“Motherhood Duplex”
Collaborators’ Q&A
What inspired you to bring your work to Broadsided?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: I love encountering poems in the wild. It’s not unusual to see artwork in public, but seeing a poem in public is much rarer. With projects like Poetry in Motion, where broadsides are displayed in public transit systems in various cities across the United States, poems are popping up in surprising places. I recently saw Vievee Francis’s “Firmament of Glass” paired with Katherine Bradford’s Queens of the Night on a Manhattan subway train. To me, this is true egalitarianism. I admire that Broadsided is part of this movement to create beautiful broadsides on which poems can appear anywhere, available to anyone who happens to pass by.
What drew you to create a visual response to this poem, in particular?
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: Entreaty. Reading “Motherhood Duplex,” I responded strongly to the sense of entreaty. I imagine it is a universal, old, and probably ancient impulse and experience. Absolutely foundational to human experience. (And maybe it exceeds human experience. I don’t know.) I see it as one of the backdrops to everything. Simone Weil writes about grace in Gravity and Grace. We all want intercession at some point. Our prayers are for Grace.
How did this poem come to be?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: In the bimonthly poetry collective I co-facilitate, we were studying Jericho Brown’s invented poetic form the duplex, which utilizes couplets and repetition. During the same time, my son experienced a medical emergency at school and ended up in the ER. This coincidence seemed perfect for combining the two experiences into “Motherhood Duplex.” The couplets, to me, represent the pairings of mother & child, health & illness, science & body, love & fear. The repetition enacts the way the mind loops when facing a frightening unknown or enduring a kind of trauma. The last line repeats the first, which loops me through the poem, again and again, just as I loop through these experiences as a mother.
How did this image come to be?
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: I am interested in the past generally. I like the past. And I am connected to art, from many centuries and cultures, through excitement, curiosity, study and through visiting and drawing at the Metropolitan Museum. I opted to work from a drawing I made of a Cambodian Khmer stone figure, a Guardian Deity, Rakshasa, from approximately 900. Cambodia has been and is negotiating for the rightful return of figures like this to Cambodia. The original statue is neither small, nor relic-like, nor female. But my drawing is small, and there’s a silence about it that engendered the painting. And through painting it from my drawing, the figure transformed and became a powerful female, somewhat evoking smaller Cycladic figures, something you might hold in your hand or place on an altar. A figure of prayer, entreaty. The rectangular space/edge was meant to invoke paper, writing, so that the figure is called within this space of writing.
What did you think an artist would pick up on from your poem? Does the artist’s response make you see the poem differently?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: I certainly hoped an artist would recognize the nature of the duplex, as a sort of side-by-side existence—togetherness, yet separation. To me, this is the dichotomy of parenthood, to feel a desperate need to protect the child, yet knowing many things are beyond one’s control. I think Elizabeth Terhune captured this paradox and the sense of the duplex with her use of dark and light and with one body made into two—holding each other, but never to be truly merged again. The poem is matter-of-fact and rather clinical, and I find Elizabeth’s rendering adds, in contrast, the earthiness and softness of motherhood, making the broadside multilayered and heartrending.
Did anything shift for you or come into new light as you began working on your visual response?
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: I can be annoyingly literal with painting, despite being a fairly associative thinker. I had initially imagined I’d focus on something more descriptive coming from the poem. That did not happen.
What question would you like to ask your collaborator? (we will print your answers, too!)
Poet to Artist: What compelled you to create a piece of art in response to this particular poem? Through what process did you arrive at your final composition?
Elizabeth Terhune: This is an interesting question for me. I’ve been a Broadsided artist for many years and so have something like muscle memory to pull from in regard to answering. I’ve looked at my process/reaction and will try to articulate what happens. It is a kind of unspooling. First, I tend to know instantly if the poem is a good match for me. Either I see exactly what I will focus on, or I sense there is something in the space of the poem that can be represented by me. Something opens. Second, I ask to be the artist only for poems that I feel I can be the artist for. This is different from liking/loving/responding strongly to a poem. Usually, something in the space—physical, psychic, aesthetic, spiritual—evoked by the poem is clear to me in such a way that I understand the connection, in the broadest sense, between the figure to its particular landscape as resonant in a way that I can express. Working on “Motherhood Duplex,” I maintained this process, but also swerved somewhat as well. Painting from a figure I’d sketched, I was thinking about icons, totems, and figurines and how they are held or placed. And I connected to that with the poem. It took a few paintings to get the one I wanted.
Artist to Poet: Is your child all right?
Melissa Joplin Higley: Elizabeth, thank you for your kind question. My son is healthy and doing well. He’s fourteen years old now and a freshman in high school, sitting beside me, writing a vignette for English homework.
When you consider the full folio of work from this issue (see the “related broadsides” links on the left), what questions, observations, or connections arise for you?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: The pieces in this folio seem interconnected by themes of suffering and loss, illness and devastation, self and family, hope and survival, solace and renewal. The threads of these themes are the threads of the human condition. The more we recognize and honor these threads, the more we recognize and honor our humanity.
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: I observe an incredible, overwhelming amount of beauty. There is no cynicism. I observe an amazing attention—from writers and visual artists—to achieving pin-prick-experienced meaning in these works. I am goosebumps. We live in an often degraded world, physically and socially and aesthetically, and everything here, in this portfolio, seems determined to push back at that. This portfolio is intense, raw, brave, and beautiful—and unapologetically so. In Irish, there is no verb to have. Instead you use prepositional pronouns. So you don’t say, I am sad. Instead you say, Tá brón orm, Sadness is on me. In this portfolio, Tá brón orm, but also Tá áthas orm. Happiness is on me. Is domhan domhain é. It is a deep world.
Describe your ideal “Vectorization”—where, in your wildest dreams, would you most like to see this broadside posted in the world?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: In my wildest dreams, I would like to see this broadside posted in the International Space Station. Here on Earth, I’d love to see this broadside posted at Haleiwa Beach Park on Oahu’s North Shore, where Hawaiian green sea turtles come to sunbathe. When my son was a toddler, he sat perfectly still on the beach for 45 minutes, waiting for a resting turtle to open its eyes, so he could say hello.
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: I think around art students. I worry about them.
If this Broadsided collaboration were a type of weather, what would it be?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: An autumn day that opens with rain, then clears to sun.
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: The advent of a storm. The waiting time. When the light changes and the wind stirs at the trees. It could also be the third day into a heavy winter storm. When it is absolutely impossible to move.
Do you have a favorite, generative prompt for artists or writers you’d like to share?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: One of my favorite exercises is to go through my journals and collect lines and phrases that still resonate. Then I rearrange the lines in differing orders until I arrive at surprising and satisfying juxtapositions.
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: As a teacher I will sometimes have my students do the classic memory drawing exercise. Look at something (complex or simple is up to you, though with practice you may make more interesting selections) for about four minutes. Turn it over. Look from many angles. Consider the negative spaces, the scale of each particular in relation to other particulars, etc. Put it away and draw it from memory for the next twenty minutes. I believe in fun. This is fun.
Read any good books lately?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: My husband, teenage son, and I are currently enjoying Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of The Odyssey, the first translation in English by a woman. When we’re all home in the evening, we read one book out loud. After we finish The Odyssey, we’ll move on to Wilson’s translation of The Iliad, which I’ve heard is just as riveting.
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: Reread Eliot’s Middlemarch. Edward Snow’s book on Breugel’s children’s games, Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children’s Games. Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat. And always, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s short stories. Also, have just started The Gaeilge Guide: Spark Your Connection to the Irish Language and Legacy by Mollie Guidera. A lovely book, newly published, telling the story of the author’s extraordinary life driven by a curiosity about languages, people, and teaching and a love of Irish. A personal story that is also about language and culture.
Seen any good art lately?
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: This summer, I participated in an art exhibit called This Gallery is a Poem: Unearthing Stories from the Collection at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York. Fourteen poets were each invited to select a piece of art from the museum’s archives and write an ekphrastic poem in response. I selected the cyanotype Fern Valley Ferns by NYC-based photographer Janelle Lynch and wrote “Ode to the Fern” in response. Much like Broadsided, this exhibit brought art and poetry into conversation with each other in a public space. The exhibit closed on August 31, but the Hudson River Museum is lovely and always has interesting exhibits and Free First Fridays.
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: I have a deep respect and love for Susan Rothenberg’s painting. There’s a very nice show up just now at Hauser & Worth in Chelsea.
Anything else? (Here, we invite the collaborators to invent a question, add a comment, or otherwise speak to what the questions so far have not tapped about their Broadsided experience).
Poet Melissa Joplin Higley: When you see a broadside out in public, do you stop to read it? Do you have a favorite? How does it make you feel to encounter this kind of art in the wild?
Artist Elizabeth Terhune: Gratitude for all Broadsided does!