Tag Archives: attention

Sonnet: Meredith Bergmann, ‘Public Art’

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A girl, eleven, racing down the street
(who might be an imaginary daughter)
pulled by her Lab (a female?) plants her feet
before a statue whose bronze skirt has caught her
big dog’s attention.
Works of art command
our gaze, on average, for three seconds. Thought
or feeling must work quickly. We can’t stand
like statues—life is taxed and overwrought.
She doesn’t have her gadget, so she scans
the stone: “Remember”, “Deepen” and “Surpass.”
Her dog is eager for a fresher scent.
The sculptures, though, are asking if she can
imagine she might wield these words. It’s fast.
This is the moment of the monument.

*****

‘Public Art’ was originally published in The Sonneteer.

Meredith Bergmann is an award-winning sculptor whose public monuments can be seen in New York, Boston and beyond. Her Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument was unveiled in Central Park in August 2020, and she recently unveiled a monument for the historic center of Lexington, MA. Her many poetry publications include Barrow Street, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, New Criterion, New Verse Review, Tri Quarterly Review and the anthologies Hot Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism, Powow River Poets Anthology II, and the forthcomingThe Country in the Mirror: Poems of Protest and Witness. She was poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly from 2006-2017. She has won three honorable mentions from the Frost Farm Poetry Prize, and in 2020, a 2nd prize from the Connecticut Poetry Club. Her chapbook A Special Education is available online from Bainbridge Island Press, and The Dying Flush, with poetry and illustrations by Bergmann, 2024 is available from EXOT Books.

Photo of Boston Women’s Memorial, Meredith Bergmann, 2003, from City of Boston

Claudia Gary, ‘The Body’

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It catches up–sore teeth,
cramped neck or growing belly–
demanding our attention
once and for all. Beneath

a well-established brain,
above submissive toes,
the rest of it rebels
at our neglect, to gain

maybe not sympathy
but serious concern–
whatever is required
for us to stop and see

its loyalty. A steed
deserving of a gallop,
water and oats, in want
of love, it must be freed.

*****

Claudia Gary’s new book, Time and Other Solvents, will be available soon from Sligo Creek Publishing (See https://www.sligocreekpublishing.com/time-and-other-solvents). 

She lives near Washington DC and teaches workshops on Sonnets, Villanelles, Natural Meter, Persona Poems, Poetry vs. Trauma, etc., at The Writer’s Center (writer.org) and privately, currently via Zoom. Also the author of Humor Me (2006) and several chapbooks, most recently Genetic Revisionism, Claudia is an advisory editor for New Verse Review, as well as a science writer, visual artist, and composer of tonal art songs and chamber music. Her article about setting poems to music can be found online at  https://straightlabyrinth.info/conference.html. See also pw.org/content/claudia_gary.

‘The Body’ was first published in Amsterdam Quarterly

Photo: “The Old Cowboy” by Big Grey Mare is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.