The Best American Poetry

Jane Freilicher, "Parts of a World" at Kasmin (Jan 21-Feb 27, 2021)

 

 

"The Master of the Gamblers": Omnia Vincit Amor

The "Master of the Gamblers" is how art historians, curators, and auctioneers refer to the 17th-century Italian painter (Rome, maybe Naples), otherwise unnamed, who painted, in the main, gamblers playing cards and shooting dice. "Omnia Vincit Amor" ("Love  Conquers All") is unusual among his works. -- DL

Rudy Burckhardt's Photos at Tibor de Nagy (part two) [by Vincent Katz]

How Rudy Burckhardt photographed on the move is something of mystery. He did it, so we know it’s possible, but try to put yourself in his position. He must have moved with a dancer’s speed and precision, or, cat-like, lain in wait before pouncing on his unsuspecting prey. He regularly captures head-on in close proximity the precise moment at which or just before someone looks at him and says, “Hey!”

In addition to tableaux frozen from the city’s gyre, Burckhardt could compose images that seem snatched from a Renaissance picture-making textbook. Such a one is V-Back, from about 1985. There are two versions of this moment. In the first, Rudy has come up close behind a beautiful woman, her hair carefully styled and held back by a clip, a slender chain around her neck, a purse hanging from her left shoulder, her sweater turned backward, so that its V reveals her upper back. We can see the spinal cleft as it travels down, widening to a darkness in between her delicately flaring shoulder blades. We see a man in a suit in front of her, waiting to cross the street. We catch a glimpse of the traffic as it rushes past.

In the second photo of this moment, Burckhardt has quickly and adroitly turned his camera from a vertical to a horizontal format. He takes advantage of a moment of urban serendipity. A large white delivery truck is passing. In Burckhardt’s horizontal frame, we now see, in addition to the man in the suit on the left, a man in a long-sleeved striped shirt on the right. These two men frame this remarkable woman, each one turned slightly toward her, without actually looking at her, in two different gestures, diffidence and deference. And in that split-second, the woman has suddenly become aware of something behind her, some heat of energy, some thinking, something stretching back to the galleries of European museums, kindled on the stages of New York’s ballet. She turns, looking at Burckhardt, and now at us in the photograph, her beautiful face caught in that glance, the whole picture given a timeless quality by the pure background of the white truck passing, such that, for a split-second, Burckhardt has taken the city completely away, and we are enveloped in this moment of observation, two people seeing each other for the first time.

The exhibition of these and other chance encounters of New York City residents immortalized by Burckhardt’s eye and body is punctuated by a sequence of three films shown on a wall-mounted monitor. In these three films — Default Averted  (1975), Cerveza Bud (1981), and Ostensibly (1989) — Burckhardt takes three different approaches, all showing his complex approach to cinema. Default Averted refers to the moment when New York City almost went bankrupt; Burckhardt takes a typically wry approach to the topic, choosing to show a building being demolished over time. This is a favorite motif of his in his films; he loved the way New York was built, and also knocked down, sporadically, without municipal oversight. Cerveza Bud focuses on one of New York’s great pleasures — public joy, in this case in the form of outdoor dancing, music playing, and roller skating. As usual, Burckhardt is drawn to the city’s black and Latinx populations. Ostensibly uses a poem by that title by John Ashbery, and in fact Ashbery appears in the film, in red suspenders, recording the poem. So many events and images fly by in these films, balanced by moments of calm, that I like to try to document them as they pass. I’ll end with my notes from the films.

Default Averted (1975, 20 minutes, black and white, music by Thelonious Monk and Edgar Varèse)

Architectural emblems, details, demolition, smoke and fire
Fireman grins
Boards dropped from roof
T Monk big band sound to sped up b/w city traffic
Shakespeare-like head all that remains: preserved relic in antic sweep of wreckage-remake (the New York mantra)
Earl Hines reflections in wet pavement
Walls fall, classic Burckhardtism

Cerveza Bud (1981, 30 minutes, color)

Endless bodies of color, dancing, roller skating
Public displays of love: bodies, gay couples dance Hustle to Kool & The Gang
Reclining in summer grass à la La Grand Jatte but more relaxed, more openly sexual
Open embrace of Twin Towers, part of that cityscape with street light suspended in front
Seagull soars against dirtied blue

Ostensibly (1989, 16 minutes, color, poem by John Ashbery,)

piano music by Alvin Curran)
JA reading poem
Kia Heath nude poses in front of Rudy’s De Kooning then dresses, walks in snow
Nice family hops backward up steps
Maine log-throwing competition
A woman (Rochelle Kraut?) reads same poem
Shots of pond details of trees
Man jogs shirtless on Maine road
NY intersection (23rd & Broadway?) in rain reflection
Dancers at party (Skowhegan?)
RB pushing garbage to gutter (NY) and trees to ground (Maine)
Lichen details
NY walkers, skylines, water towers, sped up clouds

Ed. Note:  for part one of Vincent Katz's piece on the new Rudy Burckhardt show, click here. 

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 11 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com
The show is up from December 21, 2020 until January 23, 2021.
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 10-6pm

Rudy Burckhardt’s “New York Hello!” (part one) [by Vincent Katz]

Rudy Burckhardt : “New York Hello!” Photographs and Films from the 1970s and ‘80s

At Tibor de Nagy Gallery, December 11, 2020 through January 23, 2021

https://www.tibordenagy.com

https://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions/rudy-burckhardt4

Through January 23, run over to Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 11 Rivington Street to see a glorious selection of the later New York City street photographs of famed downtown denizen Rudy Burckhardt. You can also see the images online, but Burckhardt’s prints, small and unassuming as they are, repay close observation in person.

I guess the only art form that survives intact online is poetry. Poetry was something Burckhardt had a lot of, and I often find myself making the Freudian slip of referring to a photo of his as a “poem.” Partially, that has to do with the wide spaciousness Burckhardt was able to include in his photographs. They have a space in them that reminds one of the space in the city poems of his friends Edwin Denby, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara.

When he first came to New York from his native Basel, in 1935, at the age of 21, excited though he was by the city’s gigantic scale, he was unable to photograph it, focusing instead on a prescient series of fragments — pedestrians rushing past him in midtown against slivers of storefronts and sidewalks. The effect was almost hermetic, as though Rudy was a consciousness that the urban swirl buffeted but never disturbed.

That still consciousness was something he brought to his well-known photographs of the 1940s, iconic views of Times Square and the Flatiron Building. After a few years in New York, Burckhardt had figured out a way to bring the tallest buildings and pedestrians into the same frame. He worked quickly, never wasting film, preferring to wait for the right season and light, rather than to force an unwilling moment into a picture.

Concomitant to his photographic practice, Burckhardt made over one hundred 16-millimeter films, some in collaboration with other artists, musicians and poets, others on his own as a form of diary or collage film he would assemble over time from footage shot in New York, Maine, and other locations. The collaborative films were one way Burckhardt kept up to date, choosing to invite into them succeeding generations of New York’s brightest stars, from Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles and Aaron Copland, through Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, to Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Rackstraw Downes, Taylor Mead and Yoshiko Chuma, Douglas Dunn, Grazia Della Terza, Dana Reitz, David Shapiro, Christopher Sweet, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Jacob Burckhardt and Tom Burckhardt, among others.

Like his lifelong friend and collaborator, poet and critic Edwin Denby, Burckhardt made it a habit to keep up on the latest developments in poetry, music, theater, dance, and visual art. Denby and Burckhardt were inveterate culture vultures, inspiring generations of New Yorkers after them. Part of that urbane desire involved being attuned to the look of people and things, as they changed through New York’s mid-century.

Burckhardt photographed on New York’s streets from the late 1930s through the 1990s. His later work shows him experimenting, evolving, using familiar themes in different ways, with subtly different emphases. The photographs currently on view at Tibor de Nagy are striking in their immediacy, their sophisticated informality, and their ability to project certain types or looks of people. Burckhardt was remarkable in his ability to find the beauty in many kinds of people.

Three photos of couples walking are emblematic of the power of youth, of animated promenade. In one from the mid 1980s, a black couple presents ultimate contemporary style — he in t-shirt, athletic shorts, and Pumas without socks, she elegantly coiffed, in designed low-V t-shirt, carefully ironed and cuffed jeans, white sandals. They fit together in style perfectly. But to make a great photograph, he needed more than the main subject. Intimately steeped in classic European painting, he had no trouble forging balanced photographic figure-and-ground compositions on the fly. He also was immersed in modern Abstract painting, learning from it never to leave any area without interest. Here, Burckhardt catches memorable figures between and around the two mythic beauties who dominate the scene.

Ed. note: Part two of Vincent Katz's review will appear tomorrow or the day after.

Visigoths Sack Rome [by Joseph-Noel Sylvestre]

"The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals" by Joseph-Noel Sylvestre (1847-1926) at the Musée Paul Valéry. It was the first time in 800 years that Rome had fallen to a foreign power: the Visigoths led by Alaric. The Roman Empire was in full decline. Note where in the painting the artist signs his name -- and the beauty of the living bodies attacking the serene but lifeless classical bust. -- DL

Traces [by Lera Auerbach]

^{Untitled - Ink on Handmade Paper by Lera Auerbach} 

 1.

When I think of my Great Aunt Rosa, I hear her laughter – deep chuckles rising from the belly of the Earth and exploding like an uncontrollable volcano. My earliest recollection of Great Aunt Rosa goes back to the time in my life when crawling seemed easier than walking, and every situation had a fantastic array of discoveries. Aunt Rosa was a gigantic mountain that captivated my mom's attention entirely. I was free to crawl around on my own to my total satisfaction. I had a small, plastic red fox. From time to time, I heard volcanic explosions of Aunt Rosa's laughter and thought that a tiny fox may not fully comprehend these sounds and feel scared. Remembering from one of the fairytales that foxes liked hiding in dark spaces (or in pretty wooden huts they would steal from the less intelligent animals), I looked around for a hiding place for my fox. I found it in Aunt Rosa's shoe, which was perfectly designed to be a home for a small plastic fox, combining the best qualities of a foxhole and fox-hut.

I must have fallen asleep somewhere next to the shoe rack. My parents carried me to the apartment of my mother's sister, Natasha, where we stayed during our Moscow visits. The little red fox spent that long night alone in Great Aunt Rosa's shoe, probably wondering if she would ever see the daylight again or if I had abandoned her forever.

2.

Nothing lasts forever. Perhaps, only the Great Nothing lasts forever until Something appears. Of course, it could not have been "forever," but perhaps it was – if Time (as we understand it) did not exist then. No space, no Time – nothing. Or, rather, everything so condensed and indivisible that it all had to fit into Nowhere. Then – Big Bang – everything explodes, divides, and we hear singing – the Word – God's name. Or His laughter. Or Her laughter. Or Great Aunt Rosa's laughter, which explodes and spills over as I wake up.

My mom, who is holding the telephone receiver away from her ear (so as not to be deafened by thunder), is also laughing. I can't help it and start laughing too, even though I have no idea why we are all laughing. And Natasha, my mom's sister, walks into the room and starts laughing too. And from the receiver booms Great Aunt Rosa's laugh, filling the room, spilling through the windows into the sky and breaking into snowflakes, dancing in the wind.

3.

My tiny red plastic fox had bitten my Great Aunt Rosa when she (Aunt Rosa) tried to put on her shoe. It did not surprise me. After the long night, the fox must have assumed that this shoe was her home. I wondered if small plastic animals have the same concept of time as we do. I decided that no, a night spent in a shoe could seem to last an eternity to an abandoned fox. So, of course, she bit Aunt Rosa's massive toe, which threatened to squish her inside the shoe. Aunt Rosa promised me she would keep the fox safe until our return. She did.

4.

When grownups talk, I prefer to hide under the table. I imagine them growing heads of animals: this man is a bear, and this woman is a sheep (just listen to how she bleats to every word the bear-man says.) This one is a wolf, and he always contradicts the bear. They have different strengths, the bear-man, and the wolf-man. The bear-man might be stronger, but the wolf-man is faster and more aggressive. It is why they argue; they challenge each other. In the corner, there is a woodpecker – he repeats the same point over and over again, proving everyone else wrong. He wins every discussion because others become too bored and lose any interest in him and his point of view.

5.

But who is Great Aunt Rosa?
I think and think but can't picture her as an animal. Maybe a bird?
I think of the stories involving birds but can't imagine Aunt Rosa flying. At least not now – maybe when she was young?
Was Great Aunt Rosa ever young?
Perhaps, she is a Dodo, that mythical bird, timeless and strange, so familiar, yet completely incomprehensible.
Aunt Rosa is flapping her wings, erasing colors, fading into a less and less traceable outline, until nothing remains except her shoes.

 

Unscalable [by Lera Auerbach]

Ivan Shishkin's Morning in a Pine Forest & Russian Chocolates

On the grand scale of things, it's not always clear what keeps the balance. 

But things are not scalable. Memories hide in the smallest details and surfaces like a shy relative of long-forgotten relations:
in the color of the window-curtains from childhood,
in the taste of sgushchyonka (sweet condensed milk of my childhood),
in the sound of unwrapping a chocolate candy – the favorite one with three brown bears-cubs and their mother-bear on the cover.

The picture of four bears was from a well-known painting by Shishkin, a famous Russian painter. 

Come to think of it; I'm not sure why Shishkin was so famous if the work he was mostly known for was this painting of four bears playing in the forest. Later it was discovered that Shishkin did not paint this painting, or rather he painted the forest but not the bears, because painting animals was not his forte, and he asked a friend to do it.

'Shishka' in Russian means a pinecone, but it also means a bump, as when you hit your head. It also can mean, in a slangy way, a big shot – a person in a position of power. 

The painter Shishkin clearly loved Russian nature with its pinecones, but he also hit his head hard with the bears' fake authorship. He did manage to remain a big shot in the annals of Russian art. 

I stopped liking these chocolates at the age of five when I discovered wriggling white worms in one. It was 'war chocolate' from the boxes of food my nanny kept in case of a new war. She had some of these boxes since WWII, some 40 years earlier. 

Time was eaten by worms, leaving only crumbs behind; crumbs dressed in the picture of the cute bears painted by a man who didn't get proper credit for painting them and whose name escapes my memory right now, unlike Shishkin. 

 

No Longer My Own [by Lera Auerbach]

No Longer My Own - Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

1. Some books matter only
   for the future-books
   hiding in them.
   
   
2. Books with strong plots
   offer safe captivity,
   allowing us to hide.
   
   
3. Books without plots
   may dangerously spiral,
   exposing us to memories of unburnt desires.
   
   
4. When you are writing a book, in reality, you are writing two books:
   one is the book you are writing; the other is the book
   about writing the book you're writing.
   
   
5. I face myself in the mirror,
   but I'm no longer my own.
   
   

WORKING SPACE, post-script: CLOSER TO HOME [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

Art calls to art; the conversation remains by design ongoing, unfinished.  I’m thinking about all pieces I didn't address. 

The very last visit I made to a museum was local--the Harvard Art Museum--to meet a friend to go upstairs to visit the conservation lab (where my better half works).  Here’s a glimpse:

Leaving the museum, not knowing it was about to close down, I looked across the inner courtyard at one of the more amazing recent acquisitions, a self-portrait by Kerry James Marshall (Untitled, 2008). 

Six feet tall and five feet wide, Marshall's painting is utterly compelling, a yin and yang of dark over light. The outstretched palette reminds me of Parmigianino’s outstretched hand, here a microcosm of a working space. The angled paintbrush dips into the black circle on the palette, black like a hole, black like the black circle of the painter’s hand.

Two years ago, I visited a class of undergraduates sharing their final Museum Studies assignments:  ekphrastic poems informed by technical study of works of art.  “My palette is the milky way,/ and my canvas is a blank slate” wrote a student who had focused all semester on Marshall’s painting:

    I am a shadow of my own image
    under the light you shine on me.

“Everyone and everything we see is a self-portrait,” suggests Terrance Hayes in his poem, "Self-Portrait as the Mind of a Camera," after the work of photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris (How To Be Drawn, Penguin, 2015).  The poem continues:

    ...What if, in your previous life,

    You were born a black man's camera?  Suppose you lived
    As something filled with a light and darkness that's defined
    By what it touches.  What if you could hold everything

    You behold in a chamber inside yourself: a sense of the existential,
    A sense that color sometimes conspires against you, a sense
    There are people who would be anonymous without you?

Perhaps the best poetic analogue to the self-portrait is the sonnet, that form with just enough room for a face, an about-face, and a final reflection.  How do we fit ourselves into or fight against the framings we inherit?  What room do we have to choose? In Hayes’ stunning recent book, American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), one sonnet begins, “I lock you into an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet,” and I think about locking gazes.  The poem ends:

    I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
    Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor.  It is not enough
    To love you.  It is not enough to want you destroyed.

This reminds me of Ashbery’s final address to the artist in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The chamber in the poem where self and reflection are facing off has become the kind of chamber that holds a bullet:

    Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,
    Offer it no longer as a shield or greeting,
    The shield of a greeting, Francesco:
    There is room for one bullet in the chamber:
    Our looking through the wrong end
    Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed
    Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately
    Among the features of the room, an invitation
    Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"
    Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely
    Enough how it wasn't.

What is the end or the aim of a self-portrait?  In another Hayes sonnet, one obsessed with endings, every sentence in the poem ends with “life.”  The poems Hayes reflects on challenge us to reflect on our life sentences:

    Rilke ends his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo saying
    "You must change your life."  James Wright ends "Lying
    In a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island,
    Minnesota" saying "I have wasted my life."  Ruth Stone ends
    "A Moment" saying "You do not want to repeat my life."
    A minute seed with a giant soul kicking inside it at the end
    And beginning of life.  After the opening scene where
    A car bomb destroys the black detective's family, there are
    Several scenes of our hero at the edge of life.  A shootout
    In an African American Folk Museum, a shootout
    In the middle of an interstate rest stop parking lot,
    A barn shootout endangering the farm life.  I live a life
    That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life,
    That makes me weep for another life.  Define life.

 

Smelling Beyond Words [by Lera Auerbach]

На птичьих правах - Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

 

There is a phrase in Russian, ‘na ptich'ikh pravakh’,  having birds' rights. 

To live ‘na ptich'ikh pravakh’ means not having proper rights to occupy space (i.e., no correct documents or inability to pay rent) but being temporarily tolerated and allowed to remain. 

What rights do birds have? 

And why birds? 

Why not say opossums' rights? 

The flattery of wings? Geography? Lack of stability? 

Can the lack of stability be something stable, constant?

If you're constantly absent, does this make you reliably absent? 

The bird can sing and leave. 

I do the same, but behind me snakes a trail of debt and obligations, a chain to keep me within its reach, stones available for throwers. Personalized gravitational pull.

* * *

In the world of confusion, only a dog knows the truth. 

But we rarely listen to dogs. We forgot how to listen.

A dog knows what would make us happy. Because it's precisely that which would make a dog happy: a walk in the woods, smelling the fresh air, that sense of well-being which only comes when you can commune with nature and feel fully present. 

A dog is not interested in words. 

Words are the mythological woods in which humans get lost instead of visiting the real woods and taking long walks with their dogs.

A dog knows the danger of words. That's why it can understand all human languages. 

It knows to smell beyond words. Because words are only shells. What's essential lies within, beyond the shell. And the shell may be misleading, a disfiguring perception of the shape it contains within. 

A cat also knows it all but doesn't have the patience to deal with human stupidity and stubbornness. A cat knows – it is futile to change us. 

Dogs are more hopeful.   

* * *

Living life in dogs' years. 

How many dogs will still adopt me? 

My childhood's big Sheila, then Toto and Daisy (all three were still alive when I left Russia for New York at the age of 17.) 

Then came school years without a dog, living on ptich'ikh pravakh here and there. For a while, I managed to keep a lizard at the Juilliard dorms, but it was difficult to shop for live worms and keep them all hidden. 

The moment when I rented my first apartment – little Sheila joined my life. I named little Sheila after big Sheila who died peacefully in my father's arms in Russia after I left for New York. Little Sheila also died in my father's arms, but in Boston, many years later. She was aging, she was ill, and I knew my father would take better care of her than I, in my birdy ways, fluttering from one city to the next.

And for the last two years of Sheila's life, there was Finek, whom Sheila hated as only an old cranky dog may hate a young puppy, who stole her human's attention and love. Finek didn't steal my love, for I still loved Sheila. Sheila was Sheila, and Finek was Finek. 

But I knew she did not forgive my betrayal with another dog. 

The moment Finek appeared, Sheila realized she was no longer the only one. 

Even today, many years later, I still feel guilty about it. Never sorry for getting Finek, but sorry for hurting Sheila in doing so. 

Dogs are supposed to be forgiving? Not so sure. 

But for my father, Sheila was still the only one. She's buried in Boston next to my aunt's house.

* * *

My life in dog-lives…

At night I protect Finek's dreams. 

He snores. His legs jerk – he is dreaming. 

His dreams often turn into nightmares, and he cries. 

I gently wake him up. He falls asleep again, breathes quietly. 

Does he ever dream about me? 

Am I the cause of his nightmares? 

 

Sheila and Finek

With Sheila in Siberia

WORKING SPACE: WAITING ROOMS [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

In January, I flew to see the Vija Celmins exhibition at the Met Breuer – the last flight, the last exhibition, as it so happened, of the year.  Here's the closest thing to a "Self-Portrait" in Celmins’ work:  a meticulous drawing/collage of a tiny envelope addressed to herself (from her mother), with separately drawn stamps: a house, waves, clouds—but also fire, explosion.

It reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "In the Waiting Room," in which the child (in Worcester, Massachusetts) is suddenly galvanized by the O of pain of her aunt's cry from the dentist's office, an O that somehow is and is not her own. 

        But I felt, you are an I,
        You are an Elizabeth,
        You are one of them.
        Why should you be one, too?

A self-address implies a dislocation.  When I flew to New York I was suffering with shingles; it flared along the nerve branch from my spine down my arm to my hand—the nerve I felt when I lifted a cup of coffee, or a pen.  I had a hunch that Celmins art would teach me something about what nerves are – strands of electrical impulses?  Were they the fibers of my being (did my being have fibers?)? Celmins’ astonishing renderings of spiderwebs, of the surfaces of waves, of cosmos after cosmos of (apparently) pulsing stars – the acuteness of her eye, yoked to the patience of that hand:  when I stood in the gallery the work absorbed me, helped me to find and lose myself.  Art sees you; poems read you.

I was not prepared, this summer, for the utter lucidity with which John Ashbery’s long poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” reflected back to me the pressure and yearning of shut-in days, even from its opening lines:   

        As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
        Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
        And swerving easily away, as though to protect
        What it advertises.  A few leaded panes, old beams,
        Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
        In a movement supporting the face, which swims
        Toward and away like the hand
        Except that it is in repose.

Yes, that’s the gesture of the COVID dream in which you reach toward someone and then at the last minute realize you mustn’t and pull your hand away.  For me, a miracle of Ashbery’s opening lines is that even as he tells you so plainly what is there, and so precisely and technically how Parmigianino went about making what we see (as Vasari wrote), he is able--as effortlessly as the light arriving--to make a place in his poem to establish a soul:

        The time of day or the density of light
        Adhering to the face keeps it
        Lively and intact in a recurring wave
        Of arrival.  The soul establishes itself.
        But how far can it swim out through the eyes
        And still return safely to its nest?  The surface
        Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
        Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
        That the soul is captive, treated humanely, kept
        In suspension, unable to advance much farther
        Than your look as it intercepts the picture.

Marianne Moore writes, in “When I Buy Pictures”--or, as she amends the act in the first lines of her poem, “what is closer to the truth, / when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor”—this is what matters most:

        it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;
        it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

There’s something of this in Ashbery’s poem and Parmigianino’s portrait, in the ways we register most acutely now how much it matters to be humanly face to face.  “Do you not see,” Keats asks in a letter, “how it takes a world of pains and troubles to school an intelligence and make a soul?”

        The soul has to stay where it is,
        Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
        The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
        Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
        Posing in this place.  It must move
        As little as possible.  This is what the portrait says.
        But there is in that gaze a combination
        Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
        In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
        The secret is too plain, the pity of it smarts,
        Makes hot tears spurt:  that the soul is not a soul,
        Has no secret, is small, and it fits
        Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

I wish we could start over and take five days to keep reading Ashbery’s poem, the way it moves in and out of the painting, a studio, a day, the breeze turning the pages.  But we’re out of time.

Resonating at Random [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

 

A tree is never just a tree. 

Social distancing one could measure. But how distant should one be from oneself? 

Too distant, and you risk losing yourself and becoming numb, incapable of true empathy and love. 

Too close, and you fall apart, unable to hold on to the imaginary thread
that keeps different parts of you together.

A book is like a tree: it needs a chance to grow, to take hold,
to find enough nourishment in the soil, enough water. 

In its early stages, it's too fragile, while the hurricane season is just around the corner,
and strong winds could uproot and demolish it. 

Where do all the unwritten books go? Half-written? Completed manuscripts waiting for editors? 

Forgotten manuscripts waiting for readers? Forgotten lives? 

Like a child, a book requires sacrifice. It hurts you, its birth can be bloody painful.

It can also give you the greatest joy. Ultimately, it is never yours. 

It is born through you but doesn't belong to you; you are simply its tool
and a highly imperfect one at that. 

To read a book the way one asks for forgiveness, 
as an act of searching for solace. 

But a book is just a book – a collection of words, 

resonating at random 

only when struck.

 

WORKING SPACE: BALANCE [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

A poem, a painting, a poem.  Dickinson, Vermeer, Stevens.

Here's Emily Dickinson's poem, "There's a certain Slant of light" (#258 in the Johnson edition, #320 in the Franklin edition):

    There's a certain Slant of light,
    Winter Afternoons--
    That oppresses, like the Heft
    Of Cathedral Tunes--

    Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
    We can find no scar,
    But internal difference,
    Where the Meanings, are--

    None may teach it--Any--
    "Tis the Seal Despair--
    An imperial affliction
    Sent us of the Air--

    When it comes, the Landscape listens--
    Shadows--hold their breath--
    When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
    On the look of Death--

This poem takes me back to Friday morning services in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, to the columnar quiet and then the first blast from the organ, that pressure:  I feel the heft.  The clamor that framed -- and punctuated -- our time in that cool space.   

“Balance” is a verb.  Poems perform balancing acts.  In the last stanza of Dickinson’s poem, we balance, briefly, with the listening landscape, the shadows holding their breath, between the coming and going of the Slant of light.  The poem makes room for that; the sentences make room.  Listening space, breathing space.

A certain Slant of light streams in the window in Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, alighting on her face, her hand, the twin pans of the balance, her other hand balancing lightly on the table.  In the winter of 1995, I had tickets to see the Vermeer Exhibition at the National Gallery—but the show was closed by a government shutdown.  On the last day before my flight away, when the show briefly reopened, I was in the long line waiting in the cold to get in.  And the crush!  Impossible to linger in front of a painting, to approach it slowly from across the room.  That mattered, of course – but it felt as if it didn’t matter, as if the focus and balance in the paintings invited me in.   Almost pressed against The Lacemaker (barely the size of a sheet of note paper) I lean with the woman in her toward her pins and bobbins, and the almost invisible strands threading between them.  Although her face is towards us, in my memory I’m somehow looking over her shoulder, as if steadying myself to do her work. 

“Still” is a verb.  Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance stills us – not by freezing us, but by offering us a balance; we slow down until our stillness matches the stillness seeming to arrive in the painting.  A momentary stay against confusion. Our breathing could unsettle the golden pans.

Less than ten years before Vermeer painted this painting, an immense explosion (90,000 pounds of gunpowder, stored in a convent), devastated Delft.  I don’t think his paintings shut that explosion out; instead, I think their fragile balancing acts are performed humbly, aware of the threat of chaos they might counter.

The reader in Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” leans in the summer night above his page like Vermeer’s Lacemaker over her lace:

    The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

    The house was quiet and the world was calm.
    The reader became the book; and summer night

    Was like the conscious being of the book.
    The house was quiet and the world was calm.

    The words were spoken as if there was no book,
    Except that the reader leaned above the page,

    Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
    The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

    The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
    The house was quiet because it had to be.

    The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
    The access of perfection to the page.

    And the world was calm.  The truth in a calm world,
    In which there is no other meaning, itself

    Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
    Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Just now, the “calm world” in Stevens’ poem feels wished for, rather than achieved.  The fulcrum in the poem comes in the sixth and seventh lines, where the reader

    …leaned above the page,

    Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
    The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

    The summer night is like a perfection of thought....

Bent.  Inclination.  In the pandemic winter, I enter into this poem’s wanting.  The smoothly unspooling phrases tense and catch on these intermediate commas, and bunch up in the much most of a wish that can’t quite manage to smooth itself out.  The poem’s perhaps not, as it seems, an assertion or description of calm, but a balancing act.

WORKING SPACE: GET CLOSER [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

It's James Thurber's birthday today.  In his quasi-fairy tale, The Thirteen Clocks, time is frozen; the warm hand of Saralinda can do nothing to set the clocks ticking again.  I've always loved its strange mix of logic/magic, as when the Golux offers this instruction:  "If you can touch the clocks and never start them, then you can start the clocks and never touch them." "Hold your hand this far away," he tells Saralinda. "Now that far.  Closer.  Now a little farther back.  A little farther.  There!  I think you have it!  Do not move!"

That space between the hand and the clock, like the distance between the poem and the work of art.

*

Ten years ago, my students were reading poems about Caravaggio's painting, "Conversion on the Way to Damascus."  It offers a fantastically foreshortened view of Saul/Paul on his back on the ground, almost under the feet of the horse he's fallen from, his arms wide apart as if forced open by the light.  Behind the horse and under Saul's back, everything is black.  It's a great, strange painting.  But when I tried to show it to them, the projector blew its bulb.  Blank wall.  Had I been waiting for that to happen?  We were not in rural Ohio, but--for that lucky semester--in Rome, a twenty-minute walk from the Piazza del Popolo.  We get up, go out, and hit the cobbled pavement.

Elizabeth Bowen, in A Time in Rome, insists that "knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather." We sweated our way along the crowded sidewalks of the Via di Ripetta, eventually spilling out off-axis into the wide piazza.  Across the way, there's a billboard half the expanse of the church wall:  just a line of writing and a tiny car.  Avvicinati di piu, it says.  "Come closer."

Does it matter what it's selling?  That's what we've been trying to do--come closer to the painting.  We cross the piazza, but just as we arrive at Santa Maria del Popolo, the doors are closing for a service.  It's not for so long that we've missed our chance for the day.  Just enough to make us wait.  We sit outside on the steps and re-read that morning's poems:  Thom Gunn's "In Santa Maria del Popolo" (1958), Stanley Plumly's "Comment on Thom Gunn's 'In Santa Maria del Popolo' Concerning Caravaggio's The Conversion of Paul"(2000), and Paul Otremba's "Surfing for Caravaggio's Conversion of Paul"(2008).  In all three poems, getting close to the painting is crucial to feeling what it wants us to see.  Gunn's poem sets the scene in the narrow chapel where the painting hangs:

     Waiting for when the sun an hour less
     Conveniently oblique makes visible
     The painting on one wall of this recess
     By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
     I see how shadow in the painting brims
     With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
     But a dim horse's haunch and various limbs,
     Until the very subject is in doubt.

Gunn waits to see the light.  Plumly, responding to Gunn, puts his lire in the lumen box to light up the painting.  Otremba, following in the literary but not literal footsteps of the other two, enters the keywords, "Caravaggio, painter, Santa Maria del Popolo" into his computer.

     I don't have to go to Italy
     to stand in line for a conversion,
     or to be, as the poet says, still falling.

In fact, the computer gives Otremba too much:  other versions Caravvagio painted of the scene, other Caravaggios, an intensifying chiaroscuro inducing a vertigo of its own, and a sense (Otremba writes) that even "If I were closer, I wouldn't understand." When, at last, we go in, there is no place to stand in the tiny Cerasi Chapel.  When we see it, it knocks us back, we are too close.  Caravaggio wants us to enter Saul's experience, wants the painting to be difficult, almost impossible to see. 

Is it perverse of me not want to show you the painting at all?  I'd almost rather go back to Alice Fulton's "Close," which, like Caravaggio's painting, situates us

...an arm's length from unbeing, as it seems.
I was what flashed through me

in full frost.  We were life to life,
in our flesh envelopes,
insubstantial, air to air and you and I.

Sitting near the window of a coffee shop (this was a year ago, after looking at the Frankenthaler exhibition), I thought about these paintings and these poems, until the window washer came and erased my face.

WORKING SPACE: CLOSE [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

I am thinking these days about one of my favorite ekphrastic poems, Alice Fulton's "Close," the first poem in Felt (W. W. Norton, 2001).  It responds to Joan Mitchell's "White Territory," but I hadn't seen the painting when I fell for the poem.  What I love about it is the way it tries to get me close to the painting, how it makes me feel the tricky, charged intimacy of that encounter.  Right-justified, the lines run right up to the edge of the page, as if pushing us to see what isn't there.  The poem opens like this:

To take it farther would mean dismantling doorframes,
so they unpacked the painting's cool chromatics
where it stood, shrouded in gray tarpaulin
near a stairwell in a space so tight
I couldn't get away from it.
I could see only parts of the who,
I was so close.

I was almost in the painting,
a yin-driven, frost-driven thing
of mineral tints
in the museum's vinegar light.
To get any distance, the canvas or I
would have to fall down the stairs
or dissolve through a wall.
It put me in mind of winter...

I miss being that close to paintings in this pandemic winter.  Scale, proximity, lighting, relation to the human in the room.  One of the last actual exhibitions I went to see, roughly a year ago, was at the Princeton Art Museum, of Helen Frankenthaler prints, room after gorgeous room.  The show was called "Seven Types of Ambiguity," after William Empson's essay on reading poetry.  The prints were all glass-faced, so my photos bring back my own floating through the rooms:

I gave up long ago trying to avoid reflections in the glass; I like their memorializing the visit, my having been with the art, the way the prints began to transform the space I moved through, behind my back.

Fulton puts us "in mind of winter" to conjure not only Mitchell's scumbled whites, but also to invite the company of Wallace Stevens' "Snow Man," who must have a mind of winter not to think "of any misery in the sound of the wind."  The snow man, who,

...nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Some of the most powerful non-representation art makes us confront this:  the x-ing out of the human in the scene, a conversion into radically negative capability.  How can one enter into what is happening here?

The ending of Fulton's poem returns to Stevens, shifting from where we've put the painting to where the painting puts us.  It's not, whatever the winter, a cold response:

You put me in mind of winter where I live,
a winter so big I'll have to dismantle myself
to admit it: the always winter
and its consolations of flint.
This is not an illustration.
It's what I saw when the airbag opened,
slamming me with whiteness like the other side.
I came to consciousness on braced arms,
pushing my face from the floor
in order to breathe,
an arm's length from unbeing, as it seems.
I was what flashed through me

in full frost.  We were life to life,
in our flesh envelopes,
insubstantial, air to air and you and I.
Though we could see only parts of the whole,
we felt its tropism.
We leaned toward, liked,
its bitter lungs.  We almost were that
winter tissue and cranial colored paint.
We were almost in the picture.  We were close.
We left each other a note.

"We leaned toward, liked, / its bitter lungs."

Here's another, closer picture from the Frankenthaler exhibition.  I'm closer to the glass and it's started to swallow me up--though maybe you can see my arm holding the camera to the right.  Someone in the middle is falling down a rabbit hole.  Into the painting?  Out of it?  "We were almost in the picture.  We were close. / We left each other a note."

Because I so miss this being-with-pictures, as I miss so many other kinds of being with, the poems (ekphrastic and otherwise) that give felt dimension back to me, that get me to see feelingly, are the ones I want most now.

Stravinsky: "I surround myself with obstacles. ."

Albert Gleizes, Portrait of Igor Stravinsky, 1914, Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 114.3 cm. Muséum of Modern Art Collection

"My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit." -- Igor Stravinsky

—Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons

from the archive; first posted May 15, 2016 by sdh

Ashbery on Paris (and Ellsworth Kelly)

from Ellsworth Kelly, Plant Drawings (Matthew Marks Gallery, 1992), Essay by John Ashbery. Unpaginated. About the life of an American expatriate in Paris:

          "I suspect that in this burgeoning period of his art the limiting force was Paris itself, that dome of intuitive appreciation of one's own powers of observation, a specific place and time where `some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, -- for that moment only,' in Pater's famous formulation, and where, as Gertrude Stein said, Americans can discover what it means to be American. One can never predict what form the generating impulse will take: in my case (my own years in Paris came just after Kelly's) I found my poetry being more `influenced' by the sight of the Paris phenomenon of clear water flowing in the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was learning to read at the time."

Archie Rand: The Motets (after Eugenio Montale) & collaborations with David Shapiro

Archie Rand, Motet #1, 2013, 24 x 36 inches, acrylic, enamel and fabric on canvas.

BravinLee is very pleased to exhibit the Motets, a series of 20 paintings by Archie Rand, after the poems of Eugenio Montale.  Schedule: October 28-31 and November 4-7, 12-5pm.  Appointments encouraged.  For further information or to make an appointment please email us at info@bravinlee.com   

“What you see is not what you see” – Philip Guston

Rand had previously responded to the work of Nobel Prize winning author, Eugenio Montale in a series of paintings (“Men Who Turn Back”) and then in 2013 Rand again engaged Montale’s formidable “Motets”, a group of 20 love poems that Montale seems to be mouthing into the air as they are addressed to a departed lover.  In these poems a bombardment of imagery attempts to fill the negative space around an unhealed pain, the avenue to which Montale needed to, in futility, keep open. Rand’s pictorial armature derives from Giorgio De Chirico’s parallel entropy, which shares a spirit of the unfulfilled. Long recognized as a masterful artist, Rand brings the full force of his invention and lyricism to these works.

______________________________________________________________

The Archie Rand collaboration with the poet David Shapiro has its roots in their shared experience of growing up in New York City and being maverick teen prodigies. In his mid-teens Rand played piano professionally with artists who were to become major stars and, at the age of 17, was showing at the legendary Tibor de Nagy Gallery - and Shapiro, in high school performed as a violin soloist under Leopold Stokowski and at the age of 16 had published a major book of poetry that received praise from John Ashbery and Jack Kerouac.

Met Percent: Week Twenty-Four [by Alec Bernstein]

Nize Baby!

Top: Épinette des Vosges, Amant Constant Lambert, late 19th c., not on view.
Bottom: Film credits, The Third Man, 1949; Album Cover, Soothing Sounds for Baby, 1962.

An épinettier (a player of the musical instrument; see above) followed Montaigne, along with his tutor, from room to room, playing tunes whenever he was tired or bored. This was a ritual he learned as a child.

“Being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them violently and over-hastily from sleep (wherein they are much more profoundly involved than we), [my father] caused me to be wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that purpose.” - Montaigne, Of the Education of Children.

Raymond Scott, mid-century composer and early electronic music inventor, felt the same way about children and sound and recorded several volumes of Soothing Sounds for Baby. His quiet drones remind me of the zither’s constant vibrations. When I was about 10 years old I got an “AM / FM clock-radio” and contemplated each night what station I should wake up to the next day. Today, we have apps like Mornify or Spotify, “with science-backed morning playlists . . .” in case you don’t know how to wake up properly.

The zither, the dulcimer, and the pedal steel guitar, all descend from the French épinette. If you can get to Vienna . . . and if you are willing to sit in a theatre (the Berg Kino Theater, to be exact), you can hear modern zither music featured over real rubble in real post-war Vienna in The Third Man. The title theme was a Billboard number-one hit from April-July, 1950 - unheard of for the zither!

Orson Welles’ character Harry Lime seems like the kind of guy who would have an épinettier following him around Vienna to play whenever he got tired or bored. And as his lover Anna (played by Alida Valli) said, “He never grew up. The world grew up around him”.

 

Trumpet and Verse

Left to right:
Parade Trumpet, 1700,  gallery 680. 
Natural Trumpet in D, 19th c., gallery 680.
Bass saxtuba in E-flat, 1855, Adolphe Sax, gallery 680. 
Over-the-Shoulder Soprano Horn in E-flat, ca. 1880, John F. Stratton, gallery 680. 
Coach Horn in C, ca. 1825–89, gallery 680. 
One of Evelyn Waugh‘s ear trumpets, Forum Auctions, 2017 (estimated value, £1000-1500).

Left to right: 
Jean Cocteau reciting through a megaphone in his production of Les mariés de la tour Eiffel, 1921. 
Evelyn Waugh with one of his ear trumpets. 

There is little casual about these horns. From the Old Testament to the hunt, to our ongoing battle cries, they announce — “forcible” — attention.

“Cleanthes said . . . the voice, forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcible and shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of verse darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear and apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect.” - Montaigne

Cocteau needed force in his ballet, because his themes were outlandish: "Sunday vacuity; human beastliness, ready-made expressions, disassociation of ideas from flesh and bone, ferocity of childhood, the miraculous poetry of everyday life.” So he turned to a horn, an “over-the-head-voice-trumpet”, increasing the power of his delivery.

Waugh used silence against those who displeased or bored him. By middle age, he’d become a pantomime villain with his ear trumpet — removed mid-sentence and brandished with devastating effect.

“They think that good rules cannot be understood but by the sound of a trumpet.” - Montaigne

 

Bells and Whistles (and Rattles)

The Kagura Suzu is associated with Shinto rituals at shrines and at court. Kagura (神楽) translates "god-entertainment" and encompasses instrumental music, songs, and dances. 
The Mayan bird whistle has two chambers: one in its head and one deeper in the body. The blow holes are in the tail and crown.  
The Native American Tlingit whistle depicts a double-headed eagle, and this bird could represent contact between Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast and Russian explorers. 
The polished Kuba whistle is used for the arrival of a king or the delivery of messages during hunts.

The Pre-Columbian rattle wards off evil. The terracotta mother figure nurses, and her mouth, belly, and necklace make soothing sounds.  
The English “precious and protective” baby rattles have whistles, a piece of teething coral, and silver bells. They were thought to ward off enchantment and disease. I think of Neil Postman’s Prisoners of Childhood, where he argues that preciousness signals both protected childhood and class structure. 

I wish I’d had any of these fine instruments as a kid. . . . I just had a pink rubber elephant squeeze toy. Years later working as a composer, I layered tape recordings of it, slowed and enlarged in my first studio Musique concrète piece,   Elephantomachia,   (battle of the elephants). Perhaps attempting some overdue off-warding.

 

Twist it, Clap it, Rub it, Whack it, Strike it

Top left: Damaru, 19th c., Tibet, gallery 684.
Top center: Clapper, ca. 1850–1750 B.C., Egypt, Middle Kingdom. 
Top right: Friction Drum (Lunet) 19th– 20th c.,Papua New Guinea, New Ireland, gallery 684.  
Bottom left: Gamelan, Saron Panerus Slendro, 19th c., Java, Indonesia, gallery 681. 
Bottom right: Robotic player piano, roto tom drums, and vibraphone, Aesthetic Research, Alec Bernstein & Daniel Carney,  Baltimore, 1980s.

The thod-rnga, or damaru is made from two human skulls. The drum is played by twisting it back and forth with one hand so that the small pellets at the ends of the strings strike the two drumheads. Buddhist power-tools to fight evil.

Clappers are among the earliest percussion instruments in ancient Egypt. This clapper is shaped like forearms and hands “wearing” bracelets on each wrist. Musical clappers were used at banquets, funerary processions, and other rituals. Precursors to the secularized applause machines of 1950s television.

Lunets are "friction drums" with three sound-producing wedges or tongues on top. The musician moistens a hand with water and rubs the wedges. The tones echo the cry of the island bird for which the drum was named.

The structures of gamelan music share forms with Javanese poetry. The Macapat texts, especially Kinanthi, fit into their individual melodic patterns, which are sung with the percussive orchestras. Themed metric systems are marvelous: Kinanthi, love poems; Durma, violent passions or fighting; Mas kumambang, longing or homesickness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_poetry#Sekar_madya_and_tembang_macapat.
And love those hammers. Not so far from my performance art/sound poetry, back in the day, the 1970s.

By the 1980s, digital control of analogue instruments was in vogue. My partner and I constructed systems to extend pianistic technique — any note, chord or cluster of notes could be performed live by aligning it to keys on a computer keyboard. The system relayed strike information to solenoids which struck the piano keys at the desired moment and volume. This same technique was applied to drums and mallet instruments, like the rosewood marimba I had. Real instruments, natural acoustics, no finger limits. This we called Aesthetic Research. 

“John Zisca of Bohemia, a defender of John Wicliffe’s heresies [the influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood], left order that they should flay him after his death, and of his skin make a drum to carry in the war against his enemies, fancying it would contribute to the continuation of the successes he had always obtained in the wars against them.” - Montaigne 

While viewing these instruments of the past (including my own), I felt more in than out of the tradition. Power tools go way back.

Twice Told (a poem) and Bonjour Precipice (a picture) [by Geoff Young]

I was there, I’m sure of it, at the San Francisco
Art Institute to hear the Sun Ra Arkestra play in the
Courtyard, late 70s, just as I was in New York
City, at Slug's Saloon, on a Monday night in ‘67,

Having dropped a quarter tab of Owsley acid
Before entering the bar and the music
At Slugs was four hours of traveling
The spaceways with John Gillmore, Marshall

Allen, and Pat Patrick, et. al., the Sun perched
Stage left at the keys, burning bright. Took two sips
Of a beer that sat by itself on a table, or just one.

Music over, guys packing up, I pass the leader
Standing back at the bar and all I can say to him
Is "Sun.” And Ra looks me in the eye & says, “Dig.”