The White Room The obvious is difficult To prove. Many prefer The hidden. I did, too. I listened to the trees. They had a secret Which they were about to Make known to me– And then didn’t. Summer came. Each tree On my street had its own Scheherazade. My nights Were a part of their […]
Thwarted by Awe
My posting about poetry from a few days ago (see April 1 below) drew some thoughtful and insightful responses. Here’s one from my dear friend and gifted poet Nicole that deserves highlighting up front. There are two thoughts I have regarding your posting on poetry today. As an instructor at a historically black college, I […]
To be Opened
A Green Crab’s Shell Not, exactly, green: closer to bronze preserved in kind brine, something retrieved from a Greco-Roman wreck, patinated and oddly muscular. We cannot know what his fantastic legs were like– though evidence suggests eight complexly folded scuttling works of armament, crowned by the foreclaws’ gesture of menace and power. A gull’s gobbled […]
Unnoticed, and Necessary
Variation On The Word Sleep I would like to watch you sleeping, which may not happen. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves […]
Order From Chaos
A few musings on the amazingly counter entropic gesture of pulling something into existence from what appears to be nothing… *** I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have […]
- Creativity
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Prescient Imaging
The creative process is mysterious, and I actually relish its unwillingness to be quantified and codified. Ongoing attempts to measure and metricize what it is and how it works are reminiscent of the classic image of the bubble under the tablecloth—that pocket of air that you can move around but cannot eradicate or hold in […]
Still Standing
I am not a poet. But I turn to poetry instinctively to navigating the inner life. As a painter I have given myself a hall pass to not have to chip away at language in an attempt to replicate, resuscitate or reconstitute those intense experiences that happen outside the domain of language. Outside my domain […]
Music of Hair, Music of Pain
Wait (to someone contemplating suicide) Wait, for now. Distrust everything, if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become lovely again. Second-hand gloves will become lovely […]
- Ideas
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Have it Your Way: Modern vs PoMo
How heartening it is when you find a passage that captures the essence of some of your internal floaters—those inchoate, imprecise concepts that circumambulate in the mind and never quite land on two feet. I had the settling sensation of an exhale that comes when order has been brought to a previously perceived chaos when […]
Art Lovers Of a Different Stripe
Herb and Dorothy Vogel, art collectors extraordinaire, at home The April 2009 issue of Modern Painters magazine has an interview by Christopher Turner with documentarist Megumi Sasaki about her new film, Herb and Dorothy. The story of Herb and Dorothy Vogel is so outrageous and runs so against the grain of everything I have known […]