PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW
Please join us at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art for the Opening Ceremony July 11, 2019 from 6 to 8 PM
PAINTING THE FIGURE NOW
Many of the artworks you will see tonight are available from Artsy and Artnet.
View pricing and availability now.
The Met Percent
Q: If I move to NYC, which I did, could I walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, view the collection, gallery by gallery, in ascending order, and how long would it take? The galleries begin at room 100 and end at room 999.
A: I propose to walk to the Met 100 times, viewing 8-10 rooms per visit, during the next 2 years. Each visit will be at least 1 hour, but not more than 4, depending on subject, condition, and the intensity of my response. The method will be “of Montaigne” via Gide. Documentation follows.
Alec Bernstein, April 2019-2021
0% (En Route)
Day 1, I walk through Central Park. My pre-viewing begins with all these curves, en route at 0%.
On Montaigne’s Essays: “Written without preconceived plan, without method, as events or his reading chanced to suggest, he claims to give us his whole self.” - André Gide, whose edition of Montaigne is in my left pocket. Sketchbook in my right.
On Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park: Pedestrians are led without realizing they’re being led. The sensation of feeling lost yet completely confident lets you easily return to your starting point. See his 4th Design Principal: Aim for the unconscious.
Weapons First
I am standing in the Met, in a gallery of glass, light, and quiet. The indoor weather is perfect for looking.
“When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing.” - Montaigne
Yes, somehow it is always weapons first.
Kid Egypt
“Egyptologist” was my answer to “when you grow up. . .”. Why, I don't know, but I remember a friend and I built a cardboard plane in kindergarten. We set the course for Cairo Egypt, a difficult flight. I was the pilot in charge of the weather conditions and worried about the storms in March and April.
But the sands and winds, once we blanketed the windshield, didn't matter, and in the cockpit, totally dark, sleep was easy. Through play and rest. And when I woke, my co-pilot had parachuted. I was alone. But in my smallest pocket was the emergency payphone dime: call home: “Come pick me up, I’m stuck at the Cairo Airport.”
I was not alone in the swirl of “ancient Egypt” in the century of media. Was it National Geographic that sharpened the Egyptologist in me? Lon Chaney’s “The Mummy’s Tomb”? Or the rescue of a genuine Egyptian temple to 5th Avenue?
I collected Sir E.A. Wallis Budge volumes (the once-eminent British Egyptologist). My treasure, his very rare Dictionary of Hieroglyphics, was stolen from the parking lot of the Brooklyn Museum. Of course I searched for what any modern tomb robber would surely abandon, but it was lost in Brooklyn.
Regulatory Art
As it turns out, you can only get to the afterlife if you have a legitimate function there. Pharaohs are needed for “leadership” . If they’ve added your image into their burial art, you might have a shot. Otherwise, forget it. No reward for the unconnected pious.
Gold toe thimble polisher could be your ticket.
Every spring my mother would drive to the abandoned mansion on Carlton Road. The long path leading to the front door was shaded by a canopy of overgrown lilac bushes. She would cut as many as we could hold, reaching ever higher for the biggest and most fragrant flowers. When we arrived home, she arranged them in a cut-glass vase, a wedding gift, and placed the vase on our piano so that it was reflected in the mirror above the staircase.
--sdl
My story starts with Robinson Crusoe and ends with a martini. Like Raymond Roussel, I’ll try to write between the two. In 1989 I had my first NYC one-person show at Exit Art which featured 18 paintings—a big show. My good friend Trevor Winkfield brought John Ashbery to the show and reported back to me that John was enthusiastic about the paintings. Without this favor from Trevor, the whole story never gets off the ground.
I needed a catalogue essay for a show in Sweden and John agreed to write it. To date, it is still something I treasure—as John compared me to Robinson Crusoe—seeing in him another person with diverse goals, restricted means and imaginative aptitudes applied toward that differential. John sent Ragnar Stromberg –his Swedish translator to my Gothenburg opening. The whole thing felt felicitous and easy and real.
Some years later I woke up one day with an idea. As background to this let me say, I had made paintings using a lexicon of found imagery for a number of years and all the paintings had numerical titles—there wasn’t a single word attached to these paintings. I had long loved John’s poems and one of the things I admired is the bricolage of found lapidary language set into the matrix of the poem but still retaining a strong scent of its foundness, of it coming from somewhere else—cooking, television ads, the cartoons, women’s magazines, etc. And I might have seen a poem of John’s in the New Yorker that read like a list of titles—or I might be making that up.
Anyhow, this is all pre-Email so I screwed up my courage and I called John. I reminded him that I have had only numerical identifiers for my paintings, that I used found imagery from a great variety of sources and I suggested the idea of “found titles” for my paintings. That is, found to me. I suggested that he write a set of painting titles and I, afterwards, would then make the paintings for those titles. I gave him no further information, hints, instructions or thoughts about what I was looking for with these titles. In fact, I had no agenda, I wanted to be surprised.
As I recall, John mostly listened and I mostly babbled. At a certain point I said “well, why don’t you think about it and call me back if you are interested.” I felt a little embarrassed that I had even presumed that this great poet would want to spend any time creating something for me.
A week later the phone rang and it was John saying a bit mischievously, “I have your titles. I’m faxing them now.” I will never forget hanging over the fax machine, reading upside down and seeing forty-four titles spill forth: Confessions of a Fop, The Hagiography of this Moment, Midwife to Gargoyles, The Soapstone Factory, No One Can Win at the Hurricane Bar, Bread and Butter Machine, Prevents Furring, Tom Tiddler’s Ground, Sea of Troubles.
I was not excited, I was nervous, but I allayed my fear by thinking “Well, if I can’t do this no one but John and me will know I even tried.” I looked at the list for days and then one day when I was taking a walk an idea for the first painting, “Sore Models,” came into my head. When I finished it another idea came. I never had an agenda for which title I would do next or even which ones I preferred, I would just kind of look at the list from time to time like a musician would play scales and then boom a song would pop into my head. Some of the titles I left until last I now like the most.
In the end I made a painting for all of the 44 titles he created for me and I made several paintings for some titles, so that there are 64 large oil paintings in the Jane Hammond/John Ashbery Collaboration dating from 1993-2002.
In 1997 I invited John to come and see an exhibition of the Hammond/ Ashbery paintings at my gallery in Soho. The gallery stayed open late for us and the dealer, eager to meet John, waltzed up and said “I have a nice bottle of white on ice for you.” Actually, said John rolling his eyes in that Warner Bros way of his and speaking with great emphasis on the third word, “Can you freeze my martini?” Whereupon he pulled a pint glass jar full of clear liquid out of the pocket of his chinos.
Jane Hammond works in print, paint, photography, and sculpture to create a wide array of art that is often based on dreams and literature. Her work has been exhibited in New York City and in galleries and museums around the world. She lives in New York City. Read her 2002 interview with David Lehman here. Find The Complete John Ashbery Collaboration (1993-2001) by Jane Hammond here.
from the archive; first posted September 2017
Our great national poet’s concerns during the Civil War apply with striking relevance in our own moment of war and dividedness. Whitman’s humane example and his central trope—the leaves of grass as sign of democracy and renewal—rebuke directly the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Blood and Soil.” For Whitman, American blood in American soil was not a tribal claim, and for him “the land entire” was the most fitting memorial to the war dead, “South or North, ours all”: ". . . [T]he land entire [is] saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw . . .."
In War Memoranda, forthcoming in May in time for the bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birth, Binh Danh’s photographs of Civil War memorial sites, using the nineteenth-century cyanotype process, evoke at once the past and present. And Robert Schultz’s chlorophyll prints offer portraits of Whitman and Civil War soldiers embodied in the flesh of leaves, physically enacting the central trope of Leaves of Grass—especially when the leaf used has been plucked from a “witness tree” known to have stood on a battlefield during the war. This book of art, poetry, and comment includes a generous selection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, 51 photographs, with essays by poets David Lehman and Stanley Plumly and by scholars Barbara Bair (Library of Congress) and Molly Rogers (author of Delia’s Tears). War Memoranda will be printed in a fine art edition limited to 500 copies and is available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign that will end April 2, 2019. Signed copies and original artworks by Danh and Schultz are available as premiums. For more information use the search link http://kck.st/2DvOExn or go to Kickstarter.com and search “War Memoranda.”
-- sdl
It's Shrove Tuesday, and while New Orleans may have Mardi Gras, we here in Pennsylvania Dutch Country have Fasnacht Day.
What is a fasnacht, you ask? It is a kind of super-doughnut, made with potato flour, sugar, and lard. Don't scoff. They are terrific. They are only sold one day a year - today, the day before Ash Wednesday. Historically, they were the last gastronomic hurrah before Lent, a way to use up all the sugar and lard in the pantry before forty days of fasting began. As you might imagine, they are not health food. No one, as far as I am aware, has ever calculated the calories in a fasnacht. Really, it's better not to know.
What distinguishes fasnachts from ordinary doughnuts is their muchness. They are heavier (potato flour and lard will do that) and usually significantly bigger. They have a wonderfully crispy outside and a decadently soft inside. They come in many varieties - glazed, powdered, filled - but my favorite are ones that are simply dusted with granulated sugar. Heaven.
Fasnachts are serious business here in the Susquehanna Valley. Advertising begins weeks ahead of time, and bakeries and supermarkets open early to handle the rush. When I went to the grocery store to pick up ours today, there were extra tables outside, piled high with fasnachts of all complexion wafting their yeasty aroma through the chilly air, enticing any reluctant buyers (not that there are many of those). And if you think you'll just pick up your dozen on the way home from work, think again: by suppertime, there is not a fasnacht left to be had for love nor money in York County.
So, while the good people of rural Pennsylvania are not ones for gaudy beads, jazz music, and excess alcohol, they do have their moments of over-indulgence. Ah, fasnachts! How we love you!
I’ve been looking at a lot of art about death lately. It isn’t hard to find.
A close friend is drawn to art about despair: dystopia, satirical monuments, a pointing-out of destruction and consequences. Fewer and farther between, he says, is the opposite. It’s hard to find a serious art about hope.
But I think that many young artists are doing just that. They know if they can't transcend a bleak vision of a future planet, there may not be much planet left for them.
This month, I’m posting the work of Sofía Córdova, whose art is a profound vision of human survival and empathy. I believe we can only want what we can imagine. Right now, our government wants to spend billions of dollars on symbolic infrastructure—the same leadership that responded with paper towels as three to five thousand Americans perished during and after Hurricane Maria.
Sofía Córdova was born in Puerto Rico, works in Oakland, and is featured in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Sofía Córdova
Meltwater Pulse 1A, 2016-2018
Taxidermy rooster, pheasant tail, cast head of hornbill, wire, resin, oil paint, wood, steel pipe, sand, black seamless, dried flowers, metal conduit
This is an installation by Sofía Cordova. It depicts a familiar scene: A bird perches on a branch. But it doesn’t look like any bird you’ve ever seen before, and the tree is a log spiked on a steel beam.
In this work, the final frontier is not space but the next great extinction (and what, if anything, comes after). This bird has made it through the apocalyptic event. Its body is patched together from a rooster, a pheasant, and the cast head of a hornbill. Was this creature created by mutation or code? It rises with its wings outstretched from a reconstituted tree.
The title feels both chilling and hopeful. The melting of glacial ice and the permafrost will absolutely change life as we know it, altering the climate (it is -65° in Chicago right now, thanks to a polar vortex) unlocking ancient viruses and bacteria, and releasing rock-eating sulfuric acid. But Pulse is life, enduring even through change that is currently unimaginable.
Is it only a matter of time before the whole scene pixelates into a very different sort of resurrection? In the face of climate and human chaos, it is a monument to survival.
This is a piece about change, but it is also a piece about human bodies.
A clue to understanding this series is a performance, BILONGO LILA: Nobody Dies in a Foretold War. This performance was staged at Mills College Greek Amphiteater in 2017.
Note: In lieu of credits, the first 3 minutes introduce the performers and musicians, who are graduate students from the university.
The performance begins at [3:00], with the words: “The important thing to remember is that time has officially ended. Close your eyes and trust my voice. You have come a long way to learn how to die all over again.”
I’m including it even though it is long, split-screen, and it should be seen in person--or at least much, much bigger.
1,500 years into the future, survivors of humanity are struggling to mutate and piece together a new culture, on a planet made strange by the aging and corrupted digital interventions of late technological capitalism. The environment is a digital projection (including pixellating oceans, ruined cities, and lush forests). The set is made of reclaimed sails—another nod to aged-out technology.
Córdova leaves room for the performers to improvise, and at times (especially in the beginning), the message can land a bit on the nose. But in a culture of fake news and alternative facts, this directness feels more courageous than simplistic.
The performance is about possible futures, technological capitalism, and corruption, but most powerfully it is about bodies. In her world, human survivors recognize and transcend the cultural myths of biology, identity markers, and violence to create a more hopeful society, even on a vastly altered planet. At [26:39], words of science fiction writer John V. Marsch appear on the screen: “No it was not necessary for us to lose our appearance for you to gain it.” In the foreground, two dancers perform a melting pas de deux of mutation and perhaps love, melding into a single creature in the pink light. Painted musicians vocalize the sounds of nature and technology, while on their music stands, laptops are flipped open alongside sheet music.
There are elements of science fiction, dance culture, Afro-futurism, medicine songs, Santeria. The work also quotes Ursula K. Le Guin. There is a hopeful sense that like this bird, the most fluid of us may survive.
(Ed note: Lloyd Schwartz made an interesting discovery. Read about here and over at ARTery. sdl)
The Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) is one of the most admired painters in the history of Western art. His ravishing and poignant "Hunters in the Snow" is one of the world’s best loved paintings. And he’s especially loved by poets. William Carlos Williams was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for his 1962 collection "Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems," which includes his extraordinary series that gives the book its title. (The "h" in Bruegel, once commonly used, is no longer considered correct.) And one of the great poems about art is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” (from 1938, on the brink of world-wide suffering), which is about a painting called "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" in the museum in Brussels that gives the poem its title.
If you look very closely, you can see the spindly legs of a small body that has just fallen into the sea, while the country folk on the shore are just going through their daily routine:
About suffering, they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along…In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure…[Ed note: Click here for David Lehman's take on Auden's poem.] I was in Vienna at the end of October, to see the once-in-a-lifetime Bruegel exhibition (on view through Jan. 13) at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which owns the world’s largest collection of Bruegels — 12 of his surviving 40 paintings. That one room with all 12 paintings has been one of the supreme locations for great art. Now this show, celebrating the 450th anniversary of the master’s death, has brought together for the very first time practically every Bruegel painting not too fragile to travel, plus his even rarer drawings and a selection of contemporary prints based on original Bruegel drawings mostly lost.
Lloyd Schwartz’s latest book of poems, "Little Kisses," was published by the University of Chicago Press. His work has been selected for the Best American Poetry, the Best of the Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize. He is the classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and senior editor of Classical Music for New York Arts. Longtime classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1994. He teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English.
1. (a self-portrait in Mexico by Savannah Spirit).
This is a painting.
There’s a blue hand, dead center, and below it, a pair of human legs. They’re in a room, which seems to have a remnant of an older room inside of it. The light from the east is dead and golden, an ancient warning to sailors who lived in worlds without rooms.
The arm is lost in the afternoon; the hand is the color of daybreak. The front leg looks real: an unreliable narrator. The back leg reaches out: a bad victim.
I’m trying to remember the story, but these legs don’t keep diaries. They are too personal. Life is precarious here.
I do remember when the hand leaves—when it puts itself on the knob and turns itself—it walks off with the door.
I see a hand, but the legs see only the infinite space between yellow and blue.
There is no other world, however hard you want there to be.
Why is there no furniture? He says other girls are easy. The legs don’t know how to answer and don’t answer. Who answers that.
I remember reading the only thing that travels faster than light is shadow. It makes sense, if you think about it: shadow is just an absence, really nothing at all.
In paint, the shadow is real. In paint, even light ages.
Absences don’t obey speed limits. Even if they are posted clearly. But legs vote.
Centuries later, he still haunts the light.
-- Katie Peyton
Image 1: Savannah Spirit, Eye of the Sun, 2017, Archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches.
Image 2: Alannah Farrell, Sleep Paralysis, 2018, Oil on linen, 11 x 14 inches
Poets & Artists 100 is here.
Click here and you'll arrive at a Didi Menendez's groundbreaking magazine devoted to "figurative realism" in art -- with poetry tossed in by such stalwarts as Nin Andrews, Grace Cavalieri, and Denise Duhamel.
Figurative realism is a good name for a movement in favor of representational art with the human figure at its center. The revival of the nude as an aesthetic ideal is significant. It is especially impressive in a puritanical era and may be a harbinger of welcome changes to come. The black and white painting on the left is by Dirk Dzimirsky, who curated the "Figurative Art" show up now.
The current issue of Poets & Artists includes gorgeous, sensuous paintings by such new (to me) artists as Anne-Christine Roda, Aixa Oliyeras, Veronica Winters, Megan Read, Nadine Robbins, Conne Karlera-Sales, Daniel Maidman, Victoria Selbach, Miriam Escofet (Portrait of Sophia, on right). It's an exciting development, a cry for beauty against brutality.
-- DL
Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery (Argyle Socks), 1952.
IM John Ashbery, July 28, 1927 -- September 3, 2017
Oh, What Fun! consists of group of works inspired, as with his previous collages, by Ashbery’s long held fascinations, many since childhood, with cartoons, movies and other forms of popular culture. Much of the imagery and source material is culled from his personal trove of collections, such as board games, French puzzle plates, old postcards, and other treasured knick-knacks that fill his homes in Manhattan and Hudson, New York. Ashbery became interested at a young age by surrealism, particularly the collage novels of Max Ernst and the work of Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell. A more direct and collaborative influence was his friend Joe Brainard, at times making collages side-by-side with him in Brainard’s house in Vermont and sharing found materials for future collages. Although Ashbery started making collages as an undergraduate at Harvard with one appearing on the cover of the Harvard Advocate in 1948 (a collaboration with Fred Amory), and he first publicly exhibited a single collage in a group exhibition at the Drawing Center in 1977, it has only been in the last decade that his collages have become more widely known.
Nine years ago, book designer Charlie Orr came up with a brilliant idea: why not make covers for books that do not (or do not yet) exist. The covers could quicken the composition of the book, thus totally reversing the usual order of things. Or the cover can exist as a piece of conceptual art that has the virtue of giving us a reproducible image instead of existing as merely an abstraction.
Charlie got me to buy into the project in a big way, and he created three book covers for books that I can imagine myself writing.
Here's what Charlie says: "Lehman’s project for the The Hypothetical Library would be an ambitious one, were it to be fulfilled. Vowing to write two volumes a year for the next five years, he promises to lift the veil away from historical events to reveal the hidden facts. Sadly we will never get the actual stories since this library is only hypothetical, but I hope you enjoy the three interpretations of what could have been, what might have been, and What Really Happened."
For Charlie's post of March 8, 2009, including the covers for "What Really Happened at Yalta" and "What really Happened on November 22, 1963," click here
This week, as Guest Author, I will be spotlighting innovative work by women poets in the form of new writing and review-essays. Today I'm delighted to share a folio of poems by Dora Malech. Dora Malech is the author of three books of poetry: Shore Ordered Ocean, published by The Waywiser Press in 2009; Say So, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011; and, most recently, Stet, selected by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets and forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2018. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Tin House, Lana Turner, The New England Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is the recipient of awards that include an Amy Clampitt Residency Award from the Amy Clampitt Foundation, a Writer’s Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Happy summer, and enjoy!
A Folio of Poems by Dora Malech
Essay as yes,
begged off bad beginnings, false starts of a star-sat self, her benched head cartoon bird spun, stunned out a long season. I came to claim I wouldn’t burden you with the trailed-off scrap heap of all the times I tried to explain (plain) already, but even without evidence of wadded paper, snowdrift of not that, it is those attempts that act as apologia, sense in absence, itinerant iterations’ cairns at the crossroads, hobo code in chalk or coal, worlds not long for these words. In other words: in other words, diary’s everyday no entry, inverse relationship between clarity and efficacy. I needed forms that could flail, fail, lists listing back toward their not-so-fresh catalysts, sepsis of afterbirth still lodged in the body, that which once nurtured lingering malignant.The I, just talk: just like that. Same went for the you(s): free on what messy out. I didn’t want to spill it—it meaning guts, etcetera, but mostly guts—because they weren’t all mine to spill, those two tin cans strung from the ends of viscera, the what-we-listen-to and where-we-feel-it, so to speak. In my belly, twisted sum [sic] sine in test. It’s an old story, sure, and came in waves. I left my name at the front desk. I waved. I left. Abbreviation: sin. The take lodged in to speak that leaves us P.S., postscript as remaindered O, sighed apostrophe to what we turn away (from).
Even some years later, when the nurse explained the blood test, I felt the familiar flush as something else made sense. Material released: information that circulates in the bloodstream. To point to the center and say there wasn’t quite right after all. There were bits of the story flowing through me. In fact, the old imperative, echo of act in the sense of what’s done. Is done. What is, in a manner of speaking, riveted to the text? In his anagram notebooks, Saussure said God(s) and named names. Of this, the scholar writes, “Language’s tokens make sense because they cor-respond.” Raise your hand if you’re who here can’t hear the heart.
Under wraps, rapture, sous rature’s insistent autocorrect. The trace createth (archaic ache) Zürn’s “old, dangerous fever,” Mackey’s “exegetic sweat”: open (source, sesame, letter, book). Pen, stain one mouth [and] the mountain opens. Bromine cant: recombinant. The lab in labial, the utter in, well, utter. Late tale: I hold the same old doll as me. Not a simulacrum left that the bad birds haven’t pecked up, antipathetic, now violet night, violent insight. Cite anti-path as no road home, lips lit [to] spill it.
It turns out, it doesn’t matter what we want to want because the spell still (ill saint) outs us, solves for scar in viscera where viscera is crave, cavity-crammed. Still an I, I was trying to write a beginning and an ending at once, using the only words my tongue could touch. Muddle and middle. The writing on the wall was a tunnel under cell-scratched time. Say law [of] always: simultaneous is nauseous limits. They weren’t all mine to spill, and even their spooled length unfurled and measured didn’t feel like all at all. Totality of utterance reduced to trance, to tatter.
Note burden’s sense, too, as refrain, as what we carry singing down the road. Love me little, love me long’s the bindle shouldered by that us that must end anonymous, bound to the stone of a song. With, across, after: referred myself to a different doctor, wielded the old ax in ask, metathetic. Closed eyes and metalept: hung for a moment in the air from where the bridge I burned once was. The best I could do was an embarrassment, crying for do-over blushes reread, reacts in redactions. Or is it that the space was always there, and necessary, not absence but aperture, artery’s foramen, foreman speaking for the jury?
Waved, left: laved weft, crosswise threads of a cloth washed and wrung, hung to dry on an over-under. An old story, spun whole cloth: blue banner shook upstage to make the sea’s surge billow back the act. The sine was swell and sag. The sine was pregnant, pause, pregnant, pause. Called hum [sic], hone [sic], a song sharpened in the singing, then ground to gone. Sic transit authority (see [sic] changes in signage): mind the [God of the] gap[s]. I always forgot the second I in liaison, and the screen scratched its red line ragged below our best in trysts [sic] (something in us) as I tried to make a dance of distance, move on. Something thumb sings of tapping into: the smallest screen’s green flame, time-stamped out but still smoldering, or, hinge-stung, the rise in bruise as blood’s chorus roars out its resistance. It’s not exactly the same seam, but remove or rearrange and the trace remains, asks after, echoes back into and of its origins—
_____________
I do
After Meg Ronan
Never meant, never meat, never met.
Try a break. Buckle up. Weary query
gut put after all. A last jab, haze, hex.
Beneath the mattress, guns. Stutter.
Stumble, crazy easy. Keep just a fuck,
bequeath the rest. Laws vex, amaze –
all next level parlay. Bet a jester’s last
laugh. Full cuff freeze, luck up a sleeve,
squats, lunges. But we came bulletless.
_____________
After Plath: Metaphors I
[I’m a riddle in nine syllables,]
Stealing a safe view, interstate
still a smooth read, nothing in
mirrors, not need or glint, not even
a least glimmer in the rims of a coupe
so far. An on ramp's best offer is belief,
yes, spell an easy does it and I bite,
finally sing assent, an infinity.
Big rig, add a deep rumble now,
the true coup down the highway.
____________
After Plath: Metaphors II
[An elephant, a ponderous house,]
Not to faint at blood, a creeping
up in the syringe, I avert my eyes then
run, or else. I'll feint so at a mind's
view, my unlit corners. My wild
ape meat is a treif menu in a red pen.
I’d eat. I see a starting pistol's first
green shoot, a bean's beginning in
a fêted barrel, a flash and slosh,
swim of a goldfish bowl on the go.
______________
After Plath: Metaphors IV
[O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!]
Aviary, apiary, one warm swarm
and flutter. Bubble tea, puff pastry,
lit fuse, ore. I reel, dine asea.
Greeting card sentiments, honey
dripping into the moss-lined nest
of a loon, wings riled in the offing.
Motor revs, then idles. A magician's
assistant, smiling to be sawed in half,
saying I'll be the one, the one too.
_____________
After Plath: Metaphors V
[This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.]
A nature documentary. Opening
shot, pan, a narrator’s measured
tone intent on saying stab, storm,
life, flap, ash, bone, tool, till, life,
death. So yes, as I listen, I begin
to believe I’m the whole sorry
shebang, finding my mess the stained
sign of an entire paradigm. I, inverted
flower we call fruit, fig wasp inside.
____________
After Plath: Metaphors VII
[I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.]
Mob's all thumbs in the Colosseum,
meat thrown to a dull roar as gears
engage, meat in a trendy blender.
A spy in internal affairs, other shoe
dropping, in me, it's pints of rennet
in a stein, gift pony, baloney sandwich
with a side of live wires, eel's vitals,
fine dust, fine lines—fine. I'm
a gag order to go. Bye. Ate it.
David Hockney at the Tate Gallery in London,
David Lehman composing "Dutch Interior" in a winter twilight in Ithaca,
and Trinachka (i.e. Trina Enriquez) puts them together.here
(Ed note: Last summer, Ron Padgett allerted 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)
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 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.
Find Ron Padgett's essay along with a beautiful gallery of Brainard's work here.
In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.
But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.
With that in mind, I'm thrilled to introduce another one of our talented contributors, Michael Wasson. Michael is the author of This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017). His poems appear in American Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets, and Bettering American Poetry. He is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. I'm pleased to present his poem, "Mourning Ceremony." Enjoy!
Mourning Ceremony
hipe’síweme kaa wáaqo’ ‘ilcwéew’cixnim cilakátki
‘iceyéeyenm wéetesne péetek’ene. They carved and now
Coyote distributed Monster’s body to various lands.
When grief is allowed to us it’s in the stern shape and voice of a man
who walks around ‘n yells at us and his hollering holds our faces
while we are handed polaroid photographs and old portraits
and lip-stained cups with either coffee or red Kool-Aid rings inside
and dirty paintings and ashy ashtrays and almost clean enough pots
and iron skillets and washed pans and jean jackets still glazed
with the scent of sweat ‘n armpits and pine-rubbed flannel coats
and pants so dirty when you glide your hand across ‘em dust slips off
and fades into the blaring gymnasium lights
and cracked and bent glasses frames with a little resin of ear oil
and a smear of dried blood still in the screws and plain moccasins
and porcupine quill roaches ranging from child-size to adult-size
worn out shoes and torn boots and a wristwatch an elderly woman
puts to her ear and keeps it there like a phone and a phone
though we don’t have enough money to buy an answering machine
to record your lost breathing soft into some spooled static
and a collection of tapes and your Black Sabbath and Beatles
and Jimi Hendrix and the Eagles and Led Zeppelin and Credence
Clearwater Revival and the blankets you took with you
when you ended up homeless for a little while and slept along
the Clearwater River and baskets with nothing inside them
and door knobs and rugs and your dirty shirt that had Mickey Mouse
adorned in a headdress and more blankets and letters and notes
and he’s yelling at us that this is the only time we get to mourn for you
for this loss and for this collection of your life that we broadcast
across this throbbing I feel up here in these wooden bleachers
and across the sudden loneliness taking ahold of our burning throats
that you need to hear us and that you are never coming back
that we are weak people who are holding your separated body
in our wrecked arms ‘n hands and on our laps ‘n behind our eyes
and we grip onto these monstrous pieces of you until we break
into this ancient song now flooding the air and shaking the overhead lights
burying you beneath this rush of desperate longing
and face your bright and drawn-out vanishing of ‘ilcwéew’cixnim tim’íne
your sáw’is kaa sayaqi’sníx kiké’t núunim ‘ipsúusx pipísne pawic’asc’asnóoya
and sound our tightening ribs so wide even all the long dead ones can hear
each of our gym-lit bodies bursting and wailing and blooming open.
Grateful acknowledgments to As/Us, where this poem first appeared.
For more information about our mission, and how you can help, please visit our Kickstarter page.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
THE RULE OF THUMB
by T.P.Winch
Ringfinger was nervous
Pinky terrified
when they learned
that Hand might succumb
to the rule of Thumb.
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