“Rauschenberg,” by Maya Phillips (Poetry ’17)

Maya Phillips, a 2017 poetry graduate, recently had poems featured in the New Yorker and The Baffler. Read an excerpt of “Rauschenberg” below:

Rauschenberg

Our first concern might be did the artist consider the impossibility
of defining
nothing without speaking of absence without speaking

The white paint of the artist carefully selected and applied so as to
seem
an uncreased space unwrinkled unnippled a whatever indefinite
nondescript discreet

But even without a mouth without figure or form or face the
canvas if it were to speak
as we the viewers imagine would it not speak of powdered sugar
and cocaine,
chalk, marshmallows, and salt
and even that a betrayal of substance
Would it not privately murmur something about the white simmer
of stars
Would it not speak of something not nothing would it not

You can find the poem in its entirety here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/rauschenberg