Experience Ivars Šteinbergs’ poetry at the RSU Anatomy Museum

On 16 May at 18.00, poet Ivars Šteinbergs will host a poetry intervention – Anatomical Verses –at the Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) Anatomy Museum in at 9 Kronvalda bulvāris, Rīga. Visitors to the museum will be able to view, read, and experience it from 17 May to 28 September.

Anatomical Verses is a non-linear cycle of poems the poet has created based on inspiration derived from the permanent exhibition of RSU Anatomy Museum. The museum includes several thousands of anatomical specimens — human bones, various organs and body parts — that have been collected for instruction and scientific purposes at the Riga Anatomical Theatre through the 1920s to the 1930s. The cycle includes 28 poems, some of which have been integrated into the museum’s exhibition, and the rest have been printed in a small book that accompanies the exhibition. A map will be provided to visitors that will help them find their way around the exhibition by accentuating the poems that have been integrated into it sometimes openly, sometimes in a more hidden way.

‘Before I started writing Anatomical Verses, I thought I was going to talk about mortality, but it turned out to be a story about human lives, real and imagined, lives that are moving, tragic, amusing and they show the value of being passionate about what you do.,

Live, where people have either made, collected and preserved preparations, or literally given away, most often without knowing it, their organs and body parts in order for education to continue after death. The aim of these poems is to communicate the importance of medical curiosities and the history of science, as well as to reveal the diversity of the human body. Diversity, one of the museum's key values, is purposefully reflected in the formal and intonational variety of the poems; it also became fundamentally important to choose a style for each poem that would fit the narrative of the subject or object in question. The outcome is research-based poems, designed as autonomous aesthetic events, which take on new dimensions when placed in the context of the exhibition. I hope that along with my poems, the precious (and life-changing) exhibits of the museum will also gain a meaningful depth,’ explains Ivars Šteinbergs.

Interdisciplinary cooperation projects with local and international artists have been implemented at the Anatomy Museum previously to develop an interest of the general public in the anatomy and make it more accessible.

The exhibition Anatomical Verses in RSU Anatomy Museum will be available for viewing until 28 September.

Estere Betija Grāvere and Anna Priede are the authors of the exhibition’s design. The poems were translated into English by Kintija Rodžersa. The event is supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation and Rīga Stradiņš University.

Ivars Šteinbergs is a Latvian poet, critic, literature expert, and translator of poetry. His most recent collection of poems is The ABC Book (Ābece) (by the publisher Valters Dakša). The author received the Annual Latvian Literary Award for the best poetry (2023) for his second collection of poems Youth (Jaunība) (Neputns, 2022). In 2024, he was awarded the Normunds Naumanis Annual Art Critics Award. He is also the editor of the literary magazine Current (Strāva), has translated poems of Louise Glück, Robert Bly, Sylvia Plath, Anna Sexton, Jan Wagner and others. Šteinbergs’ poems have been translated into English, Finnish, Estonian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian.