The Best American Poetry

Lear is Real: "Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are. . ."

Poor naked wretches, whereso'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.

--- King Lear, act III, scene 4

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

Larry Rivers, August 17, 1923 - August 14, 2002: A Master of Rhythm and Hues [by David Lehman]

Happy birthday, Larry Rivers. You'd have been 99 today.

Yitzchoch Grossberg, your given name, translates as Isaac Big Mountain

(on the model of Giussepe Verdi equals Joe Green)

and I love you and your saxophone on 14th Street, and how

you sang "Don't Worry 'Bout Me" in the green room

with Ashbery, Koch, and Jane Freilicher

for an event at the New School that I organized

and moderated, and I hope they taped it.

When was that? 1998? 1999?

You sat to my left and whispered in my ear

and people in the audience thoght it must be something important

when in reality you complained about the length of the program,

and Jane had a cold, and Kenneth was mad at John for reading longer than he had.

Koch read himself and O'Hara; Ashbery, himself and Schuyler,

and you showed slides and talked.

At the Knickerbocker, Larry Rivers and the Climax Band played

and you sang:  "I'm afraid the masquerade

is over, and so is love," but our love is here to stay,

and I wish you were here to hear me say it.

Read about this wonderful painter here - it's the review of Larry's autobiography I wrote for the Washington Post in December 1992. I've been told that it should be read first, and the birthday wishes above after.  It is reproduced below the picture, which is a detail of a larger photo from the late 1950s, in which, facing Larry, is Frank O'Hara. They were collaborating on Stones, the poems and drawings that were released in an edition of twenty-five (described as a "portfolio of 12 lithograph[s] and title page on linen rag paper") that would set you back $45,000 were you to try to buy a copy today. On the table between the artistic collaborators are cans of Rheingold, the dry beer.

"A Master of Rhythm and Hues"
by David Lehman
Washington Post, December 27, 1992

LARRY RIVERS's life is as colorful as the spectacularly original canvases that have firmly established his place among the major avant-garde artists of our time. Born Yitzroch Grossberg in the Bronx, Rivers was an uninhibited, grass-smoking, sex-obsessed jazz saxophonist in his early twenties when he picked up a paintbrush for the first time. The year was 1945; the war was about to end, and New York City was on the cusp of becoming the art capital of the world.

Encouraged by such estimable painters as Jane Freilicher and Nell Blaine, Rivers soon "began thinking that art was an activity on a 'higher level' than jazz," because music is "abstract" and can't be done alone whereas painting is a solo performance that allows the artist to "make nameable things." Rivers took drawing classes with the great Hans Hofmann, but he always retained the improvisatory ideal of jazz, and the make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach has served him well. Even his most monumental constructions, such as "The History of the Russian Revolution" (1965) in Washington's Hirshhorn Museum, have a fresh air of spontaneity about them, as if they had just been assembled a few minutes ago.

Rivers had a meteoric rise. A Pierre Bonnard exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1948 proved to have a decisive influence on his sense of color and composition. No less an eminence than Clement Greenberg, then the nation's foremost art critic, declared in 1949 that Rivers was already "a better composer of pictures than was Bonnard himself in many instances" -- and this on the basis of Rivers's first one-man show. Though Greenberg would later modify his praise and then withdraw it altogether, he had launched the career of "this amazing beginner."

If one condition of avant-garde art is that it is ahead of its time, and another is that it proceeds from a maverick impulse and a contrary disposition, Rivers's vanguard status was assured from the moment when, at the height of Abstract Expressionism, he audaciously made representational paintings, glorifying nostalgia and sentiment while undercutting them with metropolitan irony. His pastiches of famous paintings of the past -- such as his irreverent rendition of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" (1953) -- seemed to define the playfully ironic attitudes of post-modernism years before anyone had thought up that term. And his paintings of brand labels, found objects, and pop icons -- Camel cigarettes, Dutch Masters cigars, the menu at the Cedar Bar in 1959, a French 100-franc note -- demonstrate what is vital about Pop Art while escaping the limitations of that movement.

Rivers has his own style of painting: He relies on "charcoal drawing and rag wiping." Also distinctive is his prankish sense of humor. In 1964 he painted a spoof of Jacques-Louis David's famous "Napoleon in His Study," the portrait of the emperor in the classic hand-in-jacket pose. Rivers's version, full of smudges and erasures, manages to be iconoclastic and idolatrous at once. The finishing touch is the painting's title: Rivers called it "The Greatest Homosexual."

“What Did I Do?,” Rivers's autobiographical ramble, conveys the excitement, the nervous energy, and the sublime agitation of life in New York City at a time when rents were cheap, Lester Young was president of the republic of jazz, and painters of the caliber of Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline hung out at the Cedar Bar, which thus became, in Rivers's phrase, "the G-spot of the art scene." Obsessed with "art and the quest for sex," Rivers left his wife for the floating Bohemia of Manhattan, where he shot up heroin, was openly bisexual, and lived with his two sons and his mother-in-law, Berdie, whom he painted -- sometimes in the nude.

Rivers had (and has) an adventuresome spirit, an appetite for notoriety, and a nose for publicity. He won a lot of money on "The $64,000 Challenge," one of the fixed television game shows of the 1950s, until he met his Waterloo when he was asked to identify the maiden name of Renoir's wife. Later, Rivers made the most of his opportunity to testify at a grand jury investigation of the program, acting as if the courtroom were an extension of show biz by other means. One of the show's producers, Rivers tells us, was his friend Shirley Bernstein, "sister of Lenny." When Rivers denied that she had fed him the answers, the assistant district attorney fired back, "Why are you protecting her, Mr. Rivers?" In response, Rivers writes, he "rose from the witness chair and said dramatically, 'Because I love her -- and I don't care if the whole world knows it!'"

Long on anecdote, short on analysis, "What Did I Do?" is full of juicy stories about Rivers's friends and associates, and he seems to have been chums with aesthetic experimentalists of all stripes, from the Living Theatre's Julian Beck and Judith Malina ("violent pacifists," Rivers calls them) to John Cage (whose music "was like a sermon by Spike Jones"), Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, not to mention the poets of the New York School, with whom Rivers became fast friends: Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Harry Mathews. He and O'Hara ("a charming madman") were intermittently lovers. They collaborated on several inspired projects, such as a hilarious send-up of an art manifesto, "How to Proceed in the Arts": "How can we paint the elephants and the hippopotamuses? How are we to fill the large empty canvas at the end of the large empty loft? You do have a loft, don't you, man?"

Rivers is a world-class talker, and reading “What Did I Do?” is like listening to a candid, manic monologue. It is an experiment in discontinuous narrative, with frequent flashbacks and flash-forwards, and it is an awful lot of fun. It isn't always easy to piece together the chronology -- Rivers places his trust in memory, that least reliable of fact-checkers -- but that isn't the point. The real subject of this book -- and its greatest pleasure -- is the personality of the artist: mercurial, profane, madcap, somewhat exhibitionistic, sometimes puerile: a wiseguy who gets a kick out of shocking the censor.

In the book's preface, Rivers introduces us to his collaborator on this project, the writer Arnold Weinstein: "I knew the three women he married, he probably slept with both my wives. What can I say? He's an old pal." That is the authentic Rivers tone, and it spices up every page. Some of his riffs are extraordinary. One of his sons is "deranged but normal in every other way." Rivers and his second wife, Clarice, "parted in 1967 and have been married ever since." Or consider this echo of the book's title: "For someone who has always had fantasies of living in a whorehouse like my heroes Pascin, Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Utamaro, what am I doing with five children, adding up to 252 pairs of shoes, 1,008 boxes of cereal, hot and cold, 8,660 quarts of milk, etc., plus 23 analysts, including mine?"

David Lehman's recent books include "Operation Memory," a collection of poems, and "Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man."

A review of

“WHAT DID I DO? The Unauthorized Autobiography of Larry Rivers”
By Larry Rivers with Arnold Weinstein
Aaron Asher/HarperCollins
498 pp. $30

When Life followed Art, which returned the compliment

Life magazine, August 8, 1949. "Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?" The artIcle that changed the art world. Merely by asking the question, Life made it a self-fulfilling prophecy, demonstrating the power of the media and the tendency of journalistic questions (like "Is God Dead?" on the cover of a 1966 issue of Life's sister magazine, Time) to slide into declarations. "Life -- consider the alternative" is attributed to Marshall McLuhan. I had erroneously thought the phrase served as an ad campaign for Life, the alternative to which was either Look or death. -- DL

 On the cover: Deborah Reynolds.

"The real movement is through ideas": Beth McDermott & Maya Sonenberg in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

In writings on her time as editor of The Dial, Marianne Moore coined the term "conversity" to describe the inherently dialogic nature of poetry.  In that spirit, I'm pleased to present the following conversation between two contemporary writers who are both intriguing in their critiques of traditional genre categories:  Maya Sonenberg, a masterful storyteller, who frequently places the tools of poetry in the service of narrative, and Beth McDermott, whose ekphrastic poems often apply performative language and lyricism to the task of engaging with, and thinking through, the questions posed by works of visual art.  As this conversation unfolds, McDermott and Sonenberg consider such compelling topics as the gender politics of judgment, the relationship between writing and family, and the interplay of innovative writerly technique and the deeply personal.  

Maya Sonenberg (above left) grew up in New York City and lived in Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, California, Oregon, and Paris, France before settling in Seattle, where she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Washington.  Her newest collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters has received the Sullivan Prize and will be published by the University of Notre Dame press in August 2022. Her previous collections are Cartographies (winner of the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature) and Voices from the Blue Hotel. Other fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Web Conjunctions, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review, The Literarian, Hotel Amerika, and numerous other places.

Beth McDermott’s poetry appears in Pine Row, Tupelo Quarterly, Terrain.org, and Southern Humanities Review. Reviews and criticism about art and ecology appear in American Book Review, After the Art, Kenyon Review Online, and The Trumpeter. She’s an Assistant Professor of English at the University of St. Francis and recipient of a Distinguished Teaching Award, an Illinois Speaks Micro-Grant, and first place in the Regional Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest.  Her first book, Figure 1, just launched from Pine Row Press. 

Beth McDermott: We both write about parenting. In a couple of my poems, i.e. “Judgment” or “Getting Ready,” I consider what it means to be judged as a parent. I see common feelings among my speakers and your character in “Painting Time,” for example. In that story, written from the second person point of view, we get the partner’s perspective of the “she,” who has spent most of her time as a parent looking for time to paint. How does the choice of that viewpoint speak to what it means to be a “bad mother”? 

Maya Sonenberg: When I started writing “Painting Time,” I gave myself the challenge of using second person point of view, which I had never really done before, not that type of second person anyway where a narrator addresses one of the characters, rather than one character addressing another. I think I chose to address the husband/father as the “you” for a couple of reasons. The woman in that story is working so hard at being a “good” mother that she fears/feels she’s become a “bad” artist, and I wanted to see this struggle from the outside, through her spouse’s eyes but without the potential solipsism of the first person point of view. I hope the reader can see that he doesn’t think she’s a bad artist or a bad mother; she has internalized those judgments. However, while he’s extremely sympathetic towards her plight, and in fact tries to do whatever he can to help, he’s ultimately completely clueless about what she’s going through and also sort of jealous of her connection to the children. I carefully chose to present the male characters in this story and in “Hunters and Gatherers” in as sympathetic a light as I could muster to highlight the fact that misogyny, sexism, and expectations around motherhood are systemic rather than the actions or beliefs of isolated “bad” men.

"I look like I paint. Who am I?" [by David Lehman]

Rhapsodic blues. . taciturn Cal Coolidge. . ."you lose"
as the market reaches record highs, speculators buy on margin,
Babe Ruth makes more money than the president, having had a better year,
Lucky Lindy to Paris, Showboat on Broadway, Al Jolson on screen,
Bernice bobs her hair and wears the diamond bigger than the Ritz,
Flappers flirt, philosophers drink bootleg gin,
And this singular fellow may be looking out the window
Of a hotel room with luggage beside the bed
A woman, maybe his wife, puts on her lipstick,
There's neon at night in the city, but where he is
The people turn their back and look at the sea.

Clues:

1) Dennis
2) William
3) Edward
4) Hedda

You, who ask me for a prompt, please consider "Reclining Nude" by Isaac Israel (1865-1934)

Darragh Park's Cover for "Two Journals" by James Schuyler

In 1985 James Schuyler and Darragh park commenced on the project of "accompanying journals," in Park's phrase, Schuyler's in prose and Park's in drawings. The journals were not "mutually descriptive," but did reflect conversations the two men had and thus constitute "not only in some way an account of our relationship but also evidence of some of the things which nourished our relationship."

Of Park's cover for Two Diaries (Tibor de Nagy Editions, 1995), Douglas Crase writes:

<<
This is the view out Jimmy Schuyler's window onto 23rd Street--"a street that doesn't have much going for it," if I remember Jimmy's description aright. The building with the egg-shaped medallion, directly across, is the old Eastman Kodak building, designed by McKim, Meade, and White (they also did Eastman's house in Rochester).The street front has been brutally remodeled but you can detect their classicizing in the upper stories. Not too much, though; Eastman insisted on the economy version. Darragh gave me this drawing and I have it in my studio here in Pennsylvania so I can always share Jimmy's view -- this much at least.
>>

from the archive; first posted April 21, 2009

Donald Shambroom's "Forsythia" at Mercury Gallery (Rockport)

Forsythia, oil on canvas, 42 x 46 in.

Donald Shambroom is a visual artist and writer whose work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. In 1973, after graduating from Yale University where he studied philosophy and painting, Shambroom moved to Boston to pursue his career as a painter. His work has been shown at Francis Naumann gallery and Half Gallery in New York, and at Mercury Gallery and Howard Yezerski Gallery in Boston.   For the past decade, he has lived and worked on the banks of the Millers River in north central Massachusetts. Shambroom’s book “Duchamp’s Last Day” was published by Zwirner Books in 2018. He is currently working on his next book “Mirror Image: Leonardo da Vinci and Marcel Duchamp.”

"The Judgment of Paris" [by Peter Paul Rubens]

Peter Paul Rubens's Judgment of Paris hangs in
1) The Louvre in Paris
2) The National Gallery in London
3) Nuremburg
4) Le Bateau ivre

The painting refers to 
1) The origin of the Trojan War
2) A competition among Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite
3) Hector's brother
4) The golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon

Peter Paul Rubens's paintings are taught not only in art histoiry classes but in
1) Classes on body shape
2) The Waning of the Middle AGes (Huizinga)
3) Modern dance
4) Greek mythology

"Blue Poles" [by Jackson Pollock]

"On the canvas was not a picture, but an event."

Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News (December 1952)

Here's to you, Wayne Thiebaud

Wayne Thiebaud died in 2021 at the age of 101. A new book presents the painter's accomplishments.

Wayne Thiebaud, Cold Case, 2010–13, Oil on canvas. The painting appears in Wayne Thiebaud: Updated Edition (Rizzoli Electa).

 

Matisse!

Poet Spotlight: Jenny Grassl [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry, and to highlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this feature on poet and visual artist Jenny Grassl, whose interdisciplinary practice reflects TQ's commitment to bridging the gap between literature and the fine arts."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly 

Jenny Grassl's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review. Her manuscript DEER WOMAN IN THE DINING ROOM was selected as a runner-up for the Tupelo Press July open reading in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A Conversation with Poet & Visual Artist Jenny Grassl 

Kristina Marie Darling:  The poems featured here use the page as a canvas, a visual field.  In a world of left-margined poems, I find this approach bold, effective, and refreshing.  What advice do you have for poets who hesitate or struggle to take risks with form, to use white space as a unit of composition?  

Jenny Grassl: This is a great topic. I would say start by realizing that a block of left-margined poem stanzas or text is like a monument in a landscape. Often, its effect is to overpower that landscape, and overcome any evidence of the void. A poem that uses the whole page IS the landscape, and engages with the void. Get wandering, and start the journey. Push form to push content. Of course some poems work best in the traditional way.  

There exist great experiments with form in poetry. I am not sure how they lost relevance to so many of today's poets. I am thinking of Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Tom Clark with Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman, among others. I was exposed to their work early on, and assumed I had permission to compose a page creatively. Lewis was my earliest mentor.

KMD:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also known as a visual artist.  What has your cross-disciplinary practice, and your background in the fine arts, opened up within your poetry? 

JG: In visual art, working with form/content tension while seeking beauty, constantly re-defines beauty. This has had real consequences for my poetry. 

Many issues are the same in both poetry and art: gesture, conflict, philosophy, story, emotion, social history, image, and patterning. Not least is celebrating the medium. Poetry that foregrounds language functions for me the way painterly painting does. However, I do not mean the conceptual language of Language poets. I prefer something more sensual. The medium reveals content, and is not subservient to it. Collage and layering as expressions of language have become more important in my poetry through visual work. And, indeed, the image—I build my poems with images.  

KMD:  Tell me about your text-based visual artworks and collages.  

JG: In digital collages, I work back and forth with elements and fragments of photographs, paintings, drawings, bits of nature, and typography. The shape is panoramic, yet I think of them as interior landscapes. I am interested in how the 

wide view might investigate something personal— making maps of consciousness.

In the paintings I focus on automatic writing. I paint, scramble, and layer the words so the meaning is obscured, while still existing with integrity within the work. Each letter is part of an automatic poem. Because the words are concealed, the painting becomes a texture of pure language. 

KMD:  What can poets learn from visual artists?  

JG: Visual artists play, visually. This is not to say that is all they do. Of course there is work and rework. Poets have the same possibility.   

Figure/ground relationships are important to visual artists, and can be for poets, in their use of text in white space. Creating positive and negative space, the tension of beauty emerges. This is not merely formal. We can also learn from painters and sculptors who honor their mediums. Language is actually as much of the body as of the mind.

KMD:  In your poetry, the silences and ruptures are nearly as charged as the words themselves.  Can you speak to the power of silence and the unsaid in poetry? 

JG: Silence and rupture exist in a woman's life in the shadow of monuments.

Break apart a tightly bound form and new possibilities are created. Sometimes this is urgent and disorderly—graffiti on the monuments, or a toppling. Often a phantom text emerges. Silence always visits the page. The question is how is it shaped or left to wander. What does it mean? In visual art the color red creates the after image of green. The darkness of text creates an aura of light but also the void. 

KMD:  What else are you working on?  What can readers look forward to?

Bascove's Art and Barbara Griffel's Fashion Illustrations in the new "Stay Thirsty"

The new issue of STAY THIRSTY (volume 113) features Bascove's paintings (you'll find examples below), Jerome Charyn on "The Golden Age of Hollywood," the truly terrific fashion illustrations of Barbara Griffel (the third image below), a joint interview with Jean Hanff Korelitz and Paul Muldoon, and much else worthy of your attention. -- DL

Logo Design for Amy's Formals by Barbara Griffel

 

Stamps and Stars Forever: The Philatelic Art of Donald Evans (at Tibor de Nagy, until June 4, 2022)

	Donald Evans Philatelic Counter April 30 to June 4, 2022 Opening Reception, Saturday, April 30, 3-6pm       Donald Evans Domino. Dominos, 1975 Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Donald Evans – Philatelic Counter, the fifth presentation of the artist’s work at the gallery and the first at the 11 Rivington Street location.  Donald Evans (1945-1977) made a singular body of work consisting of watercolor stamps of imaginary countries. This exhibition will include two dozen of these works as well as two examples of never before exhibited preparatory works. Evans created most of his work in Amsterdam where he had settled and before his untimely death in a fire at age 31, he had painted almost 4000 stamps. In the decades following his death, his body of work has held an outsized significance and cultlike following. We are grateful to Bill Katz, the executor of the Estate of Donald Evans, for his help in putting this exhibition together. Evans began painting stamps of imaginary countries as a child and a novice stamp collector, and revisited and developed the concept as an adult. After graduating Cornell University, he worked for a time for the architect Richard Meier in New York City. Growing frustrated, he left that career in 1972 and moved to Europe. He eventually settled in Amsterdam where he and a friend fixed-up an old warehouse as their home. That same year he made 561 stamps representing 20 imagined countries.  All the works were made, postage stamp size, in watercolor using exclusively a number two Grumbacher brush, a method that allowed him to be able to travel with all of his painting materials.         Donald Evans Sabot. Edible mushrooms, 1973       Evans’ imaginary countries all have quirky histories, geography, and customs. These stamps represent a kind of journal, in them they celebrated his world and friends and everything that interested him. For example, he loved the sound and feel of dominos so he created the Republic of Dominos, (pictured above) whose capital is Boisivoires. Other countries have names such as Tropides Islands, Achterdijk and Katibo and can portray local neighborhoods or exotic colonial locations reached by long sea voyages. In many he pays homage to his friends, such as the country of Yteke, refering to Yteke Waterbolk, a dancer and friend who he named Queen of the nation. Evans had a large collection of visual information in books and photographs as sources for his work. Sung-Ting gets its name from a type of Chinese ceramics that Evans found beautiful. The country Sabot is named for the wooden Dutch shoe and one set of Sabot stamps illustrates local mushroom specimens (pictured above.) Another regional stamp Stein (pictured below), a literary dictatorship with 100% literacy, refers to an actual small Dutch town and also one of his favorite authors. He had many books on windmills, mushrooms, flowers, old ships, planes, birds and fruits and vegetables which would make their way into the stamps. The artist recorded each stamp series in his Catalogue of the World, organizing the work as one would an actual stamp collection.

"Modern Love": XVII [by George Meredith]

At dinner, she is hostess, I am host.
Went the feast ever cheerfuller? She keeps
The Topic over intellectual deeps
In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost.
With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball:
It is in truth a most contagious game:
Hiding the Skeleton, shall be its name.
Such play as this the devils might appal!
But here's the greater wonder; in that we,
Enamoured of an acting nought can tire,
Each other, like true hypocrites, admire;
Warm-lighted looks, Love's ephemerioe,
Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine.
We waken envy of our happy lot.
Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage-knot.
Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.

-- George Meredith

Meredith posed for "The Death of Chatterton" by Hall Wallis (1856) [above].

Tube Station (1932) [by Cyril E. Power]

Tube Station (1932) by Cyril E. Power (Metropolitan Museum, NYC)

"Parallel Bars" [by Geoffrey Young]

PARALLEL BARS

It gets bad and then it gets worse
And then the bottom falls out
But then it gets better, even great, you think
You’re there, but then it goes sour, totally alone, hurting,
But it comes back, new breath, friends again,
It’s the best it’s been in months,
Really clicking, it’s heaven, and then
Just about the time you think it’s going to stay heaven,
It gets bad, and then it gets worse, and then
The bottom falls out, will it ever get better? and then
It does, it’s even great, you blink an eye
And it goes sour, vicious, destructive,
But it comes back, new breath, friends again,
It’s the best it’s been in months, really clicking,
It’s heaven, and then just about the time
You think it’s going to stay heaven

--Geoffrey Young. Above: the cover of Young's new book Money (Prepared Remarks, 2022.)

The Ides of March [by David Lehman]

The Ides of March

The origin of every fortune is a crime.
The ides of March are a dangerous time.

The ideas of March originate in wind.
Madness may spring from a mind that hasn’t sinned.

The guides of March have scary stories to tell.
The family money came from a corpse and an oil well.

The editors of March fly to the moon and bring back April.
The original sinner has learned to shave and say “I will.”

You can trace each legacy back to the day
when the id of March exposed the ego’s feet of clay.

The dice of March roll on the green felt tabletop.
The suicides of March drive past the octagonal sign: Stop!

On the dais of March sit the deceased father and mother.
Every happy family is different from every other.

from The Atlantic (March 2011)

Growing a Book [by Lera Auerbach]

 

© Lera Auerbach - Monoprint

 

A tree is never just a tree.

Physical distance one can measure.
But what about the distance from oneself?

(Too far – and numbness spreads.
Too close – and you fall apart.)

A book is a tree:
it needs to take hold,
to find nourishment and water.

In its early stages it is fragile,
while the hurricane season is coming.

Where do all unwritten books go?
Completed manuscripts waiting for editors?
Lost publications waiting for readers?
Forgotten lives?

Like a child, a book requires sacrifice.
Its birth is painful.
Ultimately, it is never yours.

Who are you?

You are only its tool –
(and a highly imperfect one at that.)