Poem of the Week | April 15, 2025

“Number 1” by Jenny Molberg is our Poem of the Week.

Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. An NEA fellow, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, the American Poetry Review, AGNI, the Missouri Review, The Rumpus, the Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She is Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context.
 

Number 1

after Jackson Pollock

I’d had about six beers, and then a frat boy raped me.
Not because I’d had six beers. After.

Action denotes performing, doing; public acts, official conduct;
lawsuit, legal action. I’ve only taken legal action once

and it was not when I was raped.
By the 16th century, action suggested military fighting,

and by 1845, a way in which a firearm acts.
I ejected the contents of my stomach

in the parking lot outside the frat house.
I made a painting of yellow on the available canvas.

In 1923, action described a film director’s command.
I played the victim and the role didn’t suit me.

The magnolia dropped its dead stamens like spent matches,
adding to the texture of my art. Pollock splattered cream,

pink, and sky from the tips of sticks. Gestural abstraction:
dripped color, objects smeared or smashed or rubbed.

The painting, the action of its own happening. By 1965,
action meant a piece of the action, as in, if I hadn’t been at the party,

I wouldn’t have gotten a piece of the action. Action, or
putting into motion, can also suggest a noteworthy or important activity.

When a man moves over you, he is the artist
through which the object of you comes into being.

Go back in time to the 14th century,
to the word’s infancy: a sense of something done, an act.

As in: this was a happening that happened to me. Then,
the action of life in the body became an art entirely my own.

Author’s Note

One of history’s oldest stories informs this poem: women artists whose creative work and intellectual ideas were overshadowed, “forgotten” to history, or intentionally (even violently) silenced by patriarchal gatekeepers in artistic communities. In a 1981 interview for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, Elaine de Kooning speaks about the term “action,” as in “action painting,” which she first used to describe Arshile Gorky’s work in a 1951 ARTnews article. De Kooning says, “I talked about how Gorky used his own autobiography in his work . . . it didn’t exactly mean style. It meant attitude.” However, few historians credit de Kooning for coining this term; it is most often attributed to critic Harold Rosenberg; it is most often invoked when celebrating Jackson Pollock’s “drip technique”. In writing about my personal experience with sexual assault, one that has gone unreported for two decades, I’m also thinking about the hundreds and thousands of sexual assaults and gender-based acts of violence that go unreported in the art world, that are excused in the name of genius or hierarchy. Because this is personal, I’m also thinking about intersections between the Confessional and the Ekphrastic. As Elaine de Kooning once said, “Innovations don’t destroy previous art; they amplify it.” I see this poem as an interrogation of that word—action—the verb of the poem, the action of the painting, what informs the work of art, its impetus, and how the piece, when it puts a dialogue into motion, doesn’t stop happening.