jericho jennifer nelson
LightNews LightNews
banner
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
jericho jennifer nelson
@henkaipantomime.bsky.social
5.1K followers 1.6K following 3.2K posts
they + she
art historian poet
Fil Am messing with Renaissance practices
U Delaware + Philly
co-founder of the journal Selva
https://linktr.ee/henkaipantomime for books and pubs
Posts Replies Media Videos
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
best conference book haul, maybe bc mostly not from conference. that said, the great Dutch Americas volume co-edited by @periodeye.bsky.social was a steal and ends with probably my favorite academic essay of the 2020s so far
books of various colors lying on a hotel room floor. visible cover words include: The Dutch Americas Animals in Eden Venice and the Dalmatian Hinterland Kettle work Circumpolar Connections Hyperboreal Milk Black Carbon • Joan Naviyuk Kane and a melted violin on a teal blue Song Cave style cover w/ tiny words [this is Geoffrey Hilsabeck's latest]
November 2, 2025 at 3:49 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
how I navigated my simultaneous commitment to the sixteenth century (society conference) and Halloween: I submit these images

in which I experience alienation from humanity and identification with the materials of my labor

(photos of me by Raz Chen-Morris and Stephanie Leitch)
a person wearing a costume with a basket completely obscuring their face under a large light gray hooded bathrobe. if you zoom in there are weird fragments of Flemish on the hem of the robe. the person is holding a weird object and wearing a conference name tag. the background is one of those anonymous conference rooms but the subterranean style lighting enhances the creepiness of the costume the drawing of Bruegel's Beekeepers that is the basis for the costume. doughy looking humans in robes with faces blocked by basketlike masks interact with basketlike beehives. someone shady is climbing a tree and there's a cut off Dutch proverb in the lower left upper half of the same person in a costume where it is clearer that the object they are carrying is a beehive, and somewhat artificial bees are crawling all over the hive and over the basket face mask of the person, who would be in three quarter view but it's too creepy to really call it that
November 1, 2025 at 4:48 AM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
Portland! I'm not only headed back to the Sixteenth Century Society but I'm also reading poems with Joan Kane and Geoffrey Hilsabeck at 7:30 pm on November 1, the day affiliated with some of my favorite altarpieces.

first time in Portland, taking recs.

come hear us at Bishop & Wilde!
event poster with three author photos in a horizontal band across the middle and event info above and below: SATURDAY NOVEMBER 1ST BISHOP & WILDE (2601 NW THURMAN) 7:30 Ρ.Μ. GEOFFREY HILSABECK JOAN NAVIYUK KANE JERICHO JENNIFER NELSON
October 20, 2025 at 11:18 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
@ginabird.bsky.social Gina Myers have an incredible reading at the launch of WORKS AND DAYS from @radiatorpress.bsky.social in Philly last night. if you have been wondering what poetry to read next, but needing substance and solidarity, here's the link radiatorpress.org/product/work...
October 19, 2025 at 12:19 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
it's amazing to have a zoom with a colleague that refreshes and energizes you at the tail end of a series of zooms. that said it's also time to sit on the roof and let the wind write these recommendation letters with me
Philadelphia skyline seen from the south with electric blue sky mostly covered by alternately whooshy and faint crimpy style clouds
October 15, 2025 at 7:56 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
I need help finding one of my favorite poems, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly before the name change. it goes something like this (full recollection in pic):

Ever wester ever faster
Buster, hasten
your disaster.

Film is falling,
time a twister,
sound unfurling her nor'easter.
Ever wester ever faster Buster, hasten your disaster. Film is falling, time a twister, sound unfurling her nor'easter. . . . ? Ever ___ing ever flying, Buster, cinema is dying. . . . ?
October 4, 2025 at 5:08 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
I was going to make the effort to do a big lepidochromy post from my grad seminar "Is Making Really Knowing?" field trip to the Little Beasts show at the National Gallery of Art in DC but a search revealed multiple posts featuring the same word from the same show so here's one measly wing and bod
partial view of a representation of a blue underwing moth in lepidochromy (printed directly from a butterfly wing) by Joris Hoefnagel on very finely prepared thin Italian vellum
October 4, 2025 at 1:40 AM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
reposting with alt text
black sans serif words all on a pink background, partly with clouds, except for a neon blue band with the name of the author of the review and the designation of the issue: Action, Spectacle Adam Day Summer 2025 | Prose On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies by Jennifer Nelson. (Fence Books). 2025 Jennifer Nelson's fourth poetry collection (and sixth book), On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, is a complex but accessible and fascinating read. It's a joy to spend time with, and it is over before you'd like it to be. Nelson is not only a poet, but a historian of early modern art at the University of Delaware, so they are perfectly positioned to confront institutions like libraries, universities, and museums. They open the book with a prologue, "Sonnet," where they tell us: This is the rule of ghosts. They endure as much as they're remembered and carry loss like a song. This is the loam on the forest floor, the ongoing of the unremembered and those remembered wrong. on a pink background with white clouds, black sand serif words: And there is here a productive kind of disharmony; a constant questioning of the established, a making of good trouble, as such, which is connected to the resistance to interpretation, which is due in large part to the structural context in which texts are made. Who made it, why did they make it, how did they make it, and in what context was it created? Nelson largely brings forth texts that are indivisible from the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, indicating to us that if there is a right way to remember, then it is through a continuous cycle of reflection, action, and further reflection. This allows for ongoing learning and adaptation. Nelson examines the root causes of oppression and inequality, questioning dominant narratives, identifying how power operates within specific contexts. Such an approach challenges power structures, promotes social change, and potentially creates more equitable systems. But, again, all of this is dependent on how one sees (and listens): Believing we can listen can be the closest thing to listening, and change life. on a pink background with clouds, black sans serif words. in the lower right corner, a cropped shot of stylized mustard green wheat. text: They do this in part by featuring the relationships indigenous people have with the earth and with each other: "Remind me to tell you / barangays still exist / each polity a sailboat / and community at once." Barangays, for all intents and purposes, are well-organized villages or neighborhoods, but the word barangay originated from balangay, a type of boat used by a group of Austronesian peoples when they migrated to the Philippines. These barangays contradict colonial assumptions of the "native" as somehow in need of the structures and strictures of the imperial outsider. Indeed, Nelson points to the masterful paintings of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and the woodcuts of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)-the artists of which would have been seen as no less in need of "governance / and conquista" than those depicted in the Boxer Codex-as influences on the art of that very Spanish text. Nelson tells us: Scholars misinterpret images for a living, call them worlds, a synecdoche based on faith in the moment of creation.
September 23, 2025 at 10:33 AM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
I stole a poem for the third quarter of this miserable game
text appears in white on a background of clouds at sunrise: miser Jericho, desinas ineptire, et quod vides perisse perditum ducas. fulsere quondam plentiful tibi touchdowns, cum the Patriots used to not break your heart
September 21, 2025 at 7:05 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
my zany blurb for this poem through probably my fault did not make it to the site so I'm attaching it here
I saw colors differently after living a few years in the Wisconsin prairie. This began to intersect with my lifelong confusion of nature with technology. My instinct is to associate alienness with power. Yet the cultures I’m in valorize similitude, and pick bad lines of comparison as grounds for similarity. Banging on an art installation (experienced during the Sauk County Farm/Art DTour) in response to an eagle helped.
September 14, 2025 at 3:14 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
is there a word for when you synecdochically experience institutional fondness through a small but steadfast defect?
September 11, 2025 at 3:44 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
✓
extreme closeup of a cat's shining brow, altered sans large-stolen-dataset-trained algorithms for emphasis
August 30, 2025 at 5:30 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
not usually this kind of poster, but I brought home a new friend today, and I thought you should meet her, too. her name is Taliesin, aka the Watcher. she is full grown but looks smol and is
small tortoiseshell medium hair cat with bushy tail twists on a rug to attack a suspended jellyfish toy securely leashed tortoiseshell cat in sunlight is kissed by human with freshly trimmed bangs on a rooftop in front of the Philadelphia skyline securely leashed tortoiseshell cat, true to one of her names, watches as jellyfish toy approaches. her mouth is quite pink and you can clearly see her white socks as she splays on the rug
August 29, 2025 at 9:16 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
I really wanted this to be Arion inventing the dithyrambic meter like in Gustave Moreau's rendition but cannot iconographically justify it
painting by Gustave Moreau of Arion windsurfing a dolphin with a cithara (? ancient lyre like stringed instrument) as his sail and wearing golden laurels and a red cloak over Moreau-y swampy underclothes as he travels attended by daubed-on white gulls across a storm- and paint-tossed sea with cliffs and shipwreck in the background. inscribed in lower left as a gift for his buddy Chaplain
August 23, 2025 at 1:51 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
I rewatched all of my favorite anime just to get to the inferior (this is agreed upon by all fans somehow) final season and here in the antepenultimate episode I am rewarded
bust of a dark-haired, green-eyed, brown-skinned woman with green fingernails rendered in anime style chewing with a baffled, astonished, incredulous frown as she holds the handle of an unseen silverware in the foreground. seen in 3/4 view from below, she is transparent and superimposed upon much of the middle of a less detailed (but still giving Euro painting) rendering of Bruegel's Tower of Babel, the stormy one in Rotterdam. superimposed on both the English subtitles read "This is a dish whose components should never work so well together!"
August 19, 2025 at 1:32 AM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
show me your getaway vehicle
a bunch of naked people riding boar, stag, steer, horse, goat, and ram, two holding flags, including one feminine figure standing upright on a wolf-like mystery animal as if it were a paddle board, all within a great field of murky gray cloud coming from the left over a Cranachian landscape of green foliage foreground, green hills, and upright cliffs under a blue sky looks like a detail of a bigger painting (and it is, if you reverse image searched it you'd find the version of Cranach's allegory of melancholy in the national gallery in Scotland)
August 13, 2025 at 3:30 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
Brooklyn persons: on the 15th and 16th I have some 7 pm poetry readings in NYC to celebrate new books by @dianaarterian.bsky.social, Allyson Paty, @christinehou.bsky.social, and me, alongside fellow poets @zefrrr.bsky.social and Courtney Bush at Black Spring Books and Unnameable Books respectively
image of a hilly chaparrally landscape in faded green brown blues with a cloudy sky at the high horizon, on which a female body lying on a yoga mat has been superimposed at center. around her the information for the reading appears in white sans şerif letters: an evening of poetry Courtney Bush Jennifer Nelson Christine Shan Shan Hou Allyson Paty August 15th 7pm Black Spring Books 672 Driggs Ave Brooklyn a black image of a stylized bird facing right on a white background with scattered smaller black dots. as if in the space of a historiated initial information about this reading has been provided in a black square within the bird's unfurled wing: READING DIANA ARTERIAN Text ZEFYR LISOWSKI JENNIFER NELSON saturday, august 16 @ 7pm unnameable books
August 7, 2025 at 5:53 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
repost with alt text
#38 [I have observed pink monks eating blue raisins] José García Villa I have observed pink monks eating blue raisins. And I have observed blue monks eating pink raisins. Studiously have I observed. Now this is the way a pink monk eats a blue raisin: Pink is he and it is blue and the pink swallows the blue. I swear this is true. And the way a blue monk eats a pink raisin is this: Blue is he and it is pink and the blue swallows the pink. And this is also truth. Indeed I have observed and myself have partaken of blue and pink raisins. But my joy was different: My joy was to see the blue and the pink counterpointing. SELECTED BY ASA DRAKE
August 5, 2025 at 3:06 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
cheer toll: revived my love of inlaid wood at the Museum for Art in Wood on Friday when I saw Klara Knutsson's small panels for WARP 2025, including this 12th/12 fragment in a series made of veneer and MVF in oak frames. I fell away from wanting to write about wood art but never stopped loving it
inlaid wood square mostly of various light browns. a bridge cuts across the middle and a building form with subtle round and square windows almost invisibly set in it is behind the bridge in the right background. in the foreground is a fall of green leaves on a startlingly nearby-feeling branch from the upper left and a dark wood tank hewn of slightly crude shapes on the lower right in front of both bridge and building
August 3, 2025 at 5:41 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
reposting good point with alt text
screenshot of an article with this text-- Right-Wing Crackdowns Drive Academics Away From UT and the U.S. Staff morale, federal funds, and state confidence dry up BY BRANT BINGAMON, FRI., JULY 25, 2025 --above an image by Zeke Barbaro via Getty Images of an old fashioned leather suitcase with books and a disembodied gloved hand holding a microscope. on the right sit a beaker and glasses, accompanied by weird symbols of atoms and airplanes all on a field of blue ruled graph
July 29, 2025 at 2:39 AM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
the Christine Sun Kim show at the Whitney was amazing. didn't do much documentation bc the best parts were the video and (why was I surprised by this, ableism) sound pieces. recommend especially listening to the commissioned lullaby on the red pillow and the one just before the last purple pillow
framed square of off-white paper with DEGREES OF MY DEAD RAGE IN THE ART WORLD written at the top in charcoal and below this six diagrams in two rows of various angles, labeled in order from smallest to largest ACUTE RAGE, LEGIT//RIGHT RAGE, OBTUSE RAGE, STRAIGHT UP RAGE, REFLEX RAGE, and FULL ON RAGE with smaller descriptions of the art world behaviors that occasion each rage. there is a hazy vertical region of charcoal dust at what would be the bottom half of the bifurcating line, suggesting the paper has been partly folded or something like that (piece is from 2018, part of a larger series called _Degrees of Deaf Rage_) view of the installation from the east side of the Whitney, giving a view of a mural extending across the front walls of the show and into some of the interior walls. the mural is of four musical staves extending across the walls, modified as the four-fingered ASL sign for stave, with flagless note forms suspended in various places about these staves. mural is called _Ghost[ed] Notes_ and it's a site specific redux of an original from 2024 a framed off-white square of paper with the charcoal title TRAUMA, LOL and below in charcoal a large thin circle comprised of the repeating words "trauma// upon// trauma// upon//..." written as rays from the center of the circle. within the circle the words "IMPORTANT" and "COOL" form the winking eyes and the phrase "STAY POSITIVE" form the crooked smile (piece dates to 2020)
July 13, 2025 at 2:21 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
first time I've seen an alert like this
screenshot of phone alert beginning with red triangle ! Emergency alert: Extreme PENNSYLVANIA EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY - Pennsylvania is experiencing a statewide intermittent 911 outage. Individuals experiencing issues contacting 911 are asked to contact their local 911 Center on their non-Emergency lines. Check your counties social media and website for more information. OK
July 11, 2025 at 7:26 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
hey what are good art / sound shows up in NYC this weekend?

also I'm reading on Saturday at 5 in Hell's Kitchen. come if you're not at the festival on governor's island! @fencebooks.bsky.social will be selling copies of my book On the Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies.
POETRY HELL 7/12, 5pm, Enoch's Coffee 480 10th Ave, NYC Thom Eichelberger-Young Dante Fuoco Kim Rosenfield Jennifer Nelson Don Yorty hosted by Lonely Christopher SEGUE FOUNDATION ENOCH'S
July 8, 2025 at 7:21 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
my favorite one so far
with the NYT header and in the headline font The New York Times Is Zohran Mamdani's Constant Smiling A Sign of Cognitive Decline?
July 8, 2025 at 5:43 PM
henkaipantomime.bsky.social
reposting with alt text
text 1 is superimposed over text 2, Instagram story style text 1: Academic friends-these recently posted humanities lecturer positions at Columbia are in fact scab positions designed to replace graduate teaching opportunities and mitigate labor power amongst students. Quite literally, applying to these positions will directly impact me and my colleagues who are still awaiting teaching appointments/funding for the coming year. Please do not encourage students or colleagues to apply to these positions. Happy to take DMs on this and discuss text 2: Lecturer in Discipline Columbia University The Columbia College Core Curriculum invites applications for positions at the rank of Lecturer in Discipline for the 2025-2026 academic year. We are looking for experienced instructors to teach the Core courses Art Humanities, Literature Humanities, Music Humanities, or Contemporary Civilization. As the cornerstone of undergraduate general education at mbia, the Core is required for all Columbia College students and includes students from main.hercjobs.org
July 7, 2025 at 4:45 AM