Isle of the Signatories: Poems

Sculptor and architect, Siah Armajani, recently commissioned a poem from Marjorie Welish to be incorporated into his design for a plaza at the Department of History at Ohio State University. The unofficial poet laureate of the art world, Welish, also a painter and art critic, is working through issues in her poetry that virtually no one else is. She asks of poetry the same difficult questions that an abstract painter asks of her canvas: What are words? What is the page? What is the frame? What does composition mean in the twenty-first century? These aren't questions that every reader of poetry wants to explore, but they are vital ones for poetry itself, and Welish's poetry has influenced a number of younger poets (notably Ben Lerner) and has been the subject of numerous in-depth scholarly assessments.