Art – Poetry – Al Weems and Trisha Wooldridge

For our 2018 Art & Poetry pairing, one pairing was with artist Al Weems and poet Trisha Wooldridge.

Here are the works they created!

Al Weems provided this artwork to Trisha:

In response, Trisha wrote the following poem:

Tomato

Taken from my native home,
I was dragged to cold, dark, stony lands
where nights were far too long.

I was bred,
spliced,
Frankensteined
to be “hearty”
to last longer than my normally brief life,
to be fattier, beefier,
more succulent,
and bear more children than nature intended.

Hundreds of years,
of science,
of slavery,
of commodification,
of being pulled, too soon, from the vine
and transported miles in darkness,
so you
might eat my tender fruit.

It is no comfort
to know
you
commit
those same sins
upon your own children.

The second half of this pairing involved Trisha giving Al a poem as a starting point. Trisha provided this poem:

War Paint

This is for me,
not you.

I was up late,
with heartache
with insomnia
with brain weasels
with comics
or cute cat videos
with nothing at all.

And I hadn’t time to shower.
And I’m already running late.

But the glossy, flimsy, shimmering
barely there
armor
of eye-shadow, liner, mascara
maybe even lip gloss…

That’s for me.

In response, Al created this artwork:

2018 Art-Poetry Pairing main page