How to Write a Poem about Noguchi

The Noguchi Museum (Image © NYCGO)

When I lived in New York many years ago, I used to go to the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. It was his studio, and now is a series of rooms full of sculptures and drawings, short films, the akari lanterns for which he is probably most famous. There are polished stones inside the museum as well as out in the garden. It’s one of my favorite places. Even describing it now I can feel what it was like to be there, the cool darkness and occasional brightly colored shapes. I miss it intensely.

I had the idea to go repeatedly and take notes and write a long poem. It turned out to be terrible. I see now, looking at that old document, that I took a lot of it and repurposed it for a long poem I eventually wrote later that year, “Brooklyn with a New Beginning.” In that newer poem, I was writing from a lonely place. I was coming out of a deep and debilitating depression, and felt that I was freeing myself of certain negative relationships to the world and to people that had led me to the same bad places over and over. I did not know exactly how, but things were changing.

Part of the problem with the original poem was that it transcribed what I saw in a way that wanted to be symbolic or resonant, but was just reporting. One time when I went to the museum, I saw three women standing together talking about