Poetry and Art Pairings: Anna Marie Tendler Edition
Anna Marie Tendler’s confessional, expressive art is everywhere lately—capturing thousands of likes on Instagram, inspiring a Harper’s Bazaar feature, and selling out both at art festivals and online. After years of designing intricate lampshades, Tendler surprised her audience by switching her medium and turning to deeply personal portraits and still lifes. These works convey the shock and heartache of divorce, the striking loneliness of newfound isolation, and a mystical rebirth from grief. These five collections fit the emotive, often otherworldly spirit of Tendler’s art.
1. Moon in Pisces and The Crying Book by Heather Christle
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In Moon in Pisces, one of Tendler’s first self-portraits, a single, trailing tear serves as the focal point of the shot. As the tear flows, Tendler stares straightforwardly ahead, the display of emotion dauntless and unapologetic. Heather Christle’s The Crying Book takes a similar approach, exploring the role of crying and tears in everyday life. As Christle illustrates depressed tears, children’s tears, animal tears, and other types of crying, they become both a science and an art form.
2. Totally Crushed Out and Love Poems by Anne Sexton
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In Totally Crushed Out, Tendler stands under a radiant altar of flowers and playfully lifts a cloth napkin to her red-lipsticked mouth. After many haunted photos depicting long-standing sorrow, this offers a peek into a flirtatious and whimsical side of Tendler. Similarly, Anne Sexton stands out as one of the most emotionally complex and turbulent poets, frequently writing about divorce, death, and mental illness. In spite of this, Love Poems shows Sexton’s intensity channeled into romance and seduction, treating these subjects just as seriously and viscerally as despair.
3. Good Mourning and The Grief Performance by Emily Kendal Frey
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Much of Tendler’s work fits the title of this Emily Kendal Frey collection. She embraces grief as unabashed performance and dramatic costumerie, considering how this private emotion can be shared more publicly. Good Mourning is a vivid presentation of grief, with Tendler cloaked in a long, thick, black dress, her eyes obscured by a black lacy mask. In The Grief Performance, Frey also constructs and continually lives within visual reminders of her grief, “finding and re-finding loss.”
4. Life and Death and Spells: New and Selected Poems by Annie Finch
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Life and Death, one of Tendler’s still lifes, reveals that the artist’s personal touches are evident even in shots of inanimate objects. The carefully organized photo looks like a spooky and divine vanity, where flickering candles, pale, wilting flowers, and a skeleton figurine sit. One of the first Instagram comments reads, “Makes me feel like living out my teenage-witching dreams.” Indeed, the setting looks like a space to perform a ritual—perhaps a hex on someone who’s betrayed the artist. Self-proclaimed “poet witch” Annie Finch embraces spellwork in her aptly named book Spells, journeying into the depths of mystery and magic.
5. The Most Happi and The End of the Alphabet by Claudia Rankine
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In The Most Happi, Tendler styles herself after Anne Boleyn, a now-iconic 16th-century queen accused of treason and sentenced to death by her husband, King Henry VIII. In The End of the Alphabet, Claudia Rankine also communicates with muses from history, myth, and classic literature, penning persona poems from the perspectives of Jane Eyre and Lady Macbeth, among others. In doing so, she gains a more mature understanding of loss and reckons with its aftermath.
Bonus: As a writing prompt, take a cue from Tendler and make photos of yourself your subject. What poems might these different settings, emotions, and outfits lead to poetically?
