1.
Charles Pinckney’s sculpture, “Lifeboat” (1995), is a tribute to his mother.
The “Lifeboat” is also a tribute to the casket he designed for his mother, and the image of that casket passing through the center aisle of the church on its way to unfathomable shores.
Both casket and “Lifeboat” share ingredients: sterling silver, titanium, copper, bronze, brass, mild steel, cherry wood.
The inner lining is made from satin over paper form.
He explains the composition in this video.
The sculpture sits in the Birmingham Museum of Art, where it arrests me. Every time.
2.
The casket is a boat with four legs that resemble ladders. One wants to climb inside the boat which does not float, the boat which stands on the ground as if to repudiate floating.
The ladders in are a repudiation, as legs recuse themselves from walking when attached to a boat, an object that does not need them to get where it is going.
Pinckney’s “Lifeboat” is a metallurgical rejection.
Because the casket is behind a polycrystalline box, I can’t open it.
The metal chain dangles from the side, accessible only to the eyes.
I imagine the satin lining I could see if I could lift the lid.
To open the lifeboat: to see the mother. Is it the museum that makes that lifting impossible? The form, itself, suggests that opening would be natural.
The presence of the chain, the closed eye of the casket, the space inside the poem we cannot touch.
3.
Pinckney lives in Georgia. Primarily self-taught, he makes jewelry and small sculpture from metal, stones, wood, and bone.
His childhood “piece de resistance—a single chain link carved from a Popsicle stick.”
His method: “I arrange and rearrange into a composition until the piece feels balanced and exciting to me.” Each object wants to be revealed; and it communicates this through a language.
4.
Ada Limon, explaining that poetry isn’t an issue to fix or a problem to solve, quotes the ancient Chinese proverb (also quoted by Toni Morrison): “A bird sings not because he has an answer, but because he has a song.”
Once the bird’s song exists, it no longer belongs to the bird alone—it becomes part of the world where others bring their ears and lives and impressions to bear upon the hearing.
The casket is a boat. The casket sits in a museum where it accessible to the public. We see how much Pinckney loved his mother, and how the form of this love protects her from us.
4.
Jaswinder Bolina to the poet: “Your task is to arrange the words strangely in order to explain more clearly what happened.” Charles Pinckney on sculpture: “You have to release yourself from what your preconceptions are and let the thing dictate.”
The words strangely.
The words estranged from the wording, the aura that surrounds the latch.
The poem does not open the casket; the poem tells us the casket can be opened.
I am still circling around the tension between formal expectation and what the artist holds sacred.
5.
From that day forward. From that day, forward. The presence of a comma modifies what the poet asks of time. The absence makes the seam invisible. The seam is the space of asking in a poem. Each punctuation mark makes what is asked more specific.
What happens to a bird song when we score it?
6.
The bird song’s is part of the landscape. It sings whether or not we listen. You who know American Saturdays—know lawnmowers and barbecues bulldoze the song. Leaf blowers erase it and nothing else happens.
The bird does not fight to be heard over the din.
The poet must live with that.
The bind of singing: being ignored. The song’s risk is also it’s sky—it’s particular tenor.
Hoa Nyugen ends the poem, “Diệp Before Completion,”with this line:
“The past tense of sing is not singed”
No punctuation. No italics. We feel singed by the past tense, even though the poet explicitly states the opposite. The ear hears a fire.
The mind finds an ocean. An eye trying to lift it.
What is a lifeboat? “How long after chemotherapy can a DIEP flap be done?” What is the color of locked satin?
