DM, one of my favorite blogging buddies, is the voice behind the always thoughtful and provocative blog, Joe Felso:Ruminations. In a posting a few weeks back, he wrote about a book by Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town, Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. I ordered a copy without hesitating, after reading his inspiring riff […]
- Art/Language
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Les Murray, Bush Bard
I’m still pawing through a summer’s worth of half read New Yorker magazines. (My friend Lesli calls this perpetual battle with The Stack as the “tyranny of the unread”.) And to follow on yesterday’s posting that included an excerpt from an interview with poet/essayist Dan Chiasson, I found a June issue with an effervescent and […]
Art, Politics and Boiling Points
When the concentric circles closest in to consciousness are vibrating, there’s less bandwidth for the larger view. My commitment to political change, always an ambient ideal, goes in and out of sharp focus for me depending on what else is in the foreground. There is also the additional burden of how art and politics coalesce. […]
Green Valleys
Sweet stars, I’ll ask a softer question: Moon attend me to the end. I’m here alone. The feeling that one is on the edge of many things: that there are many worlds from which we are separated by only a film; that a flick of the wrist, a turn of the body another way will […]
Right Angles
Books, a constant source of solace for whatever ails the soul…I am just now getting through Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, and I was compelled by hope expressed in a review of Denis Johnson’s new novel, Tree of Smoke. The review is written by Jim Lewis (whose work I have not read unfortunately) but […]
- In Memoriam
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A flower in a field
When I wrote about Heather Mains in the posting below (Another Library Gone), I did it from the sorrow of an exile. I had been hearing about gatherings of Heather’s friends in Toronto where stories about her had been shared. But I was in Boston, a candle burning of one. But the comments left by […]
- In Memoriam
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Another Library Gone
This is a time in my life when the message seems to be, don’t get too comfortable in that chair, you’ll be getting up again. And again. Yesterday I received word that my friend Heather Mains died in a kayaking accident. We spoke just a few days ago about my pending trip to stay with […]
Mabou Mines
Yet another reason to be in New York sometime in the next week, more specifically Miller’s Launch, a forgotten corner of Staten Island. Mabou Mines, a theatre company that has been thrilling my sensibilities for 30 years, has done it again and stepped way outside the expected. This time it is a new production from […]
Matisse, Giotto and the Religious Imagination
Giotto fresco in Padua Another excerpt from Out of Eden by DiPiero. This one is from the essay, Matisse’s Broken Circle, and is particularly interesting in its reference to Matisse’s concept of the religious imagination and his emulation of Giotto. I am compelled by DiPiero’s claim that Matisse’s career was “the most sustained and variegated […]
Painting the Facelessness
Another passage of interest from W. S. Piero’s Out of Eden: Why are the jets and emulsive tracks of paints in Pollock’s Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950 so compelling? It’s not only because he was creating a greater plasticity of space and laying out dozens of contested fields of formal activity where disintegrating patterns pitch […]