The Best American Poetry

Met Percent: Week Six [by Alec Bernstein]

Have We Met?

Suddenly the ancient gods are part elephant (Cambodia) gallery 245,  or have “groups” of arms (Myanmar) gallery 250, or are standing on a buffalo (Java) gallery 247. With so many cultures in close proximity, the differences are as surprising as the similarities.

The elephant Ganesh in Cambodia is the god for the removal of obstacles - an unusual power - guarding daily existence. Ganesh is a pan-Hindu “crossover” whose role changes in Buddhism and Hinduism throughout Asia. Today, Ganesh Tattoos are very popular.

“God sends the cold according to the coat.” - Montaigne

 

“What has become of the discs?”

In China, “Bi” - the notion of a covering sky (gaitian) that revolves around a central axis - is like an early form of the carpenter’s square. Often jade is the measure of the owner’s moral integrity.

The uses are many, and many uses, unknown.

Buddah Records first album was Safe as Milk by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band. 

CLEMO UTI – "THE WATER LILIES"
By Ring Lardner

CHARACTERS
PADRE, a priest.
SETHSO}
GETHSO} both twins.
WAYSHATTEN, a shepherd’s boy.
TWO CAPITALISTS 1
WAMA TAMMISCH, her daughter.
KLEMA, a janitor’s third daughter.
KEVELA, their mother, afterwards their aunt.

{TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This show was written as if people were there to see it.}
1. NOTE: The two Capitalists don’t appear in this show.

ACT I

The Outskirts of a Parchesi Board. People are wondering what has become of the discs. They quit wondering and sing the following song.
CHORUS: What has become of the discs?
What has become of the discs?
We took them at our own risks,
But what has become of the discs?

(WAMA enters from an exclusive waffle parlor. She exits as if she had had waffles.)

ACTS II & III

(These two acts were thrown out because nothing seemed to happen.)

 

The Recumbent Pig

Pigs in Recumbent Position, China, 1st-2nd Century, Gallery 207 (top, bottom pigs not on view).

These recumbent pigs were often placed in the hands of the deceased to express the wish for wealth in the afterlife. If you got pigs (dead or alive), it’s good news . . .  wealth, abundance, plenty.

Met Percent: Week Five [by Alec Bernstein]

Streams and Mountains Without End

I did some Met mezzanine stuff, but now the second floor . . . 

China: The landscape in length: “The Mountains in Fog” is a scroll (1’ high and over 20’ long) and is “time over size”, “like time over strength” in “ruin lust” (see Week Two). The involvement of the viewer - walking the path - is a “different” form of  contemplation. 

The landscape in sheer size: “The Palace of Nine Perfections” [Yuan Jiang, Qing dynasty, 1691] is over 6’ high and 18’ long. It dominates the room; the impact is immediate. 

 

On the Importance of Being: Flowers and Birds

Exaltations of Nature. 

Vase with flowering plants and birds, China, late 17th-early 18th century, gallery 200.

Mankind . . . we regard as only one of Nature’s varied manifestations, and less worthy of appearing in the annals of Art than any other element: the fragile beauty of a flower or the graceful motions of a bird in flight rouses in our hearts, an emotion as poignant as any human loveliness or pain. - The Chinese Eye, Chiang Yee, 1935.

 

Moon Vase

Moon-shaped bottle, China, 18th century, “slippery stone”, gallery 200.

“Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do”. - Montaigne

 

The Celebration of Error

Kenzan-style Dish with Bamboo Leaves, Japan, 17th–18th century (not on view) kintsugi (kintsukuroi) gold lacquer repair.

Artist Uses Kintsugi to Mend Cracked Streets with Gold. https://mymodernmet.com/sidewalk-kintsukuroi-kintsugi-art/

 

Window onto Bamboo on a Rainy Day

“There are four principal ways of painting bamboo. In fair-weather, the leaves are spread out joyously; in rainy-weather, the leaves hang down despondently, in windy-weather, the leaves cross each other confusedly, and in the dew of early morning the leaves all point up vigorously.” - Henry P. Bowie, On the Laws of Japanese Painting, 1911.

Family apocrypha claims that at 2 I was bilingual in English and Japanese. Our gardener Mr. Yamamoto spoke no English, but our talks gave me an appreciation of bamboo, gardens, and the Japanese grid.

 

On Jane Freilicher (1924-2014) [by John Ashbery]

Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1952. Photo: Walter Silver.

I’M WRITING THIS in a room that contains a number of pictures, mostly by women, as it happens. One is by Jane Freilicher, a still life in pastel that brings together a half-dozen miscellaneous objects, including a few roses that are having the floral equivalent of a bad hair day, a reddish-brown pamphlet that was probably an address book sent to customers by the phone company (remember those?) and a copy of Art News, flopping over the edge of the table, confronting the viewer, in the time-honored tradition of trompe-l'oeil perspective, but also subtly spoofing it. Jane gave the pastel to me once, perhaps to commemorate my becoming an editor at Art News in 1965 and moving back to New York after ten years in France.

Jane was in fact the first person I met in New York. When I arrived in June, 1949, fresh out of Harvard, my friend Kenneth Koch had said I could stay at his apartment while he was away; I had only to pick up the keys from Jane, who lived above him in a small walk-up building overlooking the Third Avenue El at Sixteenth street (one of Kenneth's favorite diversions was to don a rubber ape mask and gaze out the window at trains as they passed by). I rang the bell and Jane came down and invited me up to her place for a coffee. I didn't know much about contemporary art at the time, and had never heard of the exciting teacher Hans Hofmann, whom Jane and other painters I would soon meet had studied with. It turned out that Hofmann, an abstract expressionist, didn't try to impose his own ideas about art on his students, but somehow encouraged them to be more like themselves. I did notice a few small paintings of Jane's in her living room. They seem, in retrospect, funny, discreet, comforting—all things I associate with her.

• 

  Jane Freilicher, Untitled (Still Life with Copy of ARTnews), c.1963, pastel on paper, 23 x 18”.

• 

  Jane Freilicher, Portrait of John Ashbery, c.1968, oil on canvas, 20 x 18”.

On my desk is the announcement of her last show in September, 2014, a color lithograph still life called Roses and Chrysanthemums, 2014. It is more straightforwardly realistic than the Art News pastel, yet there are “mysteries of construction,” in Marianne Moore's phrase. For instance, one rose is so meticulously, magic-realistically rendered that it seems to belong to another picture, indeed to another century. But its “lovely companions,” more summarily sketched in, don't seem to notice or mind particularly. Each has a different agenda. Democracy rules.

That's what I love about her work—the democratic vistas. Her pictures seem to have come into being all by themselves—almost. The painter sort of showed them how to do it and then returned to her other work—fixing lunch, maybe, opening the mail, and coming back to check on the picture and make sure it hasn't gone off the rails. The resulting creations look unfinished and incredibly strong. I made this, each of them seems to say. The artist? Yeah, she helped a little, maybe even a lot. Okay, so it was her idea all along.

John Ashbery is a poet based in New York.

Jane Freilicher, Roses and Chrysanthemums, 2014, color lithograph, 27 x 34”.

 

From Artforum International (January 19, 2015).

 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Sean Sexton [by Emma Trelles]

stump garden, 9" x 12" etching on zinc, sean sexton

Nest Eggs
by Sean Sexton

Yesterday morning I prepared the roe of the mackerel queen
my son caught on a Saturday morning off-shore excursion.
I exhumed two swollen, pink, vein-bound bags from the silver
damsel, and sliced them into pieces to sauté.
I lament her demise, eggs never laid, fish lives
that never will be--eaten and relished with shame.

And the pea-hen that set five eggs in our dooryard
at the foot of St. Francis beneath the penumbra of a sapling
as we watched in awe of her sorry chosen nest, her
unfaltering devotion to the task. She'd stand
a moment, shift the eggs like a careful cook frying
chicken pieces, managing warmth, and some kind of order.

The curvature and needling devise of her beak revealed
its perfection for such, as did her shape, crouched
like morning fog upon a hollow. Day or night, rain or shine,
she stayed. In a downpour at dusk, we tried to help her,
swiped a shower curtain from the guest bath, to drape
in the branches of the tree, affixed with clothespins
and best of intention. We left a radio blaring through the night,

wakened to the crying, same as last month's hen that hatched
three fuzzy balls with legs she led half a week, feeding,
gathering them in when they strayed, until in a single
obliterating moment they were taken. For days she wandered
yelping, searching aimlessly. Now shells lie asunder
like smashed crockery. She's afoot and again, loose in the air--
the sound the world makes. 


Sean Sexton was born in Indian River County and grew up on his family's Treasure Hammock Ranch, eight miles west of Vero Beach, Florida.  He divides his time between taking care of a 600 acre cow-calf and seed stock cattle operation, painting, and writing.  He is married to artist Sharon Sexton; they have two grown children and live on their ranch in a house they built with their hands. He has kept journal-sketch books drawn from his life since 1973 and was awarded an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the State of Florida in 2000-2001. He is the author of Waldo’s Mountain: A Brief History of a Small Elevation; (Waterview Press, 2001); Blood Writing, Poems (Anhinga Press, 2009), and The Empty Tomb (University of Alabama's Slash Pine Press, 2013). He was a presenter at the National Grazing Lands Coalition Conference in Orlando on the subject of Art and Agriculture. He has been a panelist at the Florida Literary Arts Coalition Conference in St. Augustine, FL, since 2012, and a regular performer at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, since 2011. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016. "Nest Eggs" is from his most recent collection of poems, May Darkness Restore (Press 53, 2019).

 

Met Percent: Week Four [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost a Hero

I was given the middle initial “C” in memory of my grandmother Celia, who had not yet died. The “C” was a placeholder for a middle name I would select. At 15, I chose Clisthenes, the Athenian tyrant and founder of the first democracy. 

History contains so much quiet violence.

After 9/11, my “C” and my Clisthenes were removed by the Social Security Administration. Apparently my parents had not included  the “C” on the birth certificate, and I never filed a legal name change (who knew). 

“On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”- Montaigne

 

Difficult Vocabulary

Catullus, Tibullus, Horace and Ginsberg [Carpe Diem, 1968-1972]. 

It was a difficult time. As teenage poets, Simon Schuchat and I published Buffalo Stamps, a poetry magazine, costs partially paid with my Bar Mitzvah money. We would take the Greyhound Bus to NY and search for poets. We found them, and kindly many gave us poems: Ted Berrigan, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Anselm Hollo, Lewis MacAdams, Bruce Andrews. Simon continued on (and continues today!).

Simon somehow got Allen Ginsberg’s phone number and got him to read at our high school. The condition was an airport pick-up and drop-off at his hotel. Simon agreed, not mentioning we weren't old enough to drive. A prize moment, the master reading in the gym, including what our faculty deemed “difficult” vocabulary. “Mouth my tongue touched once or twice all ash [ . . . ] youthful cock tip, curly pubis” - “On Neal’s Ashes” (1971).

Catullus, Carmen 16: My Harvard Loeb Classic edition includes the “difficult” lines  (“Fuck you, up your ass and in your mouth”) in Latin but excludes them in the English on the opposing page. Other editions presented this complete poem as a “fragment”. Ancient censorship! I was proud that our high school allowed vocabulary that Harvard Press did not.

Mesmerized then and now: the comfort of re-reading Kaddish and “Ave atque vale” (“Hail and farewell”) when my father passed away. Two musical tongues: one with and one without definite and indefinite articles. 

 

Honey, Milk, Wine and a Prayer

No matter how humanistic it got, much of the ancient arts served as entry tickets to the underworld.

“The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead, said, ‘Such a one has lived,’ or ‘Such a one has ceased to live’ . . . provided there was any mention of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of consolation”. - Montaigne

 

Lonely?

I was drawn in: Greek sculptures: their anatomy, their balance, their contrapposto. But also static: perfect musculature but never tense. Repressed, idealized, or both? The abstraction was key. Ivins remarks there are few groups of interacting subjects. A singular wrestler. “The figures are frighteningly lonely.” *

I spent many years engrossed in the Classics. My shift from Beat poetry was triggered by the sounds of Virgil’s Bucolics in Latin. I stepped away from the contemporary: the counterculture, DC politics, and student riots, after my unplanned presence at the Chicago Democratic convention of 1968 (not to mention being arrested for high treason; I was 14). I entered abstraction and stayed there for a very long time.

Art and Geometry, William Ivins, Harvard University Press, 1946. (Curator of the Met’s Department of Prints, 1916 - 1946).

 

Every Poem is a Momentary Stay Against Confusion: Didi Jackson's "Moon Jar" [by Elizabeth Powell]

One of the questions poetry asks us is how do we live in a fractured world? Suicide rates in the United States over the past two decades have been on an alarming rise. According to the American Psychological Association there has been a 30 % rise between 2010 and 2016. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in our country. Mental health is still less understood and accepted and treated as is physical illness. The brain is a complex organ.

Poetry is art and art knows truths that science doesn't have terms for yet. Medical studies on the effectiveness of treating emotional disorders is mixed, but expressive writing in psychological therapies has long been used. Confessional poetry was birthed from the womb of psychiatry. Today, the medical humanities and the study of literature as a means to heal and understand is gaining traction, deepening understanding, and building bridges. 

Robert Frost once said that every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world. And so it is with Didi Jackson's forthcoming book of poems from Red Hen Press, Moon Jar. To heal from the terror and pain of surviving the suicide of a loved one is a tall order. Moon Jar seeks to find wholeness in the fissure through art and the natural world.

I spoke with Jackson about the title poem recently. Moon Jar is an ekphrastic poem that uses ancient Korean ceramics as a way to build a metaphor and allegory. The moon jar’s beauty lies in its imperfection. The surface of the moon jar is like the surface of skin, full of various markings and freckles, but perhaps the better for it. The moon jar defines beauty to include imperfection. Here, ekphrasis understands that nothing is perfect. It reminds me of quilters of yesteryear who used to make sure to have one imperfection in their quilts because only God is perfect. 

The idea of modesty in the act of creation informs the tone of this achingly beautiful lyric. The finely hewn couplets and elegant syntax draws us down the page using assonance and shorter lines. The poem has a quiet power in its own testimony. The speaker is lit up by the moon’s nudge toward epiphany, which allows the speaker to merge with all color, all light, a kind of redemption that fills the fissure. A momentary stay.

Moon Jar 

My wedding ring is missing
one small diamond, and 

I like it that way: a reminder
of the imperfect in 

all of us, like that keyhole
size of grief that remains crystalline. 

In Korea, ceramicists for centuries
have made moon jars: testimony

to the virtue of modesty: asymmetrical
warping on the wheel, slumping 

in the pine-heated kiln,
impurities when fired — black

dots and pocks on its surface
like freckles on skin.

I have been kept awake
so many nights by the moon:

its pull on the pines and night birds
and who, like a monk, keeps a sharp order of time.

Never a perfect sphere,
the milky moon jar joins two 

clay hemispheres into one. 
When the light of the moon

finds me, I am the color
of everything in the winter night. 

                (originally appeared in Southern Indiana Review)

EP: Suicide continues to be a major killer in the United States. Your forthcoming book “Moon Jar” speaks to the suicide of your second husband. How did you navigate the difficult terrain of healing and writing? Artistically, were their beacons of light that lead the way?

DJ: So many who take their lives believe there is some part of themselves that is flawed. Maybe someday we will come to value each other exactly as we are. I took consolation and inspiration in the works of a number of poets and artists who served as guides in my writing of Moon Jar. I found myself looking for poets who write about their grief, whether it be from the loss of suicide or not. Ruth Stone, Matt Rasmussen, Mary Jo Bang, Nick Flynn, Edward Hirsch, Anna Akhmatova, Beth Bachman all served as inspirations as writers who have seen the darkest of days and moved through that darkness with their poems. Just after my husband’s suicide, I was especially buoyed by Kevin Young’s anthology on grief, The Art of Losing. Just to know that I wasn’t alone in facing what seemed to be an impossible recovery was incredibly beneficial. Visual artists helped too, modern and abstract artists especially Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Richard Serra. In his essay, “Why Modern Art Matters Now,” Kirk Varnedoe argues that modern art “is a source not of absolutes and enduring truths, but of uncertainties constantly exacerbated, of pieties constantly exploded” and therefore opens itself to a range of human experiences. The work of writing the poems in Moon Jar became a way for me to process what had happened and a way for me to begin to recover by investigating  my own range of emotions. 

EP: In the title poem, Moon Jar, the speaker is reckoning with the imperfect life and how to live it. The moon jar itself is an object that represents a larger trope. I know you are also a teacher of art history, but what made you want to write about the Korean ceramic moon jar and how it relates to the overall narrative of the collection?

DJ: I taught art history for almost ten years. Recently, I was teaching a course on the intersection of language and visual art. Before I could introduce my students to any type of art, I wanted to offer several good reasons why we should look at art in the first place. The moon jar, as Alain de Botton and John Armstrong mention in their book Art as Therapy, is a great example of morality taught through visual art. They ascertain that art can serve many functions. Moon jars are made by joining two hemispheres of clay. That metaphor alone is so beautiful. My poem mentions a wedding ring, a western symbol of unity. But, what I love most about the moon jar is that it is beloved for the imperfections that come from combining the two halves, firing in the kiln often adds blemishes and spots. In a time when we are obsessed with perfection, this idea is refreshing. 

 

Didi Jackson is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. 

Met Percent: Week Three [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost Gods

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.” - Montaigne

Entering the galleries of Greece and Rome was startling, coming as I did from Egyptian art. Jackal heads in profile on frontal torsos had become familiar, normal. 

But a new normal arrived: geometry, anatomical form, and gods “like us”. “Numberless are the world’s wonders, but none / more wonderful than man . . .”      - Sophocles, Antigone

 

“Divine Proportion”

500-400 BCE. Big Math. Discovered, lost, and rediscovered . . . “Things which coincide with one another are equal one to another.” - Euclid

The original Met logo was based on a woodcut by Friar Luca Pacioli (1445–1517). He taught mathematics to Leonardo da Vinci, and Leonardo illustrated his “On the Divine Proportion”.

You get an actual measure of golden ratio proportion and “beauty” using the golden ratio face calculator that is included in PhiMatrix golden ratio design software (2012).

3G

“The Three Graces, so popular in their time . . . that they appear on mosaics, frescoes, sarcophagi, silver tableware, terra-cotta oil lamps, personal objects such as engraved gems, and even coins.” Roman art, gallery 169, MetText

Greece and Rome continue: Versace’s Medusa; Super Bowl Roman numerals (I - LIII); the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials; and of course the precedent for txting: the abbreviation. 

a.k.a., a.m., p.m., i.e., e.g., p.s., (sic), vs., etc.

Laws of the Folds

Veils in stone. Glorious in execution. Whenever I feel that the artistry in representing the fold is underrated, I look to George Bridgman. I used to give copies of Drawing the Draped Figure: The Seven Laws of the Folds to many design colleagues.

Although “not on view”, the annotation of the folds of an evening dress in the Met refers to Oscar Wilde’s principles of dress: "I am not proposing any antiquarian revival of ancient costume, but trying merely to point out the right laws of dress, laws which are dictated by art and not by archaeology, by science and not by fashion; and just as the best work of art in our days is that which combines classic grace with absolute reality, from continuation of the Greek principles of beauty . . .  will come, I feel certain, the costumes of the future." 

 

Figure/Ground

Q: What is it about Greek figure that makes me crazy?

A: It grounds what will become neoclassic - the “master drawing” tradition I love.

 

For Summer: Florida Poets: Angela Narciso Torres [by Emma Trelles]

flamingo hammock palm, 24 x 24 in. oil on canvas, eleanor blair

Harvesting the Heart
by Angela Narciso Torres

                                    In Florida, I shall eat a palm seed and see if that’ll grow a new heart for me.

                                                                                                                                    -D.H. Lawrence
Indeed, swallowing a seed seems the better option.
For stealing a palm’s heart from its solitary stem
is back-breaking work and spells certain death
for the tree. The part you can eat, otherwise known
as swamp cabbage, lobster of vegetables, or
burglar’s thigh, lies deep in the green trunk between
woody bark and where the fronds begin. You’ll need
a machete to work down the trunk, cutting away
fibrous layers one at a time, each about the weight
of a small child. You’ll want to give up after the third
or fourth layer. Don’t stop. Nearer the core it’s denser,
sap-drenched, and very tender. You’d be surprised,
despite how much you’ve uncovered—arms sore,
fingers splintered—the sheer size of that heart.

 

Angela Narciso Torres  is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Book Literature Award/Poetry. Recent work appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, and TriQuarterly. Her chapbook, To the Bone, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications and her second full length collection, What Happens Is Neither, from Four Way Books.  A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Ragdale Foundation. She resides in South Florida where she joins the 2020 Palm Beach Poetry Festival faculty as a manuscript consultant.

Summer studio shots with Mary Ann Strandell... [by Katie Peyton Hofstadter]

This month, I am locked in the shimmery construction sites of Mary Ann Strandell. I snapped these process shots in her studio, and then we planted a geranium border in her garden. Her husband Michael Rees also creates fantasies: giant AR-enabled inflatables into which you can project your dreams or nightmares.

I like her paintings at this stage, when it looks like they could collapse. The light is gnawing at the western edge of the scaffolding; the light is smashed into the sixth floor balcony. It is drippy with life juices. At this moment, the painting still believes it can grow up to be an astronaut. (Is the painting female? Will there will be a space suit in its size?)

Mary Ann Strandell
Image 1: Tower/construction/Tribeca, Image 2: Tower/cell

The Met Percent: Week Two [by Alec Bernstein]

Almost a Face

Faces are distant, a bit melancholy, with a youthful, somewhat automatic beauty”. Egyptian art, gallery 121, MetText 

This is the beginning of semi-circular eyes. Semi is sufficient, more than sufficient in these halls of faces.

Some faces are more distant than others . . .

 

Ruin Lust

Wooden boats to sail to the afterlife. Fragments of jewelry. Wondrous arrangements of shards. Marred lotus blossoms. Photographs when sepia reigned. 

Ruins, real or confected, embody "the triumph of time over strength, a melancholy but not unpleasant thought". - Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, 1762.

‘But the closer I came to the ruins . . . the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe.” - W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995.

“I see a day in the future when the world as we know it has ended and the only reason I am able to survive is the experience I have gained playing these [post apocalyptic role playing] games. Crazy, I know but a man is allowed to dream right?” - Bill Wilson, [PARPG Review], Appauls, 2019. See Frostpunk, Horizon Zero Dawn, Neverdark, Wasteland 2.

 

Not Documented

“With time and custom a man doth acquaint and enure himself to all strangeness; but the more I frequent and know myself, the more my deformitie astonieth and the less I understand myself.” - Montaigne

 

On Entering the “Afterwork“

From the galleries 100-138 covering the Kingdoms of Egypt emerge the first learnings. The slow non-directed viewings of these relics allow memory to inform the present. What will my “function” be in the afterwork? I start at 65 this intuitive tracing . . . my Papyrus of Alec.

 

4.5% Met*

*At this writing, rooms 139-149 seem to be missing. So far, not one of the entry staff can explain the missing rooms or room numbers. These will be investigated.

PoetsArtists: Painting the Figure Now [by Didi Menendez]

 

View in Browser PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW Please join us at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art for the Opening Ceremony July 11, 2019 from 6 to 8 PM PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW   Many of the artworks you will see tonight are available from Artsy and Artnet. View pricing and availability now.     Check out the article in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine. Check out the July issue of American Art Collector. The inside front over ad of the July-August issue features a painting by Sara Scribner. Check it out on Instagram.   PoetsArtists , 604 Vale Street, Bloomington, Illinois 61701, USA Unsubscribe

Met Percent: Week One [by Alec Bernstein]

The Met Percent

Q: If I move to NYC, which I did, could I walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, view the collection, gallery by gallery, in ascending order, and how long would it take? The galleries begin at room 100 and end at room 999.

A: I propose to walk to the Met 100 times, viewing 8-10 rooms per visit, during the next 2 years. Each visit will be at least 1 hour, but not more than 4, depending on subject, condition, and the intensity of my response. The method will be “of Montaigne” via Gide. Documentation follows.

Alec Bernstein, April 2019-2021

0% (En Route)

Day 1, I walk through Central Park. My pre-viewing begins with all these curves, en route at 0%.

On Montaigne’s Essays: “Written without preconceived plan, without method, as events or his reading chanced to suggest, he claims to give us his whole self.” - André Gide, whose edition of Montaigne is in my left pocket. Sketchbook in my right.

On Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park: Pedestrians are led without realizing they’re being led. The sensation of feeling lost yet completely confident lets you easily return to your starting point. See his 4th Design Principal: Aim for the unconscious.

Weapons First

I am standing in the Met, in a gallery of glass, light, and quiet. The indoor weather is perfect for looking. 

“When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.” - Montaigne

Yes, somehow it is always weapons first.

 

Kid Egypt

Old stories  

“Egyptologist” was my answer to “when you grow up. . .”. Why, I don't know, but I remember a friend and I built a cardboard plane in kindergarten. We set the course for Cairo Egypt, a difficult flight. I was the pilot in charge of the weather conditions and worried about the storms in March and April. 

But the sands and winds, once we blanketed the windshield, didn't matter, and in the cockpit, totally dark, sleep was easy. Through play and rest. And when I woke, my co-pilot had parachuted. I was alone. But in my smallest pocket was the emergency payphone dime: call home: “Come pick me up, I’m stuck at the Cairo Airport.”

I was not alone in the swirl of “ancient Egypt” in the century of media. Was it National Geographic that sharpened the Egyptologist in me? Lon Chaney’s “The Mummy’s Tomb”? Or the rescue of a genuine Egyptian temple to 5th Avenue? 

I collected Sir E.A. Wallis Budge volumes (the once-eminent British Egyptologist). My treasure, his very rare  Dictionary of Hieroglyphics, was stolen from the parking lot of the Brooklyn Museum. Of course I searched for what any modern tomb robber would surely abandon, but it was lost in Brooklyn.

 

Regulatory Art

As it turns out, you can only get to the afterlife if you have a legitimate function there. Pharaohs are needed for “leadership” . If they’ve added your image into their burial art, you might have a shot.  Otherwise, forget it. No reward for the unconnected pious. 

Gold toe thimble polisher could be your ticket.

Lilac Season [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Édouard Manet (1832-1883), White Lilac, oil on canvas circa 1882

Every spring my mother would drive to the abandoned mansion on Carlton Road. The long path leading to the front door was shaded by a canopy of overgrown lilac bushes. She would cut as many as we could hold, reaching ever higher for the biggest and most fragrant flowers. When we arrived home, she arranged them in a cut-glass vase, a wedding gift, and placed the vase on our piano so that it was reflected in the mirror above the staircase.

--sdl

Is Your Roof Next? [by Katie Peyton]

 

This is a shark on a house.

 

It follows the time honored tradition of shark art, and art on top of houses.

 

It’s a statement against dropping shit from the sky.

 

What else do we need to know? 

 

According to the Oxford City Council: a lot. Should it be removed? Maintained? Landmarked forever? More importantly, if we allow one person to have shark on their house, does that mean we have to let everyone have a shark on their house? What about a dolphin? A turtle? A giant Pokémon? In other words, is the Headington Shark a gateway drug?

 

I've thought about it, and I’m pretty sure I personally don’t have much cause for concern. My building (a 1928 walkup at the edge of Greenpoint BK) is an unlikely target for guerrilla shark action. First, the shark would have to access the roof, which is not going to happen. The super is definitely not going to answer the phone. The shark can send an email to the management company, which will be received never. Someone’s cousin may come and look at the shark’s apartment and say it’s an old building, and also, no to the roof.

 

In fact, I have seen no sharks on any roofs in my neighborhood, in the time since this shark was installed in 1986. The only thing I’ve seen on top of buildings are other buildings: new construction condominiums, which literally snake over, in an L fashion, to hover on top of prewar walkups.

 

So, even if a shark does land on the roof, a condominium will probably land on top of it in three years. 

 

+++

 

I cannot believe The New Yorker was also working on a piece about this, but if you want actual reporting, you can read the whole thing here.

Remembering John Ashbery: "As I recall, John mostly listened and I mostly babbled" [by Jane Hammond]

Midwife to Gargoyles (c) Jane Hammond (click for a full-sized image)

 
My story starts with Robinson Crusoe and ends with a martini. Like Raymond Roussel, I’ll try to write between the two. In 1989 I had my first NYC one-person show at Exit Art which featured 18 paintings—a big show.  My good friend Trevor Winkfield brought John Ashbery to the show and reported back to me that John was enthusiastic about the paintings. Without this favor from Trevor, the whole story never gets off the ground.

I needed a catalogue essay for a show in Sweden and John agreed to write it.  To date, it is still something I treasure—as John compared me to Robinson Crusoe—seeing in him another person with diverse goals, restricted means and imaginative aptitudes applied toward that differential.  John sent Ragnar Stromberg –his Swedish translator to my Gothenburg opening.  The whole thing felt felicitous and easy and real.

Some years later I woke up one day with an idea.  As background to this let me say, I had made paintings using a lexicon of found imagery for a number of years and all the paintings had numerical titles—there wasn’t a single word attached to these paintings. I had long loved John’s poems and one of the things I admired is the bricolage of found lapidary language set into the matrix of the poem but still retaining a strong scent of its foundness, of it coming from somewhere else—cooking, television ads, the cartoons, women’s magazines, etc. And I might have seen a poem of John’s in the New Yorker that read like a list of titles—or I might be making that up.

No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar (c) Jane Hammond (click for a full-sized image)

Anyhow, this is all pre-Email so I screwed up my courage and I called John. I reminded him that I have had only numerical identifiers for my paintings, that I used found imagery from a great variety of sources and I suggested the idea of “found titles” for my paintings.  That is, found to me.  I suggested that he write a set of painting titles and I, afterwards, would then make the paintings for those titles.  I gave him no further information, hints, instructions or thoughts about what I was looking for with these titles.  In fact, I had no agenda, I wanted to be surprised.

As I recall, John mostly listened and I mostly babbled.  At a certain point I said “well, why don’t you think about it and call me back if you are interested.”  I felt a little embarrassed that I had even presumed that this great poet would want to spend any time creating something for me.

A week later the phone rang and it was John saying a bit mischievously, “I have your titles.  I’m faxing them now.”  I will never forget hanging over the fax machine, reading upside down and seeing forty-four titles spill forth:  Confessions of a Fop, The Hagiography of this Moment, Midwife to Gargoyles, The Soapstone Factory, No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar, Bread and Butter Machine, Prevents Furring, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, Sea of Troubles.

I was not excited, I was nervous, but I allayed my fear by thinking “Well, if I can’t do this no one but John and me will know I even tried.”  I looked at the list for days and then one day when I was taking a walk an idea for the first painting, “Sore Models,” came into my head. When I finished it another idea came.  I never had an agenda for which title I would do next or even which ones I preferred, I would just kind of look at the list from time to time like a musician would play scales and then boom a song would pop into my head.  Some of the titles I left until last I now like the most.

In the end I made a painting for all of the 44 titles he created for me and I made several paintings for some titles, so that there are 64 large oil paintings in the Jane Hammond/John Ashbery Collaboration dating from 1993-2002.

In 1997 I invited John to come and see an exhibition of the Hammond/ Ashbery paintings at my gallery in Soho.  The gallery stayed open late for us and the dealer, eager to meet John, waltzed up and said “I have a nice bottle of white on ice for you.”  Actually, said John rolling his eyes in that Warner Bros way of his and speaking with great emphasis on the third word, “Can you freeze my martini?” Whereupon he pulled a pint glass jar full of clear liquid out of the pocket of his chinos.

Prevents Furring (c) Jane Hammond (click for a full-sized image)

Jane Hammond works in print, paint, photography, and sculpture to create a wide array of art that is often based on dreams and literature. Her work has been exhibited in New York City and in galleries and museums around the world. She lives in New York City. Read her 2002 interview with David Lehman here. Find The Complete John Ashbery Collaboration (1993-2001) by Jane Hammond here.

from the archive; first posted September 2017

Every Edge of the World: Morehshin Allahyari’s "The Laughing Snake" [by Katie Peyston Hoftstadter]

What I notice first: the carved wooden snake, glowing pink and gold in the darkened room. Her lips curl back to laugh, showing teeny-tiny fangs. In the corner, a hypertext narrative glitters quietly, ready to fork.

 

Laughter isn’t a common theme in art and technology, though maybe it should be. It is a powerful game-changer. It allows us to shift one mindset to another. According to George Carlin, laughter creates a space just large enough for a new idea to slip in.

 

Laughter can also be a purge, allowing us to process cruel and absurd truths that might otherwise drive us insane.

I’ve traveled to 205 Hudson Street to see the The Laughing Snake, by Brooklyn-based Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari. See it in person, that is; I had previously experienced the hypertext narrative online, through the Whitney Museum’s Artport, a portal to Internet and new media art.

 

Morehshin Allahyari, She Who Sees the Unknown: The Laughing Snake, 2018. 3D-printed sculpture, touchscreen with hypertext narrative, mirrors, & sound. Installed in Refiguring the Future, Hunter College Art Galleries, 2019.

 

Allahyari's latest series, She Who Sees the Unknown, re-examines female monsters of Middle Eastern origin. The work slides smoothly between the past and present, drawing parallels between ancient legends and contemporary narratives and asking: How are the myths of the past shaping the technology of our future?

 

In this series, you’ll encounter dark goddesses, sinister prophecies, trickster jinn. Set at the intersection of real and virtual worlds, Allahyari explores the mysteries at the sharp edges of our culture, and in the cracks between our stories. She knows the best art often comes from these gaps. 

 

Screenshot: Moreshin Allahyari, The Laughing Snake, hypertext narrative on Artport.

 

The Laughing Snake

 

According to the Book of Felicity, an illuminated manuscript from the 16th century Ottoman Empire, the Laughing Snake was a female jinn who went on a murderous rampage. Day in and day out, she murdered humans and animals to the sound of her own hysterical laughter. Finally, a wise man came up with the brilliant plan: to hold a mirror to her face. The jinn laughed at her own reflection, until she died. 

 

A Kickstarter Worth Supporting: For Walt Whitman’s birthday: War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh & Robert Schultz

Our great national poet’s concerns during the Civil War apply with striking relevance in our own moment of war and dividedness. Whitman’s humane example and his central trope—the leaves of grass as sign of democracy and renewal—rebuke directly the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Blood and Soil.” For Whitman, American blood in American soil was not a tribal claim, and for him “the land entire” was the most fitting memorial to the war dead, “South or North, ours all”:  ". . . [T]he land entire [is] saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw . . .."

In War Memoranda, forthcoming in May in time for the bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birth, Binh Danh’s photographs of Civil War memorial sites, using the nineteenth-century cyanotype process, evoke at once the past and present. And Robert Schultz’s chlorophyll prints offer portraits of Whitman and Civil War soldiers embodied in the flesh of leaves, physically enacting the central trope of Leaves of Grass—especially when the leaf used has been plucked from a “witness tree” known to have stood on a battlefield during the war. This book of art, poetry, and comment includes a generous selection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, 51 photographs, with essays by poets David Lehman and Stanley Plumly and by scholars Barbara Bair (Library of Congress) and Molly Rogers (author of Delia’s Tears). War Memoranda will be printed in a fine art edition limited to 500 copies and is available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign that will end April 2, 2019. Signed copies and original artworks by Danh and Schultz are available as premiums. For more information use the search link http://kck.st/2DvOExn or go to Kickstarter.com and search “War Memoranda.”

-- sdl

Happy Fasnacht Day! [by Laura Orem]

The Fight between Carnival and Lent, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, oil on panel, 1559

It's Shrove Tuesday, and while New Orleans may have Mardi Gras, we here in Pennsylvania Dutch Country have Fasnacht Day.

What is a fasnacht, you ask? It is a kind of super-doughnut, made with potato flour, sugar, and lard. Don't scoff. They are terrific. They are only sold one day a year - today, the day before Ash Wednesday. Historically, they were the last gastronomic hurrah before Lent, a way to use up all the sugar and lard in the pantry before forty days of fasting began.  As you might imagine, they are not health food. No one, as far as I am aware, has ever calculated the calories in a fasnacht. Really, it's better not to know.

What distinguishes fasnachts from ordinary doughnuts is their muchness. They are heavier (potato flour and lard will do that) and usually significantly bigger. They have a wonderfully crispy outside and a decadently soft inside. They come in many varieties - glazed, powdered, filled - but my favorite are ones that are simply dusted with granulated sugar. Heaven.

Fasnachts are serious business here in the Susquehanna Valley. Advertising begins weeks ahead of time, and bakeries and supermarkets open early to handle the rush. When I went to the grocery store to pick up ours today, there were extra tables outside, piled high with fasnachts of all complexion wafting their yeasty aroma through the chilly air, enticing any reluctant buyers (not that there are many of those). And if you think you'll just pick up your dozen on the way home from work, think again: by suppertime, there is not a fasnacht left to be had for love nor money in York County.

So, while the good people of rural Pennsylvania are not ones for gaudy beads, jazz music, and excess alcohol, they do have their moments of over-indulgence. Ah, fasnachts! How we love you!

"Meltwater Pulse" and Other Possible Futures: The Extinction Art of Sofía Córdova [by Katie Peyton]

I’ve been looking at a lot of art about death lately. It isn’t hard to find.

A close friend is drawn to art about despair: dystopia, satirical monuments, a pointing-out of destruction and consequences. Fewer and farther between, he says, is the opposite. It’s hard to find a serious art about hope.

But I think that many young artists are doing just that. They know if they can't transcend a bleak vision of a future planet, there may not be much planet left for them.

This month, I’m posting the work of Sofía Córdova, whose art is a profound vision of human survival and empathy. I believe we can only want what we can imagine. Right now, our government wants to spend billions of dollars on symbolic infrastructure—the same leadership that responded with paper towels as three to five thousand Americans perished during and after Hurricane Maria.

Sofía Córdova was born in Puerto Rico, works in Oakland, and is featured in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Sofía Córdova
Meltwater Pulse 1A, 2016-2018
Taxidermy rooster, pheasant tail, cast head of hornbill, wire, resin, oil paint, wood, steel pipe, sand, black seamless, dried flowers, metal conduit

This is an installation by Sofía Cordova. It depicts a familiar scene: A bird perches on a branch. But it doesn’t look like any bird you’ve ever seen before, and the tree is a log spiked on a steel beam.

In this work, the final frontier is not space but the next great extinction (and what, if anything, comes after). This bird has made it through the apocalyptic event. Its body is patched together from a rooster, a pheasant, and the cast head of a hornbill. Was this creature created by mutation or code? It rises with its wings outstretched from a reconstituted tree. 

The title feels both chilling and hopeful. The melting of glacial ice and the permafrost will absolutely change life as we know it, altering the climate (it is -65° in Chicago right now, thanks to a polar vortex) unlocking ancient viruses and bacteria, and releasing rock-eating sulfuric acid. But Pulse is life, enduring even through change that is currently unimaginable.

Is it only a matter of time before the whole scene pixelates into a very different sort of resurrection? In the face of climate and human chaos, it is a monument to survival.

This is a piece about change, but it is also a piece about human bodies.

A clue to understanding this series is a performance, BILONGO LILA: Nobody Dies in a Foretold War. This performance was staged at Mills College Greek Amphiteater in 2017.

Note: In lieu of credits, the first 3 minutes introduce the performers and musicians, who are graduate students from the university.

The performance begins at [3:00], with the words: “The important thing to remember is that time has officially ended. Close your eyes and trust my voice. You have come a long way to learn how to die all over again.”

I’m including it even though it is long, split-screen, and it should be seen in person--or at least much, much bigger.

1,500 years into the future, survivors of humanity are struggling to mutate and piece together a new culture, on a planet made strange by the aging and corrupted digital interventions of late technological capitalism. The environment is a digital projection (including pixellating oceans, ruined cities, and lush forests). The set is made of reclaimed sails—another nod to aged-out technology.

Córdova leaves room for the performers to improvise, and at times (especially in the beginning), the message can land a bit on the nose. But in a culture of fake news and alternative facts, this directness feels more courageous than simplistic.

The performance is about possible futures, technological capitalism, and corruption, but most powerfully it is about bodies. In her world, human survivors recognize and transcend the cultural myths of biology, identity markers, and violence to create a more hopeful society, even on a vastly altered planet. At [26:39], words of science fiction writer John V. Marsch appear on the screen: “No it was not necessary for us to lose our appearance for you to gain it.” In the foreground, two dancers perform a melting pas de deux of mutation and perhaps love, melding into a single creature in the pink light. Painted musicians vocalize the sounds of nature and technology, while on their music stands, laptops are flipped open alongside sheet music.

There are elements of science fiction, dance culture, Afro-futurism, medicine songs, Santeria. The work also quotes Ursula K. Le Guin. There is a hopeful sense that like this bird, the most fluid of us may survive.

When You Discover A Bruegel Is Not A Bruegel [by Lloyd Schwartz]

(Ed note:  Lloyd Schwartz made an interesting discovery. Read about here and over at ARTery. sdl)

The Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) is one of the most admired painters in the history of Western art. His ravishing and poignant "Hunters in the Snow" is one of the world’s best loved paintings. And he’s especially loved by poets. William Carlos Williams was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his 1962 collection "Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems," which includes his extraordinary series that gives the book its title. (The "h" in Bruegel, once commonly used, is no longer considered correct.) And one of the great poems about art is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (from 1938, on the brink of world-wide suffering), which is about a painting called "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" in the museum in Brussels that gives the poem its title.

If you look very closely, you can see the spindly legs of a small body that has just fallen into the sea, while the country folk on the shore are just going through their daily routine:

About suffering, they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure…

[Ed note: Click here for David Lehman's take on Auden's poem.] I was in Vienna at the end of October, to see the once-in-a-lifetime Bruegel exhibition (on view through Jan. 13) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which owns the world’s largest collection of Bruegels — 12 of his surviving 40 paintings. That one room with all 12 paintings has been one of the supreme locations for great art. Now this show, celebrating the 450th anniversary of the master’s death, has brought together for the very first time practically every Bruegel painting not too fragile to travel, plus his even rarer drawings and a selection of contemporary prints based on original Bruegel drawings mostly lost.

continue reading here. 

Lloyd Schwartz’s latest book of poems, "Little Kisses," was published by the University of Chicago Press. His work has been selected for the Best American Poetry, the Best of the Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize. He is the classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and senior editor of Classical Music for New York Arts. Longtime classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1994. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English.