Poet Jay Deshpande recites this poem inspired by verbal description techniques.

"Changeover" is written after the museum’s one-of-a-kind “changeover” process when visitors can witness a new exhibition take shape while the previous one is deinstalled.

Access a digital copy of "Changeover" in its original format on guggenheim.org/poetry

Transcript
Jay Deshpande: Hi, I’m Jay Deshpande, and I’m reading my poem “Changeover.”

i. Removal
When you visit you watch six people, from on high, wind their way down the spiral ramp. At first all you can see, all that matters, is the heads and shoulders, the rest hidden by a wall. Turn after turn, the long arc of the journey. Some going forward, some walking back. How careful the sidling. They do not speak. As they weave closer, make room for the curve, you see what’s between them: a long wooden crate, laid flat and held at waist height. Their feet turning slightly in adjustments. First come the heels of those who take the front. Past others packing parts away, beginning to dismantle, again, some unspeakably fragile thing. Past others measuring. Consulting plans. Looking at the oculus. The six people are still moving. It can look like a dance at first, their unspoken knowing just how to work the great space between them. Wordless intimates. It starts to build a choreography of family. Down the ramp, around the bump-out, almost there. The surprising ungainliness of gathering, fit around a final corner. Bringing down the prone tower like some ancient rite. The presence of the work. All twelve of their feet still moving. The object sacred and forgotten. The carrying that becomes the point.

it
matters How
we
make
and
take
away begin
Again
to
Build
the
r ising tower of
the
work

ii. Renewal
Close your eyes. Call this sound empty museum. Not silence—it is insect-lush, a firmament. A jungle of presence: each pressure matters. How air sounds on the concrete ramp, spiraling a quarter mile up. Or a clap becomes resonant with weight, heard as if through a wall of water. A car horn makes one sound outside on Fifth Avenue; then it’s mottled by pavement, buffeted, churned through the revolving door and splayed across the rotunda like an opened bag of ash in sunlight. In the emptiness, when the art is taken down, in the hush between exhibits, the museum laps like waves on a faraway shore. The bending walls and tilting floor begin to be lavish with the water-weight of echo. You are in the womb of it. Fetal listening. Again, the body that your body wades in calls from all around you. A voice drawn out long and flensed of highs and lows: just timbre, endless, sourceless, washing up to the sides of your head. Somewhere in the sound, closer or farther you cannot tell, people still are working. Building, watching. Murmuring over a blueprint. Snapping on a safety glove to touch the edge of a canvas frame, raising it off its mount. In the towering emptiness, five short plugs of a drill somewhere, a blunted stack of periods, come to join the orchestration. You hear all of it, how can you not, in the thickened wet tent your being makes, vibrant in the work.

About this poem: When I visited the Guggenheim during changeover, my senses were incredibly stimulated by all that was happening around me—happenings that were both a part of and apart from the regular experience of the museum. My approach to making this poem was motivated by the multifaceted process of changeover: the taking-down of deinstall, the placement of the packaged artworks on the rotunda floor, and then the erection of new work in a space that is continually the same and deeply changed.

at guggenheim.org/audio

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