Exposition Park

By Roberto Tejada

Imagine a walking tour of stanzas and prose poems that give lyric voice to sight, public speech, and spectacle. In Exhibition Park, Roberto Tejada delivers a command performance in mixed genres that compel an array of literary styles. His poetry undertakes a wide range of subjects motivated by artworks from Latin America and the United States covering the colonial period to the present day.

In serial poems, short sketches, guidebook parodies, painterly triptychs, translations, and other word-based dioramas, Tejada coins wonder with historical styles—baroque, classic, and experimental. As likened to a world's fair, the resulting voices intone global stories, the dream life of art, and first-person atmospheres both premodern and postindustrial.

"Tejada's work is with dismantling borders and upsetting classifications... The result is a layered poetry that finds its form in dense stanzas composed of lines that frequently veer toward a kind of fractured prose"—Alan Gilbert in Another Future: Poetry and Modern Art in a Postmodern Twilight

"You walk through his world as a voyeur, a traveler of mirrors, witnessing your own reflection in the masses of flesh, simultaneously aroused and disturbed at the same time. Tejada's work is an invitation, a window into another world, unabashedly erotic, and succinct."—Christine Lark Fox, Poetry Project Newsletter, about Mirrors for Gold

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819569769

Roberto Tejada

Roberto Tejada is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor at the University of Houston, where he teaches in the Departments of English, Creative Writing, and Art History. He has published numerous volumes of poetry as well as several works of Art and Media History.

Book preview

exposition park

f000i-01

WESLEYAN POETRY

A DRIFTLESS SERIES BOOK

This book is the 2010 selection in the Driftless National

category, for a second poetry book by a United States citizen.

EXPOSITION PARK

ROBERTO TEJADA

pub

Published by Wesleyan University Press,

Middletown, CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2010 © Roberto Tejada

All rights reserved

Printed in U.S.A.      5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tejada, Roberto.

Exposition Park / Roberto Tejada.

p. cm. — (Wesleyan poetry)

ISBN 978-0-8195-6932-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

I. Title.

PS3570.E435E97 2010

811’.54—dc22             2009026961

The Driftless Series is funded by the

Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund

at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the

Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book

meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

copy

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1 Art & Industry

Is there a difference between this honey

In the beginning, when the will of the king was rendered

Keep the eel alive until ready to skin

Insofar as he is spirit

What the clearing looks like

Clarity before the bloodshed

Today I sharpened my knife

But also the whole Earth

2 Golden Age

Lantern that was a lamplight, a clock

If we recognize the variety and groundlessness

When from my counted days

The memory of genocide or slavery

When I stop to consider my calling

3 Cathedral Pyramid

If someone waits to witness

Her song is artless

What with the thick immobility

4 Behavioral Science

Self-Recognition of the Fish

Diorama: Snake, Habitat, Ice

Esemplastic Negativity

5 Sketchbook

Leverage for power divided by insight

In dreams a joke

To you my antonym

Tyranny past participle desire

Between exuberance and snow

There is someone who knows

From otherwise known as

Converging on scissors

To say that the value between given point X

Subject six seven siblings

6 Walking Tour

7 Debris in Pink and Black

Notes

ILLUSTRATIONS

Charles Dudley Arnold, Captive Balloon and Ferris Wheel,

World Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1892–1893.

Unidentified photographer, Louisiana Purchase Exposition,

United States National Museum Exhibit, St. Louis, Missouri, 1904.

Charles Dudley Arnold, Electric Tower from Bandstand,

Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, 1901.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to the publishers of those literary journals, limited-edition chap-books, and art catalogs, in which some of