World Make Way Review

World Make Way

new poems inspired by art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bibliography

Hopkins, L.B. (Ed.). (2018). World make way: New poems inspired by art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ISBN 9781683352884

Summary

Poet, educator, and anthologist Lee Bennett Hopkins partners with the Metropolitan Museum of Art to pair 18 poems with 18 Met paintings to give the reader a heady blend of art, word, text, and feelings. Backmatter includes biographies of the poets and artists featured in this anthology. In the forward matter, Hopkins includes a poem from Leonardo da Vinci that encapsulates the the zeitgeist of this visual and literary compilation, "Painting is poetry that is seen/ rather than felt,/ and poetry is painting that is/ felt rather than seen." This collection achieves this goal.

Analysis

Hopkins opens with a powerful pairing. Mada Primavasi by Gustav Klimt is an electric bolt of energy in purple (8). A confident girl stands boldly, legs in a a strong stance, an arm on a hip, projecting power, amid a riot of flowers. The room around her is adorned, she needs no such adornment, for her personality is enough. This painting is paired with Marilyn Singer's poem Paint Me. The girl in this poem embodies the confident girl of the painting. Singer's girl is being painted, and she chafes against the strictures that posing places on her. She "cannot" waste more hours on this. She has more important things to do and places to go. She is a dynamic force that cannot be captured by this painter. Singer's word choices: "Hurry up," "I insist," "Make way" created a thrum of movement and energy that displays the girl's vibrancy. The painter can "capture her expression" but he cannot capture her. This movement and energy also sparks the reader. We are compelled to read through the rest of these painting and poems, to be a dynamic reader.

Oide Toko's painting Cat Watching a Spider caught my eye, but Julie Fogliano's poem Cat Watching a Spider compelled me to stay (20). Both are very simple. The painting is very neutral, using very few colors to draw the eye and suggest stillness and movement in equal measure. The poem works similarly. With plenty of white space and only 23 words, Fogliano conveys the confident power a tiny spider must project to alarm the much larger cat into a state of hunting alertness. The spider is "silent and certain." The sibilance of these sounds suggests danger to the cat. The spider has a forceful personality like the Klimt girl. The cat is shown in her feline grace and power with strong consonance: "prowl and prance," "teeth and claw." They demonstrate her unleashed aggression. She will stay "watchful and wondering," for now.

Highlighted Poem

My favorite poem is Endgame by Lee Bennett Hopkins (our editor). Hopkins cleverly paired his poem with The Chess Players by Liberale da Verona (13).

Endgame

by Lee Bennett Hopkins

Stay alert—

do not divert

do not stare away.

The object

of this game

is to

Concentrate 

on every play.

 

Think as I do

methodically,

as I exploit your weakness

while you peer at

what is unclear

you are looking for 

near the door.

This is far too easy

knowing you are

about to lose.

Soon.

Within a flash,

a dash,

our date will end.

Checkmate, my dear.

Checkmate.

I love this poem because Hopkins tricked me! My eye was drawn to the chess painting: the vivid hair colors, the chess pieces, the reds of the dresses, stockings and walls. I was even distracted by the texture behind the words itself. I was further mislead by the words: "game," "every play," "exploit your weakness." These are all gaming words. Surely this poem was about chess. But no! The game in this poem is not chess, it's love (or something akin to it). I should have been looking at the player's arms clasped to each other. The "object of this game" was to draw his lover in. He wooed and distracted her (and the reader!) until, "Within a flash,/ a dash,/ our date will end." We were on a date and we are caught. We are truly "checkmated!"

Use

Students will select a painting from an assortment of famous art postcards. They will then read and choose from poetry anthologies the poem that they think best pairs with their postcard. They will share their reasoning. There are variations to this activity. The teacher can choose an artwork, and the students choose a poem to pair. It would be interesting to see the different poems chosen for one particular work and learn why each student chose it. We can also do the reverse. The teacher can choose a particular poem, then have the students choose which artwork to pair with it. Then each class can make a painting/poem anthology of their own.