The Best American Poetry

Ellen Kozak's New Paintings at David Richard Gallery

Ellen Kozak’s exhibition, Vigil: New Paintings, will be on view from November 27 through December 23, 2021, on the Ground Floor at David Richard Gallery located at 211 East 121 Street, New York, NY 10035, Phone: 212-882-1705. Email: info@DavidRichardGallery.com and website: DavidRichardGallery.com. Images of the artworks, installation views and videos will soon become available for viewing at the following link https://davidrichardgallery.com/exhibit/559-ellen-kozak.

Studio View, Reflections on water surface from passing river traffic, Hudson River, New York. Click here to view the exhibition

About Ellen Kozak:   The Artist’s Statement: I grew up near water, learning to swim at an early age in the nearby Long Island Sound and on family vacations in Maine. Water is the source of life—it goes where it wants— at its own speed, in varied states, marking time, in an indifferent universe. It is the element that has always made the most sense to me.   In 1994 I began to paint on a field easel beside bodies of water. My studio sits on the shoreline of the Hudson River in Greene County. Prior to painting I worked in video during the mid 70s through mid 80s. During these decades video was an analog medium, the video signal traveling in a fluid stream of electrons. Fluidity is a shared property of both paint and video, the materials, and methods with which I work. This commonality creates a sympathetic relationship and an ongoing dialog between the concepts and inherent craft in each medium. Recently I’ve noticed an inverse relationship between my paintings and video; while my paintings collapse hours of observation into ostensibly still surfaces, my video pieces are typically composed from still images of the same subject, water, which by nature is in constant motion.

Ellen Kozak Barges, Tugs and Tankers No. 23 Oil on panel 2021 13 x 22" Click here to view the artwork

Bodies of water are my subject, but I also depend upon their surfaces to perform a functional role, acting as an intermediary for indirectly observing the world above. Like a lens, the surface of a river can assimilate reflection, color, and pattern. The surface collects activity from the sky above, the movements of clouds, fog, foliage, planes in flight, and on the Hudson, barges that transport crude oil and hazardous material. Water and oil paint share properties of viscosity. I explore paint as a mimetic medium—it has an honest relationship with my subject.   Reflections, like mirrors, show us a version of the visible world, but they can also impose ambiguity about where things are and where one stands in space. This recalls sensations that I felt as a child while swimming. Uncertainty can undermine one’s sense of knowing, and the water’s transparency can cause displacement, bestowing optical illusions. I use this disorientation to confound my point of view and to help me step out of my own way as an observer. Indirect observation can create collisions and magnify attributes by imposing distance, both perceptual and psychological. Mediated observation can suggest metaphor and render what is known equivocal.

Ellen Kozak Barges, Tugs and Tankers No. 26 Oil on panel 2021 13 x 22" Click here to view the artwork

Brief Bio: Ellen Kozak received her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts and earned her MA in Visual Studies at from MIT, Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Cambridge, MA. She has had 21 solo exhibitions and numerous group presentations in New York, nationally and internationally including multiple exhibition in France, Japan and Cuba. Kozak has received review in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art In America, Art & Antiques, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, The Boston Globe and Boston Herald among others. Kozak was a Professor at Pratt Institute for more than 20 years and at Princeton University, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago at Oxbow, University of Massachusetts. Boston, and Art New England at Bennington College.

 

The Audience [by Lera Auerbach]

 

If I were dead, I wouldn’t want to stay around. I would fly to some other realm where I would no longer be myself but everything else at the same time. A happy, joyful radiance of a realm. 

But I wouldn’t be able to jump there if my heart was too heavy with worry for my loved ones who are still living in this world. I would have to stay around to see how they are coping. The living become the responsibility of the dead. Maybe, if I stayed around, I could still help them somehow. 

My dead grandparents and their parents and the parents of their parents und so weiter slightly move their invisible bodies making room for the new arrivals. They watch how I write these lines in English – the language they never spoke and slightly shake their heads.

 

"The Tempest" [by Alexander Lazarus Wolff]

Each shock and shudder pummels the ship
as it cleaves through the waves. The updraught
billows the sail, and combers flood
the storm-struck deck. Our crew, flayed by spray,
squint ahead through the onslaught,
making way to that island of isolation.
The ocean begins to batter again:
a pulsation reverberates throughout the ship,
causing the wood to creak and bend.
Lightning strikes the water like a damnation.
Not a single place of solace for our crew to crawl into.
Yet again, the ship ripples and pulses, and the wind
rips the spindrift from the crest of each wave.

The captain beaches the hull.
Rain and wind weaken,
giving way to night’s mist.

The crew steps onto the island before them.
In the distance, they hear a song swimming
through the night, and into their view comes
a winged figure, its song unwinding from a rock.

(Ed. Note: The image above is "The Tempest" of Giorgione.)

Making an Inventory [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Bruegel's Sky - Fragment [Photo by Lera Auerbach]

To live, one must make an inventory:

Item 1: The sky. It is everywhere.

 

Item 2: People. There are many of them.

 

Item 3: It is hard to believe, but there are still birds. They occupy space between people and the sky. Sometimes they touch the heavens; sometimes they touch the earth.

 

Item 4: Conceptual thinking.

 

Item 5: Garbage cans. Discarded objects, personal treasures no longer loved such as broken limbs of dolls.

 

Item 6: Cars. Be aware of them.

 

Item 7: The rest of the world.

 

The dead are watching the shadows caused by light. 

Inside of each shadow, a small invisible death is practicing the art of dying.

 

Der Blaue Reiter [by Wassily Kandinsky]

Cover of Der Blaue Reiter by Wassily Kandinsky (1911)

The blue rider rode on the blue horse
Franz Marc painted in 1911.
World War I killed Marc and returned Kandinsky to Russia
until 1921 when Walter Gropius summoned him
to the Bauhaus in Germany where he worked
until 1933 when the Nazis nixed it and he went to France,
painted and died just as the Battle of the Bulge was about to begin,
sparing a thought for Franz Marc and his large blue horses.

Brueghel's Icarus and Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts" [by David Lehman]

Landscape With the Fall of Icarus’ (c. 1560s), by Pieter Brueghel the Elder—the focus of Auden’s final stanza.
ROYAL MUSEUMS OF FINE ARTS OF BELGIUM

By David Lehman

Published in The Wall Street Journal under the heading “Art’s Lessons, Filtered Through Verse”
May 13, 2016 12:00 pm ET

Of the many memorable poems about paintings and sculpture—“ekphrastic poems” is the technical but ugly term for them—my favorite is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Named for the Brussels museum of fine art that Auden visited late in 1938, the poem begins with a stanza about two emblematic if generic paintings, one that depicts the birth of Christ (lines 5-8), the other depicting the crucifixion (lines 10-13)—the two most solemn moments in the Christian year:

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;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

The poem’s opening statement is guaranteed to stop you in your tracks. To appreciate the artistry, imagine a more conventional way of saying the same thing: “The old masters were never wrong about suffering.” Though virtually identical in language, the sentence loses all its power. There may be no better demonstration of a crucial lesson in the rhetoric of verse: that word order—combined with the strategic pause at the end of the line—is crucial in arousing and sustaining the reader’s attention. Note, too, the staggered rhymes in the stanza, which approaches prose but turns back to verse at each line’s end. Not until line four of this 13-line stanza do we encounter the first rhyme, and the last word of line six does not meet its mate until the stanza’s end.

If the point is that regardless of circumstance, people go on with their daily lives, oblivious to the “miraculous birth” or the “dreadful martyrdom,” the most crucial adjective appears in the final line: “innocent” meaning both “ignorant” and “guiltless.” People in general are like the children skating on a frozen pond, the dogs that bark and run and chase and fetch, and the “torturer’s horse” that scratches its backside. It is not so much that the “human position” is callous. Rather, it is that a world-historical event rarely announces itself as such—and that we are so wrapped up in our lives that we wouldn’t notice in any case.

The poem segues, in its second and final stanza, to “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” (c. 1560s) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a painting about an incident culled not from the Christian calendar but from Roman myth as recorded in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” To escape from a labyrinthine prison, Dedalus, the craftsman, fashions wax wings to permit him and his son Icarus to fly to safety. Father instructs son not to fly too near the sun, but to no avail. The wings melt, the boy falls to his death, and the incident illustrates the principle about the Old Masters and their understanding of human suffering:

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; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Unlike mediocre writers, who rely on modifiers to do the work of verbs, Auden chooses his adjectives and adverbs with great care. Consider the work done by “the forsaken cry.” Does this not link the falling Icarus with the dying Christ, who, expiring on the cross, is said by St. Matthew to utter the words “My father, why hast thou forsaken me?” The linkage suggests a universality of experience transcending the differences between the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman worldviews.

Even better is “an important failure.” The adjective is devastating. It is not enough to have failed; the failure is not even deemed worthy of notice. So transitory is the glory of the world that the ploughman in the foreground of the painting and the “expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,” take no notice. They have “somewhere to get to,” and life goes on.

I teach poetry in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York. A favorite prompt of mine is to read “Musée des Beaux Arts” and other poems about paintings. Then I suggest that the students visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art and write about Brueghel’s sublime depiction of summer, “The Harvesters.” Try it—not in competition with Auden (you can’t win), but with Auden’s marvelous poem as your model.

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

Silent Notes [by Lera Auerbach]

Silent Notes. Photo by Lera Auerbah

 

When pianos are not played,
they become very sad,
they collect silent notes.
Unplayed music floats –
invisible dust of overtones.
The dead are waiting expectantly:
so many keys – 88 – all untouched. 
The day of silent music
sheds the signature of uncaptured Time.

(“What are you practicing now?”
my mother asks me quietly.
Her eyebrows raised. I shrug.)

 

You Choose: Two Versions of “Autumn Song” [by W. H. Auden]

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last,
Nurses to their graves are gone,
But the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours left and right
Daunt us from our true delight,
Able hands are forced to freeze
Derelict on lonely knees.

Close behind us on our track,
Dead in hundreds cry Alack,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Scrawny through a plundered wood,
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Clear, unscaleable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

-- March 1936 

Posted by  Stacey on November 03, 2013 aComments

Auden was not an American poet--and this version of "Autumn Song" is the better one.

Autumn Song

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last;
Nurses to the graves are gone,
And the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the real delight;
And the active hands must freeze
Lonely on the separate knees.

Dead in hundreds at the back
Follow wooden in our track,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Starving through the leafless wood
Trolls run scolding for their food;
And the nightingale is dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Cold, impossible, ahead
Lifts the mountain's lovely head
Whose white waterfall could bless
Travellers in their last distress.

Posted by: James Obertino | September 30, 2014 at 03:48 PM

I prefer “able hands”, and “lonely” to “derelict “.
Also, the “thes” in these two lines can be omitted.

Posted by: Annette D'Arcy | October 06, 2018 at 06:59 AM

I, too, vote for "able hands," and I guess "lonely," while not ideal, is superior to "derelict." But I would contest the view that Auden was not an American poet. True, when he wrote this poem he had never been to America. There were two main periods, and there are those who feel that the English Auden of the 1930s is the authentic voice. But he came to America in 1939, settled in New York, wrote a couple of his greatest and most ambitious poems in the US (the Freud elegy, "Sept 1, 1939," "Under Which Lyre). He became a naturalized US citizen (in 1946, I believe). He is nearly as American as St. Louis native T. S. Eliot is English. -- DL

Posted by: The Best American Poetry | October 06, 2018 at 10:10 AM

I feel like the last two lines are much better in the first version. "From whose cold cascading streams None may drink except in dreams." conveys a sense of privation and bleakness that is in line with the rest of poem, and it's a much more powerful ending.

Overall, I feel like there are moments when the first version is better, and other moments in which the second version is better.

Posted by: Valerie Yip | November 29, 2020 at 11:27 AM

"Autumn Song" is a poem that shows Auden at his most British American or the other way around.

Posted by: William Barnes | January 28, 2021 at 10:39 PM

The second of these 2 versions is the one set to music by Benjamin Britten, in his song cycle, "On this Island." Britten and Auden knew each other.

Posted by: Frances Brock | September 10, 2021 at 06:58 AM

from the archive; first posted November 3, 2013

"Take the No Out of Now": Rozanne Gold in conversation with poet/multi-media artist Gerd Stern

Gerd Stern in front of Contact Is The Only Love, first shown at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1963

Politics excepted, death and dying have become the meat of current discourse. As an end-of-life doula (with an MFA in poetry), trained to do “life reviews” that explore the vicissitudes of aging, I was excited to interview Gerd Stern, a renowned psychedelic artist and one of the world’s original Beat poets. Soon to be 93, Gerd eagerly awaits the 2022 publication of his fifth book of poetry, “Take the No Out of Now.” A colleague of Timothy Leary at Harvard, Gerd was Maya Angelou’s lover and manager, living together on a houseboat in Sausalito.

Gerd is a multi-media artist as well as a poet, and an emissary of the Beats. His book, First Poems and Others, was published in 1952. A second, Afterimage, appeared in 1965, followed years later by Fragmeants (2002), and WhenThen (2018). Stern was a founder of USCO, a group of pioneering artists, engineers and poets creating multimedia performances and environments that redefined art in the 1960’s. Their multimedia discotheque, named The World, was featured on the cover of Life magazine.  USCO’s work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Whitney, the Pompidou, the Tate Liverpool and museums in Vienna and Munich.   

Over the past decade, Gerd has been an artist-in-residence in Italy, Germany and the U.S. He has given talks and poetry readings on the Lower East Side, Woodstock, San Francisco’s Beat Museum (which celebrated his 90^th birthday), the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Utah State University, the National Gallery in Washington and the Fri Art Kunstalle in Switzerland. 

Until recently, Gerd lived in an 18^th-century house in Cresskill, New Jersey, and had a home in Jamaica (in the Caribbean) known as “POETREEF.”  He now lives in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, near Judith Sokoloff, his partner for fourteen years.  

At 93, Gerd still looks like the hippie he was, forever cool, and open to “what is.”  A father, great-grandfather, and artist-in-residence, Gerd joined me in a frank discussion about this sacred time of life. We called it end-of-life poetics, which, surprisingly, led him to forecast “possibility” and an optimistic view of the future.   

Gerd Stern (right) with Jim Kempner at Jim Kempner Fine Art during a show of Stern's multimedia work, February 2020.

RG: When were you first aware of death?

GS: It might have been my maternal grandmother’s. Her son, a doctor, inadvertently killed her. She had very bad asthma and they put radium pellets into her nose – they left a piece in her nose and that did her in. That affected me profoundly. I was a teenager mid-teens or late teens, I can’t remember. She was a piano teacher – a concert pianist in Europe. She was my first cultural contact in life – she would take me to the Metropolitan Opera. Her name was Oma Levinson and she was in her late 70s. My mother died when I was four, when we lived in Saarbrucken, Germany. I did not get to say goodbye.  

RG: Have you ever had an intimate experience with someone who was dying?

GS: I was with my father the minute he died in a hospital bed. He was in pain but also on morphine – it was a rather decent death. I witnessed a level of acceptance and I am comforted by that. On the other hand, my stepmother was angry that he died without her being there. And she died an angry woman. My father was 95 and my stepmother was 99. 

RG: How would you like to die?

GS: I’d like to die peacefully and somewhere where I’m loved. I’d like to die at home or I wouldn’t mind dying when I’m traveling (I spend a lot of time traveling – Venice, Germany, California). But home feels right – not a bad place. 

RG: Who is there with you?  What’s around you?

GS: Judith, my kids, my closest friends. I love all kinds of music, especially jazz since I was quite young, but there is nothing I would specify for that moment. I listen to music quite a lot but not as much as I used to. I prefer to be doing and thinking and working on papers. I am surrounded by piles of them – and they are important to me. But I have too many and can’t manage them like as I’d like  That’s part of end-of-life – I’m past the point of organization and can’t control it like I used to. I feel the pressure of facing up to some issues -- IRS stuff and raising money for the church building (the home of USCO) in Garnerville, New York, to become part of its local historical society. I’d like to turn it into an artist-in-residency venue. 

RG: Which poets feel meaningful, or inspiring, to you?    

GS: Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Ted Roethke, Dylan Thomas. Sylvia Plath, Rachel Hadas, T.S. Eliot.  And my erstwhile lover, Maya Angelou, but I actually preferred her prose. Also meaningful were my friendships – with Lenny Bruce, Chet Baker, Huey Newton, Philip Lamantia, as well as Dylan Thomas.

RG: Edward Said in “On Late Style” posited, “Late works constitute a form of exile.” Although perspectives vary greatly – from Sontag’s war-like posture to defeat death, to Freud’s willingness to go quietly but be in total control, and Dylan Thomas’s self-destructive, ignominious path -- what seems universal is their commitment to creating art until the very end, but in a manner quite distinct from their previous output. What do you think of this idea of late works in general?

GS: I think of “late works” in a strange way – as a time for me to recognize when a poem is mine because it sings and becomes attuned to my own being and knowing. (I’ve grappled with this from my late teens until my early forties, and seem to be grappling with it again). And so at this age my late works are not unlike the waves of the ocean. Each poem, or piece of art, distinct from any previous output.  This is not exile but the nature of things. Late works, then, is each poem, or piece of art, distinct from any previous output, but part of the flow.

(L to R): Vern Bennett, Ann London (Gerd's wife) Gerd Stern, Allen Ginsberg, Mimi London. In the front is Madge Bennett. Standing rear: Percy Heath of the Modern Jazz Quartet. Photograph was taken at Gerd’s barge in Waldo Point, Sausalito in the 1950s. © Gordon Onslow-Ford.

RG:One of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s patients said, “I want to live through my dying.” I’ll paraphrase this as “I want to live through my aging.”  I know you are not dying but how might your poetry differ at the end-of-life?

GS: I think this is where I might now be in my writing because I believe that everything in the coming years will be end-of-life poems. In my 40s, I began recognizing who I was as a poet and what poems mean to be Gerd Stern poems. Ever since, I identify myself as the poet who wrote or writes those poems. Before that I was struggling to claim who I was. My titles tell their own story in a way: “My First Poems and Others;” “Afterimage,” and my most recent “WhenThen” -- wow, that really sounds like end-of life poetics! I’ve been obsessed with time in my poetry since I started writing. I try to place my poems in some particular time -- so that the inspiration is definite, defined – not just all over the place. The idea of possible futures keeps me laughing, while the consideration of them keeps me creating and very alive.  This may be the best way I can “live through my aging.”

RG: Since getting my MFA I have explored the work of artists and poets at the end of life and noticed great similarities: A pervasive awareness of diminution (shrinking or fading away), stylistic changes (including fragments of texts, weightier lines, erasures, Haiku). Does any of this apply to you or your work?

GS: My late works in collage may be the best example of a stylistic change. A collage in itself is a great metaphor for a life review – where fragments, layers, and the interstices of thought, ideas and memory – overlap, collide, become resemblances of my own cadences and rhythms – essential elements to who I am, and add what is needed now. 

RG: Tell me about your relationship with Maya Angelou.

Woman and Skeleton [by Albert York]

Homage to Irving Berlin

with thanks to Rick Winston

And if you can, listen to Bruce Adolphe and Fred Child on NPR's "Great Performances": they may just take a Berlin standard ("Cheek to Chek," say) and have it performed as if it were a Mendelssohn piano concerto.

McClure Kick Blues [by Vincent Katz]

Tomorrow, at the California Shakespeare Theater, in Orinda, California, there will be a memorial to poet, playwright and thinker Michael McClure, who passed away in May of 2020. Along with Diane di Prima, of all the great poets we have lost in the past few years, Michael for me defines an era. It’s funny to think of it now, but it’s McClure and di Prima who somehow stand for a whole experiment in poetry and living that remains vital to me, and I imagine always will. I think it is partially the integration of their poetry with a way of thinking about living that is the key to their vitality.

In his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras, published by City Lights in 1964, McClure wrote:

I WAS HERE AND I LIKED IT!

It was all O.K.

I suffered.

There were scents, and flowers, and textures, beautiful women.

I was a handsome man. I invented love.

I radiated genius for those who saw me with loving eyes.

I was happy — I laughed and cried. Constantly new

sights and sounds. I trembled and sweated

at the sight of beauty. I laughed at strong

things because I loved them — wanting to kick them in

and make freedom. When I go I’M GONE.

Don’t resurrect me

or the duplicates of my atoms.

It was perfect !

I am sheer spirit.

Tomorrow, poets, musicians, publishers, friends will celebrate this poet who some link to Shelley and Lawrence, and who I see as a human being able to intuit his living on earth in relation to all other living beings, and simultaneously to flesh that out in relation to the beauty, and sometimes terror, he sensed in the arts of painting, music, dance, theater. He wanted to reach most of all, to reach out, to resist, to feel the softness of the couch beneath his lover and himself, the dissolving of inside and out, the hummingbird, the bombs falling on Cambodia, consciousness creating and destroying itself each instant.

                     

As a kind of parting gift, Michael left us Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, published this year by City Lights. Editor Garrett Caples’ account of how the book was put together makes clear both McClure’s fastidiousness when it came to form and his openness to such questions as sequencing and grouping poems. A sequence of four “Death Poems” in a section called “MORTALITIES” evinces one of the most joyful attitudes toward death I’ve seen in poetry, something perhaps not surprising to readers of McClure, but still a fantastic thing to have:

                                                            TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE.

                                                                            Death is a dark chocolate cake,

                                                                      sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.

Remember Michael tomorrow, remember joy, remember poetry.

The Layers of “To Be” [by Lera Auerbach]

Labyrinth - Ink on Handmade Paper by Lera Auerbach

The verb “to be” is very short, yet it contains layers of existence.
It is possible to hide in these folds – that’s the secret of survival.
You share hiding spaces with ghosts, and ghosts become you.
You speak for them because, generally speaking, ghosts cannot speak.
But you can. Words flood your mind, and your heart can’t mend
broken words and broken promises. Your heart murmurs between the beats,
and the dead encourage it to keep on beating.

If I raise my hand – would my fingers touch the invisible hand of my nanny Marianna?
Or my grandma Alichka? Can love just disappear with the departed
or some crucial nothingness stays around, protecting you in moments of despair?
You can’t see the thread in the darkness, but you can choose to believe it’s there –
to guide you through the labyrinth of your own making.

Ron Padgett on Joe Brainard: from Tulsa to NYC on $5 a month

[Ed note: "I know how valuable my time is and I plan to never ever get a job again.” Joe Brainard. In summer 2017, Ron Padgett alerted us to his wonderful essay about his great friend the poet and artist Joe Brainard. I'm posting an excerpt below with a link to the full piece. Thank you Ron. sdh]

Untitled (Pat), June or July 1961, oil on pressboard, 15 ¾ X 15 inches (c) Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard in 1961-63 by Ron Padgett

Because documentation has been lacking, relatively little has been written about two crucial years in Joe Brainard’s life, 1961 and 1962— just after he moved at age 18 to New York City (December of 1960) and just before he moved to Boston (January of 1963). Joe did not keep a diary, nor did he write letters to his closest friends, who had come to New York about the same time as he. His letters—the few that survive—to his parents and aunt back in Tulsa consisted of perfunctory reassurances that he was all right. Recently, however, a group of his letters has surfaced, providing new and important details on this period.

The letters and postcards were addressed to Sue Schempf (1918–2009), a woman he met in Tulsa when he was still a high school student or a very recent graduate. Schempf, a decent Sunday painter, had signed on as a patron; that is, in the early 1960s she was sending him five dollars per month. The financial arrangement appears to have been vague: at several points Joe mentions owing her money and at others he gives the impression that she is due work in exchange or that he is going to repay her. Regardless, the monthly arrival of five dollars was important to Joe.

The first piece of correspondence (postmarked December 15, 1960), addressed to Schempf and her husband, is a postcard announcement of Joe’s modest solo exhibition at a place called The Gallery, in a small shopping center in Tulsa, to take place on December 17 and 18. The announcement is addressed in the hand of someone other than Joe, who was either in Dayton or New York City at the time. Over the course of the next year, Sue Schempf herself would open a frame shop, which would also be available for small shows.

At some point she bought one of his collages, a 1960 work that not only reflected the structure of the cover design he did for The White Dove Review a year or so before but also proved to be a harbinger of his collages to come 15 years later.

Fig 01 Mixed media collage, 1960, coll. E. G. Schempf 25 × 22 inches

Find Ron Padgett's essay along with a beautiful gallery of Brainard's work here.
From the archive; first posted January 5, 2018.

Untitled (Pat), June or July 1961, oil on pressboard, 15 ¾ X 15 inches (c) Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard in 1961-63 by Ron Padgett

Because documentation has been lacking, relatively little has been written about two crucial years in Joe Brainard’s life, 1961 and 1962— just after he moved at age 18 to New York City (December of 1960) and just before he moved to Boston (January of 1963). Joe did not keep a diary, nor did he write letters to his closest friends, who had come to New York about the same time as he. His letters—the few that survive—to his parents and aunt back in Tulsa consisted of perfunctory reassurances that he was all right. Recently, however, a group of his letters has surfaced, providing new and important details on this period.

The letters and postcards were addressed to Sue Schempf (1918–2009), a woman he met in Tulsa when he was still a high school student or a very recent graduate. Schempf, a decent Sunday painter, had signed on as a patron; that is, in the early 1960s she was sending him five dollars per month. The financial arrangement appears to have been vague: at several points Joe mentions owing her money and at others he gives the impression that she is due work in exchange or that he is going to repay her. Regardless, the monthly arrival of five dollars was important to Joe.

The first piece of correspondence (postmarked December 15, 1960), addressed to Schempf and her husband, is a postcard announcement of Joe’s modest solo exhibition at a place called The Gallery, in a small shopping center in Tulsa, to take place on December 17 and 18. The announcement is addressed in the hand of someone other than Joe, who was either in Dayton or New York City at the time. Over the course of the next year, Sue Schempf herself would open a frame shop, which would also be available for small shows.

At some point she bought one of his collages, a 1960 work that not only reflected the structure of the cover design he did for The White Dove Review a year or so before but also proved to be a harbinger of his collages to come 15 years later.

Fig 01 Mixed media collage, 1960, coll. E. G. Schempf 25 × 22 inches

Find Ron Padgett's essay along with a beautiful gallery of Brainard's work here.
From the archive; first posted January 5, 2018.

The Shadows of Memories [by Lera Auerbach]

Untitled [Oil on Canvas] by Lera Auerbach

 

1. Forgetting Ignorance

The world is created anew. I often fail to see it and think as if it was still the old world that I knew. I forget my ignorance.

My mother doesn’t own a computer and doesn’t understand how the Internet works. It’s all mundanely miraculous and miraculously mundane to her. I try to explain but realize that I don’t understand it either. I can navigate it, but I do not know who or what is staring at me from the other side of the screen.

 

2. Reflection

I spit out blood from my bleeding gums and, looking at the sink, see my death.

 

3. The Shadows of Memories

One can think about so many things and nothing at all.
How can nothing be something?
How can nothing be?

Can a shadow cast a shadow?
Perhaps within each shadow lies a deeper shadow, just like within the first death, lies the second death. 
If a person can be born more than once, it’s possible that after he is dead, he dies again – a death within death from which it is impossible to return. In this second death, he loses not only his memories but the shadows of memories.

When did Eurydice die?

An Interview with Justin Jamail [by Aspen Matis]

Poet and attorney Justin Jamail is the author of Exchangeable Bonds, published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. His poems and commentary have appeared in many journals and online publications, and he is the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden. Raised in Houston, Texas, he now lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

I corresponded with Mr. Jamail via email about the radical nature of uncommon wit, the arena of poetry criticism as a realm “where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed,” and the pleasure of rereading great works many times over. We also discussed the intimate relationship between clarity and metaphor thought Mr. Jamail’s original definition of “exchangeable bonds” in the context of a poem: “Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.”

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

I write poems for fun, as an intellectual challenge or game, and because I think poems can be beautiful. Also to impress my wife and other friends.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

Very generally speaking, it seems to me that art is necessary for the good life. I just mean that as an empirical observation — I don’t have any explanation for why it is necessary or what it “does,” and I am not interested in those questions at all. That man does not live on bread alone can also be taken as an empirical observation rather than as a moral or theological principle. That is what I mean here. Poetry is a kind of art, so it fills that role in “our present society” as it has in every other society. Its comparative advantage, I guess, is that it fits in the pocket or average memory and, among literary arts, seems to me to place the least burden on the audience. Its apparent necessity notwithstanding, our present society rather overvalues art and poetry than undervalues it — or so it seems to me.

In your view, in what way does our present society overvalue art and poetry? I imagine that’s an uncommon perspective, among poets.

Oh, I mainly mean expressions that seem to reveal an expectation that promises more from art than it can give. Expectations that poetry will make the audience better, wiser, or more successful people or citizens, for example. Or, as a very different example, any expectation that any aesthetic experience can approach the value placed on oil paintings. It’s modern cant (there’s an 18th century influence!). I would gladly have all awareness of the existence of Picasso erased from my mind in exchange for the current market value of one of his paintings. Probably.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Demonstrate uncommon skill and wit without the appearance of effort or diligence or pride.

Your book of poems, Exchangeable Bonds, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. Poet and editor David Lehman praised the collection as a “book worthy of its legacy,” in which one “can sense the benign influence of such major New York School figures as Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this debut collection? Is there a particular inquiry or exploration that unifies the book? And what do you hope readers will be left with, after the final page?

These were what seemed to be most of the best poems I had written over a pretty long period. Tony Towle, one of my favorite poets, was nice enough to give me advice on the ordering in addition to some splendid editorial comments. I hope the audience likes the poems. For someone as authoritative as David to have sensed the influence of poets as great as Koch and Violi is pretty humbling. There is no doubt that those poets exert a huge influence on my sense of what makes a poem successful.

What do you do (beyond listening) when “The room pulls away” and you are standing, as in your fine poem Early April Subway?

Write poetry! — or anyway a line or two.

What are exchangeable bonds, metaphorically speaking?

Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.

You dedicated your book to “My fathers” — who are these men? 

Jeffrey Jamail and David Lifson

You are an accomplished attorney, currently the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden; is there a place in your creative practice where your legal and poetic fascinations unify? Or are these lines of work necessarily distinct — two independent threads of your life’s tapestry? 

I don’t see much connection. The scenes and clichés of office work life enter poems fairly often, I notice. Hmmm… I may write a Georgics of the office…

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Robert Herrick. Andrew Marvell. Shakespeare of course if we are talking early 17th century (is he part of the “long 16th”? Probably.). I read a lot of 17th and 18th century sermons; I think it is a neglected area of excellent English literature. If I had the time for an academical career I would concentrate on this. I read some poems by Sarah Egerton and Anne Finch last year and liked them quite a bit. I like Oliver Goldsmith’s writing. It’s hard to be inspired by 18th century poetry because there is a lot of “inside baseball” — references to each other and contemporary events and so forth. But I admire it a great deal. Those poets were masters of skills I don’t seem to have developed to any meaningful degree.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Poetry criticism is an area where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed. I have been told that one should not argue about taste, but that is not a reason for extending one’s exposure to bad taste. When poetry is critiqued well, what happens is that a critic has told convincingly in what way a poem or poet is successful or unsuccessful. This is valuable because it can form what is really only an impression of taste (or something) into clear ideas. Sometimes criticism can be the occasion for general remarks on mankind, of course. Such writing is often also a pleasurable or beautiful thing in its own right.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

I haven’t noticed much correlation, but I don’t read enough to take an intelligent view. The results of the system seem consistent with the construction of the system?  

The reason great works become obscure is that there are too many great works to read conveniently and there is also (as Johnson noted) a social pressure that many seem to feel to keep up with whatever is current, so good things get neglected. I mean, I am 41 years old, have enjoyed English literature for decades, and am only now reading Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy with attention. Yet there are serious people who consider it the most admirable work in the language! For every such book that I have neglected, there must be dozens of less famous works. Also, I think I could defend an observation that there has been a steady increase in the quantity of literature of all kinds and all qualities. What keeps me, in particular, among those responsible for great works falling into obscurity is that I reread favorite works many times over. I guess I have a terrible memory for literature!

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

Read more.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

A Georgics of the office and more short lyric poems that I hope my wife will like.

Songs in Minor Keys [by Lera Auerbach]

Leitmotifs [Photo by Lera Auerbach]

Every day I give birth
to my death. Each death is different.
They flutter around like moths.
I find them in dusty corners, in drawers,
or trapped in the spider webs
hanging from the ceiling. My deaths
can see my ancestors and talk to them.
My deaths sing to each other
children's songs in minor keys.
They prefer lullabies.
I fall asleep, listening.

Homage to 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).

from the archive; first posted August 23, 2019

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).

from the archive; first posted August 23, 2019

From “A Parliament of Flesh: Reclaiming the Body through Erotic Expression" [by Andrea Applebee]

For Tupelo Quarterly, Andrea Applebee interviewed Bea, the Turkish born American artist, whose work can be viewed here. She says, "I use erotic themes—nudity, the female gaze, the female body, landscapes of desire—but I don’t think I make erotic art. . . .This series [of "Send Nudes," one of which is reproduced below] features nude self-portraiture, but it is not meant to be erotic. Sensuality and intimacy are always a part of me, and my refusal to excise or censor these thoughts makes them an underlying theme in my work." Here's an excerpt from their conversation:

AA: When I think about writing erotic or sensual poems, what immediately comes to mind is the epistemological and aesthetic disenfranchisement of these themes that separates us from our own bodies. How do you anticipate and deal with this dilemma? 

BB: One issue I’m grappling with currently is the question of “taste,” as it often defines and judges erotic content. It is a concept that is relative to individuals but it is also socially coordinated to promote what is considered acceptable in visual and poetic language.  It aligns with socially prioritized ideas about beauty and the female body. The word itself appeals to our senses and implies that something should be pleasing—historically it is heteronormative and circumscribed by ideals of attractiveness. But today there is a very narrow category of bodies that is considered universally appealing.  There are certain bodies—dependent on age, dis/ability, race, sexual orientation, and body type—that have been considered objectionable or unaesthetic in visual arts, effectively disenfranchising huge groups of people, and further perpetuating this epistemological and aesthetic alienation you mention. 

AA: This is an experience I’ve had personally as a blind woman—I can remember not taking my cane to my grauate poetry classes because I thought it would be unattractive and somehow discredit me. I also had no idea how to incorporate my actual body into my work, and wrote only about objects and landscapes for many years 

BB: Certain bodies outside of the young white female have a problematic place in our art history through the colonialist male gaze, like Gauguin’s portraits of Polynesian women. The beauty Gauguin finds in his subjects lies in his fascination with what he deems exotic and pure in a primitive way, and he packages that fascination skillfully for the consumption of the Western male. 

I wonder about abjection as an art movement in the 90s, and whether some bodies, stages of bodies, body parts, or even poses are perpetually abject in our contemporary aesthetics. Taboo bodily functions—urine, feces, menstrual blood—are abject, but so are certain sexual acts and unions, like anal. Abject art evokes evulsion and disgust, an impulse to look away, a nobody-wants-to-see-that feeling. Presenting the human body in any way other than what has been deemed aesthetically pleasing is abjection. 

AA: The abject movement coincides and grows out of the rise of AIDS and queer culture taking a stand against conservative politics. It makes me think of Bersoni’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” and Mapplethorpe’s photography. And before them—French erotic revolutionaries, like Rimbaud and Bataille. They were all about smashing the unspoken codes that contain and constrain erotic narratives.

BB: I started to think about this when I presented the drawings for “Sits Like a Lady” to an art group, and one of the women said that it made her uncomfortable. I showed the two drawings individually, and the reaction was discomfort. When I showed how I intended to overlay the two drawings, the group mentioned that they liked the combination. The purpose of this work was to express the interface of female social propriety and closeted female desire, and the group affirmed that they did not want to look at spread legs and orgasmic faces; they are more comfortable if passion is screened through the veneer of modesty and decorum. We use so many tools for this in visual arts—modesty covers, shadows, strategically placed drapery or objects, the gracefully resting hand on private parts, poses that obscure and block, even more aggressive forms of censorship like bars, pixelation, and cropping.

AA: In poetry, we have similar practices: euphemisms (“he possessed her”, “they slept together”, “bed (v.)”) and metaphors (“manhood”, “member”; “folds”, “sheath”). These strategies veil what is really being talked about. Can we identify the sometimes unspoken strategies for obscuring or censoring the details of sexuality in visual art? 

“Sits Like A Lady,” 2021, 21×29.7 cm, marker on paper

BB: Anything stylized or blurred is more acceptable than hyperrealism.  Male breasts are always acceptable. Women’s breasts are more scandalous—less offensive than some other body parts but still in need of coverage, for instance in photography. Pussy can be tolerable depending on the position of the legs. It can be present but shouldn’t be spread. Same thing with the butt—standing or seated positions are demure, bent over is too suggestive. Buttholes are generally in poor taste, especially in proximity to hands or pussies. If you insist on depicting intimacy, missionary position is sensual and beautiful; anything else is unseemly.  

Click here for more of the interview.

Parmigianino and His Poets [by Mindy Aloff]

Francesco Mazzola, called Il Parmigianino (1503–1540) Schiava Turca, c. 1531–34 Oil on panel 26 3/4 x 20 7/8 inches Galleria Nazionale di Parma Photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY

When, back in college, I first encountered the Mannerist Italian painter known to the public as Parmigianino (1503-1540), it was by way of a slide of his symbolic, devotional, unfinished painting known as Madonna of the Long Neck, a private commission that took him six years of his 37-year life to complete.We were told it’s a masterpiece, and I was happy to agree, as long as I didn’t have to keep it in my living room. Despite the angelic beauty of the Madonna’s face and the charm of all the adolescent angels crowding in on one side of her to see the infant in her lap, the naked, ashen-colored child stretched out across her mighty, enrobed thighs looks alarmingly lifeless. The Madonna’s delicate head, canted against the twist of her body; her Alice-in-Wonderland neck; and her disproportionately mighty legs reminded me, as a total package, of a brontosaurus, excuse me, an apatosauros—and, after nearly five decades, they still do. Behind the Madonna, an unnervingly unmoored row of columns float toward a treeless horizon. Somewhere, alone, in their vicinity is a tiny, half-naked male figure  (he’s both far away in distance and, I guess, far below the Madonna and angels in other, symbolic respects) who turns out not to be the babe’s dad but rather the prophet St. Jerome silently reminding everyone of something on the order of “I told you so!” 

The painting seems to be about anticipation of one kind or another: The pre-teen angels are certainly expecting something; the baby’s alarmingly lifeless posture and pallor, some art historians have explained, is a reminder of what is going to happen when it grows up. What did Parmigianino’s early-16^th-century patron think when she looked at this work? There’s no way she could have had the associations I do. Not only were the Tenniel drawings of Alice four-and-a-half centuries in the future, but the brontosaurus-apatosauros wasn’t first (mis)named and classified until 1875. As for the disturbing architectural elements, de Chirico wouldn’t be teaching us to see such architecture as ominous until the 20^th century. Did the painting look to the patron like a dream or just the usual iconography of transcendence? Did the elements I see as so strange lead her to shake her head and say, “Artists! What will they think of next!”? What did she make of those headless columns? Did the painter explain to her what his reasons were for the physical distortions, or, paraphrasing Frank Lloyd Wright’s answer to clients who protested the way he built their houses, did Parmigianino say, when she asked, “If you don’t like my vision, get another painter”? And how would he have finished the painting, if he had finished it? If I were a poet, I’d write a few lines about Madonna of the Long Neck and its enigmas.

Art reviewer and poet John Ashbery—taken by another famous Parmigianino canvas, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a presentation piece Parmigianino made at age 21 to demonstrate his virtuosity—did exactly that, publishing his own masterpiece of a poem, of the same title, by my estimate some 600 lines long, in 1975. I can’t say I understand Ashbery’s poem entirely, either: Sometimes he focuses directly on the painting (enumerating the moods he finds in the painter’s expression or the possible interpretations of the intended gesture of the painter’s magnified right hand). Sometimes, as David Lehman has observed, the poet manages to squeeze himself inside the reflection; there, he describes the sensation of, so to speak, rubbing elbows with the painter’s consciousness and ruminating on the analogy between Parmigianino’s bravura image of unreachable youth and the human soul; and sometimes the poet seems to be using the painting as a platform to speak about tensions and his efforts to resolve them in his own life. But when I listen to Ashbery read those unemphatic, six-beat lines, meticulously crafted to seem spontaneous and conversational (there’s a film on YouTube) in his steady, slightly flattening and purely American voice, I think, well, if I were to ponder a little harder, it would all make sense to my intellect as well as to my ear, like the fine print of an insurance policy. The illusion that sense is swimming just over there, under the surface of the sensibility, if only we had world enough and time to fish it out, is a special type of greatness in art, as aggravating as it can be in insurance policies.

Over at The Frick Collection this summer, yet another Parmigianino is visiting temporarily: a portrait of a woman, Schiava Turca (“Turkish Slave”), a title slapped on it by an art cataloguer three centuries after it was painted. This lovely picture also has an enigma or two in it, but its subtle elements of distortion (such as the woman’s delicately stylized left hand) aren’t as pressing as the question of, Whom does the painting represent? In the accompanying catalogue—a beaut in every way—Frick scholar Aimee Ng presents a most elegant essay concerning her painstaking detective work to try to provide an answer, or a couple of related answers. From comparisons with portraits of male and female Renaissance Italian poets and with other paintings by Parmigianino, and by research into aspects of the sitter’s dress, the ostrich fan she holds, and the meaning of her hat badge—showing a winged horse and stream underfoot, which Ng is pretty sure represent Pegasus, the horse associated with poetry, whose stamping hoof drew forth the Hippocrene spring, sacred to the Muses—Ng proposes that the sitter was herself not only the painter’s muse for that canvas but also a poet and possibly a specific poet: Veronica Gambara.

Incidentally, I looked up Pegasus and discovered that, as far back as Hesiod, this was one unusual horse. He and a twin brother, Khrysaor (represented as either a giant or a winged boar), were children of the disharmonious couple Poseidon and the Gorgon Medusa—who, by some accounts, after being raped by Poseidon, was transformed into a monster, with hair consisting of live serpents and a face that turned anyone who looked at her to stone. When Perseus, using his shield as a mirror to catch Medusa’s reflection so he wouldn’t have to look at her, beheaded her, from her neck (or from the blood of her neck) the twins were born. The ornamental, snaky curls of Schiava Turca took on a new import after I learned this.

from the archive; first posted June 5, 2014

Creation According to the Cat [by Lera Auerbach]

 

 

Oil on Metal Roof Tile [by Lera Auerbach]

When God created animals, He first asked each animal for their permission. But He never received the Cat’s blessing. The Cat just didn’t answer, and God took the Cat’s silence as “yes.” But the Cat simply needed some time to think whether to enter into existence. It needed to look through the open doors of creation and then decide if it wanted to be in or out, but God was in a rush and didn’t pay enough attention to subtleties. So, He created the Cat along with all other animals. Later, the Cat reprimanded God. The Cat said that it was going to answer “no,” that God created it against its will, and that God needed to compensate it for all the pain and suffering since the creation of the world.

It is why God bestowed the Cat with nine lives. This way, it could have additional time to decide whether to stay alive or not. That’s why the Cat, unlike others, can move through time – it understands its porous nature and knows how to slip through. The Cat doesn’t like closed doors. According to the Cat, a good door is a door half-opened (or half-closed depending on the perspective.) According to the Cat, one should always see both sides and be free to change one’s mind at any time. According to the Cat, things only pretend to be solid, but in truth, they are mostly empty spaces, and one needs to learn to see through their illusory solidity.

According to the Cat, one needs to learn how to disappear and, even more importantly, when.