The Best American Poetry

Is Your Roof Next? [by Katie Peyton]

 

This is a shark on a house.

 

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

 

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

 

What else do we need to know? 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

+++

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

from the archive; first posted September 2017

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

The Laughing Snake

 

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

 

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

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

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

-- sdl

Happy Fasnacht Day! [by Laura Orem]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

continue reading here. 

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

"This is a photograph. . ." [by Katie Peyton]

1. (a self-portrait in Mexico by Savannah Spirit).

This is a photograph.

 

My friend photographs her body at 40, in Ajijic, in December. She says that is when the conditions are right for photography, when needles of light will attach like music. She takes a hundred shots, sends a few out into the world, and waits for the next December.

 

She knows cameras lie. Words smudge. She doesn’t know but suspects that one day her skin will be a ritual space on which weather will gather. I don't really know her: friend made event, a broken line, a porcupine of light.

 

She gave me this photograph, and I show it to people who come to my apartment. Do you like it? I ask. They say, it’s amazing. Then, oh my gosh. I see the woman!

2. (a painting by Alannah Farrell)

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: all hail Didi Menendez [by David Lehman]

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's Portrait of JA (1952)

Fairfield Porter, John Ashbery (Argyle Socks), 1952.

IM John Ashbery, July 28, 1927 -- September 3, 2017

Ashbery Collages at Tibor de Nagy, September 5 -- October 14, 2018

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​

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Oh, What Fun! an exhibition of John Ashbery's collages made from 2015 until his death in September 2017. This will be Ashbery’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and his first at the gallery’s Rivington Street location.

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.

​Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 15 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com

"The Hypothetical Library of Charlie Orr" [by David Lehman]

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 

Poet Spotlight: Dora Malech [by Kristina Marie Darling]

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.

"The Opposites Game" [poem by Brendan Constantine, video by Mike Gioia]

Brendan Constantine is an LA poet whose most recent book "Dementia, My Darling" was published by Red Hen Press. You can visit his website here. The poem was selected by Dana Gioia for the Best American Poetry 2018.

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse videos. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

"Dutch Interior": Where Two Davids (Hockney, Lehman) Meet [thanks to Trina Enriquez]

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

"I know how valuable my time is and I plan to never ever get a job again.” Joe Brainard, from an essay by Ron Padgett

(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)

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

Joe Brainard in 1961-63 by Ron Padgett

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

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

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

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

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

Find Ron Padgett's essay along with a beautiful gallery of Brainard's work here. 

Poet Spotlight: Michael Wasson [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

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.  

 

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This! On “breath to oblivion no ladder no chaser” from Finely Tuned Static by Charles Borkhuis [by Susan Lewis]

When I was invited to guest blog for Best American Poetry, I immediately thought of a marvelous post on Harriett by John Beer, in which he thoughtfully explores one poem by Carol Ciavonne (a fine poet and Posit contributor, who has recently become one of our associate editors). Beer’s reminder that reading is at the core of what we writers do and love, evokes “a sense of one reader’s process, not a method per se but a set of explorations,” and seems eminently worthy of emulation.

I’ll start by dipping into “breath to oblivion no ladder no chaser” from Finely Tuned Static by Charles Borkhuis, in collaboration with painter John McCluskey (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2017).  The conversation in this lovely book between text and image is direct and intense, without seeming constricted or constrained. Although its visual and verbal components are fully capable of standing alone, together they make magic. Seasoned and grave, yet crackling with irony and pleasure, these poems are also erudite, salted with references to Duchamp (a “nude descending an escalator”); Orpheus (a narrator who “turned back to see you disappear”); and Turner (“the red buoy bobbing on the waves.”) Their engagement with the paintings yields a tapestry of responsive, but imaginative, tropes, such as the structure of matter, fragmentation, the entangled relationship between creation and destruction – and, of course, static.  This book handily refutes the counsel (mentioned in “where was it      I”) of those “frozen in place” to “stay inside the lines.”

Here’s John McCluskey’s Plate Five, and the poem (the first of a triptych addressing it):

breath to oblivion no ladder no chaser

sizzle-cage crossing the shatters

or a child’s braces tightening water on lightning

my new home on a boat of sticks

rowing through a haunted love tunnel

the long flow of ink spreads across uncertainty

the target pulls an arrow through a stranger’s shadow

pinholes of light deep in a deserted sky

no one here but animals of ice grazing on the sunset

light approaching from a dead star the body

displaced by negative space

a caesura shimmering between day and night

what is it like this striptease of body parts this

splintered angle of image crystals watered down

to an empty shoe darkness opens me like a tin can

my secret light my hand burned down to the wires

continues writing to you from another space curled up

inside this one don’t paint yourself too thin no going back now

red rider come in come in get ready for razor static

thundering hooves through the whites of your eyes

through the hole in the next word string a sound

up and over the yawning toothless abyss this this this

 

Take a look at the efficiency, wit, and depth packed into that incredible opening, which somehow manages to summarize our mortal existence: the passage from breath (life) to oblivion, with no help from any (literal or figurative) ladder, nor hope of a chaser (afterlife). It’s a characteristic Borkhuis line: snappy and funny; inflected by the imagery, lingo, and hard-boiled attitude of noir; brunt and exhilarating in its clarity and directness. This line also establishes the poem’s ekphrastic project: a duality echoed within the painting, with its parallel linear assemblages of black shards crossing a pale field sprinkled with brightly-colored scraps. The very duality of the poem’s project mirrors the image of a ladder even while its explicit language, as well as the painted image itself, dashes any hope of one: consider the absence of any marks resembling rungs connecting the parallel black lines. A rung-less ladder as the best tool available to help us muddle through our lives? It’s a metaphor worthy of Beckett.

There’s a bleak humor at work here, reinforced by the horizontality of those black lines, belying any hope of a progress narrative to redeem life’s so-called journey. In the world of this collaboration, there is no ascent; there is only pushing through, “crossing the shatters” in our “sizzle-cage.” In these images from the second line of the poem, Borkhuis draws on theology and physics for resonance and depth, characterizing the body, that earthly vessel, as a pain-filled trap (“sizzle-cage”) from which we can only hope to be liberated once it conveys us across “the shatters:” a resonant description of the painting’s shard-strewn ground, as well as the violently fragmented fabric of matter itself.

By the fourth line a first-person narrator is introduced, and with her, a change of scale, even while the imagery continues on its double mission. The narrator’s “new home” becomes a “boat of sticks” (another perilously incommodious vessel assembled from the shards suspended between the black swaths bisecting the painting) “rowing through” the sexually resonant “haunted love tunnel” with its menstrual-like “flow of ink” spreading “across uncertainty.” Here, the poet seems to evoke the puny cluelessness of human existence as revealed by the existential implications of particle physics. Am I the only reader also reminded of the philosophical angst of the protagonist sperm in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask)?”

I’d like to point out just a few more brilliant bits, like the “striptease of body parts” in the second stanza, which carries forward the first stanza’s sexual imagery, highlighting the resemblance of the painting’s strewn and scattered shards to the skimpy bits of clothing cast off in a striptease. Except that this is “striptease of body parts,” connecting the earlier references to death and destruction to those that follow, such as “darkness opens me like a tin can,” “my hand burned down to the wires,” and the “thundering hooves” of the “red rider” (a reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse).

One source of this poem’s energy is its accelerating pace. The increasing omission of punctuation, and the eschewal of ‘natural’ or ‘intuitive’ line breaks (which otherwise tend to function as punctuational proxies), creates a headlong rush from image to image: “another space curled up / inside this one don’t paint yourself too thin no going back now.” The poem, considering its own project (“my hand . . . / writing to you,” “through the hole in the next word”), circles back to its opening vision of mortality, via a powerfully rushing, hissing, terminal rhyme: “the yawning toothless abyss this this this.” It’s a masterful ending, one that evokes the uncontrollable hemorrhage of breath that defines life on its journey towards death, even as it echoes the lusty vitality of Molly Bloom’s final words in Joyce’s Ulysses: “yes I will yes she said yes.”  

Remembering Kate Millett [by Catharine R. Stimpson]

                 

Kate Millett, sculptor, author and feminist, on her booted stool by her useless piano, two-headed bed and bachelor chest at Judson Memorial Church in New York, March 1st, 1967. Photograph: Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

             Kate Millett died on September 6, 2017, in Paris, eight days before her 83^rd birthday. We met in the mid-1960s when we were doctoral students at Columbia University and part-time lecturers in English at Barnard College. For years, we were close friends, and then, without any quarrel, without any design, we met with less and less frequency. However, I never lost touch with my feelings of love, some concern, and respect. She was streaked with genius. Now, I must be one of her sorrowing mourners.

            The first time I heard her voice was over the phone in 1963 or 1964. I was living over an Irish bar in an apartment with a Pullman kitchen and a pink-tiled bathroom at 1254 Lexington Avenue in the Yorkville District of New York. I was experimenting with the contours of my adult life. I had begun teaching at Barnard. I was going through one of the transitions of that period, from a putative heterosexuality to a precarious bisexuality to a settled if partially secretive lesbianism. When a women’s sports magazine later satirically selected me for its Hall of Fame, my sport was “Hide and Seek.”

            That first conversation with Kate was professional and correct. She had been told to call me for advice because she was in a situation that was similar to mine. She had a B.A. from Oxford. I had one from Cambridge. She had gone to Japan for a while, but she was now back. She was entering the doctoral program at Columbia. I was already there. What was it like? I am, I said, truthfully, an indifferent and probably irritating graduate student, but here is how I managed the situation with credits from an English university. She also inquired about teaching at Barnard. The students are wonderful, I answered. .

            We ended up with adjacent desks, two of the four in an office on the 4^th floor of Barnard Hall. We were urgently earnest, enthusiastic teachers, who adored literature and learning, and who marked student papers with zeal. We once calculated that with our classes and our attention to student writing and our conferences, we were earning $.81 per hours. We seemed to understand each other, a balance of seriousness and irony. Soon we became known as the “two Kates.” All the pictures in her current obituaries, whether of the young or the aging Kate, show her with long hair, but in the office, her hair was in a bun, and she wore long skirts and shoes with wooden heels. She seemed to be emulating a stereotype of a female Oxford don. I, on the other hand, danced around in mini-skirts and ran my hands through my curly black locks.

            Soon I met Fumio Yoshimura, the artist, whom she had met in Japan. She had helped him through the death of his wife there. He came with her to America. Kate would say that they married because of immigration. She also murmured, muttered once about pleasing her family. But it was also a marriage of love, support, and shared devotion to making art. Sexual Politics is dedicated to him. Their marriage was no dash to City Hall, but in a church, albeit a progressive one. After the wedding dinner the night before, we were all hung over, but I could still notice that she was wearing a white bridal gown, and Fumio was ceremoniously dressed, and Kate’s brother-in-law walked her down the aisle. An officer in the military, he wore his dress uniform.

            Kate and Fumio were living on the Bowery, and Kate persuaded me to move downtown. I found my loft at 352 Bowery. We were neighbors at home and work. Then, in 1966, she walked in the office, holding a piece of mimeographed paper. “Stimps,” she said, I could be either Stimps or Stimpson, “there’s this meeting about a civil rights organization for women. We should check it out.” She was already a fervent supporter of black civil rights. The meeting took place in a church office on Morningside Heights, a few rows of folding metal chairs. Instantly, it made sense to be there. Like starfish, we suddenly grew back missing limbs. She became chair of the Education Committee, I of the Image Committee. Competition for these posts was minimal.

            In Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think of Sex and Politics (2004), Rosalind Rosenberg writes ably about these days on Morningside Heights. For Kate and me, moving back and forth from Downtown to uptown, from politics to scholarship, was a seamless journey. Sexual Politics, famously her doctoral dissertation, embodies this. I still remember, with some chagrin, sitting on a beach with Kate. She, Fumio, Ruby (my partner at the time), and I were on vacation. I was reading a draft passage about D.H. Lawrence. “Kate,” I said, “you can’t say that about Lawrence. He’s a great writer.” In the sun, on the sand, she was non-committal.

            Looming behind Sexual Politics, and perhaps insufficiently recognized, were two formidable intellectual forces: Simone de Beauvoir and the Second Sex, translated into English only a few years before, and Steven Marcus, the Columbia scholar who was her adviser. Kate was scrupulous about her intellectual debts. In her “Preface,” she writes, “I am particularly grateful to Steven Marcus who gave the manuscript the most careful reading and could always find time and patience to insist rhetoric give way to reason.”

            Kate was an artist. One of my most treasured possessions is her sculpture of a diner at a table, with fork and knife pointing in the wrong direction. I bought this representation of frustration, paying $15 per month for a period of two or three years. Kate had a passionate imagination. Yet, she was a scholar, a woman of research and reason. She was proud, legitimately, of her first at Oxford. Later, when we looked at each other, we saw paths not taken. We were, of course, mildly competitive, and I was wildly jealous of her portrait on the cover of Time magazine in 1970. In Flying, she gave me two names, Emerson and Morgan, both a sly reference to certain of my tastes. Was I the woman who lived downtown but who did not take up the rugged rigors of the artist’s life? As for Kate, she should have been a tenured professor of literature who wrote burning books and made art, an outlier in the profession who would have become an icon.

            As her obituaries point out, the Barnard English Department did not renew Kate’s contract, a terrible wound for her. It was not only her politics, not only her presence. Polite though she could be, her direct gaze could be discomforting. Some members of the Department, now dead, were narrow prigs. One woman thought a passage from Lawrence, on a syllabus, was too bald and bold for Barnard undergraduates. One man harrumped to me that she had not written him a thank-you note after she taught his course in Victorian literature when he was on leave. Kate did stay on at Barnard for a little while. Powerful members of the faculty, such as Mary Mothersill, then the chair of the Philosophy Department, helped to arrange a position as director of the Experimental College (new, of course). Perhaps, after Sexual Politics, Kate did not need the academy, but she would have been an astonishing professor.

            I have all of Kate’s books, including her early pamphlets, except for my inscribed first edition of Sexual Politics. I often wonder who nicked it. After I heard about her death, I ran my hand over them. I thought that I must write about them all, because her cultural reputation cannot be reduced to Sexual Politics. The books have a consistent spine. They are about the suffering of the powerless, about the hell into which the powerful cast the powerless. Kate urges us, forces us, to look into hell and then dares us to put out its fires. In her cosmology, ethics, sense of martyrdom, ferocious capacity for hard work, and anguish, she was, I believe, radically Roman Catholic, the rebuked church of her youth.

                  One headline in an obituary called Sexual Politics a “Bible of Feminism.” Another named her a “’high priestess’ of second-wave feminism.” Perhaps their writers knew more than they knew. I have imagined us together in Medieval times, before Protestants so rubbished women’s convents. We would have been in a convent, a place for women who relished holding books and manuscripts open before them. But, like some of those irrepressible and renegade saints, she would have been difficult. She would dispatched her disruptive messages, written in both impeccable Latin and in the vernacular, and she would have walked out into the countryside, perhaps in sandals, perhaps in her bare feet, founding new communities of yearning believers.

Dear Kate, I believe this fantasy would have amused you.

Catharine R. Stimpson is University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. Stimpson is a pioneer in the study of women and gender, a founder of feminist criticism, and is also known for her role as a public intellectual and her public service, which includes her wide-ranging writing on the humanities, liberal arts, and the university.

Remembering John Ashbery: The Gift of The Unanticipated [by Archie Rand]

John Ashbery and Archie Rand signing their series "Flow Chart Illuminated"

I was the kid mascot to Clem Greenberg’s troops.  Although I was well treated their assumed trajectory was haughtily self-referential, if not comically oblivious. The odor of money permeated, so there were few, if any, poets in that confident clutch of artists.  For nutrition I hung out with downtown poets where, for an unheard-of two-page poem, The New Yorker paid Paul Blackburn enough to buy a few rounds of drinks at McSorley’s.   When David Kermani became my Director at The Tibor deNagy Gallery I was introduced to the great John Ashbery, whose work I loved but whose name was quarantined downtown.  I had a concurrent love for Cecil Taylor’s interminable music, which was also derided by the be-bop-only adherents, along with the verdict that Rauschenberg's extended work lacked focus.  It was that very relentlessness in John’s poetry that attracted me as courageously factual - as content.  I had previously made paintings on bolts of canvas that were too long to install anywhere.   Torah scrolls.  Memorial walls.  Reading John’s book-length poems, whose expanse recalled Coleridge and Tennyson and whose last lines didn’t end with a preachy faux-wisdom was a relief.   As there is no tether, no indebtedness acknowledged, there is no instruction intended.  John’s work invented a reliable present-tense artifact.

Kitaj established that one didn’t have to be Jewish to feel marginalized – that we are all “diasporists”.  Well, if you feel that you have been disqualified from nurturing any progeny because the source of your voice has been exiled from the dialog then you have no obligation to curate the reins of a tradition whose aesthetics assure your invisibility.   Unremitting observation is the only platform of your existence.   Giving constant witness, watching, is the charity that John’s poetry performs, leaving generous evidence of consciousness.  John’s work avails a truth of how our minds digest. Oddly, it is the manifest news that Williams warns about.  To this we can relate. For all of his humor, the experience of reading John’s poetry is the most adult exercise.   The Talmudic tradition joyously offers numerous contradictory conclusions, none of which are prioritized.  You’re on your own.  Discussants will engage, taste, wander off and return.  Similarly John’s achievement is not in the poet’s proclamation – it is in our absorption of stimuli that prompt a welcome recall and trigger identification.  For all of John's wryness there isn't a drop of cynicism.  It is all love.  I know this point can be argued.  I stick by my guns on this one.  Highways and alleyways of sunlight – of embraces, aromas – all materialize, fade to vanishing and replenish as we continue.  Hidden, from the roadside, urchins throw memories at us that we had figured were unrecoverable.  Such giving. Such geography.  Fearless - and despite the chant of his mingy critics – without stance.  Anyone recognizing John’s lead glimpsed some recipe snippets to extricate from a received revolving aesthetic.   A kindly revolutionary who freed us from confronting that maze’s entrance into which an unexamined velocity would have cast us, John exposed open spaces into which we could, yes, romp - if only we accepted the liberties for which John’s work signified allowance.  Our collaborative works, giddily, lovingly and efficiently engineered by David, remain seamless. 

Supportive and funny John was a sweetheart of a man. He also did a spot-on impression of Eric Blore.  An Alice, convinced that The Queen of Hearts’ universe was nothing but a pack of cards, his performance, crashing a convoy through roadblocks of smothering axioms - no - ignoring them, helped change me and my work. For that I can never express sufficient gratitude.  Thank you John.  Thank you David, so much, for being my companion, mentor and enabler on the long, wonderful trip for which you enlisted me so many years ago. 

Archie Rand is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rand's work as a painter and muralist is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèquee de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His graphic works and books are held by the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, the Museum of Modern A, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute Of Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, and The New York Public Library; and are owned by Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, and Johns Hopkins universities.