Becoming Another: The Power of Masks Poetry Guide

Becoming Another: The Power of Masks On view at the Rubin Museum of Art March 13, 2015–February 8, 2016 Support for this exhibition has been provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. Additional support has been provided through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and through the 2015 Exhibitions Fund.

Created in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America Special thanks to the Poetry Society of America for commissioning these poems

CONTENTS I Come to You in This Mask Tarfia Faizullah

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We Are the Difference and the Difference Is a Skin Morgan Parker

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red and bird Stephen Motika

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Wish You Were Here Fady Joudah

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A Boy’s Song: Hyottoko Atsuro Riley

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Confession Richard Siken

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Shisa Liondogs Guard the Threshold. But What Is a Threshold? 18 Brenda Shaughnessy Untitled Patricia Smith

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I have been invited by the Poetry Society of America to write a poem about a Japanese Fox mask of unspecified origin, used for theatrical purposes Robyn Schiff

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FOREWORD

This chapbook, a small collection of mask-inspired poems and related images, is a collaborative offering from the Rubin Museum of Art and the Poetry Society of America. The Poetry Society invited a select group of poets to reflect on and respond to masks in the Museum’s 2014–2015 exhibition Becoming Another: The Power of Masks, which displays masks from diverse cultural regions, including the Himalayas, Siberia, Japan, and the Pacific Northwest Coast of America. The poets—Tarfia Faizullah, Morgan Parker, Stephan Motika, Fady Joudah, Atsuro Riley, Richard Siken, Brenda Shaughnessy, Patricia Smith, and Robyn Schiff—are highly accomplished, stylistically distinctive, and critically lauded. The poems in this chapbook are also presented in an audio tour of the exhibition, which features the poets reading their own work. This creative collaboration has been a great pleasure, and we hope that the poems delight you and augment your appreciation of the masks on view.

Sincerely,

Dominique Townsend Assistant Director of Interpretation and Engagement

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Possible Shamanic Mask Possibly Magar Peoples 19th century Western Nepal; Wood, traces of pigment, metal, hair, and cloth ties Bruce Miller Collection

I Come to You in This Mask Tarfia Faizullah

By the time the sun asked, I was already someone else. My left eye, smaller than the right, and blinding are the gravel paths

I was feeding your leopard when you took my fingers.

I’m already someone else, and I turn her face

to your collarbone, Lord.

My tribe’s children, who can’t stop bleeding the grievances of ghosts,

away from me to gaze at yours.

Why are you? I dream until you ask me to sing through the spikes of your mouth.

are now asleep.

I come to you bare, wearing only this mask.

You lift my oblong chin

O Lord, I am hideous until I am near you.

Die, you command, and I do, kneeling before I rise.

towards mountains with your lies and whisper into the tuft of gray hair I cut from my father’s beard.

You did not teach me to save him, but at the ceremony, you kissed the bronze strip fastened to my forehead so I never forgot his rage. Lord,

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Transformation Mask Tsungani Fearon Smith, Jr. (Cherokee, b. 1948) 1979 Wood, horsehair, abalone, paint Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Bequest of William R. Wright, 1995

We Are the Difference and the Difference Is a Skin Morgan Parker

We chant we kill we become a sport. We are your pet.

We are your God we glow in a tree.

Our dark eyes are fossils and pianos.

We are a man and a bird and a woman half-animal.

Our eyelashes half-horsehair.

Our eyelashes grow and grow.

We don’t remember our first country.

We couldn’t talk. We weren’t

You brought us into this mud. We turned into river.

born red. We had eyelashes for fur.

Our eyelashes turned into hands.

You believe you are at war.

There is a cast of you rising up.

A white ocean coast rising up.

Everything costs us our life. This is not a weapon in our hands it’s an eclipse.

Tell us to deliver us. We are your brother braid your hair into ours.

Grass so lush we choke on it.

We don’t remember sleeping.

Our thickness is trying to convince you.

We are the wet shore.

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Thunderbird Mask Kwakwaka’wakw Peoples before 1917 Wood, pigment Pacific Northwest Coast; Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Peabody Museum Expedition, 1917

red and bird Stephen Motika

this crimson falling a shadow trail ceremony wind, large eyed, in green lens swiftly separates beaked over rock, barbed in abeyance of fact, on arrival, this fine head moved from indeterminate evocation to the categorized and the cataloged. malachite tinged plane, the pupil of a life’s thought—no metal in this thunderbird’s rush, cascade of eagle, raven and hawk in winging, testament of adolescent indolence before capture. what is likeness against the forested backdrop? escape can be felt in the tremors beneath Haida Gwaii, its people largely killed under the icon of Queen Charlotte, amateur botanist of empire, before Newcombe brought conveyance to remove totems of a devastated people. what has happened in the hundred years hence? heightened, for first nations, the dances of intellect, a renewed making, in language, in resistance, so that masking breaks the cage, fire leaps off the page. carmine, tongues of feather at last, cedar white, again, flight

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Owl Bhutan 20th century Papier-mâchÊ, polychrome Bruce Miller Collection

Wish You Were Here Fady Joudah

Genie in a lamp call me call me insane if I think that after three wishes I had been your master Are you a Sufi is all our longing to your ears born equal a devil in love is a devoted angel?

If you see my love tonight tell her that if she can come by I’ll make her coffee and tea we’ll play chutes and ladders climb desire descend ecstasy and toss the chromosomal dice I can play her and she can play me

I’ve heard you take written requests is it true that you are literate miracle gas have you got sisters or brothers is it true that deep down inside you detest appearances to those who don’t ask about your dreams in the shut of your flask?

Oh Genie we’re still here ink and amulet fratricide taxonomy and hyena doctor eyes

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Usofuki Japan; 18th-19th century Wood Brooklyn Museum, 28.744

A Boy’s Song: Hyottoko Atsuro Riley

The whistling Usofuki (Usobuki) character in Kyogen drama may derive from the folkstory of a boy, Hyottoko, who was said to create gold from his belly button.

The mask is often used in Kyogen to portray the spirits of small beings and ‘the least-grains of life’: pine-sap & needles, crickets, mosquitoes, mushrooms, mosses.

I’m a whistle-song that’s barely there.

I’m the whistle-song you hardly hear.

My song it pipes and flutes like young bamboo.

My belly-song breathes gold.

That whistle-song you can’t quite catch is me, is mine.

I’m whistling-in as soul of ant.

I sing (the inscape, pith) of ferns, cicadas, sticky pines.

Nights, I whistle-stroke your dogs.

My whistle-song the nightlong night was needle-mat, was moss on logs.

Is low not lonesome. My belly-song breathes gold.

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Deer Bhutan; 20th century Papier-mâchÊ, polychrome Bruce Miller Collection

Confession Richard Siken We stayed the field to watch over the children. They gallop and laugh and bang their heads senseless. We rustle the grass or flash a whip of tail to bewilder, leave strange prints in the mud under the windows.

Something wild was here and you are not alone. Landfill, we have a question for you, about the bones of things. Library, we have questions about the bones. We spend our nights saying it wrong, and yet we run so you can dream of running, so you remember, good or bad, that the world glows bright. In a myth, we uprooted the fences and wore them as crowns. Call it a myth and the truth grows abstract. Call it a mask and the self is a doubled fact.

A man lies down in the leaves, singing. His song is a mountain and all the ladders that every living thing is climbing. He will sing his beast into a larger beast and trample the open field of himself into wonderment. These things happen.

There’s a formula where you take one part water. Anything else would be too much to bear.

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Mask, Hinged Mouth Japan; Wood, pigment, lacquer American Museum of Natural History, 70.0/3676

Shisa Liondogs Guard the Threshold. But What Is a Threshold?

Brenda Shaughnessy

No flower knows the ocean. Not deeply.

The sea—just its finger—never fully finds the forest though it can see the trees wave and thus in response wave back overmuch.

Too, a succulent has no bud for salt, its own opposite, but three houses down, the deer lick and lick as if replenishing the kelp of the hoof of its own newborn body swum in from the sea for centuries in spite of recent memory to the contrary. O isn’t the wind just sister and news to all, blowing baskets of windfall and garbage alike to those who don’t deserve either gifts or refuse? Where I can see the line between my home and the world, the sky’s shape and texture is so much closer and cleaner there.

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Yase-otoko Japan; date unknown Wood, lacquer, pigment, plaster American Museum of Natural History, 70.0/ 3592

Untitled Patricia Smith

I wake each day with dawn yawning an unbridled itch in my mouth, as if there is a lie that will die if it is not sung.

I begin inarguably alone, raveled in slate-gray sheets and cloaked in a funk so oddly rhymed I suspect its drift is what forces my eyes open. Unnerved by my own banal arithmetic, I stink to stay lonely, to explain why my thick fingers have never mumbled a love or grasped the scarlet art of turning a woman into moan and spectacular dust.

I stink to stay vital. I stink to bless my body with structure while I wallow in the want of a flap-mouthed kiss, a card flowered with slant rhymes from someone who knew me before my plummet utter and south. Fall into the imploding ring of my arms because this morn has wildly spiraled and led you here. Come, I will teach you to mourn with your whole damned face, to unreel a reeking keen that stutters this dawn. Twirl dazed in my fetid sheets until itch becomes overwhelm. My love, we’ll weep our lives.

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Fox Japan Edo Period (1615-1868) American Museum of Natural History, 70.0/3592

I have been invited by the Poetry Society of America to write a poem about a Japanese Fox mask of unspecified origin, used for theatrical purposes Robyn Schiff

—well, I actually chose the fox; there were a lot of masks to choose from— and I made a choice between the Fox and No. By telepathic means I sent a message to the Poetry Society of America: “Many thanks for thinking of me for this exciting project, but I’m afraid it’s impossible;” and then I followedup by email: “I’d love to participate! I will send you my mask preference by tomorrow,” and so I sing the Fox of Yes. You have to accept a gift to make it legal, you have to give yourself to it. Here comes the Fox Mask now with something blandly 22

mystical in its room temperature mouth. In the manner of a game orchestrated by the father of a classmate in his newly finished basement in which we passed a giant vivid orange between us chin-to-chest with hands tied behind us, I will accept what the Fox has to give, I was, after all, once head receptionist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and so receptive bike messengers formed a line to my burning desk. Highest-ranked lowest-rung of secretary, I was curator of the western world and signed for everything; at night I dreamtransacted with grave symbolic foxes delivering forbidden documents regarding artifice and discipline. Much like all the positions I’ve taken since, this was an acting job and from my desk I heard the stage door bang open to admit each fabled, fox-faced human animal courier. “Who will sign for this?”

“I will.” This is 23

a poem about acceptance. In a cave painting depicting a herd of wild goats stands a goat on two feet. A bow I can not see is taut beneath that goat’s pelt. It has the intensity of the will that made it, like thread and needle, rod and line, a “complementary toolset,” in five stages of skilled production of twenty-two raw materials, plus goods semi-finished, twine, glue, worked over by ten different tools sixty-four thousand years ago. The costume that conceals the bow stinks of the real; this is the world’s first theater review and the goats buy in. I return to the fox: though we stand unconvinced, man and beast, and don’t accept that cold wooden snout at all, a real bill’s been left by that imaginary fox and who knows what I’m paying for or what it plans to drag in payment down its hole. In the manner of the conclusion of The Odyssey, where Odysseus inventories

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the trees his father gave him long before the war, when he was just a boy and each tree he stood to inherit was pointed out and named to him, in the same manner he names those same trees now, to prove who he is to his own father whom he hasn’t seen in 20 years, the whole war and journey homeward, and in the source I consulted, suggests reunion with the soil of Ithaca, here I name the trees on my property, acknowledge, and sign for them, in the order Total Tree Care warned they must come down before they come down upon my family: Mulberry, Mulberry, Maple, Tree of Heaven.

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