English Lecturer Selected for Long Island's First 'Poetry Path'

Dr. Jesse Curran of the English Department, and mentor for the Honors College, was selected for inclusion on Long Island's first Poetry Path. The Northport Village Poetry Path, located at the Northport Village Park, features poems paired with paintings inspired by their work. Curran's poem, "Dove's Long Island (1940)," describes and reflects upon Arthur Dove's 1940 painting, "Long Island."

"I'm delighted that the poem is part of the Path especially because I think Dove might get a kick out of it," said Curran. "The poem thinks about both Dove's artistic craft and my own life-long relationship to the area, and it references specific places familiar to me, Dove, and other community members. My hope is that people who explore the poem/path are able to experience how the visual arts and poetry might come together to enrich the ways we care for and appreciate our places and local environments."

The poem is part of a larger book project Curran is completing on Dove and his wife Helen Torr, and their relationship to the North Shore, as well as the ways in which landscape art might enrich and restore an ethical relationship to place. Curran presented a paper connected to this work, "Arthur Dove's Sand and Sea: On Abstract Landscape's Place in Natural History," at the June conference, "Making Nature: The Labor of Natural History," hosted by the American Philosophical Society.