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By Isabella Lagatta

Throughout Kaur’ poems, the theme of self love v. self hatred is especially relevant. In this particular photo, the girl looks at something off screen in horror, hand pressed to her face. She’s mourning her loss off time. She’s mourning her youth, as shown by the clock, the darkness, and the black dress. This is a direct contrast to the light yellow hue of the bees and the pink hue of the curtain. In her poems, Kaur ricochets between self love and self hatred very quickly. This photo is meant to exemplify how difficult that is.

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By Benjamin Carollo

The inspiration for this House of Poetry comes from a line in "Night" which states, "We have to break the absolute into prisms that distort perception into refraction and destruction. But the absolute can reassemble the pieces it has generated into new patterns for the world to restore itself...
It spreads like ink, moves like a forest animal, slides as fever in the veins: there’s savagery to this obscurity" (Adnan). The dark human figure stares into this circular pond at its reflection. However, oftentimes in water our reflections are distorted because of waves and ripples throughout the water. To represent this obscurity, I used red streaks of paper, which spread red ink across the water. The color red symbolizes chaos. In the background one can see the night on the left and the day on the right. In "Night", night is supposed to represent mystery and chaos. The color purple was chosen for the night's background because purple is a color of mystery and uncertainty. The pond being on the night's side of the background is to show that looking at one's reflection, or looking at one's memories, is chaotic and uncertain. The pond is specifically a circle to represent the infinite time and memories we have. So when one looks into the circular pond at their shadowy reflection, they're looking into this infinite chaos of memories throughout time. Throughout "Night", Adnan promotes the idea that darkness and obscurity is more valuable than clarity and light, because without darkness, there would never be light. It also gives one the power to perceive themselves as they'd please. When one looks at their memories, represented by the shadow, they can perceive these memories as they please, just as how one can move around to look at their shadow from different perspectives.

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By Ciara Weber

The House of Poetry is mainly inspired by Tess Taylor's first collection of works, which discusses privilege and her personal family history in relation to Thomas Jefferson. The books are symbolizing the records that Taylor used in order to research her family history and that are mentioned in many of her poems. The Silver Spoon seen on one of the books is a direct homage to one of Taylor's writings, where she talks about the privilege she has gained from her family's legacy. The pen is also a major part of Taylor's writings, she often breaks the fourth wall and mentions herself writing and the impact her work has. The tomato represents all of the nature descriptions Taylor uses in her writing, tomatoes, flowers, berries and other plants as well as seasons and weather. Often Taylor uses nature in ways that are contradictory to common associations, making cloudy days positive and summer a painful time. The candles are included to represent some of Taylor's other works, when she speaks of social justice issues such as shootings and the AIDS epidemic in the 90s.

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By Fiona Strout

This house of poetry is mainly a play on Maggie Nelson’s Something Bright, Then Holes and Bluets, with inspiration from The Argonauts and The Red Parts. This scene depicts a main theme of growth presented in many of her works, especially in the Red Parts. In "Something Bright, Then Holes", she describes, "The heart, too, is porous; / I lost the water you poured into it." She lost the water poured into her heart by a previous partner, but I depicted her watering her own heart, showing the growth that can come from self love. I used my hand to represent Nelson's hand and wrote Nelson's initials to show that it is her hand. It shows how the heart is not porous when you learn to give it the love it needs, as I depicted through the water droplets of self love in my structure. Furthermore, Nelson’s Bluets is a tribute to the color blue and its importance in her life. Regarding this, I used flowers to represent growth. The blue flowers blooming from Nelson’s heart are a hyacinth and a salvia (sage), further adding to the importance of blue depicted in Nelson’s works. More importantly, hyacinths symbolize joy and rebirth, while salvias symbolize healing. Thus, I chose these flowers because they bloom as a result of Nelson’s self love, showing that Nelson’s heart is being reborn. I kept the heart white to show how she has felt empty in the past, but her self love is creating flowers that spread life, as seen by the faint red color, back to her heart. In addition, I took inspiration from Nelson’s The Argonauts in creating the Argonaut symbol in the center of the heart. Jason and the Argonauts were heroes in Greek mythology who ventured to find the Golden Fleece in years before the Trojan War. Nelson named her book The Argonauts as a reference to Roland Barthes' belief that the person who says, “I love you”, resembles the Argonaut, rebuilding his/her ship during its voyage without changing its name. I thought this was fitting to put on the heart because Nelson’s heart isn’t physically changing from being a heart, it’s emotionally changing.

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By Grace Klag

For my House of Poetry presentation, I constructed four, very minimalistic, figures out of Model Magic, the middle and largest one being my poet and narrator of the piece, Ocean Vuong, and the others representing the key influences for his poem, Telemachus. In Telemachus, Vuong draws from different family relationships and how they shaped him as a person. I portrayed the subjects of these relationships with different colored figures behind him; his father is blue, his mother is brown, and his grandmother is yellow. The sizes of the figures and the sizes of the colored dots on the center figure represent how influential these people were to Vuong based on how much they were mentioned in Telemachus. Vuong’s father’s figure and the blue dot on Vuong’s figure are the largest because he is mentioned directly and is the general subject of the poem. Vuong writes that he struggles with how he resembles his father and the possibility that he will be more like him behaviorally. He then alludes to his other family members and how they adapted to their new life without his father, so I included them but smaller because they weren’t as influential in this specific piece.

I placed the blue dot as the base to all the other dots on Vuong’s sculpture because Vuong’s father's absence set a rocky foundation for all of his family dynamics. In Telemachus, Vuong focuses on how other influences like his mother and grandmother were forced to build off of this foundation, never fully erasing the influences of his father, but providing repairs. This piece as a whole represents how external factors cause a person to develop, both positively and negatively. These influences, no matter how small they are, leave lasting impressions on a person and ultimately shape who we are as individuals.

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By Ava Pravlik

My house of poetry focuses on Rankine's concentration (particularly in her quintessential poem that I read to the class) on the micro-aggressions in public places that undermine the identity of black Americans by making them feel virtually invisible. This particular scene is in the subway, so I constructed a Lego train shown in the middle of the page. This is a reference to a story that Rankine tells in her quintessential poem, during which a white man knocks a black boy to the ground in the subway because he "does not see him." To add more depth to the scene, I attempted to capture more of the most important themes from Rankine's poetry through illustrations. In the bottom right-hand corner, a white person is seen elbowing a black individual off of his elevated surface, while another black person struggles at the bottom. This is symbolic of way that Rankine discusses feeling invisible and disposable by white Americans. Behind this scene, a black person weeps on a set of stairs, while a white person carelessly leaning against him stares up at a TV screen flashing a breaking news story about George Floyd. Rankine often discusses in her poetry her hatred for watching the news because it leaves her feeling hopeless. The person weeping on the stairs is meant to symbolize this hopelessness in the face of oppression. In the top left-hand corner, the words "In the subway, at the airport, in the car, in America" once again reference Rankine's quintessential poem by highlighting different places that are meant to be safe and equal in which Rankine has experienced or witnessed a micro-aggression on the basis of race. This is where Rankine lives, and yet it does not feel like home.

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By: Jessica Zdep

Throughout Rupi Kaur's works The Sun and Her Flowers and Milk and Honey, she uses her poems to share her own experiences with tough topics and also uses her poetry to share the impact these experiences have had on her life. For my quintessential poem, I chose a poem in which Rupi shared her feelings about humans have manipulated love and how humans are the cruel ones showing the effects of all of her life experiences. For my house of poetry, I constructed a heart that is being broken apart by humans and their cruel actions. The tags ripping the heart apart read rape, manipulation, lack of family support, gender inequality, beauty standards, and breakups as Rupi frequently writes about her personal experiences with all of these topics and the scars they have left on her. The tags are directly connected to people as in Kaur's quintessential poem she says "love is not cruel we are cruel" showing her experiences have led her to lose faith in the human race and humans cause the pain that she associates with love. Rupi's collection Milk and Honey is broken into 4 parts, the hurting, the loving, the breaking and the healing. In order to represent the healing, the bandaids on the heart read "self love" and "female empowerment" which are two tactics she frequently writes about that have helped her heal the pain and scars she lives with from experiences such as her rape by her uncle, distant father, struggles with her appearance and being used for sex by her boyfriends. All of the words in my house of poetry are written in lowercase letters to mirror the way Kaur writes all of her poems, without case distinction and only using periods, to represent her native tongue and culture, Punjabi. The faces of the humans are left blank so people can picture the people in their lives who have caused them the pain and heartbreak that Rupi Kaur has experiences as Kaur aims to be relatable to her readers. The simplicity of my house of poetry also represents the simplicity that Kaur is known for and incorporates into a majority of her poems and illustrations.

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By: Matt Lynch

For my House of Poetry project I have created a lego botanical scene with a sunflower as the centerpiece. Leading up to the flower are the five main human senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. These sensations present themselves in many of Collins’s works as I discovered through my reading of “Introduction to Poetry”, Collins’s quintessential poem. Embedded in this piece is the call to truly feel and experience, not only while exploring a poem, but also while living life. Rather than jumping to the bigger picture, Collins urges his readers to slow down and enjoy what’s given to them. I feel as though this piece beautifully represents Billy Collins as a poet as well as the themes seen throughout many of his pieces because it captures this message in its entirety. Although it may be hard to see, the roots branching out from the sunflower connect to each of the five human senses as if to show how the flower feeds from them. The flower itself represents life, the act of living, and growth. This scene portrays the relationship between these senses and truly experiencing life as Collins describes it; they must go hand-in-hand. By using our senses, we gain a stronger connection to life around us and may come to enjoy living rather than getting caught up in its many wonders and riddles. This piece serves to prove how something magnificent can come from such simple practices. However, this beauty is delicate, and as Collins warns us, is easily lost to the wind

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The Sun and Her Flowers / Milk and Honey - Rupi Kaur

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The Sun and Her Flowers / Milk and Honey - Rupi Kaur

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By Ella Johnson

Hi guys, and welcome to my House of Poetry! Rupi Kaur uses a lot of nature to represent her work and I decided to use this in my artistic depiction of her as a poet. The piece I created shows a flower, but one greatly affected by the topics outlined in the poems of Rupi Kaur, specifically the quintessential poem that I chose which talks about beauty products and how hard the author and society tries to perfect themselves with substance but can never really reach a level of self satisfaction. First, the center of the flower is a mirror. This represents the way Kaur centers all of her work around her own experiences and relating to others. If you were to look directly into the flower that I created, you would see yourself in this image, and this is exactly what Rupi Kaur attempts to do when she writes: help you see yourself in her work. The petals of the flower include the substances and tools women use to try and reach society’s unreachable idea of perfection. I included real samples of actual products on the page, such as blush, eye shadow, and lipstick because Kaur’s work is so real and pure and a representation of her deserves the same attention. The flower is clearly crying and bleeding in pain as it struggles to live through such painful processes and the words that surround it. The butterflies that lay lifeless on the soil are contrasted with the bees who fly looking for their next victims, injecting hate, conformity, lies and judgement. Embedded in the soil are my favorite words extracted from Kaur’s books, milk and honey and the sun and her flowers. As much as the flower attempts to grow, these words will always hinder its progress just as society does for females in the twenty-first century. Rupi Kaur’s poems are not always gentle, and neither is the art I created. The blood represents pain and struggle that is heavily depicted in the poems. While her work is sometimes hard to read, the drama of the piece shows the severity of the experiences that Kaur references, such as rape and sexual assault. The wording woven into the art are phrases and feelings that I connected with Kaur’s poems while I related to her words and, as she intended, used my own experiences to tell a bit of my story as a female through this art.

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By Lucy Langhart

For my house of poetry I was heavily influenced by Heaney's award winning work, "Death of a Naturalist". In my house of poetry I tried to make some of the main themes throughout his work tangible in order to be able to portray Heaney's body of work. I chose to make a well due to the consistant themes of self reflection throughout his poems. Heaney regularly uses older narrators that reflect back on their childhood experience in order to display lessons or metaphors to the reader. Hence the well which is representative of reflection of one's self and character. I got the inspiration for the well from Heaney's piece of work "Personal Helicon" in which a narrator displays the loss of creativity through societal rules when growing up through his changing appearance and attitude towards a well near his house. Furthermore, inside the well I planted Oxalis, otherwise known as the shamrock plant. It was incredibly important for me to have a living, natural thing in my piece because all of Heaney's poems are so nature-focused. Though Heaney is a more modern poet, when reading his work I felt he borrowed Heavily from periods such as the Romantic period due to his depiction of the power of nature with pessimistic undertones. I chose oxalis to be the natural aspect because shamrocks are the national plant of Ireland, Heaney's home country and another constant theme throughout his poems. Due to Heaney's consistant usage of both his Irish culture and metaphors through nature in his work I thought Oxalis would be the perfect plant to place inside the well.

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By: Maggie Cassidy

For my House of Poetry project, I used model magic to create a hand with a mouth in the palm of it. Sarah Kay is a spoken word poet, so a good handful of her poetry is performed, and has a very deep impact on her audience because of this technique. Throughout nearly all of her poems, she stresses the significance of hands, and she also has an entire poem titled “Hands,” dedicated to the many duties and the simplicity yet the beauty of hands. Thus, I thought it was fitting to put how she projects her voice (the mouth) on a body part that she deems the most important (the hand). However, I chose the poem “Postcards” as Kay’s quintessential poem because although it mentions hands, that is not the only focus of the poem. A main idea in this poem is the importance of good communication and based on this poem and many of her others, I think that Kay craves that in her personal relationships, which is possibly why she chooses to literally communicate her poetry to her audience. While most of her poems are very personal, they each carry universal messages that any audience can learn lessons from. She is able to truly move her audience with just her hands and her words.

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Something Bright, Then Holes- Maggie Nelson

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Something Bright, Then Holes- Maggie Nelson

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By: Ava Bracco

For my house of poetry, I based it off of the theme of poems from Maggie Nelson’s collection entitled, “Something Bright, Then Holes”, which originates around a struggling relationship and a canal in Brooklyn. In this model, I used model magic to make a “broken heart”, which represents how Nelson feels about her love interest in “Something Bright, Then Holes”. Her love interest, which is given the mysterious title, “The Man In Black”, is manipulative and selfish. He makes Nelson feel trapped down by the canal, ultimately feeling like she will never be able to escape. The construction paper represents the canal, which was the major setting of where Nelson struggled with her relationship and made her question what love really was in the end. Nelson suffered from heart break down by the canal and the canal was almost able to give her some sort of sanity in times of her struggling from severe manipulation. The significance of the green wire wrapped around the heart relates to Nelson’s feelings about the color green and how she feels “surrounded by green, green gagging me pleasurably, green holding onto my hips from behind”. Nelson being able to experience nature down by the canal allowed her to develop this appreciation for the color green. This color green also relates to the broken heart because Nelson’s experience of nature centers around her struggle with love and her relationship with “The Man In Black”.

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By: Jack Tedesco

The poet, Ocean Vuong, consistently exhibits the same themes throughout his works. He writes about painful loss, longing, and transformation. For my house of poetry, I suspended a knife with wings above ash. The knife is representative of the violent/painful loss that Vuong writes about in many of his poems. Vuong had a poor relationship with the rest of his family and this painful/violent past is what he exhibits throughout his works.  Early in his life, Vuong’s father left him and his mother, leaving Vuong to struggle with his masculinity and societal gender roles. Vuong’s struggle is representative of his violent loss because Vuong received bullying from his peers and his community. Now, he longs for the answer to who he is. Another aspect of his violent past is his struggle with drugs. While growing up, Hartford had an opioid epidemic and Vuong was surrounded by peers who were dying because of the use of this drug. Surrounded by this violence, Vuong almost committed to using drugs but came to the conclusion that his family mattered more and the only way to ensure their future was for him to be successful. The ashes underneath the knife and the wings attached to the knife are both representative of a transformation. The ashes signify the painful past burning away and the wings are lifting it out of that ash as the new object. Vuong also includes the beauty of the transformation throughout his works. In my quintessential poem, Essay on Craft, Vuong describes such transformation and the beauty that ensues. He describes the transformation leaving behind silver on “every leaf”. The knife’s silver color is a  representation of the beauty that he talks about. This sculpture also embodies something similar to the transformation of the fictional animal the phoenix where the bird reaches a certain age then it dies and burns into ash where it is then reborn as a young phoenix again.

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By: Kavya Panjwani

Throughout her collection Black Girl, Call Home, poet Jasmine Mans attempts to identify and analyze the identity of the black woman in modern-day America. The conclusion she comes to throughout her works is that black women are continuously exploited by American society; their talents manipulated for others’ selfish desires and the essence of their character desecrated. In what I believe to be her quintessential poem entitled Whitney: Hologram, one of the countless poems referencing the late black icon, Whitney Houston, Mans encapsulates the disrespect that black women are granted in America, through use of the experiences of Houston’s life and death. The poem speaks directly to how the music industry wrongfully utilized Whitney Houston’s image and musical art to profit off of. They recognized how cherished Whitney was to the black community and thus capitalized off of this once pure voice. I attempted to represent this by creating an origami coffin and placing an origami microphone on top said coffin, to mimic how the music industry and white society succeeded in attempting “to steal the song / right out of the casket”, the stanza from this poem that I chose to highlight in my House of Poetry. I aimed to present the microphone in a similar position as one would place a resting body on top of a casket before a burial, to depict that to the music industry, Whitney is nothing more than a voice, symbolized by the microphone, and not a human worthy of respect. Furthermore, Mans makes countless other references to death throughout the poem, symbolizing how violence and death is a part of the lives of the black community in America. In Whitney’s case, even in death, they resurrected her voice, forcing her to perform and never allowing her to rest. As Mans put it in the last line of her poem, the music industry “Gave you the second chance at life / did you a favor, / saved your career, / just not you”.

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By: Shreya Jyotishi

My House of Poetry features Atwood’s quintessential conflict on how to deal with sadness through a representation of inevitability and human development. Atwood’s “A Sad Child” provides the reader with the anecdotal situation of a young child wondering how to deal with newly discovered depressing sentiments. Through the child’s turning point in life, Atwood puts forth two separate interpretations of how humans make certain choices in living with such misery: either with a desolate outlook that death is the only manner to evade these harrowing emotions, or with the acceptance that one’s internal sadness will simply be apart of the other beauties of life. This conflict is captured by this House of Poetry, in which an individual has an option to face either a dark, straight-forward perspective on life or a brighter, more organic experience. Atwood confines her conflict to solely these two options, as represented by one’s life being combined by the wooden box surrounding these two tunnels; the confinement of the box also reflects how one must make a defining choice and select one of these tunnels to live with the weight of sadness instead of simply shedding the emotions away. This sadness is natural, as evidenced by the simply background landscape, but is hidden within these tunnels as humans reflect either their optimistic or pessimistic choice instead of raw misery. Of course, Atwood knows that “when it comes right down to it,” no matter what a person selects at this crucial moment, the ultimate fate a person reaches is death, reflected in the bloody, ever-present “bliss?” sign at the convergence point of these two tunnels. The sign reflects Atwood’s core message in saying that “none of us is [the favorite child], or else we all are,” where the true answer to this paradoxical statement is unknown - instead, death is the sole manner to see if living in awareness or ignorant bliss of one’s sadness was correct, and such an unknown hangs over Atwood’s advice in dealing with unhappiness, just like how the unknown rules over the core decision a person makes regarding optimism or pessimism. Atwood conveys that the clarity of how humans must actually deal with the natural bouts of sadness is only seen after the human life experience is over, just this House of Poetry reflects that a potential quality of bliss within one’s choice between Atwood’s two perspectives will solely arise after traveling through these distinct tunnels within the confines of life.

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The Witch Doesn’t Burn In This One - Amanda Lovelace 

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The Witch Doesn’t Burn In This One - Amanda Lovelace 

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By Sophia Spadaro

In her poetry book, the witch doesn't burn in this one, Amanda Lovelace talks about her childhood, where she was the victim of child abuse, bullying, self-harm, and eating disorders. She also includes how she overcame those struggles and her journey to becoming a strong, independent woman. Furthermore, by comparing modern-day women to the women who burned during the Salem witch trials, Amanda Lovelace tries to encourage her readers to stand up for themselves. In her quintessential poem, “this is the reckoning,” Lovelace touches upon sensitive material such as assault, harassment, rape, feminism, and of course, fire. I tried to incorporate all of these topics in my House of Poetry, a poster board with 3D aspects. To the left are the words “rape,” “abuse,” and “assault” in the same font used in newspapers. Holding those three words down are mini books with titles that relate to the content that Amanda Lovelace writes about. The books holding the words down symbolize how Lovelace is able to take complete control of what happened to her through her writing. On the bottom left and the top right of the poster board is fire, made out of tissue paper. In “this is the reckoning,” Lovelace talks about how in her fantasy, the same fire that burned the women at the Salem witch trials is the same fire that now motivates, comforts, and protects women. Furthermore, coming out of the fire are witch brooms to incorporate Lovelace’s lines about the Salem witch trials. To the right of the poster is a mirror with measuring tape around its borders with the words “eating disorders.” While Amanda does not address eating disorders in her quintessential poem, the subject is present in many of her poems. Thus, I thought it was necessary to include it in my House of Poetry. In the mirror’s reflection is her poetry book: the witch doesn't burn in this one. In addition, throughout the poster are red and white flowers. The white flowers have matches as stems, and the red flowers are roses. These flowers represent my favorite line from her poetry collection, “I will be the voice that tells you to cover your arms with flower petals instead” (Lovelace, Amanda). In the center of the poster board are red handprints to represent sexual assault, which is one of the main topics of Lovelace’s quintessential poem. Last but not least, in the center of the board is also the sentence, “This does not define me.” I tried to make this the focus of the poster board as I believe this is the most critical message that Lovelace tries to convey to her readers.

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By: Hailey Bruder

My house of poetry is inspired by one of Sarah Kay’s collections entitled No Matter The Wreckage and is constructed on a canvas. Kay’s collection features very personal poems that reflect on her past. Poems such as Subway and The Oak Tree Speaks exhibit significant aspects of Kay’s life growing up in New York City. Kay touches on how her childhood in such a dangerous yet fascinating city shaped her life greatly. Therefore, the main focus of my house of poetry is a city scene which includes taxis made out of popsicle sticks that signify specific aspects of Kay’s journey. The taxi with hearts accounts for the relationships in her life including the one with her father, her relationship with her past lovers and even the relationship with herself. Kay emphasizes in her poetry that her past relationships helped to shape who she is today by exposing her to different people, places and experiences. The middle taxi contains trees to show Kay’s growth. In what I feel is Kay’s quintessential poem, The Paradox, her growth is demonstrated as Kay learns to accept her dissatisfaction in her life and celebrates her past experiences instead of second guessing them. Finally, the third taxi was created to represent Kay’s past memories. A multitude of poems in No Matter The Wreckage reflect on what can be considered insignificant events, such as turbulence in the poem Jetlag, to show how even the smallest of events touched Kay’s life. The inclusion of such details shows that Kay’s life was truly shaped by multiple experiences surrounding her. I would say the overall theme of No Matter The Wreckage is reflection because Kay’s poems come off as vulnerable as they share valuable lessons as well as past experiences that she will travel down the road of life into her future… Quite possibly in a taxi.

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By: Takekuni Tanemori

Moon Bo Young exhibits her views on human nature through her poems. Many of her works including her collection of poems, Pillar of Books, encompass her pessimistic views on human nature through the use of many creative symbolisms. Specifically, she sees humans as insignificant creatures incapable of empathy.

For my House of Poetry, I constructed most of the components out of paper. My project consists of of an origami scale with an origami human baby on one side. The scale is placed on a glass jar containing an origami brain.

I made my project based off of Moon Bo Young's perspectives on the inherent human nature. The scale represents the human mind as demonstrated by the brain underneath the scale. The brain being trapped depicts the capacity and the limits of a human since Moon Bo Young emphasizes on the faults of human nature. The scale is balanced, or at least I attempted to, even though a human baby is present on one side while the other is empty. Since a human life is being equated to nothingness by the brain, this represents humans' lack of ability to perceive other beings. This directly relates to Moon Bo Young's beliefs since she views humans as beings only capable of thinking for themselves.

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By: Carsyn Parmelee

Throughout his poetry collection Counting Descent, Clint Smith describes what it is like to be black in a country that renders dark skin colors as something to be afraid of. He takes the reader on a journey in which they can reflect on what they’ve learned throughout their life on the basis of race, in regards to stereotypes, micro-aggressions, police brutality, and systemic racism. His quintessential poem, "Playground Elegy," is structured to represent its titular playground slide, as well is to represent the downfall of the experience of a Black American as they progress throughout their life.  They begin as a child with great expectations, but as they grow older and come-of-age, their expectations of justice and liberty get lower and lower. My house of poetry embodies this idea, and depicts common issues that Smith illustrates in his work. At the top of the slide, the words success, happiness, justice, equality, and survival are written, to portray a black child's hopes prior to the downfall in their black experience. As the slide hits the ground, the colors seep out into the shape of the United States, and each word is replaced with a modern issue that is faced by the black community in America (all of which are represented throughout Smith's collection). Successful becomes the racial wage gap. Happiness becomes mass incarceration. Justice becomes systemic racism. Equality becomes discrimination. Survival becomes police brutality. In my model, a young child has surpassed the "height requirement" to ride the "black experience," as they sit on top of the slide, anticipating their ultimate downfall.

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Message of Purity -     Aleksandra Baker

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Message of Purity -     Aleksandra Baker

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I constructed this scene as a representation of Billy Collins’s message in the poem “Purity” from his poetry book “Questions About Angels.” He initially discusses how he removes his clothes, flesh, and organs in order to reach a state of purity in which he can write his poems. He does this in order to construct simple poems that can all resonate within us at a base or skeletal level. The skeleton is the most bare form of a person that everyone shares. This is why I depict skeletons building the bridge in my scene. They are creating a simple path that everyone can walk on together in the same general direction. Collins goes further on to describe how he puts his organs, flesh, and clothes back on in order to reward himself by driving at sunset - to see many beautiful things that he could only appreciate fully back in his own body and formulate his own opinions about - as he says the “stone walls, farmhouses, and frozen ponds, [are] all arranged like words in a famous sonnet” (Collins, lines 36-37). My interpretation of this was that although given this shared basic path in reading his poems, we will still have our own opinions and beliefs about his work because we are with our unique flesh and organs when we read them. This is the importance of individual perspective and forming our own paths based on our own preoccupations and experiences. Looking back at my mess of a scene, this is why I show two people climbing in alternate directions from the bridge and another person flying over the bridge all to their own desired locations: their own conclusions. I’ll also add that this scene looks so ridiculous as a representation of Billy Collins’ inclusion of humor in the majority of his poems, and not just me being terrible at art.

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By Katie Miles

This house of poetry is completely inhospitable, which is fitting for Joyelle McSweeney, a poet whose work inspires deep discomfort and is almost unreadable at times, due in part to form/ style and in part to intense emotional content. I attempted to replicate these qualities in her work with the visual difficulty of the piece. In terms of reflecting the themes of violence, pain and trauma, that was attempted through the usage of broken pieces of things including glass and wire which could potentially be dangerous. The form of this house is a highly textured 3D collage, which I chose because I thought a collection of physical objects was best suited to the style of McSweeney's work in which she uses objects as symbols and means of conveying mood and emotion. I think this house really functions as a visual  representation of her body of work on many levels because to me it conveys a chaotic, complex, multifaceted, unique look. The objects used in the collage were also all chosen deliberately. To represent the usage of biological terminology, I chose feathers and a plastic fawn; the feathers can represent the spirit and idea of her daughter which is lightly woven into all the poems, while the fawn is often directly mentioned, as a connection to birth, youth, and the dangers young creatures face. I also used small, metal bone and lung charms, to invoke McSweeney's discussion of internal organs and bodily function, as well as pieces of scrap metal to convey the danger and destruction present in her work. The battery, cassette tape and pieces of CD represent the technological focus of McSweeney's work, the detritus of a culture she dissects and the idea of memory and how trauma remains recorded in the body and mind. The wire and yarn connect and tie together the different aspects of the piece, as McSweeney interweaves the natural, technological, social and personal. The slime represents a kind of dangerous residual toxicity, which is a focus of her work, while the glitter (besides being another word McSweeney often plays with) is indicative of the beautiful, dazzling aspects of her work, when she strings words together in stunning ways, although the glitter used is black, green and purple and still contains a certain darkness. The overall green-ness of the piece is a reflection both of the natural and hyper-stylized, artificial, unnatural in her work, since green is associated with nature but this is a bright, toxic green; both sides of the color are invoked and mentioned throughout her work.

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Blackout Poem From Self Love - Isabella Lagatta 

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Blackout Poem From Self Love - Isabella Lagatta 

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This is a blackout poem from Rupi Kaur's "Self Love." This is directly inspired by the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. This is meant to emphasize the inner turmoil that our protagonist, Dorian, feels after events in the novel. He did not actually shoot anyone dead - that is metaphorical, as he is indirectly responsible for the deaths of many characters in the novel.

Allow me to explain. Firstly, in a panicked frenzy, Dorian stabs his longtime friend Basil Hallward, killing him almost instantly. His love interest, Sybil Vane, commits suicide after he professes that he no longer loves her. Finally, James Vane, her older brother, seeks out Dorian to avenge the death of his sister and gets shot and killed.

Dorian tells himself a different narrative. He tells himself that he cleaned the bodies, and, horrified with himself, took his own life.

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i am the rage - Martina McGowan                            

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i am the rage - Martina McGowan                            

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By Lindsey Pietrewicz

In my House of Poetry, I constructed a scene symbolic of contemporary America. The individuals are standing on a cutout of America, on top of an extensive list of police brutality victims. I included this list because my poet, Dr. Martina McGowan, constantly touches on themes of black people falling victim to the inherently racist police system. For instance, she includes a poem about the fallen Breonna Taylor, demonstrating the severity of the problem that plagues the country today. Their names are written in red, symbolizing their innocent blood spilled. To continue, at the bottom I included a spin on the Preamble of the United States Constitution, writing “We the ⅗ People”. It is known that “We the People” are the iconic words that begin the document of our so-called unbounded freedoms. I included the ⅗ to emphasize that black people were not, and still are not considered equal and are continuously oppressed under the government that claims that they are free. Dr. Martina McGowan highlights this in her work by bringing the ⅗ Compromise into her poem “Human Enough”, which I consider to be her quintessential work. She does this to represent that black people are never seen as or treated the same as whites. To continue to demonstrate this, the individuals standing on the country are only colored in ⅗ of their entire figure. I colored this part of them in rainbow to represent their freedom, to show how it always falls short of its full potential due to the color of their skin. On the other side of the rainbow coloring, representative of their freedoms cut short, I wrote the ⅗ Compromise to demonstrate that this is the thing doing just that. The government is inherently racist, out from the very beginning under a mask of “freedom for all” to terminate and place limits on these innocent people. This theme is overarching captured in McGowan’s work, which is why I chose to hone in on it through my art.