Blackbird Archive
← v13n1, Spring 2014
Poetry · Volume 13, Number 1

KM4

Tom Sleigh

KM4 is poem in ten sections by Tom Sleigh. Each in the sequence is accompanied here with a painting by Michael Hafftka. The poem appears left, with a portion of the accompanying image exposed to the right. Click the visible portion of the image to reveal the drawing; click again to return to the text. Next / previous buttons in the top right column cycle through the sequence.

Hafftka, in his artist statement linked below, explains the relationship between the poem and the paintings; he speaks to “his experience of the poem” and to avoiding “the trap of illustration.”

warart
Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh is the author of eight books of poetry, including Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new book, Station Zed , is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015. He is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College. Photo by Ed Robbins