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• 1 2021-04-23T21:50:34+00:00 Snowy Owls 9 Object 3 Submission plain 2021-05-13T03:43:15+00:00

  By Jenna Larson

  I began my research for this prompt by simply poking around the outside of the Watkinson Library on campus. Due to the pandemic, all the doors are shut and locked and the lights are off. It was a little upsetting to me at first because I feel like I could have gained a lot from physically exploring the library. I think walking around a library can be very therapeutic and inspirational if you look at it the right way. Although I couldn’t go inside the library, there are still some pieces of art on display outside. There’s a lovely project that I believe was done by a student that looked like something I want to create one day. Ultimately, I think I needed just a little spark of creativity. Simply looking at art in its physical form is something I haven’t done in a really long time, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it. After looking at the art on the walls, I felt more motivated to do my virtual research. I began by looking up the Watkinson and seeing if I could find any collections that stuck out tome. I thought, because I am primarily a writer, that I would want to reflect on a piece of written work. However, in my research I found all these prints of a variety of birds. I was struck by them and the familiarity of them. Birds are around me all the time at home because of the bird feeders my dad tends to. He loves seeing birds from the kitchen window, so I have naturally become so used to having them around. The piece “Snowy Owl” by John James Audubon is the one that struck the biggest chord with me. I love owls and find them so powerful and fascinating which inspired me to write a poem about the two owls on the tree.
  
  Both owls have a certain personality in my mind which inspired me to write a stanza about each of them with a repeating rhyming couplet to connect them. The phrase “Winter Night Spirit” came to me almost out of nowhere as I was thinking of a title. The snowy owls clearly make me reminisce on the winter season and owls are known as wise creatures of the night, so putting those ideas together just made sense to me. The poem is brief, but I feel like it says all it needs to. I essentially took out what I thought to be the most important words in the passage describing the piece and rearranged them into a poem. In my eyes, this print could be hung up with my poem right below or beside it as the description. This fits into our idea of curiosity as well because people are so used to seeing factual, clear descriptions accompanying pieces of art. However, bridging to mediums and having a piece of literary work describe a visual art piece makes in all the more beautiful in my mind. People take in different types of art differently. Therefore, someone may feel more connected to my poem and be able to make an image in their mind, or people may feel that the image speaks entirely for itself. The beautiful thing about combining these pieces is that they work well separately as well as together.