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| Painter, art instructor Bob Ross |
Every time I try to take a break from poetry, someone pulls me back in. This time, it was none other than C. Liegh McInnis, who has a habit of getting my attention. He'll send an email about this or that; he'll publish an article on a topic; or he'll make a comment during a podcast or interview, and then I'm distracted,. This time, he got me with a poem.
I had seen a lot and then here comes McInnis writing about Bob Ross. What?
Ross was a white painter and art instructor, most well-known for his television show
The Joy of Painting. Speaking in a calming voice, he offered
instructions on how to paint natural landscapes using oil painting. The show aired from 1983 to 1994 on PBS.
I recall seeing the show as a child. For the most part, bits and pieces of Ross painting and discussing the artwork resided somewhere far off in the back of my mind. Then, I checked out the most recent issue of African American Review and came across McInnis's "
Saturday Serenades aka Watching Bob Ross Paint," which opens:
How much weed or whisky
must a white man consume
to have a perfect and permanent ’fro,
splashing paint as a precursor
to precision bending happy accidents
into Saturday surprises of sublime
Beyond or along with the painting, Ross was known for his signature lil 'fro, hence McInnis's comments in those opening lines.
Later, at one point, referencing the sound of Ross speaking, McInnis writes, "His voice is a sedative— /
saturated with summer naps and spring dreams." There are points throughout the poem where McInnis is describing the painter at work and his images. Reading the piece took me back to older memories.
A Long History of Black Poets on (and with) Artists and Artwork
McInnis's "Saturday Serenades aka Watching Bob Ross Paint" contributes to a long, long history of African American artists writing about artists and artwork. More formally, people use the term ekphrasis to refer to poets writing about artwork. As you might imagine, before the advent of video and photography, writings describing visual art was particularly valued.
In the context of African American poetry, Phillis Wheatley's poem about artist Scipio Moorhead is perhaps the earliest example of a poet writing about an artist. Her poem “
To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works” (1773) is part of the centuries-long road of artistic compositions leading us to C. Liegh MCinnis publishing a 2026 poem about a white dude painting rocking a fro.
Dunbar's pome "
The Photograph" (1899) contributes to the continuum of poems along this line as well. The speaker of the poem opens, "See dis pictyah in my han'? / Dat's my gal." Later the speaker goes, "She sont me dis photygraph / Jes' las' week."
More broadly, Dunbar is important to the interaction between poems and artwork and photography because the Hampton Institute Camera Club produced illustrated books, such as
Poems of the Cabin and Field (1899) and
When Malindy Sings (1903) that accompanied Dunbar's poems.
Countee Cullen's well-known poem "Heritage" is not known as a poem about artwork. However, when the poem was initially published in
Survey Graphic in March 1925, the poem was accompanied by photographs of African masks and sculptures
. Those images provide added weight to the poem's famous recurring line: "What is Africa to me?"
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| Countee Cullen's "Heritage," with photos of African masks and sculpture from Survey Graphic, 1925 |
When we look back at publications throughout the 1920s, the so-called Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, we see various instances of poems appearing alongside artwork. It's also true that visual artists and poets were frequently interacting with each other and collaborating.
During the 1960s, sometime around 1965, Robert Hayden wrote "
Monet's Waterlilies" published in his collection
Words in the Mourning Time (1970). The poem refers to Claude Monet Water Lilies series, which include about 250 oil paintings. Hayden opens the poem noting that "Today as the news from Selma and Saigon / poisons the air like fallout," he turns his attention to Monet's artwork.
Speaking of Hayden's poem, in November 2025, the New York Times ran
a piece by A.O. Scott discussing Hayden's composition. Scott noted that "the way Hayden invokes Monet’s painting shifts the mood and focus decisively away from the world’s problems."
That point had me thinking about the way McInnis's poem on Ross took me to some other place, reflecting on the appearance of Ross on television painting and then taking my mind to the places in my childhood where I was as I watched Ross.
The Visual Productions of the Black Arts Era
Much of the scholarly work on the Black Arts Movement focuses on the writings--poems and other compositions. My own book, The Black Arts Enterprise, certainly does that as I focus on poets and print culture of the era.
But part of what drew me to Black Arts in general was the abundance of visual productions, including striking book covers and various photographs and illustrations presented throughout Negro Digest/Black World magazine, and other publications.
In 1967, Broadside Press published Gwendolyn Brooks's "
The Wall: For Edward Christmas" in honor the
Wall of Respect, a mural produced by the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Christmas, to whom Brooks dedicated her poem, was one of the artists involved in OBAC. More than a dozen artists contributed to the Wall of Respect, and Christmas had painted the image Brooks for the mural.
Black Poets on Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and James
Several poets have published poems about the artwork of Jacob Lawrence. For the Museum of Modern Art's "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North" (2015), Elizabeth Alexander curated/commissioned Lawrence-inspired poems by a group of poets. That included Rita Dove's "
Protocol" and "
Say Grace," Nikky Finney's "
Migration Portraiture," Tyehimba Jess's "
Negro Migration," among others.
I haven't many poems by poets focusing on photographers, but I am aware of Alexander's "Van Der Zee" in honor of James Van Der Zee.
Somehow moving from McInnis, or tracing from Wheatley to McInnis had me thinking back on those poems.
And More
“July 13, 1954” by Rachel Eliza Griffiths references the death date of artist Frida Kahlo. Others have written about Kahlo including Alexander's "Painting" as well as Yusef Komunyakaa's "
Frida’s Earth Mother." Also, poet celeste doaks has a poem “To the Sea, From Frida.”
Rickey Laurentiis has a poem "
Vanitas with Negro Boy" responding to a David Bailly
painting, and "Black Iris" responding to Georgia O'Keeffe's
image of the same title. The idea of taking a painting with "Black" in the title and crafting a poem drawing an association links to McInnis highlighting a white man with a fro.
Various poets have written about Basquiat. Most extensively, Kevin Young's
To Repel Ghosts focuses on the painter. For individual poems, we have works like Adrian Matejka's "
& Later," Roger Reeves's "Boy Removing Fleas," and Mahogany L. Browne's "
upon viewing the death of basquiat*," to name a few.
William J. Harris's Sketches
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| Harris notebook entry with drawings on “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2021. |
After years of observing and being interested in poets engaging artwork, I learned that in addition to writing about artists and artwork, William J. Harris sketches the artwork that interests him. He'll produce drawings that remind him of what he's seen at an exhibit. So throughout his notebooks, he has words and notations about the images he viewed.
In
an interview, I asked Harris what led him to start sketching the images. He responded, "I was thinking about the paintings, observing the paintings, and I wanted a record of them." Early in his career, he experimented with word-image poems, where he included little drawings alongside poems, like with his piece “
My Friend, Wendell Berry.”
He then started drawing in journals in 2017. He said, "I would have started earlier if I hadn’t wanted to express everything in words." Producing sketches of artwork, though, was important. "My copying of the paintings," he said, "let me into the creative process and added a dimension to my enterprise."
Layers of Black Art
For quite some time, I've been interested in various kinds of layering in artistic culture. So things like masks or multiple masks or visual allusions (like
Huey as Malcolm).
So, in the context of the long history of Black poets writing about art, I was intrigued with the idea of McInnis writing about an artist at work on television. His poem is a reflection on looking at an artist and artwork through a medium beyond canvas and photograph.
To further this layering, after reading the poem and thinking about Bob Ross, I of course went to YouTube to refresh my memory of some of those instructional videos. The Bob Ross
YoTube channel, by the way, is an expansive undertaking with more than 1,000 videos.
Watching Ross and thinking about McInnis's poem, it occurred to me that we rarely encounter works drawn from artists in the act of painting. I suppose that's one more unique contribution that McInnis made to this expansive continuum of Black poets on visual artists.
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