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Collaboration between poets and their peers in poetry and painting is
a crucial element of modernism and of avant-garde art in general, and
it’s a prized feature of the New York School. John Ashbery wrote a
novel, A Nest of Ninnies, alternating sentences with James
Schuyler. Kenneth Koch got Ashbery to collaborate with him on zany poems
with detailed and arbitrary requirements. A show consisting largely of
Frank O’Hara’s collaborations with painters opened in Los Angeles in
1999 and traveled the next summer to New York. For these writers,
collaborating was, in a way, their model of friendship.
The more than 60 paintings Jane Hammond has created since embarking on her “John Ashbery Collaboration”—works that seem to me inexhaustible as objects of vision and contemplation—attest to the extraordinary power that artistic friendship can have in the genesis of works of art. Back in June 1993, Jane asked John to come up with titles for paintings that she would then make. A week later he faxed her the list. It took him (he later wrote) about four minutes to make a list of 44 titles. That’s 11 titles every 60 seconds. And these titles are anything but pedestrian; Ashbery casually produced some of the wildest appellations this side of Wallace Stevens, titles like No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar, Lobby Card, Bread and Butter Machine, The Hagiography of This Moment, Contra-Zed, A Parliament of Refrigerator Magnets and Do Husbands Matter? I liked the last one (and the painting it inspired) so much that I wrote this poem:
Do Husbands Matter?
for Jane Hammond
At the vital center the fool holds a candle
like a pious medieval donor
in one hand, a feather in the other
but look he has more than two hands
I count seven it's as if this were
a Hindu tarot card wishbone in one
a heart some gems a horseshoe a mask
and a globe in the belly how does one read that
for read it one must, not chaos but a rebus
of my life or yours stares you in the face
scratched on the walls of my cabin where
I left messages for others to write over
it's a scratched itch and a door into a hallway
where stands a row of grandfather clocks
that don't tell time in this dream of a cello
in the corner where function follows form
and girls with dolls assemble a still life
with fallen candles on the highway a black car
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Read my interview with Jane Hammond, along with reproductions of some of her paintings, in the Faul 2002 issue of Bomb -- DL
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