Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2002SYR09
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
Poem Inspiration Location
Under Tumbled Black
poster information
Description
Under tumbled black
Liquid pigeons pour through sky
Chased by peregrine.
I work in the city, and every day during my lunch hour I go for a walk. So I've sort of formed a bond with pigeons. Not because I feed them, but because I find them so beautiful.
Once I wrote a whole series of pigeon poems, and people actually got angry at me. They were angry because I was writing about something that seemed so trivial to them. But I find beauty in most everything, including pigeons.
After a while, I discovered there were peregrine falcons living on the tops of buildings, and they were eating the pigeons. So I actually saw a scene like the one that I wrote about. It was on this dark, ominous day. And it was thrilling to see it, especially under such exciting weather conditions.
The poem is about a peregrine hawk chasing pigeons. At first I didn't know what a peregrine was. Then someone told me it was a kind of hawk. So I thought, “Cool—a bird.“ I like painting birds. They're one of my favorite subjects. You can paint them very expressively.
The poem alone brings to mind lots of images. I chose to portray hawk minus the pigeons. Someone suggested I show the hawk tearing the pigeons up. But I thought that would be distasteful. And to have a bunch of pigeons in the background would have been redundant. It wasn't really necessary. The image was focusing more on the city of Syracuse.