought up the idea with Debbie Lee, who is a good friend and a professor in our English Department.  Debbie and I chat frequently over tea.  We’ve hiked and backpacked together, critiqued each other’s writing, and we’ve taught a course—on scientific travel narratives—together.  We have also discussed a lot of poetry over the years, venturing quickly from Wordsworth to Eliot and well beyond.  Last year, I asked Debbie if she would create with me an exhibit of poems for the Conner Museum of Natural History.  

The idea was to match poems with the taxidermy mounts of animals on display in the museum.  We went in search of poems about animals—particularly those animals that we have on display, which are mostly from the American Northwest.  Debbie’s expertise is the Romantic era, and she readily provided poems from Coleridge and Keats.  My reading tends more toward the modern, and I suggested poems by Wallace Stevens and Gary Snyder.  As we looked at the poems, we found that many didn’t correspond well to the animals on display.  We have few British birds in our museum collection, and, thus, out went Wordsworth’s cuckoos, Keats’s nightingales, Hopkins’s skylarks, and Hardy’s thrushes.   We found other marvelous poems, such as R. S. Thomas’s “Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man,” which I wrote about here several weeks ago, and A. E. Stallings’s “Extinction of Silence,” which is about understanding life from museum specimens.  

As Debbie and I e-mailed back and forth our ideas, we also tried-out various title for the exhibit.  Debbie suggested we consider a line from a poem by Emily Dickinson that began 

A Sparrow took a Slice of Twig

And thought it very nice

I think, because his empty Plate

Was handed Nature twice—

“Nature Twice” struck us as apropos for the exhibit name.  Our exhibit would offer two views of nature— one manifest in the animal mounts on display and the other in the poems. 

As we considered how to do the exhibit, we decided to invite graduate students from both the Department of English and School of Biological Sciences to collaborate with us on the development and curation of the exhibit.  We e-mailed an invitation to students and eleven decided to join us.  Last spring, the graduate students, Linda Russo (a poet in our English Department), Debbie, and I took our large pile of possible poems for exhibit and spread them through the museum, matching poems with animal specimens.  We discussed the physical spacing of the poems as well as their contents and lengths—and this led us to select 40 poems for the exhibit.  

We wanted also to offer visitors to the exhibit a guide.  Over the summer, the students, Linda, Debbie, and I wrote essays about the poems.  Those essays have now been assembled, printed, and bound along with a preface and introduction to make a compact book.

The “Nature Twice” exhibit opens this week in the Conner Museum of Natural History.  Our opening on Thursday evening will begin with the poets Linda Russo and Ray Hanby reading from their work.  Both Linda and Ray have explored the natural world in their poems and used nature in the broadest sense to comprehend life.  Debbie and I hope that visitors to the opening and the exhibit will gain insights into both animals and poems.  We hope the exhibit will encourage visitors to consider diverse and creative ways to understand nature.The idea of exhibiting poems delights me.  We look at poems in books and little magazines—not in museums.  We think about reading poems or listening to them.  We question whether poems can change the world.  I wanted to mix these perceptions together to create something slightly new. 

I have imagined visitors to our exhibit reading the poems—even just stanzas or lines—aloud to themselves or to friends while in the museum.  I think about that reading and listening, while these visitors are at the same time looking at the animals on display in the museum.  The conversations that emerge from the experience of the exhibit may not change the world, but I think the context, this new setting for poetry, will encourage new perceptions.  Our exhibit will help visitors to the exhibit see that science and art are miscible and a mix of both inevitably influences our understanding of nature.