on dioramas and the poet's task
I realized the other day that my two most recent zine projects were centered around dioramas--either the grandness of the Field Museum displays, which are always my favorite, or the intricately glass encased creatures of Walter Potter. There are similar themes that reach across both--nature and death, the act of stilling something to capture and interpret it. The precariousness of humans, who capture their own existence whether accurately or inaccurately. (this is one the overarching themes of my animal, vegetable, monster manuscript, which nests both of these series.) Through things like museum dioramas and art. The stillness that nonetheless implies movement or progress. It's obvious I love things like taxidermy and all sorts of flora and fauna (my second book is, after all, called in the bird museum and has a whole series devoted to Cornell boxes. One of my favorite art projects was this installation, which I use as a backdrop for my website these days--it's ability to be both pretty and a little creepy at the same time. And really, as the Potter poems attest, what cold be more creepy, more uncanny than things not only dead, but frozen as if they still live (even anthropomorphism aside, which is also a little creepy, but also delightful.)
In extinction event, this dead/alive is forged alongside very real extinction and climate change concerns. I did some research into the artists who are responsible for many of the Field's most well-loved diorama work. The human desire to collect and display. How much we never really know about the past but can only reassemble what may have happened, how the world may have been like--the dinosaurs, prehistoric rock formations, long extinct mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers. How can we discern how anything really lived--especially humans--who are regularly rewriting their own history (if critical race study discussions have taught us anything, what we leave out matters as much as what we include.) Mostly, if you create diorama--paint a picture, tale a photo-what you do not include is just as important (and maybe more important, than what you do.
When I was in elementary school, we often were tasked with creating shoe box dioramas and it was something, even with my rudimentary art skills I loved. I'd collect sticks and rocks and try to assemble something that looked like reality. This may be why I spent so many hours in the old modern wing of the Art Institute when I was working on the Cornell pieces (until they moved them to the new wing and basically ruined how you experience them.) Later, I would make my own shadowboxes using vintage wallpaper, collage bits, and porcelain animals. Good, but not Cornell good.
And sometimes poems are their own dioramas. Their own glimpses of stillness that are more loaded than one might think. Unlike a story or an essay that has an obvious destination--a poem is something small, like a tiny box or a little machine. In my second book, I often think of a piece called "midnight pastoral" which seems entirely its own sort of diorama or shadowbox. A girl and a farmer and a ladder into the night sky. Other poems that possess what I like to think of as moving stillness. A scene in which so much is happening if you look closer. And the Field's dioramas feel like this. You might notice the hyenas or the lions, but also, there are other birds and insects that make the scene not just about what is happening center frame, but what was happening a moment ago. And what will happen after.
Comments