The poetry of pictures

A couple years ago my friend and I spent a hilarious afternoon on the third floor of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, where they were displaying pictures and poems by elementary school students. The children had studiously copied famous works of art and wrote short interpretive stanzas relating to their pictures. Some were poignant and thoughtful. Most of them seemed comical because the children focused on aspects of the paintings that were unimportant to the typical art historian but were fascinating to their young eyes. They became fixated on things like pearl earrings or walking sticks laid carelessly behind a portrait subject and in their reinterpretation of the work, the earrings or the walking stick took center stage. It was an absolute pleasure to see the works through the children's eyes.

At work, I recently asked a nine year old boy to write a response to a work in the museum's collection. He liked a picture of the Grand Canyon and he chose to write a poem. Here's my favorite part:

Formed over millions of years by wind, rain, ice and by the Colorado River.

A spectacular view captured on canvas to excite and inspire us,

Makes me want to go there and hang glide off the edge,

And go soaring through the canyon with the birds.

There's the funny and there's the poignant. And then sometimes, some one can capture the essence of a scene and what they have said or written becomes even better than the work itself.