Julia Kim Smith

Concrete Poetry 2 is an interactive outdoor installation of 100 free-standing cast concrete letters placed on a platform of concrete pavers. Visitors to The Ivy Bookshop’s gardens are welcome to move the letters and compose poetry. On occasion, noted authors are invited to feature their work.

Please handle the letters with care. Concrete was chosen as a medium because it is inexpensive and durable–but it can break. If a letter is broken, please set the pieces aside, next to the sign. Broken letters will be repaired.

The gardens are family friendly, so please refrain from the use of profanity and abusive language in your poetry.

As public art, Concrete Poetry 2 is an expression of community trust. It is permanent and mutable. As often the case with public art, permanence and immutability can prove to be elusive. Through the installation, the artist queries: how do we move forward in an impermanent world?

Concrete Poetry 2 is set in Clarendon, a slab serif with a bold, sturdy structure. It was created by Robert Besley for Fann—later Thorowgood and Co.—type founders (U.K.) in 1845 and exists today in modern iterations. Haas Clarendon was introduced as the U.S. National Park Service standard by Chermayeff and Geismar in 1975 and was in use on park signage until 2000.

FABRICATION
Jonathan Ceci Landscape Architects, New World Gardens, Orlando Products, Remington Artist Services

In celebration of Pride Month, an excerpt from José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity is currently featured: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain.”
—José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NYU Press, 2009

From the publisher (10th anniversary edition, 2019):
Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, José Esteban Muñoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.

In celebration of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders Heritage Month, an excerpt from Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning is currently featured: “For as long as I can remember, I have struggled to prove myself into existence.”
—Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Penguin Random House, 2020

From the publisher:
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.