Our nation’s newest holiday is indeed cause to celebrate. For many Black people, Juneteenth represents freedom at a greater depth than Independence Day. Hopefully, in times to come, it will be equally significant for non-Black people as well—the cause to celebrate freedom being yet another contribution by Black people to these very much divided United States.
Twenty-five years ago, Cave Canem was founded around a question of freedom: the freedom to express Blackness in all its individual and collective forms, unadulterated, through the medium of poetry. Since then, the public profile of Black poets has grown greater than it has ever been and the majority of those poets—National Book Award winners, schoolteachers, Pulitzer Prize winners, actors, National Book Critics’ Circle Award winners, college professors, members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, gardeners, and state poets laureate—are directly related to the organization through a variety of programs designed to support Black poets at various stages in their artistic production.
Left: Cubiculum (bedroom) from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, ca. 50–40 B.C. Roman, late Republic. Fresco, 8 ft. 8 1/2 in. × 10 ft. 11 1/2 in. × 19 ft. 1 7/8 in. (265.4 × 334 × 583.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1903 (03.14.13a–g). Right: Kerry James Marshall (American, born 1955). Untitled (Studio), 2014. Acrylic on PVC panels, 83 ¼ × 119 ¼ in. (211.6 × 302.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation Gift, Acquisitions Fund and The Metropolitan Museum of Art Multicultural Audience Development Initiative Gift, 2015 (2015.366). © Kerry James Marshall
The ekphrastic exercise is certainly not new to poets in the Anglophone tradition, and the visual arts play an important role in the presentation of poetry in book form. One need only peruse the poetry shelf of their local bookstore, if it still exists, to see myriad artworks from around the world, in diverse styles, gracing the covers of this debut collection or that must-have anthology. Poets cannot get enough of the stuff; it’s like rocket fuel, launching our imaginations into the far reaches of color and composition, no matter the medium. To ask Black poets to mediate on works of their own choosing from the Museum’s vast collection, however, is risky. What might they reveal about the acquisitors of these works?
The Cave Canem Fellows who were commissioned to compose poems for this celebration are New Yorkers with a vested interest in the civic enterprise of museums, especially this one, whose identity is inextricably linked to the city as a geographical space and an archetypal metropolis. Black voices like theirs have not historically been called upon to provide the spectator’s point of view, nor were they originally considered in the selection of works to be put on display.
Writers and former Cave Canem Fellows Eisa Davis (left) and Bakar Wilson (right). Courtesy the authors
In its metapoetic consideration of the stanza, Eisa Davis’s “Cubiculum Nocturnum” ranges back and forth across the Atlantic, between New York and several Italian cities, all the while standing inside a bedroom inside a gallery at The Met. Bakar Wilson takes his reader by the hand and leads them on a lyrical journey into a painting, behind the eyes of a painter and finally into his own mind in “Marshall’s Studio.”
These poems will live beside their respective art works in a digital home, I hope, in perpetuity—but if not, they might linger alongside your attention, which is what art asks of us all.
