TEACHING POETRY & AMERICAN ART

  • Introduction
    • Why Poetry and American Art?
    • Strategies
    • Disclaimer
    • About Me
  • Romanticism
    • Intro to American Romanticism (1820-1900)
    • John James Audubon
    • Thomas Cole
    • Asher Durand
    • Daniel Chester French
    • Winslow Homer
    • Albert Pinkham Ryder
    • Augustus Saint-Gaudens
    • "Illuminated Gems of Sacred Poetry"
    • "Indian Summer: Autumn Poems and Sketches"
  • Realism / Social Realism
    • Realism >
      • Intro to Realism (1900-1920)
      • George Bellows
      • Edwin Dawes
      • Thomas Eakins
      • Edward Hopper
      • Thomas Hovenden
      • John Sloan
    • Social Realism >
      • Intro to Social Realism (1920-1940)
      • Walker Evans
      • Dorothea Lange
      • Ben Shahn
  • Regionalism
    • Intro to Regionalism (1920-1940)
    • Thomas Hart Benton
    • Maynard Dixon
    • Grant Wood
  • Modernism
    • Intro to Modernism (1910-1940)
    • Stuart Davis
    • Charles Demuth
    • Marsden Hartley
    • Georgia O'Keeffe
  • Harlem Renaissance
    • Intro to Harlem Renaissance (1920-1940)
    • Aaron Douglas
    • Meta Warrick Fuller
    • Jacob Lawrence
    • Faith Ringgold
    • Carl Van Vechten
    • Hale Woodruff
  • Abstract Expressionism
    • Intro to Abstract Expressionism / New York School (1940-1960)
    • Morris Graves
    • Red Grooms
    • Philip Guston
    • Grace Hartigan
    • Kenneth Patchen
    • Dorothea Tanning
    • Walasse Ting
    • Cy Twombly
  • Postmodern/Contemporary
    • Intro to Postmodern / Contemporary Art (1950-present)
    • Visual Poetry
    • Louise Bourgeois
    • Joseph Goldyne
    • Elizabeth Murray
    • Jeff Schlanger
    • Kiki Smith
    • Jaune Q. Smith
  • More Resources
  • Introduction
    • Why Poetry and American Art?
    • Strategies
    • Disclaimer
    • About Me
  • Romanticism
    • Intro to American Romanticism (1820-1900)
    • John James Audubon
    • Thomas Cole
    • Asher Durand
    • Daniel Chester French
    • Winslow Homer
    • Albert Pinkham Ryder
    • Augustus Saint-Gaudens
    • "Illuminated Gems of Sacred Poetry"
    • "Indian Summer: Autumn Poems and Sketches"
  • Realism / Social Realism
    • Realism >
      • Intro to Realism (1900-1920)
      • George Bellows
      • Edwin Dawes
      • Thomas Eakins
      • Edward Hopper
      • Thomas Hovenden
      • John Sloan
    • Social Realism >
      • Intro to Social Realism (1920-1940)
      • Walker Evans
      • Dorothea Lange
      • Ben Shahn
  • Regionalism
    • Intro to Regionalism (1920-1940)
    • Thomas Hart Benton
    • Maynard Dixon
    • Grant Wood
  • Modernism
    • Intro to Modernism (1910-1940)
    • Stuart Davis
    • Charles Demuth
    • Marsden Hartley
    • Georgia O'Keeffe
  • Harlem Renaissance
    • Intro to Harlem Renaissance (1920-1940)
    • Aaron Douglas
    • Meta Warrick Fuller
    • Jacob Lawrence
    • Faith Ringgold
    • Carl Van Vechten
    • Hale Woodruff
  • Abstract Expressionism
    • Intro to Abstract Expressionism / New York School (1940-1960)
    • Morris Graves
    • Red Grooms
    • Philip Guston
    • Grace Hartigan
    • Kenneth Patchen
    • Dorothea Tanning
    • Walasse Ting
    • Cy Twombly
  • Postmodern/Contemporary
    • Intro to Postmodern / Contemporary Art (1950-present)
    • Visual Poetry
    • Louise Bourgeois
    • Joseph Goldyne
    • Elizabeth Murray
    • Jeff Schlanger
    • Kiki Smith
    • Jaune Q. Smith
  • More Resources

Elizabeth Murray and Anne Waldman: Her Story

In Her Story (1988-1990), Murray collaborated with acclaimed American performance-poet Anne Waldman (born 1945) to create a highly personal and consciously feminine reaction to modern life. Murray's engaging color prints, which may at first glance seem like abstract compositions, are actually amalgams of recognizable subject matter--cups and saucers, chairs, paint brushes, and human figures--that she uses as starting points for her visual and emotional explorations of her environment.
(https://collections.artsmia.org/art/61859/her-story-elizabeth-murray) 

Picture
1. 

                    Objects placed
  toward the noisiest door
                        ritual of day
open blind, wake the one
                  she comes now
          although hesitating
               2 minutes longer
                  Then he's gone
                  She thought he
                might be a catch
                    before he was
                         to be useful
                          distraction:
             trowel, eyeglasses
        a sudden play of legs
He's here to make a baby

​


Picture
2.

​      Manhattan red-heart
            street of romance
                      alley-hearts
playground by the river
                rush to vehicle
              moon's fury, etc.

           Manhattan fabric
             The fabrications
                  went like this
                       I lied I lied
                                 I lied
                          I tell you
              Love perverted
                      my tongue

​


Picture
3.

​            Cluster in tongue
                drives me mad
                            after all
        I say "upstreperous"
 I say "Avenue du Clichy"
 I want to say Concorde
              Stop Here Now


Picture
4.

​        Suspicion leaves
                      the town
                nonverbally
                   All around
                         chatter
    It's a town of tears
Ask me about it later
 & face the rising sun​









Picture
5.

​                     Looks like day 
                or breaking point 
                           It looks like 
                 somebody ready 
                               to go out
                             to scream
              to defy something 
                          somewhere
                           throw up a 
                                cloud of 
                                       dust
                       Smokescreen
               The red of my lust
The green of your sweater
                  The cool blue of
                  night coming on
                  Any path will do


Picture
6.

​Unsteady at the window
         Reflection a legend
                    she observed
            Her hair a nest of
                            currents
           Safety of a door, a
         long corridor, walk,
                     What's next?



Picture
7.

     A wrench is a power
                     instrument
                  getting itself
                          together
                 getting ahold
             the way we are
              The way a vise
         keeps up in shape
                I want to be a 
     viceless small thing
  wrapped in a blanket
​                 put me down


Picture
8.

The man makes me nervous
                   He sees inside me
                             like an x-ray
                  Balloons come out 
                               of my head
                             like bubbles
                          as if drowned
               This one says "Gulp"
            This one says "Whew"
                   I'm in his cartoon
                         each morning
               Night: lock the door



Picture
9.

Historic America
  See for yourself
  Never listening 




Picture
 10.

​                      Inside a head
       a person acclimatized
                               to world
Make more rubber bands
                            or make a
 dark space for returning
                                   things
                   Make thoughts
          the shape of spoons
          or breasts or leaves
            A postage stamp is
​                 nice in its place


Picture
11.

                       Glacial men
            enter & state their
love with hearts of stone
     Yet their love is a rage
                               of color
    Their love is a harness
             that chafes on me
               Love to do me in
              transfixed for life





Picture
12.

​                The lines
    can be adjusted
             as if to say
   non-discernible
           The picture
                             is
    distinguishable
                from me
              the model
               Lines are
 drawn by feeling
           The feeling
      will no longer​​​​​​
      help you draw
         on your past
                Forget it
        My arms are
        hollow tubes
  You aren't there
              anymore


Picture
13.

              I saw the
   rhythms inside
 They were stark
               & joyous
& I painted them
​              All to see


Discussion Points

→  Like her oil paintings, Murray's prints are vividly colored, exuberantly decorative, and strongly sculptural in feeling. And while her images reveal an obvious penchant for elaborate geometric arrangements of form and color, it is Murray's emotional reaction to the world and its physicality that lies at the heart of her work and lends it such a potent vitality.
​              (https://collections.artsmia.org/art/61859/her-story-elizabeth-murray)

→ In Her Story, Murray’s drawings are cellular, mutating, nuclear, nucleus, openings around liquid matter where small intersections of shapes are floating... bodies in the process of being formed, something between animation and machine, between organic and synthetic, between anemone, monster, and human.

→ The act of imagining a space entails that the writer actually go in and interpret what the artist is trying to do — revealing the parts while simultaneously seeing the whole. In Her Story, Waldman looks very closely at what Murray is doing and then finds a form for it in language. She describes her reading of Murray’s work: “The drawings are coils, bursts of energy, fantastically witty, like cartoons gone awry yet made elegant in their transformation. She seems located in ‘things,’ but what are they?” (Vow, 324) Here Waldman is looking at the artwork in a particular way in order to find a point of intersection where she can find her own form in language.
       
To do this, Waldman inserts a “she” who is finding her form in the floating shapes. This “she” must first disconnect herself from a “he” who is also claiming the territory. Waldman describes the narrative of Her Story as “a narrative logic. It embeds being female, being pregnant, being in a kind of humorous, hormonal situation vis-à-vis the world, the ‘male.’ It’s a contest, a struggle. Her drawings suggested a story, not necessarily hers or mine but the story of a state of mind taking shape” (Vow, 325-6). In order to find this evolving mind, Waldman had to actually enter the space of the artwork and find its logic. This is exactly what the “she” is doing in the poem — wandering through a territory where maps have gone awry, navigating a maze of corners and loops, making (marking) her way through.

→ ​ The seventh of Murray’s drawings in the sequence has two discernible shapes that have broken away from each other — one is floating in the sky, the other is cascading across the ground — each is in its own form that makes sense where it is in space. Waldman, in her corresponding poem, has wrestled the tubular amoebas and has found her way through the tangle of primal mess — those strings and quarks that keep it all together. Seeing herself in the context of a larger world, Waldman looks into Murray’s drawings and sees an individual body being held together by a larger, unstructured universe.

(http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/prevallet.html)
(
Waldman, Anne. Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews and Manifestos. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2001)
(Her Story. Islet, NY: Universal Limited Art Editions, 1999.)
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