I consider myself apprentice to their divergent approaches, the distinctive ways they place poetry in the expanded field of abstract visual art. Unlike me, Rick Barot, Khadijah Queen, and Cole Swensen have practiced ekphrastic art for most of their careers. Would I be interested, Linnea asked, in writing Johns-inspired work, commissioning new poetry from three other poets, and organizing an online reading? This time I said yes, knowing already who I’d ask. COVID-19 had delayed the opening of Mind/Mirror, and the museum had decided to move online most of their programming around the retrospective.

Two years later I heard again from the PMA, this time from Linnea West, Manager of Adult Public Programs. I was about to leave Philadelphia and couldn’t see how I’d pull anything together from a distance and though I’d started to familiarize myself with Johns’s long career, I couldn’t yet see what his work might mean to me. Carlos envisioned readings that would be performative and perhaps even governed by chance, in honor of John Cage, an early interlocutor and another friend. He wanted poets to write Johns-inspired poems, since some of his most poignant work of the 1960s references either Modernist poet Hart Crane or New York School poet Frank O’Hara, MOMA curator, art critic, and friend. Carlos envisioned something elaborate that would take place live in the PMA’s galleries during their half of Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror, the other half of which the Whitney would host. We met in the PMA’s curatorial offices during the summer of 2019. Vogelman, exhibition assistant, asked me to collaborate. That might be why Carlos Basualdo, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Sarah B. Researching Agnes Martin’s art and writing had introduced me to the art world and milieu of Johns’s early years in lower Manhattan, and had resulted in a book, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. I remain grateful I didn’t give his retrospective my time then-that Defeo show was life-changing! And because by the time I was first asked to consider writing about Johns, I had grown less dismissive, if not less wary. I associated his oeuvre with the male, white, monied bias of museums, and left it at that. That I preferred Defeo had little to do with Johns, whose work I didn’t know. Instead I spent several afternoons in the Jay Defeo retrospective hung in galleries opposite his. He first opportunity I had to see a Johns retrospective-at SFMOMA in 2013-I declined.

Jasper johns exhibition mind mirror