Poetry - John Paul Caponigro Art

I’ve written most of my life and studied writing in college, earning a BFA with a double major in art and literature. Writing about creativity and photography (technically and conceptually) for over twenty-five years, I grew increasingly hungry to express myself in other ways.

In 2019, during the first Youth Climate Strike, I saw a young poetess make a video presentation and have even more emotional impact than 45th vice-president Al Gore as he trained us to make effective presentations through his Climate Reality Leadership Corps. Her performance helped me understand that I didn’t need to change my social activism but rather intensify the ways my artworks are socially active.

In 2020 Covid-19 shut down my in-person digital printing workshop and made it possible for me to attend Richard Blanco’s chapbook workshop offered online the same week. I had a thirty-year bucket list item to write a series of love poems to the earth and I saw this as an opportunity to complete it. It became much more than that. I hadn’t planned to write a poem a day for a year – or be trained as a voice actor – but that is what happened. Poetry helped me survive and thrive during the Great Pause.

In 2021, after fifth inaugural poet Richard Blanco’s workshop, I learned the young woman who impressed me so much became the next inaugural poet Amanda Gorman.

Poetry has become a daily part of my spiritual practice and an integral part of the ecosystem of my creativity.

For me, the visual and the verbal are inseparable.

Whether visual or verbal, my passion is ecopoetry (making art as a way of understanding earth) and ekphrasis (making art as a way of understanding art),

though it may only be language itself that separates art from e art h

or nature nature from human nature.

View my TEDx and Google talks here.