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Slought Foundation is pleased to announce a poetry reading by Sharon Black entitled "When the Wind Was Really a Goose" in the Slought Foundation vaults on April 13 at 6:30 pm. This reading is the inaugural event of Slought Foundation’s Fellows Series, in which non-curatorial staff members, working outside traditional curatorial frameworks, propose and organize programs for the Foundation. This first event will be an intimate reading and conversation in Slought Foundation’s rear bank vaults, organized by Jim Carpenter, Assistant to the Executive Director.
Carpenter selected Black for this inaugural reading because of his appreciation for “her image-rich searches for the epiphanic within the quotidian.” But Black is less interested in the image by itself than in conflating it with others in surprising, often dizzying juxtapositions. In a Black poem you will find a wrestler and a detective riding the same escalator. In a similar way, she stakes her own unique claim on feminism by reimagining the domestic (last night's wind of lace and tinsel and raw meat/ is why we play house) or foisting it into the wider world: the smoke is industrial and hunkers/ over the city like pepper/ in a shaker the shape of a Scottie.
A democratizing spirit weaves itself throughout her work, riffing on plainspeak and clichés alongside more heightened language: Say I’m out to lunch/ searching for the nearest aqueduct/ your silver shout the baton I catch behind my back—a spirit often laced with traces of sardonic humor: Let’s get away from these windy flames/ Software is safer. It often comes down to the poet questioning the essential nature of perception (Nothing begins by being what it is) and its place in the creation of texts and the realities they portray: To fix the broken screw, you must first take out the TV. But above all, Black’s poems are playful and provocative romps toward a deepening consciousness of and through language amidst the lumpy/ and uncertain doubting there is any/ clearer conscience than imagination.
Sharon Black, who has been writing poetry for over thirty years, is the Librarian of the Annenberg School for Communication Library at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, FEMSPEC, Slipstream, Rhino, The South Carolina Review, and GW Review. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize.
This program is made possible in part through the generous sponsorship or support of the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation.
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