Introduction to Kinematics
I was asked by the Nebraska Writers Collective to participate in Joslyn Art Museum’s All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840–1955 Community Voices project.
“All Aboard: The Railroad in American Art, 1840-1955, explores depictions of trains and train infrastructure in American painting during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From its emergence as a technological marvel in mid-nineteenth century landscape views to its adoption by artists as a symbol of modern life and industry, the railroad was a significant motif in several major art movements…”
Read more about the exhibition here.
The exhibition is on display from Feb 15, 2025 to May 4, 2025.
The Community Voices project came with a request to partner with the museum to create a label for the Jacob Lawrence piece "Subway–Home from Work (In the Evening the Mother and Father Come Home from Work)”, 1943.
Jacob Lawrence, (1917 – 2000) was a Black American painter that created many works in a bold, magnetic style he referred to as “dynamic cubism). Think geometric shapes, jewel tones, stark color palettes. Jacob Lawrence’s work is known for it’s powerful storytelling, both of the contemporary Black experience and of historical events that centered Black bodied folks. The same year that Lawrence finished the piece referenced in this post, he is also credited with this quote:
“I do not look upon the story of the Blacks in America as a separate experience to the American culture but as a part of the American heritage and experience as a whole.”
The Harlem Renaissance (1910s to 1930s) was a fortunate back drop to many his years of creation.
Ngl, I knew very little about Jacob Lawrence before being asked to write this poem. My experience with the Harlem Renaissance artists lies more in what I know of writers (which, yeah, makes sense. You’re a poet, Noni). I also come from a very musical family that loves jazz and the history of our people in this country. I grew up reading and/or hearing music from Duke Ellington, Zora Neale Hurston, Louis Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Ella Fitzgerald, etc.
Lately, I have been expanding my study and enjoyment of the visual arts. How fortuitous to be offered this opportunity to write and share an ekphrastic poem in response to a piece by Jacob Lawrence.
I titled my poem “Introduction to Kinematics”. Kinematics is body of study in the realm of physics and mathematics that concerns itself with the movement of bodies (or systems of bodies) through space. It does not concern itself with the physical properties related to that movement (mass of the object, force applied to the object, etc). I chose kinematics as a lens for viewing this poem because a my working title for this project was “Volume of an Object as a Function of Time”.
I took in Lawrence’s piece, examining the bodies on the sidewalk, moving through the streets, taking the subway to work, and then expanding that into going to work, being at work, having something to come home to. The distance between home and away can be measured in miles and inches, but also in minutes and hours.
Being a three-dimensional being (allegedly) in a three-dimensional plane (allegedly) lent itself to the consideration that if I considered the movement of the self through space, calculated the size of going and coming home, I would be left with fitting my arms around the magnitude of both longing and being longed for. To indicate the volume of that emotion, I wanted the reader to go back to basics and think about the formula for volume of an object being length x width x height:
Lengths of subway cars or
Heights of turnstiles or
Widths of strides over sidewalk sections between leaving and returning
When searching for a body of science to anchor this moderately unscientific thought process, I began reading through what I could find about the movement of bodies or systems of bodies as a function of time. This led me to kinematics, a geometry of motion. And now we have this poem. Yay! You can read it below.
