Terri Witek
TERRI WITEK is the author of seven previous books of poems. Exit Island was a Florida Book Award medalist; The Rape Kit won the the 2018 Slope Editions Prize, judged by Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin called The Rape Kit “a grand success, the best we’ll get. Fresh, relevant, and heartbreaking” and “a fire in the throat of a culture that has no appropriate language for rape and its aftermath …” Witek’s poetry, though often topical, traces the breakages between words and visual images. Her visual poetics work is featured in two recent international anthologies: JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and WAAVe Global Gallery of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (2021). It has appeared in museum and gallery shows and in site-specific performances as well, often in collaboration with visual artists. With Cyriaco Lopes, Witek team-teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas. They also run The Fernando Pessoa Game as faculty in the Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Witek also directs Stetson’s undergraduate creative writing program, and holds the university’s Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing. (terriwitek.com)
When texts about paintings try to reach each other across space, pages that query how we experience art become poetic experiments in seeing/reading. What clings to what on these page walls? And do paintings from other centuries (older materialities, differently-moving) themselves re-make each other through their almost touch? Are we momentarily part of a painting when we consider such things? And what’s the changing position of the museum which poses us by country, by technique, by year and by foot pattern? In Something’s Missing in This Museum, the subjects are love, torture, transaction and time.
SOMETHING’S MISSING IN THIS MUSEUM BY TERRI WITEK $20.00
Vermeer
Table is wound. Globe is wound — that country where your hand rests is the throb
of it. You have a fingering thought and it’s wound.
Chair is bent and slower wound, floor is unseen so it’s flood not wound
but thread canyons are wound — vine-bloomed drape at that fold
where you grip its slide over table. Second degree wound, then, or third:
air gone wound as you pass through it, wound the room where you pause and
pause. You look away, light — light wounds.