Another in my continuing reflections on the nature of dioramas in the Field Museum.

Have you seen this poem about and painting of your brainpan SUE the T. rex 🦖 ? It's available here vergebooks.com/#/eric-elshtai…

The biomechanics exhibit Field Museum conjured up cartoon imagery--I left out the tongue being used as a strop by toonish barbers...

The Cambrian Explosion!

Drafted while helping Field Museum patron's make erasure poems with pages from Bram Stoker's Dracula...for the Bloodsuckers: Legends to Leeches exhibit closing event. fieldmuseum.org/exhibitions/bl…

Opaline Plesiosaur Vertebra, Field Museum see an image of it here: nextfield.vercel.app/blog/working-p…

Very drafty--but I think it's onto something. Not the idea--it's not mine--but the idea maybe coalescing into a decent poem. The handwriting reads, "Will all those animals be released from history?"

A little bit different than the poems I usually post here--this is science adjacent, rather than scientific.

I urge you to look up the tripod fish. In the meantime, read a draft of a little something I wrote @fieldmseum today...

Written (with typos) while watching high school art students sketch the perched quetzalcoatlus @fieldmuseum

It's been a little while--but here's a poem written for a long-time Field Museum volunteer. Mary provided the content, I added an idea and sculpted it into a poem...

Thank you to Haley for her love of mollusks. We also had a fascinating discussion about Watergate and the historical patterns of distrust in government. That part of our conversation colored this poem in political tones.

It's the Year of the Snake...so here's a snaky one.

New draft of a poem based on several conversations about birds with Field Museum visitors. Typed on my 1929 Smith Corona 4.

Needs some revision--but a first draft of the possible origin story for a paleontologist.

Three days, thirty cat poems. One of my favorites is about two cats named Spatula and Plunger. A few lines, based on the humans' description of the cats, read: sometimes your minds seem as inert as the objects you're named after...

Two about science/art and art/science. Of all the amazing aspects of the Field Museum, I think I have written most about the dioramas and Quetzalcoatlus...

Draft #20--composed and revised in the Field Museum's Hall of Birds--the real poem may well begin in stanza six...??

For those in the Chicago Area, poetic science and scientific poetry. Friday November 14th, 4pm. 57th Street Books semcoop.com/event/afternoo… Graywolf Press Verge Books