Mary Jo Bang with Others

 
 
Last fall—on November 30, 2018—Washington University Libraries’ Julian Edison Department of Special Collections hosted an event to celebrate poet, professor, and artist Mary Jo Bang’s collection of manuscripts in the Modern Literature Collection. The event was called “Self-Portrait with Others” and featured talks and readings of Bang’s work by six poets: Mark Bibbins, Aaron Coleman, Cassie Donish, Timothy Donnelly, Aditi Machado, and Justin Phillip Reed. The Spectacle asked Bang, as well as Bibbins and Donnelly, two of her closest friends, for poetry to publish alongside a piece of Bang’s artwork.

Mary Jo Bang has published eight poetry collections, including A Doll for Throwing, The Last Two Seconds, and Elegy, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and an acclaimed translation of Dante’s Inferno. She has won numerous awards and fellowships, including a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Berlin Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Read more about the event, read an interview with Bang about her manuscripts, or explore the Mary Jo Bang Papers.

The day shimmers with silver bouncing off the surface 
of a pond-size July—some identical twin sister, 
one step ahead, looking back without stopping.
Can time keep capturing an animal 
even after it’s turned itself in? Cellblock of an instant, 
mug shot of an afternoon faun, a disappearance 
at the border of a forest, a bed of narrow-gauge needles. 
A sparkling pool at the park’s edge, 
a botanical garden defined by the never-ending echo 
of a Deco clock. The ornamental myth of floral love, 
carried over moment by moment, repeating 
ad infinitum. You point to something: the doll
in the side yard, her plastic teeth perfect in moonlight. 
You open your mouth to let the hush in. 
You and she dressed alike in visible luminous blue. 
When asked you’ll make manifest your ideal smile, 
your adaptable funhouse face. Punishment will find you 
when a fever fractures into pieces the durable rod
of your long-standing spine. A coat slips 
from your shoulders: in its pocket, the magical half-tab 
you’re waiting to take. Rimbaud to Verlaine, 
in ink in a folded letter, ‘You have to be a seer to see.’ 
What you really want is to be is a camera, 
documenting the height you’re about to fall from.

Though I would like to find 
out how many new emotions
were published today  
I have never known exactly 
where to look. Next door 
in a room adorned 
with sketches of fruits 
and bees a man won’t stop 
talking. He wants the world
so much he might crush it 
between his teeth. Go ahead 
it’s already yours I ought 
to tell him but how
would he hear me. 
I put something on
the floor and now I can’t 
see or reach it so I wait with 
the dark to remember
what it was. Should anyone  
who finds me care to know 
which way I am facing they
will have to touch my shoes.

When I sensed I might
belong, I drew

the cotton duck drape
that hung before

the patio door
to the residency’s

clean white space
to seal me in, to seal

me in,
but my hand had been

where it had been,

and the stain it made
is blazon of my house.

Mark Bibbins’s fourth collection of poems, 13th Balloon, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020. He lives in New York City and teaches in the graduate writing programs at The New School and Columbia University, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program.

Timothy Donnelly is the author of The Problem of the Many (Wave Books, forthcoming 2019), The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010), which won the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003). He is Director of Poetry in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family.