The Best American Poetry

Friday: we got through another week [by Vincent Katz]

Somehow, my Friday post got swallowed, so here's Friday and Saturday in one fell swoop.  Thursday night we went to see the Wooster Group's open rehearsal of La Didone at St. Ann's Playhouse under the Brooklyn Bridge.  La Didone is a mix of a 17th-century opera based on the Dido and Aeneas story with a 1960s Italian sci-fi outerspace adventure.  It was highly entertaining, but as large sections were devoted to music and singing, the group's great actors were less in evidence than in other productions.  Still, a very fine piece.

Earlier, I lectured on Black Mountain College to a group of MFA students at SVA.  They are mostly into photography and video, I understood, so I tried to gear the lecture towards photography at Black Mountain, collaboration, media, as well as the open environment for experimentation and crossing over to other fields.  We talked a little about Olson's plan for BMC activities after the college closed, graphed by him on an amazing sheet of paper, with concentric circles spreading from the college to outpotsts in New York and San Francisco, dealing with discrete aspects of artistic creation.  Something like that actually did happen.  I've been wondering lately about influence — the influence of Black Mountain and the influence of Language poets on contemporary poetry.

Friday, I went to see a number of exhibitions in Chelsea, partially to find material for my column for Apollo magazine.  I saw some good paintings and wondered if making a good painting — or poem — is enough.  Doesn't there have to be some kind of engagement with one's times?  On the other side, I saw work that was aware of its times but had little technical awareness of the materials of its creation.  Both elements link a work of art to art of the past, which is, in my opinion, one of the prime goals of art.

Saturday was a day of doing nothing, well there was some business thrown in, but just hanging out with the kids and the parents, lunch at Caffé Dante, and that was basically that.

I'll end my week with a poem of mine, in memory of our dachshund, Luis, who died this summer.  This poem was not about Luis, but another canine.  I am glad to have had the opportunity to post this week; thanks for reading.

SUNLIT PORTRAIT

beautiful face
the delicate look
from a tapered top lip
and fuller lower

her dog has died
“you could almost
not notice him, but
the silence, now,

is deafening”
how’d she grow
up in Little Rock?
so refined, her

look of America
but quieter
holds a photo
of Rusty now

they’re all photos
light becomes
gripping, dull
and we return

to the mischievous
energy of plants
and parks and
Foosball games

Thursday, a new day [by Vincent Katz]

Here we are again.  A fresh start.  The sounds of morning.  The sounds of children, endlessly fulfilling, except the sounds of sad, bothered children. 

I wake up thinking about words.  I am interested in the way writers use words to think about art.  In David Cohen's review of John Ashbery's collage show (The New York Sun 9/4/08), one realizes he is almost daunted by the knowledge that  the greatest word-user of our time will be reading with interest.  My favorite sentence in Cohen's review, in speaking of the collages of another artist/writer, Mario Naves, contains the phrase: "...in drawing upon detritus whose desuetude survives the alchemy of its artistic transmogrification."  This is exciting writing, it wakes you up, whether or not the critical determination is accurate.  You realize that an important part of criticism is precision in using words.  I believe many people think you only need to learn the correct terminology and then slot the art into the terms.  The problem is that good artists have no interest in terms and are constantly trying to get us to redefine our terms, or rather, to show us that our terms are useful only up to a point.  That is why the best criticism does not make use of preconceived terms of discourse but rather uses everyday language to try to translate what the artist is doing.

After seeing Claude Chabrol's Girl Cut In Two last night with Karen Koch, we went to Le Zie for dinner, where we ran into Irving and Lucy Sandler.  Irving interviewed Jerry Saltz in the curent Brooklyn Rail, and it is a very interesting account of how Saltz became a critic.  (Saltz' piece in a recent New York on the Catalan restaurant El Bulli is highly entertaining).  Saltz in the interview says that he feels the need to visit the Met regularly, always finding something he had not noticed earlier, whereas with the Frick, he only needs to visit it twice a year, just as one needs to hear the opening bars of "Gimme Shelter" a couple of times a year.  I loved that comparison, and it got me thinking, again, about Popular Song, about which more later.

Wednesday: The Crest [by Vincent Katz]

The week is cresting, and I feel good.  I woke up apprehensively on Monday.  Tuesday, I woke again with problems that needed resolving.  Yesterday, things were worked out somewhat.  Today, the pile of papers on my desk has not diminished, but there is the sense, as Frank O'Hara writes at the end of "Joe's Jacket" of being ready (of course he was speaking of a Monday, well, it's something to strive for). 

I am back in Black Mountain: lectures coming up on the artists (SVA) and the poets (The New School).  Reading John Wieners, amazed by the way his lines seem so courtly and classical, while at the same time being smeared with the bodily fluids of outlaw life and love. 

Again to smell what this calm
ocean cannot tell us.   The seasons.
Only the heart remembers
and records in the words
of works
we lay down for those men
who can come to them.

I love the way he bends the meanings, so that "we lay down for those men" stands on it its own, while simultaneously being part of the phrase "works we lay down for those man who can..."  Works suggests poems, and men who can come to them (If Olson or Williams were writing this) would men mean who can understand.  Here "come to them" has an undeniably sexual overtone.  I also like the way, if you take the last sentence as a whole, the heart remembers and records, but the poem does not tell us what it records.  It is a sentence without an object, leaving it open for each reader to make his or her own recording of the moment, while reading or remembering this poem.  There is something formally beautiful and stylistically modern about the encasing of the rhymes words/works and calm/come.

More later, it's time for breakfast.

Ashbery's collages at Tibor de Nagy

John Ashbery's collages at Tibor de Nagy (724 Fifth Avenue) received handsome coverage from Holland Cotter in yesterday's New York Times, and the paper also put up a slide show, which you can see if you click here.

Note that one of the collages, L'Heure exquise (1977), furnished the cover art for Great American Prose Poems:

"Warhol's Portraits" [by George Green]

Warhol’s Portraits

Liz

Marilyn killed herself because she thought
that middle age began at thirty-five.
In Liz’s case it did, but she kept going,
though Dick went down in flames (Exorcist II).
This print’s from ‘65 and she looks ready
to frug the night away with Peter Lawford,
who hasn’t started wearing beads (not yet).
Those were the days, before the TV movies,
before the Percoset and Häagan Dazs.
Oblivious to the telltale signs, she smiles,
the long descent to Neverland begun.

Mick Jagger

He is in my opinion past his prime
already in this print, and he and Keith
are fast becoming tacky little skanks
and sherry-slurping, chicken-headed whores.
They shake their butts and sweat in leather pants,
like ancient drag queens high on Angel dust.

Dennis Hopper

His cowboy Hamlet death scenes are the best.
He flops, jerks, and blabs beseechingly,
then flops, imploringly, and dies. John Wayne,
even, is stunned by so much hamminess.
(He kills him twice: True Grit and Katie Elder).
Now Dennis sells investments on TV,                                    
blabbing away to boomers who have bucks
enough to golf all day, enough to die
of boredom in the sun.  Dennis is cool, though,
and still the hippest actor on the scene.
A poet and a painter, and, what’s more,
a recognized authority on Andy.

Goethe

From Tischbein’s portrait of the noble poet
lounging beside a shattered obelisk.
The campiness of Goethe’s hat and cloak
no doubt explains why Andy did this copy.
The coloring is pure Electric Circus
and  Maharishi-era Donovan.
“The savoring of unintended ironies”
is Peter Schjeldahl in last week’s New Yorker
explaining camp to dopes out in the burbs.                      

Deborah Harry

She is expressionless, or nearly so,
and yet the muffled insolence is there,
a look that prom queens have — the secret stoners;
a look that cover girls will overdo.
I’ve seen that look on Bombay prostitutes
in coffee-table books, but, some of them,
pathetically, look out at us with hope,
as if a photograph could rescue them
or set them up inside a better cathouse.

Truman Capote

Those A-list types who had rejected Andy
(Capote, Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns)
all came around when he got really big,
though friendship had become extraneous.
The portraits of his friends are extra flat.
You can’t look into them: There is no in.
A frightful vacancy and transience
is what, I guess, he meant us all to see.
He might as well have kept on painting shoes.

Jerry Hall

I could step back and make a case for these,
regard them, somehow, in another light.
Maybe the sitters have been divinized
and that’s why they all fade into abstraction.
Maybe those patches where the colors smear,
blurring the lines, express the soul’s diffuse
ethereality, reminding us
of what, time and again, the Lord enjoins—
that we behold each other as divine.

Mao

The Chairman’s constipation was so bad,
he only defecated once a week,
and during the Long March his weekly voidings
were sometimes celebrated by his troops.
Mao moved his bowels once on a mountaintop
above the clouds, and members of his staff                      
began to dance and clap their hands.  The news
spread rapidly as cheers went up along
the mountain side. The tattered ranks rejoiced,
ten-thousand hats were tossed into the air!
From goat trails near the summit bugles sounded,
and acclamations echoed in the dells.

-- George Green

JA and JA at JA's Opening

photo 2008(c)Star Black

Actress Joan Allen was among the fans who poured into the Tibor de Nagy gallery in NYC last week for a show of John Ashbery's collages.  She liked especially the collage you see over her left shoulder.  The show (which also features paintings by Trevor Winkfield) remains at the gallery through October 4.  Get there if you can to see more work by these amazing artists.

Sixty Years of John Ashbery's Collages at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NYC

Septeber 4-October 4, 2008.  Opening reception, September 4, 5-7 PM.   
Tibor de Nagy, 724 Fifth Avenue, NY NY  212 262 5050

RIP: Manny Farber, 1917-2008

Manny Farber, major film critic and painter, has passed away at the age of 91.

See Ken Tucker's August 18 post on the EW blog, "Remembering Manny Farber," which begins with these paragraphs:

<<<
Manny Farber, who died last night at the age of 91, was one of the 20th Century's greatest critics, as well as a powerful painter in his own right. Notice I didn’t just say "film critic" — Farber wrote primarily about the movies, but his collection of film criticism, Negative Space, is essential to understanding all modern non-academic criticism. Farber established a tone, cleared a patch of cultural landscape, and filled it with more ideas, opinions, and attitude than a thousand reviewers and bloggers — not just in movies but in music, television, book, and art criticism too — will ever muster.

With the exception of Pauline Kael, Farber was probably the movie critic other movie critics most often quoted, particularly his hugely influential 1962 essay "White Elephant Art Vs. Termite Art," which came as close to anything he wrote to boiling down his critical creed. In that piece, Farber positioned himself ferociously against what he called the "self-aggrandizing masterwork" that "treat[s] every inch of the screen and film as a potential area for prizeworthy creativity." In opposition to this he championed "termite art," which “goes always forward eating its own boundaries… leav[ing] nothing in its path other than signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity." At a time when crap nostalgia is routinely praised with unthinking effusiveness, it's harder now to appreciate how daring and emboldening it was to read Farber's championing of supposedly such minor work as the then-ignored Westerns of director Budd Boetticher and the face-slamming camerawork of director Sam Fuller.
>>>

For the rest of Ken's report, click here.

Also just a click away are Ted Burke's "Like It Or Not" appreciation of Manny and the Movie City Indie's feelings on Farber's demise.

Here is one of Manny Farber's remarkable paintings:

 

Larry Rivers at the Guild Hall in East Hampton

Art Review | 'Larry Rivers'

The New York Times, August 14, 2008

A spirit of possibility electrifies the galleries of Guild Hall in East Hampton, Long Island. The exhibition on view, “Larry Rivers: Major Early Works,” includes only 20 paintings, drawings and sculptures from 1952 to 1965, about half of which could be called major. But it is an exciting show.

Read the rest of Ken Johnson's article here.

Larry Rivers, The Last Civil War Veteran (1961)

Ad Reinhardt at the Guggenheim

“Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting” remains at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, at 89th Street, guggenheim.org, through Sept. 14.

from Holland Cotter's review in today's New York Times:

<< . . . at the Guggenheim, at least, the story has a sublime ending. Just off the main exhibition Ms. Stringari has installed a group of “Black Paintings” in apparently pristine condition in a plain room with a big bench, and with the low lighting Reinhardt stipulated. They don’t feel either particularly heavy or light, joyous or somber, perfect or imperfect.

You let your eyes rest on them, and what you see changes, constantly: blacks change shades; reds and blues appear and fade. One minute you think you are looking at a grid or a cruciform; the next at a cloudy sky or a Monet landscape, dark like the negative of a photograph. Your vision is changing things; you are changing. The paintings are not. But they are, perhaps, leaving their trace on your psyche and memory. The mark may be permanent, whatever permanent means. >>

Read Holland Cotter's NY Times review here.