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who sees in sound

poetry and images by
Eleni Sikelianos and Elizabeth Duffy

Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Elizabeth Duffy, Eleni Sikelianos Wearing at the Providence Natural History Museum, 2023.

Editor’s note: Press play to listen to Eleni Sikelianos read “who sees in sound,” from her 2023 book Your Kingdom. Poetry can be both a visual an auditory medium; doubly so as her poem is accompanied by friend and collaborator Elizabeth Duffy’s photographs. Sikelianos wears a dress made especially for her, from Duffy’s Wearing series, which explores time, lineage, skin(s); themes intrinsic to both of their work. Read more about Wearing, here.

 

 

who sees in sound 

 

We came to think we 

’d thought everything 

then we knew we 

hadn’t 

& we didn’t 

& we wouldn’t 

for other animals 

had thought other 

things & there was 

no way of knowing 

or thinking what 

these things were 

 

how a crab cerebrates 

   a hardened harried escape 

        across sands damp with night & 

had a grackle recongressed its torn skin & kin 

    its kind on unvertiginous grasses earthbound 

all albatrosses deduced aerodynamic efficiency in adjacent air 

if you tap two pebbles together can you tell 

how deep the cave is if you were a bat you’d do it 

in a throat-squeeze, tongue-click 

staring a rock in the face & the rock 

is staring you back, rocks 

become you, worn 

lightly, your rock- 

 

face, gold & gray 

 

 

Elizabeth Duffy, Eleni with Two Shields, Wearing, 2023.

Elizabeth Duffy, Eleni Unraveling, Wearing, 2023.

Elizabeth Duffy, Eleni Seated, Wearing, 2023.

Elizabeth Duffy, Eleni with Thread, Wearing, 2023.

About the Author/s

Born in California on Walt Whitman’s birthday, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and "a master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages. Your Kingdom (Winter 2023) will be her tenth book of poetry, riding alongside two memoir-verse-image-novels.

Elizabeth Duffy has exhibited her work widely including at the Drawing Center, The RISD Museum. the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, White Columns, Wave Hill, and DM Contemporary. She has held residencies at the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Sirius Art Centre in Cobh, Ireland, VCCA, and Ucross. Duffy is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, where she was awarded grants in both Sculpture and Craft in 2019. Her work has been written about in the New York Times, Art News, Art on Paper, the Boston Globe, the Village Voice, and many other publications. She has curated exhibitions including Dead Ringer at the Bristol Art Museum and Office Space.

Duffy received her MFA from CUNY/Brooklyn College and her BA at Rutgers College. She studied Textile Conservation at FIT, Jewelry making the School of Visual Arts and painting, drawing, painting and sculpture at the New York Studio School. She lives and works in Providence, RI and teaches in the Art Department at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island and in the Graduate Program at Vermont College of Fine Art.