Blanton director Jessie Otto Hite commissioned the poem printed below, "What Starts Here," for the museum's Grand Opening. She asked her longtime friend and colleague Jack Gordon Brannon, who also happens to be an award-winning poet to write something for the occasion. Brannon received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, is the founder and director of the Poetry at Round Top festival and was an administrator with the University of Texas College of Fine Arts until his recent retirement. His book of poems, Vigil, was a finalist for the Violet Crown Book Award. Brannon read his poem during the official welcoming and ribbon-cutting ceremony at noon Sunday, April 30. Other honorary speakers included Jack Blanton, former university president Larry R. Faulkner, current university president Bill Powers, Austin's mayor Will Wynn, Hite, and then College of Fine Arts dean Robert Freeman. The naming of the Blanton plaza in honor of Larry and Mary Ann Faulkner was publicly announced at this ceremony and so it is a fitting tribute that the poem is in part dedicated to Faulkner and speaks of the "vernal gardens."
What Starts Here
There is a beginning before the beginning,
this wellspring that now nurtures
the southmost edge of the Forty Acres
arising from a myriad of rivulets,
tributaries long beneath the surface,
percolated through limestone strata
while this site remained to the eye a dry place,
an asphalt byway, devoted to the passage
of a century of students, parades
of pedestrians, a daily tide of automobiles.
The campus within site of a capitol,
expanded along a different axis.
I
He sits silent before the immense canvas,
its fiery explosions of red and black
erupting from the surface of a chalk-white plain.
He is there each Wednesday at noon,
crossing the plaza from his morning class,
his only conversation, intense,
internal, argumentative at times,
reserved for the painting itself.
He has no idea why this long-dead painter
might have a clarifying light to cast
on his all-too contemporary shadows,
how these soaring nebulae can speak
to his utterly earth-bound dilemmas,
knows only that after plunging through
the harrows of another week,
this is where he wants to be,
has come to count on that stark image,
a presence beyond the campus rush, beyond
the noise, like an old friend, beyond doubt.
The birth of a gallery for this raw-boned campus
in the fervor of its first half-century,
happened a hill away beyond boarding houses,
amid peeling walls of war-surplus barracks,
a modest notion settled into shared quarters,
on one side overlooking the baseball field,
to the other a bronze swirl of Texas mustangs,
all thrown together in an upstart academe
shaped by its frontier past, marked by
an ever-growing ferment of the new.
II
The young girl's laugh never fails to begin
as soon as she sees the marvelous yellow egg
afloat in its royal blue sky,
her mother amazed, amused,
grateful that such a simple image
has become the source of such deep delight.
By now the girl has made it her own
in watercolors, pencil, occasional crayolas,
drawing it a dozen times or more
since first it caught her eye
in the luminous space of the new gallery,
inspired their painting on paper-shell
eggs at home. Whatever produces
such magic spark, her mother savors
these interludes of laughter seized between
carpooling, classes, day care, and work.
Histories of cathedrals and monuments
tell the work of generations,
the modern era more often a tale
of instantaneous construction.
The vision of a new museum
worthy of the university and its art
endured through decades while governors
and presidents would come and go,
rode the vagaries of change while legions of
graduates went out into the world.
The future's font for creative arts
lingered still as a dream deferred
while traffic rumbled along the avenue.
III
The man is elderly, must travel round about
to reach the upper galleries,
shies away from the grand staircase
until a docent leads him to an elevator,
upward to the warmth of forest green walls
where he stands before Rubens' portrait
of a young man, old man's eyes bright through tears.
He feels certain he saw the painting with his wife
somewhere in their travels,
remembers she said the painter was her favorite,
the lustrous flesh of his figures
more alive even than life itself,
the glory of the work causing her to cry,
just as softly he does now, unembarrassed by his tears.
In this place dreamers became builders,
turning ground with gleamy shovels
to the roar of a drought-breaking deluge
when the Lord sent a thunderclap so rightly timed,
all who witnessed took it for divine approval,
fresh waters pouring down on dignitaries,
bulldozers, white canvas of catering tents,
hallowing this site so newly dedicated,
where waters and builders resolved to raise
a wondrous museum. Some planted vision,
some seeded limestone and steel
while others set out gifts of art.
Where traffic once flowed the grass is green,
live oaks leafing out. By evening,
beyond the vernal gardens of Faulkner Plaza,
art's new home glows in the night air,
waiting like a present to be opened.
Here beneath the arch of sculpted gateways,
in a civil elegance of limestone colonnade,
the university extends its welcome to the world.
Dedicated to Larry R. Faulkner and James A. Michener
with admiration and deep gratitude
Jack Gordon Brannon
Austin, Texas
