What Dr. Harris is doing in this poem is interesting. While he could have easily deployed it as a paragraph of jagged prose, he decided to linebreak, enjamb, and pump fake toward a poem.  Harris’s speaker is both reporting and opining about what they see, but also welcomes us into questioning what we might see.

While the speaker draws contrasts about the actions of the card players, the speaker zooms out to look at both paintings. In the second to last stanza Harris’s speaker notes,

drawing the comparison of the palettes of both of Cezanne’s and Bearden’s card players.

When I think of how Black poetries can exist as a kind of critical language when talking about Black art,  I think this kind of observing and “poeming” could be that. While Harris’s poem may be a very basic example, I like what is accomplished with so few words…the questions asked, the description of what we see, the comparison of the colors chosen by the artists, what the people in the image are doing…Harris covers a lot of ground and asks us to look again, look deeper.

The Black Card Players: A Collage

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