We have a bad habit as humans.
Actually, we have a lot of bad habits—but this one is particularly sneaky.
We look at someone and decide, almost instantly, how intelligent they are.
It’s subtle. Automatic. A quick scan: clothes, posture, job title, maybe even the way they speak. And then—boom—we’ve placed them neatly into a category.
Smart. Not smart. Educated. Not “that kind” of educated.
And if we’re being honest? Degree choice carries a suspicious amount of weight in this silent judgment Olympics.
I’ve felt that.
I’ve walked into spaces knowing my background in art—painting, printmaking, the creative world—was being quietly measured against more “practical” degrees. As if intelligence can only be proven in spreadsheets, lab reports, or anything that doesn’t involve getting paint under your fingernails.
As if choosing art is somehow choosing less.
But here’s the flaw in that thinking:
Intelligence, like art, is subjective.
And artists? We don’t just make things—we translate, interpret, adapt. We learn how to see what isn’t obvious. We take one medium and bend it into another. We communicate without always relying on words… until we do.
Because eventually, the art spills over.
For me, it did.
I started with paint and ink. That was my language. That’s what I studied, what I trained in. But somewhere along the way, words started creeping in—first quietly, then all at once.
Poetry. Writing. Another form of seeing.
Not a departure from art, but an extension of it.
Because literary arts and visual arts don’t compete—they collaborate. They hold hands in the same messy, beautiful process of trying to make meaning out of something that doesn’t quite fit into neat boxes.
Which brings me here.
I entered the Vision and Verse Poetry portion of the Allegany National Photography Competition and Exhibition—something I never really saw coming for myself. Ekphrastic poetry, if we’re being fancy about it. Which is just a poetic way of saying: I looked at art and let it speak through me.
I chose two monochrome images. Black and white. No distractions. No color to hide behind.
Just contrast. Just truth.
One captures birth—raw, powerful, unfiltered. A moment where everything changes and nothing asks for permission.
The other holds something quieter. Reflection. Movement. A path forward, even when forward feels uncertain.
Two images. Two moments. Both about becoming.
And here’s the thing that keeps circling back to me:
If you judged the creators of these works—or me—based on appearance, job title, or degree alone, you would miss it.
You would miss the depth. The intention. The intelligence required to see like that.
Because intelligence isn’t always loud.
It doesn’t always come with credentials that make people nod in approval.
Sometimes it looks like a woman sitting in a field of ash, quietly deciding to move forward.
Sometimes it looks like a body doing the impossible, bringing life into the world while everything else fades into the background.
Sometimes it looks like an artist who decided to pick up a pen instead of a brush—and realized it was never just one or the other.
So maybe the problem isn’t that artists are underestimated.
Maybe it’s that we’ve been taught to define intelligence too narrowly.
And we’ve gotten really good at being wrong about people.
Ekphrastic Poem: I Move Forward
by Michelle Perrin-Crawford
Inspired by Donna Cooper's image, Moving Forward
There was a moment, a Wednesday,
the world split in two-
before you
and everything after.
In the before
your voice lived in the ordinary-
the recipes half-remembered,
in the way laughter filled a room
before I even knew why.
In the after,
silence learned my name.
It resides on the other end of the phone,
rides along in empty passenger seats,
echoes where your laughter and stories used to land.
They say time softens grief
but that isn’t so.
Grief doesn’t shrink
it teaches your heart
how to grow around it.
So I carry you now
not by your presence,
but in quiet ways-
in the instinct to be kind
the urge to talk to a stranger
in the way I still turn to tell you things.
I move forward
not because I am ready
not because I’m finished missing you-
but because you loved me
into someone who could.
And some days
I’m paddling through life in an invisible canoe,
treading the water of my tears-
laughing and feeling guilty afterwards
standing in the sunlight
and wondering how it still shines.
But it does
I’ll find you in the scent of a rose,
soft and unexpected.
in the warmth I didn’t expect,
in the strength I didn’t know that I had.
I keep moving forward.
With your love stitched in my bones,
with your memory lighting the dark,
with every step saying
what I didn’t get to say enough-
I keep moving forward.
Ekphrastic Poem: Sacred Pause
by Michelle Perrin-Crawford
Inspired by A Sacred Pause, image by Sara Hunter
There is a pause
no one prepares you for-
a suspended breath
between who you were
and who you are about to become.
The room hums,
voices blur into something distant.
A ring of fire and time slows
as if it,too, is waiting.
You gather yourself
for one final push-
but it feels like more than effort,
more than pain.
It is your soul,
loosening, stretching beyond you,
ready to exist,forever,
as a piece outside of your body.
And then-
a cry splits the air,
sharp, undeniable, familiar-
and everything rearranges.
You are two-
separate yet
forever tethered
by something deeper than blood.
They place this new life against your skin,
and you recognize them
in a way that makes no sense
and every sense at once.
This is a miracle-
not that they are here,
but you have become
someone entirely new.
In one breath.
In one moment.
In one final push-
you became a mother.