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FIVE POEMS: The Gospel According to Toni Morrison
In 2002, Toni Morrison published a short collection of poetry entitled Five Poems. Printed by Peter Koch Printers, only four hundred and twenty five copies were issued by Rainmaker Editions of Las Vegas, Nevada. The five free verse poems are extraordinary because they represent Morrison's first and only foray into verse, and also because each poem is accompanied by a silhouette image by contemporary artist Kara Walker. Surprisingly, these poems have yet to receive any critical attention and have been omitted from Morrison bibliographies.1
Five Poems remains largely unknown because of the limited copies produced by Peter Koch Printers and because Rainmaker Editions disintegrated soon after the book was printed. Promotion for Five Poems has been limited to the websites of Peter Koch Printers and the Black Mountain Institute, which absorbed Rainmaker Editions in 2006. Five Poems also does not have an International Standard Book Number (ISBN), an identification usually assigned to a text by the publisher, and therefore it does not appear in library catalogs, though a few universities and public collections have the book.2 Moreover, in the numerous interviews Morrison has given since the publication of Five Poems she has never mentioned the book or discussed her approach to writing poetry.
The partnership between Morrison and Walker is both remarkable and unprecedented. Although Walker has cited Morrison as a key influence on her artistic development and critics have begun to analyze intersections in their work, Five Poems is the first demonstration of collaboration between two of the most important living African American artists.3 To learn more about the origin of this project, I contacted the printer Peter Koch who explained that initially Morrison was invited by Wole Soyinka on behalf of Rainmaker Editions to submit an original unpublished manuscript.4 Morrison sent five short poems, the full text of the collection. Concerned that the seventy-eight lines of the poems would be too short, Koch suggested including illustrations to supplement the text. He independently recommended contacting Walker, an artist whose work he believed would complement that of Morrison. The publishers at Rainmaker agreed to this arrangement and Walker was sent the poems. As Koch explains, Morrison and Walker never actually met to discuss their collaboration and did...