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.