The object that I chose is “Written on the Breath”. It is a collage of poetry reading poster of various artist and poets. The collage mentions that even though poetry reading is very common today, it, in fact, flourished only recently after World War II with the Beat Generation. I was drawn to this case because after I went to the literary event “‘Howl’ at Emory”, in which Emory faculties and students perform Ginsberg’s “Howl” and local poets read their own Beat-inspired poems, I truly felt the difference between reading poems and hearing them. Hearing the poem engenders more intense emotion than merely looking at them, and depend on the reader’s voice, the audience might pay attention to things that they did not notice when they were reading the poem.

This case reminded me of the guest speaker we had in class that performed Ted Berrigan’s poem which was accompanied by a film clip. We also watched many videos of poets reading their own poem, such as Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” and Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s “Discourse on the Logic of Language”. All these experiences made me think that reading is not the only way to appreciate and understand poems, sounds also matter.

This case gives me inspirations on my final project because I always thought one case of an exhibit can only contain one object, and I never thought of using the form of collage to include various materials that address similar topics. Furthermore, after looking at the exhibit, I realized that the materials included in an exhibit can be very different. It can range from actual poems and magazines published during that period to personal items like love letter and passport of the leading figure of the movement. A wide range of materials can be included as long as there is an overarching theme that ties all the pieces together.

After looking at the case, some questions I had are that why is poetry reading only started recently considering that poetry writing has such a long history, and what made poets start to realize the importance of poetry performing? To answer these questions, I would need to go search online or from the library the history of poetry. I also need to look up the beginning of the Beat movement to see what inspired the poets to start poetry reading.