Lee Wardlaw’s Mask Poem, “History Lesson,” is one of the model/mentor poems within Amy Ludwig VanDerwater’s Poems Are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres.

 

The Mask Poem is an opportunity not only to walk in the shoes of another person, we can write while standing in those shoes. We get to take on the persona or wear in words the personification of a subject that just a moment before was intangible. This is the gift of poetry. For just a moment, we can revise in order to really see a drop of rain slipping off a blade of grass, the way a baby’s breath moves into the nostrils of a parent, the way a cloud wanders away lonely.

 

James Castle has a number of figures that appear within the body of his work that have square heads. It is difficult to ascertain what these depictions might represent or say about the artist relationships with the figures in these “snapshots” of what we can only assume are family members, those closest to James. We also know from the historical record that James would recycle any cardboard material into his art and his constructions.

 

If those boxes that appear where the head might have been, it may very well be that we have a “mask” working in the art. And this could be the inspiration for a Mask Poem:

 

“If You Were To Bring Me a Box”

 

 

If you were to show me a box,

I might see the makings of a room.

 

 

 

If you were to bring me a box,

I might make something of the world.

 

 

 

If you were to put me in a box,

I would make a world of that little room.

 

 

 

And if your head were rendered a box, it would only be

to make the world and the wonder of you a smaller room.

 

 

 

And if my head were a box, you might take a look inside

and you would find a little room within my larger world.

 

 

You and I are boxes filled and marked by soot & spit

labeled “Story Stuff: Fragile: Handle with Care.”