Between the Lines

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Along a tall, slender shelf at the far end of the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s library, between Oscar Wilde and William Carlos Williams, sits a spine made of wood. This is not quite a book, but an interpretation of one. Pull it from the shelf and you’ll discover something closer to an artifact — a wooden panel that carries the warmth and weight of a novel, but without the usual cover and pages between. In their place is a vivid window of glass and metal, molded and embroidered into a quietly striking abstract design.  

Created by Phoenix-based artist Mary Lucking, the artifact is a work of cloisonné. To some, this may sound like a cream-filled pastry sold at a Parisian café, but it is in fact an ancient and rigorous artistic technique in which glass, ground with colored minerals, is melted between wires.  

“Cloisonné was a relatively new medium for me when I designed this project,” Lucking says. A degree of playfulness and experimentation, therefore, was perhaps to be expected — an ethos that felt at home in the Poetry Center. “I’d been playing around with the idea of proposing a project to the Poetry Center for a long time,” she says. “The space itself is so wonderful, but I didn’t want to create anything that would detract from the experience of reading poetry.”  

Lucking decided to design something different from her other artwork, which is often intended for larger, more populated spaces. So she gave herself some goalposts. “Creating something at the same scale as a poem, that would be held in your hand and quietly contemplated, just as you would a poem, was the way I found to celebrate the experience that the Poetry Center offers to its visitors.” 

Scattered across the shelves are 26 pieces in total — some alongside Lucking’s favorite poets, some between books that resonate with the abstract imagery on the panel. The result is a set of objects that, depending on the person, may inform or serve as a counterpoint to the surrounding poetry and prose. “Originally, I had toyed with the idea of making close visual analogs to specific poems, or maybe different forms of poetry. But as I was making test pieces to see what would work, I realized that the playful spirit of making the test pieces reminded me of the experimental feeling of the work of a poet I admire, Dean Young.” 

This openness, it seems, is by design: Rather than shoehorning an intended idea or overt meaning into each panel, Lucking took an intuitive approach to shaping her fragments of metal, honoring mood and tone over anything too constructed. “I decided to play with silver and glass the way he plays with words and see what the widest variety of visual experiences using these materials could be.”  

Lucking’s abstract pieces blend well with the nebulous nature of the Poetry Center’s archive, which spans centuries and last year surpassed 60,000 titles. “When you walk into the Poetry Center,” director Tyler Meier says, “You’re in the presence of somewhere between 8 and 10 million poems around you, in physical form.” This, Meier tells me, is a story of careful collecting and librarianship for the last 65 years. It is also a diverse archive — visit the center’s library today, and you’ll find the latest exhibit showcasing its long history as a desert hub for artists, featuring items such as a telegram from Elizabeth Bishop and a black-and-white photograph of Lucille Clifton sitting before a swath of saguaros. “Collaborating is in the DNA of the place. Working with Mary, for instance, was terrific. Her vision was to create something that would be a kind of visual counterpoint to the sort of text-based objects that we have.” 

Lucking’s installation also speaks to the Poetry Center’s latest effort in community-making: the Belonging Initiative. Inspired by a push in Oakland, California, to turn “belonging” into something people can actually feel — through culture, education and other shared practices — Meier hopes to do the same here in Tucson. The goal, he says, is to root people more deeply in place through programs that grow out of key local communities. Among them is a new reading series centered on urgent ecological questions and Indigenous voices, including work led by Tohono O’odham poet and U of A Regents Professor Ofelia Zepeda. “It’s about $800,000 to endow them all,” Meier says, “and we’ve just passed $600,000 in gifts and pledges, so we’re getting there.” True to the Poetry Center’s history, this money hasn’t come from a few big names but from many hands. “Our model is that we have many champions,” Meier adds. “It’s been a communal effort from the start.” 

The notion of belonging, though, ultimately goes back to something as granular and personal as the written word. “A poet who was just here talked about poems as a proxy for a person’s mind. As a reader, when you enter a space and open a book, you’re immediately beginning with a relationship. And so we see this work around belonging as a way to do what we always do, but with a kind of intention that is built on collaboration and experiences that build the conditions for belonging in the place where we make our lives.” 

Meier is happy Lucking’s installation is here to stay. “We’ve adopted it now as a permanent part of the Poetry Center. And so it’s a chance to peruse the shelves more closely. You’re seeing things in the collection that you maybe wouldn’t otherwise, while also participating in the exhibit’s operations.” Much like the Belonging Initiative’s mission, the installation locates meaning in shared experience: in the interplay between reader and artifact, between art and archive, between the Poetry Center and the community it continues to cultivate.