Saturday - September 5, 2020 - From our poetry archives: “Linens” - Liz Adams - Issue No. 4 - Summer 2018.
There’s a synergy that occurs often, though not always, when poetry and visual art meet. Not every painter who tries her hand at poetry has a knack for knowing what to show through words, and what to keep hidden within the spaces and lines that make up the poem.
Liz Adam’s poetry is focused and intentional, and does not try to do what her paintings have already accomplished. Over the summer of 2018, we enjoyed speaking with Liz, the self-described figurative painter, poet, and humanist.
Adams, who is a native of Marietta, GA received her BFA in Drawing and Painting at Georgia State University. From there, she later relocated to New York to continue her studies at the Art Students League and the National Academy School of Fine Arts, where she studied life drawing and painting.
Although the amount of time that she’s spent as a painter stretches farther back than her poetry practice (she first started writing poems in 2017), there’s a freshness, as well as an emotional honesty to her work that’s easy to pick up on.
“Linens,” offers a solid example: fabrics, napkins, and “sullied cotton with its / Perwinkle striped border” are brought to life, then imbued with colors that only a painter can see: “The color of sky, of possibility, of first love.”
- Photograph and portrait by Emily Fishman.
Linens
I have taken to stealing napkins at bars
Those French country accents
Very chic and understated
A wishful me
Dab at the corners of my mouth
Wipe away words
I didn’t mean to say
I’ll clean the sullied cotton with its
Periwinkle striped border
I’ll wash it by hand
Let it air dry
Pressed to a warm window
The way my grandmother showed me to
Wash a handkerchief
I carried hers
Down the aisle
With its goassamer lace
The color of sky, of possibility, of first love
Nothing lasts but her cloth of delicate grace
To wipe away the loss
I still have linens to wash
Squeezing out the water
Each time remembering her worn hand
