This morning I received an email from George Wingate, an artist and my first roommate in Manhattan oh so many years ago. He sent me an excerpt from a page torn from an old New Yorker that he found while cleaning his studio barn. Kenneth Tynan comments on the death of Janet Flanner in 1978 […]
Reflectivity
An article about mirrors appeared in the New York Times two weeks ago, and its contents have continued to nag my mind. (An excerpt is on Slow Painting if you don’t want to read the whole piece.) There are a number of threads in this piece that would be worth some time to delve into […]
- Ideas
- ...
Making Strange
It has been three full days since I saw Guy Maddin’s “documentary,” My Winnipeg, and the ambience still hasn’t left my consciousness. It is quixotic and visually arresting, preposterously absurd and yet quite tender, both epic and lyric at the same time. I was enchanted. My Winnipeg, by Guy Maddin And as the critic Peter […]
May Swenson: Looking at Trees
All That Time I saw two trees embracing. One leaned on the other as if to throw her down. But she was the upright one. Since their twin youth, maybe she had been pulling him toward her all that time, and finally almost uprooted him. He was the thin, dry, insecure one, the most wind-warped, […]
Poetry and Truth
Peculiar to poetry is a preconceived expectation of “truth”. David Orr’s essay in the Times Sunday Book Review captures some of this response in spite of cynicism in the culture about literary authenticity, particularly following a spate of memoir writers whose manufactured memories and inaccurate portrayals were exposed and condemned. Orr starts with an anecdote […]
Moving in the Landscape as One of Its Details
This was a weekend with a disruptive sense of time. It made me think of an essay by the poet Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods” in which he describes making a trip to a forest in Kentucky. He leaves work, drives hard over the interstate highways for over an hour, then finally arrives […]
Written on the Skin
Body of Book This is one way to talk about a book: I woke into the locus of my body. In sleep’s thick envelope, what poems fit? Dream-card sealed with a kiss and then sent out. What we meant was musing, nothing else. Did the dream not spring from memory? Remembering who said what or […]
- Art Making
- ...
Enough With the Words!
This short piece by Jonathan Jones (in The Guardian) captures rather succinctly many of the frustrations I have written about here in earlier posts. We are currently living through a period of inappropriate dependence on language to extol and explain what is often beyond language in the visual arts. Enough words! My voice joins others […]
Slow Drip, and an Absence of Edges
A new poet laureate was announced today. Kay Ryan’s story is humble, unpretentious and heartwarming. Here’s an excerpt from the announcement in the New York Times: When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls… […]
Travelling, Or Being Travelled?
Whatever you may be, you are being ‘lived’. You are not travelling, as you think: you are being ‘travelled’. Remember: you are in a train. Stop trying to carry your baggage yourself! It will come along with you anyhow. – Wei Wu Wei, from Open Secret One of the best things about being online IMHO […]