San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
‘LOVE’ARTIST INSPIRED POETRY PROJECT
Museumgoers can send a text and receive a poem by a San Antonio writer
There’s a lot to see on the walls of the McNay Art Museum exhibit “Robert Indiana: A Legacy of Love,” but visitors should spare a glance or two for the floor, too.
That’s where decals can be found with instructions to text a single word related to Indiana’s work, such as “love” or “pop,” to 830-468-9600. Within seconds, texters will be rewarded with a brief poem or piece of prose by a San Antonio writer, dispatched by a poetry bot. (You don’t have to be at the museum to receive a poem.)
The poetry-via-text endeavor was inspired partly by the need to create touch-free interactive elements for the exhibit and partly to make sure that the poetry aspect of Indiana’s work wasn’t lost on visitors.
“When we were thinking about Robert Indiana, one of the things we didn’t want to lose sight of was that he did identify so strongly with poetry and wrote poetry, so we wanted that to be a part of the takeaway from the exhibit,” said Kate Carey, the museum’s head of education.
She said that Indiana had described “LOVE” — his bestknown work, in which he rendered the word with a lopsided ‘o’ in two-and three-dimensional forms that stacked the “LO” on top of the “VE” — as “a concrete poem.”
The artist, who died in 2018, talked about that in a 1991 interview excerpted on his website, robertindiana.com, saying he equated his paintings with his poetry: “The ‘LOVE’ is a concrete poem as far as I’m concerned. Just a one word poem. Repeated so endlessly by myself …
“Love is a noun and a verb and so one must decide what my love is. It’s a command, love, and it’s a subject, love. It is an exercise, and grammar is one of my favorite subjects.”
To help strengthen the poetry component of the exhibit, the McNay team reached out to Gemini Ink, the literary arts organization. Executive Director Alexandra van de Kamp was in right away.
“I just am such a fan of anything that’s about cross-pollination across the artforms,” van de Kamp said.
Following a brainstorming session in which the team decided that a bot was the ideal delivery method for the poems, Gemini Ink issued a call for entries. Writers were asked to submit up to two bite-sized poems or bits of prose of no more than eight lines or 40 words.
To help writers get going, the organization provided a handful of writing prompts, including a “LOVE”-like suggestion that they create a piece exploring the graphic look of a onesyllable word with personal significance.
“We got a lot of poems on love, but that’s good,” van de Kamp said. “It was supposed to spread kind of a feeling of love and hope and even the dynamism of the word ‘vote’ in a very intense fall.”
About 125 short pieces were submitted. There are a few well-known writers in the mix, including poet Sheila Black, the former executive director of Gemini Ink, as well as students in the North East School of the Arts’ creative writing program and a number of educators.
Some of the poems are bilingual. One example is Carlos Ponce-Melendez’ “Poema”: “Dios conoce mi sed de ternura/ Love arrived on time but she was no longer there.” The Spanish line translates into English as “God knows my thirst for tenderness.”
Some submissions were well-crafted but too long to be texted, van de Kamp said. A total of 86 were loaded into the bot, which was designed by Carlos Martinez. The texted poems’ jazzy look comes from assistant curator Lauren
Thompson. She based it on the exhibit’s Pop art-influenced graphics, which were created by Brian Silva, the museum’s graphic designer.
The poems seem to be popular with visitors. The weekend that the exhibit opened, the bot sent out almost 150, Carey said. Since then, an average of between 70 and 90 poems are sent daily.
“In some ways, it breaks up the everyday of our text message feeds,” Carey said. “I think there’s something kind of romantic and also something very contemporary about that.”
Gemini Ink also helped create a few gateways for those who are inspired to pursue their own literary muses.
Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, the city’s poet laureate, will lead a free virtual poetry workshop for all ages at 4 p.m. Thursday. Folks can register at tinyurl.com/yy6ygktv.
In addition, a screen in the exhibit plays a short video with writing prompts from poet Jim Lavilla-Havelin. Visitors are encouraged to write on the fly, on their devices or in their heads, and then to share their work, if they are so inclined, online with the hashtag #lovemcnay.
“I think that sometimes, especially with writing, it can be daunting to get started,” Carey said. “Having a starting place can be something that gives you a little bit of a boost in a way. I love that Jim developed some things that were Indiana-specific. They speak to the exhibit, but they also are relatively easy to conquer.”
She would love it if all of those elements create new poets: “That would be a wonderful outcome.”