A blazing collection of poetry and lyrical essays that mixes autobiography and philosophy, art criticism and urban science
?speaking / at once / to where I come from and where I am coming from? ?Simone White
In New Poems for Museums, the acclaimed poet and philosopher-critic Simone White intertwines the personal and historical with sharp insights on art and the gallery-museum. Many of the poems and all of the essays in this book turn toward specific works of art or a body of work?by such artists as Pope.L, Trisha Donnelly, and Arthur Jafa?seeking out formal rejoinders to the ekphrastic presumptions of the literature-artworld economy. The book opens with ?the righteous comedy of my mother's beatings? and ends with a mutual love of flowers. In one poem, a meditation on Claus Oldenburg's steel sculpture Clothespin turns to the poet's sixteen-year-old self running feral in a city ?where black children get bombed? and her father is being humiliated by a senator at City Hall. Other poems, too, seek out the life that has shaped the poet and the life that has shaped the art, swerving from Philadelphia gentrification to the metrosea of Pasadena, from Joni Mitchell to Michelle Obama, from the indictment of her father (a prominent lawyer) to a sleepwalking child and the unrest of duration. If the book can be said to mark the commencement and extension of a period of poetic thinking conditioned by being compelled to perform as ?poet,? then it is also the way White has worked out?the only way?of speaking in a contemporary voice through ?the book of poems.?
