Tag Archives: sculpture

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

Ekphrastic poem: Jenna Le, ‘The Implorer’

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This figurine of bronze
cast by Camille Claudel,
known as Auguste Rodin’s
mentee and, for a spell,

his lover, is most striking
for being non-erotic–
desexed–despite depicting
a kneeling nude, lordotic

trunk outthrust at an angle,
headlong, precipitous,
arms outstretched not to strangle
one who broke faith, but just

to make a strangled gesture,
a soundless, ground-out groan,
the hauntings that oppress her
knowable to her alone.

*****

This ekphrastic poem was recently published in Able Muse.

Jenna Le writes: “I often draw inspiration from wandering around in art museums. The Implorer is a statuette I first saw at the Met. I find I’m especially attracted to artworks by women artists that portray female experience, and this bronze in particular called out to me because it radiated such a powerful sense of interiority, depicting a woman as not a muse or a reflective surface but as a source of painfully strong thought and emotion.”

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She won Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Pleiades, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. She works as a physician in New York City.

Photo: “File:The Implorer (L’Implorante) MET DP-13617-053.jpg” by Camille Claudel is marked with CC0 1.0.