Poet Cameron Awkward-Rich recites this poem inspired by verbal description techniques.

"Trans Study: Untitled 4 (Facial Expression)" was written after John Edmond’s "Untitled 4 (Facial Expression)," on view in "Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility. "

Cameron Awkward-Rich was invited to write a poem in response to this artwork by Guggenheim’s 2023 Poet-in-Residence, Ama Codjoe. Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry—"Sympathetic Little Monster and Dispatch"—as well as "The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment" (Duke University Press). His work has been supported by fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, the ACLS, and elsewhere. Presently, he is an associate professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Transcript
Cameron Awkward-Rich: Hi, I’m Cameron Awkward-Rich, and I’m reading "Trans Study: Untitled 4 (Facial Expression)," after John Edmonds’s photograph of the same name.

Upon first glance, it is difficult to decipher a figure, much less a facial expression. Upon first glance, it is difficult, the figure. Upon first glance, there is no face. Upon first, undecipherable, the glance. It is difficult. It depends on who is looking. We might say: Upon first glance, we are in a dark room. We are behind our eyelids in the room. We are looking, in the dark. The figure before us is also behind the eyelids, their eyelids. It is as if neither we nor they are present to the other, though we are, looking, together, in and from the dark. We look to work out the other’s intentions. We cannot. We look. We breathe together inside the room inside. The figure, having been exposed, overexposed, to light has become like a shadow or a barely lit shape on the midnight lake. For the sake of simplicity, we could call the figure a man, but I will not. We are in the room that precedes all that. The cleavage of this from that. It goes: first darkness, then form. Remember that. Try. If we look too long at the lake what surfaces is the old thought — "when I was a child, when I was a child" — we are thrown back to before, not shame, but shame of shame. We become furious and wild-limbed and kind. We pass the clause between us, a rope tethering, tethering, taut. A poem, we’ve been taught, though we can’t say where, should leave this part out. We should rush from room to bright room so that we can be surprised by what we find. But the figure is still in the dark. They require our stillness. Our black breath. I am afraid, I say to no one, to be like this image. Upon first glance, unreachable. Exposed. When I was a child, there was a figure in the dark. A man. Let’s call him that. A man. I was a question. I was a question he answered. I was a question he held and demanded my stillness. Part of me lives in that room, still, though I left it with a new, wretched name. But—and I can say this now—he saw me, the man in the dark, when no one else could see me. When I was, in manner of speaking, difficult to decipher. A darkness before form. He held me. Stilled me. He brought me into the frame. We were two black men there, in the black, the close black, the black from which life, relentlessly, comes. The breath between us was cruel. But I could see him. Him. I could see the sorrow, the rage, the calm water, the father raising his fist, the unnamable quiet of his face.

About this poem: I was taken by John Edmonds’s photograph "Untitled 4 (Facial Expression)" at once, but I could not quite say why—something about the black figure rising from the black surface and the near-perfect opacity and self-contained stance of the figure who nonetheless drew me in.

Read more at guggenheim.org/audio