Commonplace Spring 2025, Volume I, Issue I

It’s About Attention?

By Meg Davis Roberts

for the class of 2018

I ask them what a poem is And they tell me a story about modern art It looks like nothing, you see , until the Velvet stanchion ropes in a perfect braid And gilded ornament curves its corners I want to say the poem is not nothing They’re being obstinate, postmodern It’s like that block of Swiss cheese with hair in it! Stylize some trash and put it in a case! They’re spirited now, this post-lunch crowd

Seniors, despite themselves, debating the Boundaries of the form, their voices

Weaving to a dense, purply silk And I see the chalice for the face So, you’re saying—

Rubin’s vase, named after Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in 1915, features the silhouette of a vase in black and the profiles of two faces in white looking inward. The image illustrates the figure-ground principle, which explains how the brain switches its focus in order to perceive two different views.

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