POUR, TEAR, CARVE

Full circle

Before I ever encountered the term ekphrastic, I was a museum nerd exploring the streets of the big city. As if it were yesterday,  I can still see the textured paint strokes of Picasso, Pollock, and van Gogh on the walls of the MOMA, where I’d wander as a teenager. For what felt like hours, I’d fixate on the swirl of van Gogh’s Starry Night and try to put words to a notebook to describe what those painters did that moved me so. It would be too coincidental to say that these museum visits made me a poet, but I can say, with certainty, that there was an early conversation taking place. Those colors, swirls, and textures spoke to me. And later as a poet, I would keep experiencing that overwhelming sensation of wanting to find words that paint an emotion, that frame my subject appropriately, that invite the reader (or listener) in, the way those painters spoke to me all those years ago. 

So you can imagine my delight in being asked to curate this section for Full Bleed’s Materials Issue in partnership with The Phillips Collection’s Pour, Tear, Carve, an exhibition of over 65 pieces varying widely across media, time, and theme. The collaboration has culminated with the publication of the poems included here, and was bookended by community writing workshops and a reading. 

As I worked with the editorial team at Full Bleed to put together this selection, I wanted to look at the entire project as I would create a long poem. How does one begin and end? What are the movements in-between? How do the poems speak to each other? This was my favorite part of the job—laying the poems out side-by-side and hearing their voices. When I encountered Katherine E. Young’s “Tesserae,” I knew I had found our first poem; it begins: “As good a starting place as any.” I then let the authors’ voices guide me toward their sequence. I wanted–as best as I could–to create a dialogue between the poems. So, when the first ended with “Scrawl my name across the bottom (Just in case)”, the opening to Sue Eisenfeld’s “And She was Born”--“She grew out of nothing, blankness/emerging from the negative space.”--fell into place beside it. These defiant voices leaped off the page and soon had me spilling the poems all over my office floor, re-reading each one while lying on my back as I cycled through the poems presented here. 

As you read this curated section, the themes of permanence and resistance to erasure seem to emerge. Faced with all that is fleeting and destructive, these poems bear witness to a materiality that persists. This is one of the virtues of good art: it speaks to our time while leaving its mark on our senses. I hope that you find yourself enraptured by both the artworks that gave rise to this remarkable exhibition and the unforgettable voices that bring the art alive on the page–the insistent voices pulsing at the margins, challenging our perspectives. I’m grateful to the editor of Full Bleed for bringing me back to the museum, where I return to my boyhood. After staring at so many great pieces, I had the urge to shout, Look, there’s Charlie “Bird” Parker, and to watch the birds sewn into Dinga McCannon’s quilt, which bears his likeness. And the music I imagine he’d play. Our feet keeping time. And we collectively sigh, happy to be alive. 

Abdul Ali
Baltimore, MD
May 1, 2023