Her voice echoing among art pieces in the quiet center of the Grinnell Arts Museum, Lívia Stein Freitas `25 presented a reading of eight poems centered around grief, love, absence and animal companions, all selected from her collection “Any Ocean Can House Sirens.” Faculty and students gathered for the event on April 21, as Stein Freitas demonstrated her exploration of different mediums and styles of poetry, inspired by a diverse set of art pieces.
An original 16 poems were written with the help of the English Department’s Harris Grant, which allowed Stein Freitas the opportunity to visit ICA Boston, the Harvard Art Museum and MassArt and base her writing on the visual art she observed over the course of a week. This included pieces like Joachim Beuckelaer’s “Fish Market” from 1568, which Stein Freitas recontextualized into an ekphrastic poem about the ability of fish to feel pain, and “Future Fossils,” a collection containing modern objects produced with indigenous Amazonian ceramic techniques, which inspired Stein Freitas’s free verse poem “Ode to the Paiaguá, Bororó, Guaicurú and Terena.” Of translating visuals into poetry, Stein Freitas said, “The most difficult thing was choosing which aspect I would take inspiration from and really leaning into that as a positive.”
She decided to work with Tilly Woodard, curator of academic and community outreach at the museum, and share her poems in that setting because “the collection is so heavily inspired by museum exhibitions.” For each of her poems, she projected the visual inspiration behind the poem, read it aloud, provided context and then gave her notes on the poem, including a description of her favorite line. She said “I wanted to display the unique poetic forms that I used, and at the same time have something cohesive.” Many of the poems explored emotionally intense themes across different poetic forms, like “Letter to the Editor,” which is about the limitations of the idea of Schrodinger’s Cat, and “Blood on the Kitchen Door at 12 A.M.” about the nature of the online game Neopets. Both poems addressed the mourning of Stein Freitas’ beloved dog Melzinha. After reading these poems, she described that “I was afraid that my grief would spill into everything … that’s the perfect place to do that, with your art.”
One poem, “Scurvy Boy Love Letter” was connected to summer computer science research done by Stein Freitas about old ship logs, containing weather data alongside personal details of maritime life. As both an English and computer science major, Stein Freitas says that some questions in computer programming translate to poetry, such as the concept of decomposing larger tasks. “Each stanza you want to be doing something specific … if you think about the little elements that form it, like I want some ocean imagery, or I want it to be a villanelle and I want the first paragraph to introduce the tension, like that makes it so much easier,” she said.
In response to a question at the end of the talk about writing in English versus Portuguese, Stein Freitas emphasized the difference between the two languages. She said, “English is more customizable, and Portuguese is more melodic… if I wrote a poem, finished, and tried to write the same poem in Portuguese it would be completely different.” Stein Freitas has plans to return to Brazil after graduation and try writing her poetry in Portuguese, “Just to see what I can do. Right now I feel like I don’t have an idea what my poetry would look like, so I’m excited for that.” The Grinnell Press will publish the “Any Ocean Can House Sirens” collection this spring, with printed copies accessible around campus.
