Artist Talk #15

I have no idea what you are doing here
or how to use this mic.

Someday I’m going to die
and God said, look get that commission.

I usually start with a shape — maybe that one —
in the form of either a baby or a table.

If it’s table, we’ve got a still life,
if a baby, then we are in chaos.

Either way, there’s a whole cosmology,
abstraction is meant to make order from.

Is that too deep? How about this blue — too deep for you?
My technique is to reach an absolute limit, and then add more.

ξ

“Artist Talk #15” was first published in Women's Review of Books, Jan/Feb 2021

Merridawn Duckler is a writer and visual artist from Oregon, author of INTERSTATE (dancing girl press), IDIOM (Harbor Review), and MISSPENT YOUTH (rinky dink press). Beulah Rose poetry prize from Smartish Pace, non-fiction prize from Invisible City, judged by Heather Christle, Elizabeth Sloane Tyler Memorial Award from Woven Tale Press, judged by Ann Beattie, Drama prize from Arts and Letters in Georgia. Publications: Painted Bride Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Western Humanities Review, Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review, Plume. She’s an associate editor at Narrative and the international philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics.

Relish: An Internet Archive is a twice-monthly column featuring poems, stories, and essays that were first published in print literary magazines and journals but have no former presence online. This initiative strives to disseminate more excellent writing to a wider audience. To submit to this column, please read our submission guidelines.