Introducing Meg Day: PJI Prize Judge and Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim

This is the first in a two-part Q&A with Meg Day. You can find the second part, a deep dive into their poetry collection, The Last Psalm at Sea Level, here.

The Poetic Justice Institute recently sat down with Meg Day, the judge for the 2024-2025 PJI Prize, to discuss their current work at the Guggenheim and discovering New York City while they are the current poet-in-residence at the museum. Day organized the Guggenheim exhibit Ekphrasis in Air on the sixth floor of the rotunda which showcases performances of Deaf poets, viewable until March 9th. 

PJI: You grew up in the Bay Area, a large oceanic and cultural pool in itself. Has the contours of its landscape shaped your work, and do you currently find topographical inspiration here in New York City?

Meg: I find the pace of New York City comforting, familiar, invigorating. It hiccups in me an old and easy confidence I recognize from working and teaching in my early twenties, traveling back and forth across the bay every day, finding new workarounds on public transit, growing assertive in my self-sufficiency. Working in New York City has been a welcome and temporary return to that particular physical, visceral relationship to place; it expresses itself differently in rural places or places with less infrastructure. What remains true, though, is that while being in NYC activates my brain in plenty of exciting ways—perfect for thinking big alongside curators, for example, or designing ways to engage the public—it really prevents me from making poems. I need a lot of stillness and some quiet—psychically, emotionally—to do that. It’s not that elements of urban landscapes or even industrial life don’t find a home in my work; indeed, they do. But I don’t think, tonally, this is where my poetics lives. It’s somewhere between San Francisco and Half Moon Bay, between Fruitvale and Alameda Beach, between Stinson and Agate: in motion, in transit, inbetween. The hills, the reservoirs, the coastline, the redwoods—even the Sierras, the foothills—all of this feels intimate to the mental and emotional space where my poems originate, even if they end up taking place elsewhere. I’ve spent most of my time in New York inside the belly of the Guggenheim, learning to engage with architecture in a new way. I’m interested to see how this time in residence reflects in the work I’ll end up making when I’m back in the relative quiet of North Carolina. 

PJI: What excites you most about your work with the Guggenheim?

Meg: I could talk a lot about the impact of this work and the way it’s changed so many people’s relationship to Deafness, to ASL, to their understanding of poetics and access and disability and and and—but the truth is that the most exciting thing for me, personally, has been the model of the residency and how its changed my relationship to institutional collaboration for the better. Early on in my conversations with the Guggenheim, I jokingly asked, “Do yall ever say no?” We had been discussing my proposal as Poet-in-Residence, moving through what felt possible and how to activate the many different layers of my plans. The possibility and permission had made me suddenly nervous. Everyone was so genuinely present and kind and generous with their invitation to make things on my own terms, to maximize their design and impact in collaboration with the professionals in-house, to—in a word—dream big. I was struck by how unprepared my imagination felt. When I write project descriptions or proposals for applications, I often feel what many of us feel, which is a kind of ongoing genuflection to the source of support. Please oh please and thank you and I promise I won’t be trouble or ask for too much is a line we learn from scarcity models across poetics, across the arts and humanities, across capitalism. It keeps us small and easy controlled and ingratiated. At the Guggenheim, we played many rounds of what-do-you-want / well-what-can-I-have before breaking free of that cycle and doing what felt right. How would I hope an exhibition of signing poets in the Guggenheim might look? And then we did that in Sixth Stanza: Ekphrasis in Air. . How can we engage young people in new ways during their museum visit through visual poetics? And then we made it happen in the new Youth Poet booklets. What kind of showcase would feel like a satisfying first go at representing poets across the spectrum of Deafness? And then we did that in Sound/Off. What kind of access coordination would be best for all the kinds of people we hope will attend this event? And then we just—did that! I’m not sure if I can adequately convey how rare it is to be surrounded by artists and educators and curators and all kinds of professionals who want to lean in and not out. I have had the chance to fulfill literally every part of my proposal, and more. It has changed the way I think about art and about advocacy, about activism and about the role of access in the lives of the nondisabled and hearing public. My imagination is bigger. I’m grateful, but I’m not on my knees—I’m helping install American Sign Language poems in the Guggenheim instead. 

PJI: You have shared online that, with the Guggenheim, you want to emphasize the artistry of sign language. How are you accomplishing this, and what new possibilities does the museum space afford? 

Meg: One thing I love about museums is that they call into question the boundaries of genre. What is and isn’t art in a museum? Is the water fountain art? The exit sign? The ticketing agent, gallery guide, the person standing next to you weeping over the Rothko? The structure and conventions of the building inform its contents and also, in many cases, welcome the public’s curiosity, attention, and ignorance. It is okay not to know things in a museum. I took my graduate student poets to the Gregg Museum at NC State recently and they engaged in what I might call aggressive looking—they want to see something, they want to understand, and it’s evident they don’t, not yet, not right away. And in a museum, this is also okay. It’s acceptable, maybe even assumed. One can weep over the Rothko or one can be frustrated by it—either way, it’s doing a lot of artistic work.

So it is, I think, with signed languages in a majority hearing world. Poems in sign are stunning, physically and visually: evocative, moving, and full of contagious grace, surprising humor—even if you don’t necessarily know the many ways they can mean. And when you do? In the case of American Sign Language, the poems can be deeply cultural and finely crafted. They showcase analytic skill, sociohistorical wit, clever metaphor, and inventive use of the body’s variations, the signers own corporeal canvas. The artistry is undeniable, but the artistry is derived, largely, from mastery of the language. It’s a really powerful experience to see such talent displayed on the walls of a museum like the Guggenheim.

One of the risks of installing American Sign Language in the Guggenheim, though, is that the stakes of reception involve actual people who are in the midst of an ongoing civil rights showdown. The rights of Deaf and disabled people are always in question; our personhood is frequently withheld. Hearing people seem, at large, very content to remain ignorant of American Sign Language; the larger hearing public doesn’t really seem to care what Deaf people have to say. If they did, learning ASL would be compulsory for all people. So while some museum-goers might find themselves frustrated that access to the video poems has not been provided in the form of captioning (welcome to our world!), the acculturated experience of seeing ASL, but not understanding it, means that most may not even notice—or care—that they are missing out on something. This is risky. Deaf people already experience such severe language deprivation that showcasing its artistry might allow for further reduction and fetishization of signed languages as artistic but not linguistic—and therefore, to some factions of power, reinforces that it is not a necessity or a human right, but an aesthetic, a purely imaginative pursuit, a hobby.