By Wendy
Mary Collins, a poet based in Boston, visited “The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl” last week at the ICA/Boston. Right away, the art reminded her of a poem she’d written.
“I have to admit that I had written it before I saw the show,” she told us, by email. “When I took the poem to workshop a couple years ago, some people questioned what the birds were doing in the poem, but when I saw Jeroen Diepenmaat’s artworks, I said to myself, ‘That is what the birds are doing in the poem!’ ”
Mary agreed to share her poem:
sound came
obsidian black
from the disks
with whirligig grooves
lights low
diamond-sparked electricity crackled
guitar riffs
mellow flat sevens
descended in passages
down the notches
to lazy hazy
lovemaking sounddreams
embryonic sixteenth notes slipped from
phonograph kisses
lipsticked
spinning stripes on the carnival tents
of vinyl lovefests
cracked broken
the records
dot the dump
cardinals chipa chipa chip chip
sparrows twitter wit
bluejays scrrrrrritch
old age
listens
all alone
predeceased by
that dark that glowed red hot
with the wild beats
of three-plus decades
IMAGE: Jeroen Diepenmaat, “Pour des dents d’un blanc éclatant et saines,” 2005. Record players, vinyl records, stuffed birds, sound. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.