Commentary by Donna Monday
In October, Mother Nature fades the flowers, paints the leaves and inspires many artists. Some of those artists are now presenting their most creative work at Zionsville Town Hall.
A group of six poets have each written a poem inspired by one of six quilts hanging from high above the first floor and seen upon entry into the building. The quilter, Laurie Evans Gavrin, made all the quilts and called the exhibition “Seeing the Unseen.”
“Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see,” she said.
The poems written about the quilts range from somewhat humorous (“Mona Lisa with Beloved Support Team”) to profound (“Quantum Entanglement”). Other poems are entitled “Rainbows of Ash,” “Thanks be for Leopards,” “Nature Floating” and “In the Quilted Multiverse.”
The poems are printed and fastened to a display board on the floor beneath the quilts. The six poets are Shari Wagner, Joe Heithaus, Noel Bewley, Stephanie L. Harper, Michael Crawford and Denise Buschmann.
The poems they wrote are ekphrastic poems, written in response to a work of art by Heithaus, an English professor at DePauw University.
Heithaus wrote about the quilt “Hidden Figures” and titled his poem “Rainbows of Ash.” When asked about the title, he said he understood that it might sound depressing.
“Still,” he said, “I was really drawn to the quilt because it makes humans in the dark landscape into beacons of one kind or another. We humans are the culprits, but we are also the hope, the possibility, the very cure to such ills as injustice, racism, animal and child neglect.”
The quilts and the poems, like all good art, are subject to the viewer or reader’s interpretation. The display is a project presented by Brick Street Poetry, Inc.
Founder Joyce Brinkman says the organization “Is always happy to bring poetry into different venues and to the people. Town Hall seemed a unique place to do that.”
