Poet Claretta Holsey responds to "Wildfire" by Malcolm Corley

At the age of three, Malcolm Corley (b. 1999) was diagnosed with autism. At about the same time, he began to draw the sketches from the TV show, Blues Clues. Recreations of Dr. Seuss’s illustrations came next, some of which he drew from memory.

In February, 2019, his sketch “Jazz Hands” was published in Hot Metal Bridge, and eight of his portraits were published in Up the Staircase. “Kiana” appeared on the Fusion Art website in March, 2019; two months later, “Closet” was published in Penn Review. His art has been shown at the Ware Center in Lancaster, PA, and two juried international exhibits/sales: Art of Possibility at the Courage Kenny Rehab Center in Minneapolis and the 2019 and 2020 Art Ability Exhibitions at Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital, where one of his pieces received an honorable mention prize. In addition, he has had solo shows at the Winter Center and the Emerald Foundation, also in Lancaster. He is a nominee for Lancaster PA’s 2021 Black Artist Waystation Project.

“Untitled #1,” an acrylic painting Malcolm created in AP Art class at Hempfield High School, was one of 15 works chosen by The Kennedy Center’s 2019 VSA program. Malcolm was the youngest artist to be recognized, and the only one with no post-secondary art training. “Untitled #1” was also chosen, along with “Hoodie Self-portrait,” for the CRIP Ritual art show in Toronto, Ontario, currently scheduled for January, 2022. “Untitled #1” formed the “T” in an installation of the word UNITY at the Kennedy Center from January-February, 2021​​​​​​​.

Claretta Holsey is a Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellow and a Literary Translation Graduate Certificate candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A three-time awardee of the Academy of American Poets prize, she recently graduated summa cum laude with a BA from Stetson University. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in New Delta Review, The Columbia Review, Eclectica Magazine, PromptPress, Poetry Breakfast, Fishfood Magazine, and on Poets.org. She has read for the microjournal Black Poetry Review and is reading for The Iowa Review. She is the spring 2021 production intern at Copper Canyon Press.

Process Notes

Whether Malcolm has painted a portrait or a landscape, I am always imagining a human story underneath. In Wildfire, the sun and the flame are depicted with identical intensity, and so I am encouraged to think about legacy, the way one body begets another, the way violence is passed down (from father-sun to son). I am thinking, too, about the sound (in French, le son) fire makes as it spreads, and I compare that to the soundless movement of Malcolm’s painting: The harm unfolds in silence; I watch, doing nothing because what’s done is done, and I am implicated in the scene. In my poem, through soundplay and pacing, I wanted to capture the multi-resonance of this all-too-human story.