ARCHIVAL - Julie Poole at 100W
By David Searcy, April 2021
Julie Poole’s poems address the natural world with meticulous and studious indirection. What she studies is the world as seen or gathered by another. As affected by that seeing, that collecting. As reduced thereby. As concentrated. Rendered somehow volatile, releasing strange and sinuous and wild associations that appear to drift like smoke or like the fragrance of dead flowers down the pages of her broadside, “The Herbarium”—twelve poems on twelve dead flowers (watercolors by her mother) from the University of Texas’ Plant Resources Center in Austin, where she lives, and whose botanical collection she examined through the fall and early winter of 2017/18 at a little desk with her ghostly specimens, haunted “to sit in the chimney-like tower that had been the sniper’s outpost in 1966.” She hovers over these dead flowers and inhales them into sentiments as startling and clear and even dangerous (a dangerous thing to say) as any rifle.
With the broadside, on display here on the third floor of the Residency, tacked along the white wall, are five images of early twentieth century glass lantern slides from the U.T. Plant Resources Center’s Moldenke Collection. Each hand-colored photographic scene is from a national park and depicts a natural wonder. And beside each is a block of text describing it. There’s nothing sinuous here. The hard, rectangular block of text—about the size and shape of the image—is no travelogue. Or not the usual sort at any rate. It is a sudden apprehension. An amazement as surprising and immediate as the clacking of a glass slide into brilliant illumination. As if wonders such as these have only now been revealed to us and we have yet to find the language. And the beauty of these lines is in their brilliantly illuminated struggle toward a language for these structures of the world we find reduced and pressed in glass. You want to treat these pairs as stereoscopic—cross your eyes to make them merge to trick you into deeper understanding. Which I think they do already. Like the “Claude glass”—that small tinted convex mirror in its travel case—that well-heeled Europeans liked to take on tour to view the glorious natural sublimities of the Lake District or the Alps reduced and darkened on its surface to resemble the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain.
These text-and-image pairs will multiply into a book at some point— “Landscapes Without Us.” Which I’m hoping will be coffee-table-beautiful to lure you in and trick you into deeper understanding. How we want more than to just be in the world. We want to have it.