To mark National Poetry Month, the New York Public Library invited 30 poets to contribute original poems inspired by an image in our Digital Collections. One of our participating poets is Staten Island’s Poet Laureate, Dr. Marguerite Maria Rivas. She used an historical local image which she found on NYPL’s fascinating Stereogranimator online tool, in which you can make your own animated GIF with an NYPL historical stereogram.

National Poetry Month, which takes place every April, is in an ideal position now to provide comfort as it coincides with the challenging times we are in. And Dr. Rivas is adept at opening our minds to the serendipitous beauties that are revealed in our world. Born and raised on Staten Island, she received a fellowship to conduct research in the Wertheim Study at NYPL’s Stephen Schwarzman Building. She uses the resiliency and kinship witnessed in her Island home as her muse.

I asked Dr. Rivas about the creation of her poem, “The Kills by Moonlight”, and the image which inspired it.

How did you come across this image and what particularly drew your attention to it?

To celebrate NYPL's 125th anniversary, the Library wanted to highlight the Digital Collections. They asked 30 poets to go through the digital archives and choose an image that spoke to them and write a poem inspired by it. I spent time looking for things related to Staten Island. This is actually a double image, a stereoscopic slide used for entertainment in the nineteenth century. When I enlarged the image I realized it was what I remembered as having the look of an old Perth Amboy ferry. There were other ferries crossing to NJ from SI until the bridges went up. It appeared to me that it was about to enter a band of moonlight, the kind that’s so strong it almost makes you look blue. I thought of those long-ago travelers and we who still ride ferries every day and imagined that experience from an earlier time.

Writing a poem based on an image must pose particular opportunities and challenges. How did you find the process?

Well, I started to write the first draft of the poem in February. I knew these poems were going to be printed and distributed by the thousands all over the city from every NYPL branch and Center for Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 30 [editors note: they are now available online as digital #PocketPoems]. It was nerve wracking but exciting. I had to make the poem short to fit certain space constraints, so I took my draft and boiled it down to that experience both a nineteenth century ferry rider and a twenty-first century ferry rider would share.

Every line seems beautifully crafted. Can you discuss the care you put into picking the right words, and the placement of those words to evoke certain feelings and thoughts?

I chose the line breaks carefully to create the feeling of how home is that ultimate destination where our feet are planted, so I ended the first line with 'planted' and the last with 'home'. I originally had a different word where 'planted' is but it wasn’t as strong a word or as varied in meaning. I wanted the ferry riders to experience both the literal and figurative meanings of those 'dark waters' to make the contrast into the stark moonlight even stronger. Little did I know how that would be true by the time this was published. We are in dark waters now. I also wanted it to be a crossing into spring, so I arranged the words and line breaks again so the line would read 'into a silvery band of spring'. The next two lines are purposeful juxtapositions 'moonbeams. Our faces/blue light and deep shade.'” We still carry the dark and light with us, but our faces beam, outweighing the 'deep shade' or shadow through which we have just passed to get home.”

Congratulations to Dr. Rivas on a lovely work! Please enjoy her poem along with its associated image, and read other poets' offerings for the Library's Celebration of National Poetry Month.