Untitled Mural: Cleaver Visual Poetics Contest

I have long admired Cleaver international literary journal for its professional, edgy, glittering support of poetry and the arts. So it was with great joy that I got word that my poem "Untitled Mural" had garnished third place in their 2025 visual poetics contest.

All the more so because visual poetry is really new to me and not something I have embraced, but rather something I fell into trying at the encouragement of colleagues at the VCFA Summer Manuscript Workshop. In fact, I approached the idea of trying visual poetry with resistance and disdainful cynicism ('"ah want visual poetry? fine. here ya go. pfffft.")

Then, for a few things in one of my manuscripts-in-progress, it started to gel. I had the initial version of this poem about a mural I painted on my closet doors when I was 15 but that keeps popping up in my life. But I had it as an un-visual poem, initially in three parts labeled with roman numerals. Then I was struck with the notion to put it in three vertical panels, and to add the fourth bringing my teen-aged mural's resonance together with the mural I painted for my daughter when she was pregnant with my granddaughter -- all reflecting those cheesy metal hinged closet door panels that everyone I know had in their bedroom growing up.

My idea was that the first panel was a description of the initial mural, as if I'm really standing in it.

The second panel recalls when my parents made me repaint my hippy teenage room before I moved out to grad school -- but I couldn't bring myself to paint over the mural. I rendered the rest of the room boring beige instead of forest green, which changed how the mural worked, but still it clung to the closet doors.

The third panel is me years later, finding the poem I'd written as panel 2, remembering how important that mural had been to me.

And the last reflects how, years later, my daughter brought it up and asked me to paint this other mural, and how much that meant to me, to move this thing I'd been carrying for so long forward to another form.

Now, mind you, I'm NOT an artist. My paintings suck. But sometimes I feel driven to paint, to get something out of me that I can look at. But my lack of skill has not prevented me from splashing paint across a very big wall. Because, what the heck, right?

How absolutely gratifying and heartwarming it was, then, to get these words from the contest judge, Kazim Ali. To feel that what I'd written had truly been seen. I'm filled with gratitude, and I'll be honest, the layout was so lovely it brought tears to my eyes.

And I now look at visual poetry in an entirely new light. I'll admit it, I'm a visual poetry convert.

It’s an ironic turn—words without an image, but arranged in columns and offered as if a mural. I’d paint these on the side of a building any day. The four poems carry with them a journey from sight to encounter to real vision.

-Kazim Ali, contest judge

https://www.cleavermagazine.com/untitled-mural-by-cindy-hill/