OK everybody, before going to brunch, ask yourself this one question:
Who wrote the world's biggest big-ass poem?
Hint: the title of the poem is "Breakast"
Hint: this poster is located near a construction site in London.If you guessed Billy Collins, you win.
"Post Poetry is a great new genre," Ida Noise told this reporter.
Partisans of Jennifer L. Knox's "Hot Ass Poem" may advocate magnifying it on a poster in Portland, Oregon.
OK now. . .off to brunch you go. -- DL
Monsieur Loyal commente
la ballerine s’évente
et pique la piste
en vrille
rouge banderille
(MC Gayffier)
– MC talktalking / ballerina / thrusting / redded blade /right through
The season of giving has come and, I expect, like hatchlings blindly looking for a behavioral model, you all’ll be needing something lovely – a little brain and eye toy – to fix on in the New Year 2020.
I’m glad to gift you with a glimpse of the work of live performance photographer Benoîte Fanton (www.facebook.com/BenoiteFantonPhotographies).
Judging from Fall 2019 retrospective shows hosted by both Mac Créteil, choreographer and activist Mourad Merzouki’s urban dance temple in suburban Paris, and the high-brow commercial Théâtre du Rond Point on the Champs Elysées, Fanton’s dramatic images speak not only to me, Karine, and my circle of esthetically circumspect performance gourmets, but to every kind of lover of the movement arts.
So it should. Fanton has specialized in capturing dance performance – photographing more than 2000 classic, modern, contemporary and urban dance shows in Paris and across France – for the last 15 years or so of her 20-year career.
The photographs offered above and below are from Fanton’s retrospective collection, entitled Sur quel pied danser. I reckon Sur quel pied danser means to be in some doubt as to how to go forward. As a collection Sur quel pied danser, Fanton writes, is dedicated to the notion of holding on (with aplomb) once you, as James Brown famously implores, Get on up.
Get on up, hold on: good advice for opening any year, but especially for this one which open out on to the last chance to do something serious about the climate emergency before it becomes so complexly exponential there is nothing we can do.
At Fanton’s shows, and in her photo book (also titled Sur quel pied danser), each photo is accompanied by a short meditation by MC Gayffier, painter and musician and, of course, poet. Gayffier’s lines admirably take on, fit to and gel with Fanton’s pictures.
I’ve interpreted rather than translated what I think of as Gayffier’s “New Parisian Loose Haiku”. In my mind, the mechanic of her writing was like that of a neo-realist painter than Zen-consciousness warrior: looking from the model to the words and back again. The interval between the focus points was where the poetry was written.
I’ve tried this same imagined mechanic in my interpretative effort of Gayffier’s work, swinging my focus from her lines to my visual sense of the photo, putting down the words that result. I hope my encounter with Gayffier’s sensibility makes her work shine through for you.
Get on up. Hold on.
One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.
-- Frank O'Hara
View of Manhattan from the Smith/9th St. subway station (photo by Stacey Harwood)
Dear, I can’t subsist on this diet
(really more of a fast—celery
seed and a soft word every other
month) any longer. Is that blood
on your pillowcase or another girl’s
lipstick? I want you to know
I’ve had such unalloyed joy
over the past several decades,
smelling your hair and petting
your sweat-beaded feet while
you were asleep. It was far sweeter
than I ever thought possible.
But my ancestors are welling up
in me now and keep nudging me
towards the door. Bells are rung,
harps are played: recessional music.
We both know the theater will close
in a few minutes. If you had been
more attentive or a better pretender
I could have run on fumes for a few
more years, sipping snow melt,
remaining quite high on it. Let
the record show I recited prayers
for your perpetual ascension
and good health as I laid this note
in its frozen envelope on your desk
and left, taking both dogs, the teal
parakeet and the black cat with me.
They got custody of our love.
from American Poetry Review (2008)
Ed note: A few weeks ago, Angela Ball visited David and me in Ithaca, NY. One morning over coffee, Angela showed me pictures of her lovely home in Mississippi, where she lives and teaches. I was struck by the arrangement of objects on her mantelpiece and asked for the story behind each. This poem is Angela's reply. Thank you, Angela. sdl:
Arranging things on a mantel you have latitude
the longitude is missing just the latitude
to choose things
A series of completions or
incompletions; in 2014, John Ashbery’s husband
said of their interior, “It’s probably the last
version” but so changed
now as is James Tate’s
the house of the strangest yard sale
that after a warm rainy breakfast
of intersections and messages
asked me
to choose
Size of course is always relative
The red scarf above the fez-capped man, the wiener
mobile, Dagwood, and R2D2
could wrap their Central Park, their Yosemite; maybe
their outer space
The mirror is an ocean
propped to the wall
As for the miniature edition of James Wright’s
The Branch Will Not Break
its largess
saved many from the wish
to give up before beginning
This ragtag display’s password
might be “generous”
since below it, in summer,
no edited forest burns
The man with the fez is some remote relative of the Shriners who swooped down the hospital hill
gripping the steering wheels of their midget cars on the very day a newborn was presented to a
mother by the gull-wing armature of a nun. And it is this very Zebra-cat with its free birdseed
who is now heard neighing, meowing, and trilling from a James Tate poem standing alone near a
cotillion of fruit trees and Minnow-Bucket Road
On Silver Street, Cambridge, England. . .
In this New Yorker podcast, David Lehman joins New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young to read and discuss John Ashbery’s poem “Worsening Situation” and his own poem “Stages on Life’s Way"
To prep for the interview, David (pictured left in this 1997 photo by Jack Mitchell) wrote "On John Ashbery's 'Worsening Situation'":
On John Ashbery’s “Worsening Situation”
Like a collage, I wrote, the bruised words
Shampoo the hair of the dog. Or like
The simile eclipsing the thing it is likened to,
Which remains unnamed. The feast is
Near enough to watch but too far to reach
By foot. To up the ante, we get an echo
Of Keats's last poem or a quote from Rimbaud.
The key repetition occurs here. We feel
We have been riding the A train since 1965.
Rides, ceremonies, rites. What's the point?
Yet it bothers me, everything I haven't disclosed
Fully. I still read spy novels and get crank
Phone calls. I'm like the guy whose wife
You see on TV wondering how to get
My collars clean. Tell her I'm somewhere
Else -- Paris, Texas, for instance..
-- David Lehman [November 2017; in American Poetry Review, May/June 2018]
Mother’s Day
My mother did not live to be a hundred
like the old nuns in the Sacred Heart
convent, sheltered from life. She was
fifty-five when she died. I was the baby
of the family. It does not seem so long
ago to me that I snuck into bed
between her and my father, no greater
antidote to fear than that. Life is not
a slow read. We speed through it,
pages flipping. After her funeral,
I hated the smell of flowers.
She used to make my brother take me
to the movies to help me breathe
in the cool dark of the air-conditioned Elsmere.
Now all I want to do is watch movies in bed,
central air humming through the house. I cried
so much when she died that it still embarrasses me.
She used to visit me in my dreams,
even sometimes speaking to me from
the beyond. But I haven’t seen
or heard from her in years.
My own heart thumps
wildly in my chest sometimes,
when I think about the story ending.
My arms are swollen from allergy shots,
my son examining bumblebees
in the backyard. I inhale as deeply as I can.
Flowers don’t bother me anymore.
[This poem was written, I think, ca. 2000. The photo shows me, checking the time, and my best friend, Dennis O'Toole, sitting on my mother's lap in 1948 in Rockaway Beach, NYC. My mother was Bridie Flynn from Co. Galway, Ireland.]
If you’ve been to Paris, you’ve seen the urban tableaus.
The miscellany of blue-jeaned and be-suited, be-skirted individus hustling from métro station to a host of previously unremarked glass, wood or steel doors of every shape and size, all of which, surely, must lead to some form of, more or less obscure, money-generating activity …
You’ve seen them. The bustlers and moppers in the hotels, the stork-standing servers armed with brown trays haunting the restaurants and cafés, security guys in cheap suits, usually cheerful-seeming, shelf-stockers and cashiers… And firemen! And I’ve only ever seen fire “men”: well-filled, clingy, muscle shirts and pants, discretely streaked with a glisten of attractively trickled sweat, jogging and jiggling hither and yon as the working day clatters open…
You’ve seen them, usually in white or blue pants and lab-style cotton jackets: plumbers, heat and lighting technicians, deliverers, mail-people on yellow bikes saluting concierges, those who gesticulate in the ubiquitous pharmacies and medical-test laboratoires.
Finally, perhaps most especially, you’ve noticed the drivers and passengers of the little white utility trucks that bear mysterious names – the raisons sociales, as they say, of enterprise –“Socranil” or “Cefelec”, “Sofrapup”, “Pippubli” or “Acrosoc”.
At home, many of the above-mentioned tableau thems are my neighbors.
As such, they go back and forth to jobs, have children, pastimes, apartments, taxes to pay, errands to run, points of view, tastes, quiet thoughts, bref, as Robert Graves once famously summed up the routine of life, “all that”.
back and forth
Sarah Meunier, also a neighbor – also a photographer of "street art" who works closely with the Lavo // Matic “graffiti” gallery in the thirteenth arrondissement – has made “street portraits” of many of these, our mutual thems, our mutual neighbors, hors tableau, as they go about their lives. As if for study, an outsize proof sheet of her portraits was hung above the drinks table during the open house of La Fabrique Bagnolet arts center this past Fall.
Meunier has managed to pull forth a certain, almost Hollywoodian, glamor in the familiar, most-often anonymous, human beings whom I run across every day in the stairwell, on the street, at the market, in the stores, in the bus, in the metro: those who animate the thems we see in the Paris tableaus.
I offer these eight Sarah Meunier street portraits as my end-of-year-begin-the-year gift. I offer them as eight reasons to be of good cheer about the true state of humanity, eight reasons to love and esteem the people who make France and, above all, eight reasons to love our neighbors.
Joyeux Noël 2017, Happy New Year 2018.
in the metro
the raisons sociales of enterprise
glamor in the familiar
How do contemporary creators live and what do they make of it?
There are thousands of artists working in in France today.
If I had the nerve, not to speak of the time to listen to the end of the story, I’d ask each artist I meet, What do you live on? How do you live? And What’s your mood and attitude as you face the first two questions?
I’d do this because, myself a person with what they used to call a “checkered” story and, except for one small detail, an uncertain future, I’ve often supposed that someone besides my sweet boy might, after that one future certitude has kicked in, wonder how I looked at my life and managed my practical means and ends, compared, say, with the way Savage, Johnson or Boswell looked at and managed theirs?
It is impossible to know how far any individual responses of any individual artist to such questions represent some general reality usefully comparable to whatever. All the same, when a series of even partial responses to even one of the three interesting questions, it might provide a starting point for other artists to put together their own, more complete, responses. Thus, using Tracy’s Lives of the Artists, handbook for the artistically perplexed, those who have not yet kicked on through to certitude could begin putting together a pastiche of first-hand stories that could help them understand their own situations.
So, when Christine Champagne, an artist working well beyond words today, wrote me a letter that touched intelligently on What do you live on? How do you live? What’s your mood and attitude? I saved and translated her words & sense to put together the essay that follows.
“I am looking at water and the sense I have of it”, Christine began, “So as to thread some video-sculptures and photos that I now have in my head around it (water). I am learning new stuff also… and in coming months I’ll be hand-developing my photos, which requires a little bit of set up! I am also on a team project on an angel theme where I will be doing the B&W photography. O! Yes. I am also modeling for a photographer friend: a pleasant, and also, a learning, experience on and about the other side of the lens; also learning some new techniques and a new way to look at my métier.”
Christine then went on to tell me about her experience living and working as an artist today in Paris, in France, saying that, basically, now, a working creator today – one who is not already in the infinitely small rank that makes up the publicly recognized “artist” on the private market or who is supported in some other way by the public market – cannot make a living as an artist, even in a small way. She concludes “This is just what I am feeling at the moment; I’m feeling upset; I don’t say this every day…”.
Christine’s work, she acknowledges, aims not so much to pleasing the onlooker as at having a dialog with the onlooker’s heart. In that, perhaps, the creative product she wants to sell is different from others, so not really any more comparable to any other creative product on the market than she, as a person, is comparable to other creators. But, in terms of not making a living off her creativity, she asks me to keep in mind that, in addition to her personal creating, she teaches and makes original jewelry for another account.
“I don’t object to working for others or on things that aren’t of my invention”, Christine continues. “I feel I am creative in that, too. But, doing all that I do does not allow me to compensate the family for the costs I generate by my own creative work.”
Despite the tolerance and generosity of her family, she says, she winds up feeling guilty about being so little a contributor to the common enterprise… adding that, in a better world, money from her creative efforts would enable her to spoil her own people, at least a little, as well as enable more, bigger and better, more complex, productions.
“I love to experiment, break new ground,” she writes, “This takes time, it has to be taken forward carefully.” …But money takes time and time is money, even in Paris, and today’s creator, like most working people, especially, perhaps, the female ones, has no time.
The contemporary way of doing things is out of whack, Christine affirms. “It can’t be right,” she says, to not be able, even working a straight job elsewhere, to practice a vocation. A visual artist, like a barista or bank worker or assistant professor who wants to buy living space, some leisure time, or just be a bit above the bare minimum, is forced to work two or even three jobs.
Beyond the economic realities that today limit the lifestyle possibilities of most other working people, there is the way the creative market is organized that puts the brakes on hopes of an artistic career. “Unlike everybody else,” Christine points out, “And in addition to working steadily at other work, an artist who wants to even the most modest recognition has to take on several, unpaid, but highly necessary, jobs, quite distinct from her creative production: support functions such as marketing, logistics and technical work.”
Like any other merchandise, creative work doesn’t speak for itself, she says. But unlike other merchandise, nobody but the artist has to do all that support stuff before they can even get it to somebody who will put it before the public. Creative production “does not have My stuff by huge international brand stamped on it,” or even the reassuring imprimatur of some reputable gallery, she points out, which predisposes a buyer or exhibitor to believe in a creative product’s quality, taste and with-it-ness.
In our system, Christine says that, for instance, even if employers are obliged by law to pay a driver a minimal something for taking an overpriced box or a higher-paid worker from point A to point B, they are not obliged to pay any associated investment costs, such as driving license, clothes or car. So, too, for today’s visual artist.
The contemporary visual artist pays upfront, just like an Uber driver, for her tools and materials, plus for advertising, space rental – in short, 200€ here, 300€ there… The management, of course, that is, the curators, publicity agents, and so on and so forth, like the Uber management, get paid upfront and also generally work for somebody else. Of course, Christine points out, if the artist is not known or well-enough known, she has to, first, get these paid employees interested enough that they want to get the upfront money from the visual artist!
There are other particularities in the Paris market, Christine writes. Most galleries are strict rental arrangements as is a restaurant or cell phone sales point. “The owner rents the space, that’s all, allows the artist to fill up the gallery. If it sells, it sells. If not, the owner has his, even if the artist has nothing at all.” For the most part, the “self-interested friendship” of a gallery-owner à la Paul Rosenberg, who understands the work exhibited and promotes it does not exist for today’s working artists.
Christine has some trouble imagining how such a system developed, where no one takes any risk but the most vulnerable one, the producer. And it certainly is true that even the ceaselessly-wailing farmers have some protection, not to speak of notaries, lawyers, accountants, doctors, even those lowest of the low on the economy’s value-chain, have some sort of social-risk sharing arrangement, whether it is unemployment insurance or subventions or restrictive professional legislation.
Once and if the means are available to meet the public, Christine says, the nature of creative production makes an eventual meeting of minds with an interested public a costly, long-term project. “It’s interesting to demonstrate, to persuade, to force the brain to follow on an idea or a concept. All that’s good, I like it.”
But for this, the creator has to do a lot of exhibitions and be as present as possible on the scene and in the market. Understand that, in Paris, a stand at an exhibition costs between 1,000 and 10,000 euros, usually for three or four days and not including packing transport, lodging, meals or set up help.
Christine concludes her letter with a statement of her own intent in her creation, putting into question, at least obliquely, whether contemporary economics even leaves room for such intentions, even as a past-time or what one feels as an ineluctable vocation.
“I’ve said enough about money,” she writes. Money is necessary to live, but money is certainly not what motivates my creation. My work is also a spiritual path, a search for the depth of life. No, this way of putting it is not adequate: Creation is a sort of élan, a surge of presence from within me… I try to refine this feeling and to work it into sculpture, photographs, installations. I firmly believe that our lives are not limited to what we see of them in daily life”.
In the context of her personal motivations, then, for Christine, the almost impossible economic cost is worth the candle. “What is formidable in showing one’s creative production is the encounter with others,” she affirms. “It has no price, thank goodness.”
For Christine, the human exchange is in the creation of a vision shared for a moment, a unique bridge between two worlds, hers, his, theirs and mine, or maybe a bridge for all of us to the bigger, invisible part of living. “I think about things in different ways so that I can show my worlds, and make them available to everyone… “I want to bring some well-being to others, give them a spiritual break, to provide a bit of dream.”
My brilliant beautiful brave husband!
-- sdh
We welcome the publication of In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, a posthumous collection by a wonderful poet who died in 1994, entirely too young. The publisher is Nightboat Books, and the work of editing it was shared by Philip Clark and the late Reginald Shepherd. I knew Donald well; he is represented in an anthology I edited, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, for which he wrote a statement about the occasion and objectives of one of his poems. It may be the only critical statement that he ever published. Three of Donald's poems appeared in a low-circulation magazine I edited, Poetry in Motion, in the late 1970s. There will be a release party for the book at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City on Friday, May 20, 2016, at 6 PM.
In he picture above, Donald is the fourth poet from the left. To his right is Tim Dlugos, with Dennis Cooper standing on the other side of Tim. Amy Gerstler is second from the right. Also in the picture are Michael Silverblatt, Bob Flanagan, and Ed Smith. The venue is the Ear Inn and I'd have to guess the date as early 1980s.
Here is the first paragraph of Douglas Crase's afterword to the new collection.
<< The appearance in print of the selected poems of Donald Britton is an affront to cynicism and a triumph over fate. When Donald died, in 1994, it was sadly reasonable to assume that the influence of his poetry would be confined to the few who had preserved a copy of his single book, the slender, deceptively titled Italy, published thirteen years earlier. As the few became fewer it seemed all but certain the audience for his poems would disappear. Donald never taught, so there were no students to mature into positions of critical authority. There was no keeper of the flame to incite publication, no posthumous foundation to subsidize it, not even a martyrology in place to demand it out of sentiment. The survival of his work would have to come about, instead, as a pure instance of “go little booke”—an instance that must now warm the heart of anyone who has ever believed in poetry. It was the poems in Italy themselves, free of professional standing or obligation, that inspired the successive affections of two remarkable editors and the confident publisher of the present selection. Donald, who despite his brilliance was a modest and self-effacing person, would be surprised.
>>
Crase's afterword concludes with this thought about the "longevity" of poetry as opposed to a "career" in the field.
<<< Donald’s posthumous success in inspiring the publication of his selected poems, coupled with the undeniable failure in worldly terms of his career, is occasion to wonder if the career is ever the same as poetry itself. From time to time a critic will observe that Hart Crane’s suicide, for example, or Joe Brainard’s decision to stop making art, may be regarded as proof the artist realized what his admirers don’t, that the work was a failure and the career could not be sustained. The critic doesn’t quite dare to draw the same conclusion from the abjuration of Rimbaud or the suicide of Sylvia Plath, which reveals of course that the logic in the first case was as opportunistic as it is preposterous. Someday a critic will do us the service of disentangling poetry from the standard map of a professional career. The map is a convenience to committees but meaningless to the future reader—the twelve-year-old boy or girl in San Angelo—the very reader poets must hope to have. What is useful to that boy or girl is sometimes no more than a phrase, perhaps a book or poem, amounting to a style of mind in which to escape or dwell. I recognized such a style of mind in Donald Britton and it made us friends. The first time I heard him read his work in public was at the Ear Inn in New York, the afternoon of March 7, 1981. Blond as ever, he was in that environment an apparition of nervous grace. I can’t say he connected with the audience; he certainly didn’t flatter it. He conveyed, perhaps too clearly for the occasion, his sense of an audience beyond the room. One got the feeling he expected to reach across time and elicit a response composed of the same respect for intellect and desire that we had there, in the Ear Inn, that Saturday afternoon. Donald's poems were not lessons or anecdotes. They are invitations to the unending contemplation of ourselves, and things beyond us, that makes the human species a window on creation.
>>>
Here is a poem by Donald Britton from the new volume:
Notes on the Articulation of Time
It becomes a critical account
of all that’s spoken, done:
the drawing in of breaths, even,
these nights whose atmosphere
reminds us of mountains,
white volumes of air. We need
these narratives, we want them:
the city lies before us
and some one person in the sleeve
of a streetlamp awaits
our enraptured attention
as we await the concept of the city
which tells us how we move
in the particolored geographies
about us. We can’t be certain
we are moving toward this person
nor do we require certitude.
It is enough to acknowledge
the movement itself, shavings
of light inscribing a circle.
Our childlike sense of the other
bears these forces toward
completion and renewal,
a lexis of infatuated sounds.
-- Donald Britton
I've been collecting photographs seriously for the last seven years or so: First, focusing pretty much entirely on vintage Hollywood images of movie stars riding bikes, issued by the studios' publicity departments to promote their melodramas and westerns, rom-coms and noirs -- and the actors and actresses playing all type of hero and heroine, villain and vamp, in them. It's an ongoing obsession: I post a few new (old) photos on my blog, Rides a Bike, every week. Movies and bikes are two of my passions, and landing on, say, a photo of a Mad Men-era Paul Newman pedaling around the backlot on a clunky delivery bike, or Virna Lisi in a white sundress on an Atala step-through, stopping on a country road somewhere... well, pretty much bliss.
Same thing happened -- the kick of discovery, surprise, joy -- when I started searching through dealers' collections and movie memorabilia shops for photographs of stars having coffee, making coffee, clinking their mugs next to craft services tables (and grabbing a donut while they're at it), refilling from a trusty percolator in their dressing room, or in their kitchen back home. Coffee: another passion, and, yes, probably an addiction, too. Last night my wife and I went to hear Kelly Jones and Teddy Thompson play at a club in Philadelphia -- the two singers and songwriters have teamed for Little Windows, a collection of heartbreakingly beautiful duets that recall classic country couples like George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and Porter Wagoner, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris (and the Everlys and the Louvins). There was one song with a line about sugar in a coffee cup, how it dissolves like true love can dissolve.... It was a sweet moment, or bittersweet, anyway.
Where am I going with this? Well, as I continue (daily) to troll for bike photos and coffee photos on the eBay sites of dealers in Canada and California, France and Argentina (yes, there's a gentleman in Buenos Aires who has a collection of 50,000 photos, 20,000 posters, all hailing from Hollywood), I sometimes screech to a stop on an image that has neither a bike nor a steaming cup of joe in it, but it's a photo that I nonetheless feel compelled to bid on, to own. An iconic star from an iconic movie, a still from one of my all-time favorites (I've got an expanding folder of press photos from Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, with Joel McCrea and Veronica Lake in and out of their hobo gear), an incongruous, odd or just-plain-beautiful shot. So, on this a.m., as guest author on the Best American Poetry blog, I thought I'd share two of these gems, at least I think they are. Poetry in motion... pictures.
First, here's Jean Parker in an artfully staged shot from 1934's Sequoia, an MGM wildlife drama set in California's sequoia forests. Parker's character, Toni Martin, grew up in the woods, befriending puma and deer, and then loggers came rolling in threatening the animals' -- her pals' -- sanctuary. An environmental cautionary tale, way-back-when!
Second, Vanessa Redgrave, clapping her own clapperboard in a production still from Isadora, the 1968 Karel Reisz biopic, from Universal, in which the British actress starred as modern dance legend Isadora Duncan. (Who died, by the way, strangled, in a flukey accident, by a long, flowing silk scarf given to her by her close friend, Mary Desti, who happened to be Preston Sturges' mother.) It's the 84th scene, the first take. Action!
If you like, I'll share a few more images over the course of the week. For now, have a cup of coffee, get on your bike, go watch a movie!
June 1939. Standing left to right: Bert Lahr (the Cowardly Lion), Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow), MGM executive L.K. Sidney, Yip Harburg, composer/ conductor Meredith Willson (who wrote The Music Man), music publisher Harry Link. Seated: Judy Garland and Harold Arlen. (Photo courtesy of Yip Harburg Estate)
Arlen wrote the music and Harburg the lyrics for the score of The Wizard of Oz. Harold turned 34 that year and had the world on a string.
Happy birthday, Uncle Harold -- DL
Act 4 is the briefest of the Acts in Bill Hayward's Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs. It opens with a lovely image of the prima ballerina Kyra Nichols in high arabesque. The dancer stands on one leg, and extends the other behind her body so that the legs are at 180º. One arm is extended toward the floor, the other is parallel to her raised back leg.The position requires tremendous strength and balance and is often quite fleeting. In Hayward's photo Nichols is barely visible. You see her face in profile, her arms, and her silver toe-shoes. You discern her position from her shadow on the floor, cast on a rectangle of light.
The pictures that follow (sixteen on two pages) document Bill's "The Intimacies Project" collaboration with Marinov Dance (in photo above) and "Bent" a film collaboration with Karen Furman and Grounded Aerial. I was among the lucky few who attended a performance of Marinov Dance that Bill held in his studio. It was a striking performance that I wrote about here.
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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