Now on display: Concrete Poetry 2: James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear”
The Ivy Bookshop gardens
November 26-December 6

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“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize, is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.”
–James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” The New York Times, 1962

From Ploughshares, March 21, 2023:
In the New York Times Book Review in 1962, Baldwin explicitly confronts the idea that writers like Hemingway and Henry James were “sacrosanct” and “touchstones” used to reveal the “lamentable inadequacy of the younger literary artists,” himself included. In his essay “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” he argues rather that they are the inadequate representatives of the American experience because they have all failed to deliver what his title promises. Instead, “One hears, it seems to me, in the work of all American novelists, even including the mighty Henry James, songs of the plains, the memory of a virgin continent, mysteriously despoiled, though all dreams were to have become possible here. This did not happen. And the panic, then, to which I have referred comes out of the fact that we are now confronting the awful question of whether or not all our dreams have failed.” At issue in this statement is the essential innocence of the American character, that the virgin continent was mysteriously despoiled rather than, as Jill Lepore recently formulated it: “Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried 12 million Africans there by force; and as many as 50 million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease … Taking possession of the Americas gave Europeans a surplus of land; it ended famine and led to four centuries of economic growth.” That any kind of experience, even the “inexpressible pain” of “innocence being lost” “which lends such force to […] the marvelous fishing sequence in The Sun Also Rises,” does little to address what that innocence conceals. Individual experience can’t negate innocence when that innocence is coded with racism and sexism. Experience transcends rather than confronts, a move that Baldwin sees as leaving poisonous American innocence rather intact.

The conclusion of his essay is a call to arms against this: “Not everything that is faced can be changed: but nothing can be changed until it is faced. The principal fact that we must now face, and that a handful of writers are trying to dramatize is that the time has now come for us to turn our backs forever on the big two-hearted river.” But even as Baldwin calls for a new literature intent on facing America’s problematic innocence, his approach is not to go around the work of the previous generation of American authors. Instead, he goes through it.
–Nicholas Bredie, “James Baldwin in the Archive,” Ploughshares, March 21, 2023 (originally published August 29, 2019)

Concrete Poetry 2 is an interactive outdoor installation of 100 free-standing cast concrete letters placed on a platform of concrete pavers. Visitors to The Ivy Bookshop’s gardens are welcome to move the letters and compose poetry. On occasion, work by noted authors is featured.

Artist’s Statement
As public art, Concrete Poetry 2 is an expression of community trust. It is permanent and mutable. As often the case with public art, permanence and immutability can prove to be elusive. Through the installation, I query how do we move forward in an impermanent world?
–Julia Kim Smith