Cute Hall

Warsaw, retrospectively

2008-05-28T08:18:00.003+01:00

I've written in an earlier post on this blog of the Polish artist Barbara Falkowska. She has been on my mind again recently for two reasons. First was the arrival in the post of a new retrospective catalogue of her work--a beautifully put-together publication. Second, was the preparation I've had to do, along with animator Orla McHardy,
for an interview for an award to make a film of my poem, "The Polish Language," which is dedicated to Barbara. In that interview, I told the story of meeting Barbara twenty four years ago in Maine and how in the years since, we have kept in touch, and how the poem came to be written because of my contact with Polish culture that began with that friendship (and with Barbara's niece, Basia, an extraordinary individual--but that is another story).
So here is something I wrote in Boston in 1994 about my visit to Poland four years earlier. The photo of the lady and cabbages above was taken in an indoor market. (We got the award by the way, and the film will be premiered at the Galway Film Fleadh in 2009. )

Warsaw
(1990)

I went to Warsaw to visit the Polish artist Barbara Falkowska and her family. Barbara spins, dyes and weaves wool, linen and raffia into large tapestries, which she calls gobelins. They are richly coloured and textured fibre paintings, marvellous things. I had had the good fortune of studying with her a few years before, and I became close to both Barbara and her niece Basia. When the airfares from the U.S. to Eastern Europe dropped in the early 90’s, I jumped at the chance to visit my friends.

At the time I arrived in Poland, the Communist government had just conceded its power to Solidarity, so Warsaw had not yet been brightened by the United Colours of Benetton and other festive regalia provided by free enterprise. Everything had that legendary totalitarian grey pallor. Store windows enticed customers with nothing more than a few dusty jars of pickles, a couple of wrinkled onions. Aside from the rebuilt Old City that catered to tourists, the better part of Warsaw was made up of rows and rows of concrete, high-rise housing blocks, stretching for miles across the flat plain that hugs the Vistula River.

When I arrived at the building that housed Barbara’s home and studio, I found it to be like all the others: grey, concrete, shabby. I remember that I looked up to the tenth floor, which I knew to be Barbara’s level, and saw one balcony upon which vines had been trained to grow, forming a kind of arbour. I knew it would be hers. I also remember the remarkable interior of Barbara’s small home, which was also her studio. She had filled it with lovely things: hand-made glassware and table linens, forged iron decorations, paintings and sculptures, all made by her friends in Poland and abroad. This place was filled with a kind of erotic energy for life in the midst of the starkest aesthetic landscape I could imagine. It spoke volumes about what art really is, at least to me. And at that time and place art was not yet much of a commodity as it now is in Poland. The need to make art and the need to live seemed very closely connected among Barbara and her friends. And the fact that they kept making art through the bleakest years of the worst regimes was in itself subversive; she and her friends had been harassed for years by the security police. I guess on this visit to Warsaw I got a clear vision of what art can be, is: life-giving, erotic, subversive, indomitable.

That same day, as the sun began to set, Barbara took me to her little studio on the second floor of the flat. She began to hand some of her recent works about the studio for me to look at. The one I remember most was a big tapestry, about ten by twelve feet, which she called “Screen”. It was made of very dark chocolate brown wools and linens with a central, globe-like image that was carved out on one edge by flecks of cornflower blue wool. The abstracted image reminded me a little of those astronaut photos of the earth seen from space, licked on one side by sunlight. I asked her to talk about this work, and she said that it was about her relationship to herself. Then she said, “I feel the greatest gift would if I could be completely myself.” I remember puzzling over those words; I felt as if she had said something important, something I needed to understand, but really comprehending it was not in my reach at that time...

Early in my second year of graduate school (in painting), I read a letter in which Matisse wrote the following. It recalled to me Barbara’s puzzling words. I’ve had it tacked up on my studio wall.

There are many things that I would like to understand about myself.
but after half a century of hard work and reflection, the wall remains.
Nature, or rather, my nature remains mysterious; at least I have put a little
order in my chaos by following the small light that guides me and responds
energetically to my frequent S.O.S’s. I am not intelligent.

A poem by Barry Spacks

2007-10-08T17:16:00.000+01:00

This is one of those poems that has been a music in my head for over twenty years. Thought it
deserved having some light shed on it. The poet has a blog (url below), so you can check up what he is up to now as well.

Poem

Will it come again like this?
Will we ever get it right?
It is always as it is,
And it passes.

Never as it was,
Yet always somehow bright,
Always somehow sweet
In its changes.

We will never get it right.
It will come again, but not like this.
It is always as it is,
And it changes.

from
Barry Spacks
Spacks Street
see also
www.barryspacks.blogspot.com

Scenes from The Flatlake Festival

2007-08-27T22:03:00.000+01:00

Went to Clones, County Monaghan last weekend to the Flatlake Literary and Arts Festival, which was held (for the first time) at a beautiful estate called Hilton Park. It was a blast. It was literary. It was art. It was anarchy. It felt as if anything might happen. A very good thing.

Some highlights: The Butty Barn as a gathering space for readings, art auctions, gigs, interviews. Eoin McNamee reading his recent story, "North of Riga." Claire Keegan reading her story, "The Parting Gift." The 15 Second Film Festival. Eugene McCabe interviewed by Colm Tóibín. The sunlight on the big house on Sunday afternoon. Camping for the first time in a long, long time. Watching my daughter (7) not squirm and whinge but actually be still and attentive to Stephen Rea and Fintan McKeown read from Pinter's "Dumb Waiter"--the language and acting had a magnetic force.

I'll write more on Flatlake later, but for now I'll post photos. The third and fourth photos are in the Butty Barn, with Margot Quinn's whimsical and mad collage of "stuff" (one of the pointing red hands read "Radio Na Buttica Anseo"). The fourth photo shows the Butty Booth, where Pat McCabe's "Radio Butty" was broadcast throughout the festival. The top half of McCabe's hatted head could usually be spied in the cut-out centre of the booth which was designed to be " a cross between the Star Trek space shuttle cockpit and Miss O'Leary's Irish scullery/kitchen." The sound (from the radio broadcast inside the Butty Barn) was perfect: low and tinny as if McCabe was on a transistor radio propped in the corner. He favours the theme songs to "The Virginian" and "Secret Agent Man" and has a knack for a steady stream of "bleather"--not dominant, but important as an anchor and a note to which the entire festival tuned itself. Mad-as-a-badger.

Really wanted to stay for Jinx Lennon but the daughter had had enough. As I say, more later.

William Meredith died yesterday

2007-05-31T21:48:00.000+01:00

William Meredith died yesterday in New London, Connecticut. He was a poet, a pilot of a fighter jet in WW II, a friend to many, many people. And a teacher. He had a truly generous spirit and a gift of quiet, penetrating insight into people. He was a much lauded poet (the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in the US), and he had known many of the most influential figures of the the second half of the twentieth c. in American poetry Frost, Bishop, Berryman, Lowell, Auden, Jarrell, Rukeyser among them. His poems were reticent, quietly funny and full of a wise warmth and understanding for the human condition. A few favourite Meredith poems: "A Major Work", "Crossing Over" and "Hazard Faces a Sunday in the Decline". His critical writings, a selection of which is published in "Poems Are Hard To Read" (Michigan Press), are wonderful.

It had been many years since we'd seen each other. Then, he appeared a few miles up the road last summer in Sligo. He was doing a small tour of Ireland with some readings along the way. The photo is from our last visit together at the home of novelist Jack Harte. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis. Deep sympathies to his beloved and devoted partner Richard Harteis and to all his family and friends. Funeral is June 6th in New London and there will be a celebration of his life later on in the year at Connecticut College. Click here to listen to an interview about Meredith with Michael Collier, who was also a student of his and who now directs the Breadloaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. It's on National Public Radio in the U.S. and Collier reads "A Major Work" and "Parents".

A Blur

2007-05-27T13:53:00.000+01:00

William Meredith is dying
now and I look up
from my book to bushes
out the glass doors
a dark blur
has just left the frame
I was too slow
to catch it a blackbird
I am pretty sure. I know
I am hungry here
is my empty
hand.

Wax Ear ( a poem from the series "Milagros + Retablos")

2007-04-17T15:57:00.000+01:00

Wax Ear

You ought to take God’s hint
who gave you twice as many ears
as tongues. It takes years, this.
Fuck the career.
Becaws I begun to know by then
I wer some kind of lissener as wel.

(the text in italics is a quotation from Russell Hoban's novel, Riddley Walker)

Arab Map of the World with the South at the Top

2007-04-04T21:12:00.000+01:00

Arab Map of the World with the South at the Top
(Ibn Hawqal, 10th c.)

Plainsong puzzle.
No rush to mean.
Duodenum inlet.
Dotty. Green.

Holes in the hills.
Oval worldview.
Hawqal on a roll.
Foiled fold snafu.

Truro on the ulna
Truro on the ulna

Terre vert, vinegar,
Urine, honey, salt.
Lambent vellum riff.
Simmered down gestalt.

Trouble on the sea.
Bug proboscis cay.
Bang a left east
To slack jaw bay.

Truro on the ulna
Truro on the ulna

(the poem first appeared in Poetry Ireland Review no.86)
Thought it would be nice to post the image with the poem.

Mahon + Haas: savoury + sweet

2007-04-02T10:45:00.000+01:00

Went to Dun Laoighaire to the annual Poetry Now festival (PN 07) on Saturday evening. Derek Mahon and Robert Haas were reading. It was a fine event. I really enjoyed sitting there in the dark, packed house, the single, white stage light focused on the podium. It's a great venue for hearing poems, for watching poets in action.

They were a terrific pair to see in the one night. Mahon and Haas. The Irish poet of the whiplash wit, legendary erudition, vinegary aspect. He of the tight, tender, classical poems. There's an enormous scope of ambition and reach to Mahon's poems, and they return that ambition generously and suprisingly. He made a quirky, mischievous selection of his own poems and his versions of other poets' works (Beckett, Rilke). I wish he'd gone on for another hour.

Haas was all Mahon wasn't. Loose, rangy, sunny sometimes. His voice, his California accent, his presentation all belie what's going on in the poems, which are philosophical tracts injected with the particularities of his life. His ear is well-tuned to casual speech, and he knows just where to place right words. I loved the use of "and they are wholly unsupervised" in one poem--like Frost, he has that ear, that love for the conversational.

One of the things I loved on the night was to see each poet's response to the introduction he was given by Peter Fallon, who is the founder/publisher of The Gallery Press (Mahon's publisher). Fallon has a surprisingly high voice for a man of his stature. He introduced Mahon with high speech; he obviously has enormous respect for the poet. He told us that after the judges of the David Cohen Prize for literature in England had reached a unanimous decision to award it to Mahon (which they did last week), they broke into applause. Fallon told us that he had heard it from Andrew Motion (the chair of the judging panel), and he was not making it up. Really.

Mahon then strode out, the two men passing as the one exited and the other entered. Mahon reached the podium, pulled the mike down towards his mouth (he's quite short). "Peter tends to exaggerate," he said, his merry eyes squinting out at us.

After a different, equally salutory introduction to Haas, Fallon headed for stage left as Haas came out from the same side. Haas stopped him, shook his hand, hugged him with one arm and then made for the podium where he thanked Peter for his wonderful introduction, thanked John McAuliffe for all the help, thanked all of us for coming, and you get the picture. It was nice, but compared to Mahon's reticence and salty wit, it was gushing. And I just loved that about the both of them on the night. The Irish make us Americans seem so sweet and open about everything. We, even a poet of depth such as Haas, embarrass the Irish a bit, or a lot. You could just feel it in that literary audience. And then when Haas read a few poems about his mother and her drinking problems and all that, the difference between him and Mahon just sang out. Again, it was lovely. Because Haas's confessional poems aren't gratuitous. In fact, it could all be a fiction (though I suspect not)--but the stories set within the poems are right for where the poems take those stories. And how they transform them into a larger vision.

But Mahon would never never do that in a poem. He would never write about his mother drinking in a closet.

Haas read a lot of new poems, which were terrific. Many of them took strange, swift, left-hand turns before they ended. I look forward to encountering them again on the page.

Great reading. Thanks John McAuliffe (who bows out as director this year) and all the other folk who organized PN O7.

A year's mind for John McGahern and Cootehall marches forward (supposedly)

2007-03-28T12:24:00.000+01:00

One month after a death, there is the "month's mind" Mass. Here, that is. Well, this week it is a year's mind for John McGahern. The first winter with him not among us was very, very wet. But the spring arrives even more welcome. Yesterday was a cracker. After four dry days, only one corner of Regan's field required wellies to venture into to retrieve the ball.

As I write this, the thundering booms from the diggers resound all around me. In Cootehall, 100 plus new homes are being constructed. All in the name of rural renewal, but for that you should read "whopping tax break". The village could have done with a bit more life. A few more dwellings and shops. But, oy vey. You wouldn't recognize it. The spring weather brought all the Cootehall denizens out of hibernation. And we just stood around on the road and gave out about all the building and our dirty windows and about how we should have done something about it before it was too late. Well, it's too late.

The photo here was taken while I was standing on the riverbank beside the Barracks in Cootehall, looking across to the Oakport side. Can you believe how close these houses were allowed to be built to each other?? Asking price: €650,000 yo yos. And The Barracks appears on the publicity brochures created by the property developers. Come summer, imagine the 42 new speed boats (some of the houses come with one "free") roaring by in the foreground.

Riffs on Reading

2007-03-07T16:33:00.000Z

Have picked up One Art, one of the books I swim in again and again – collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop, skillfully edited by Robert Giroux. Picked it up this time in order to find a few specific Herbert poems that were favourites of hers. I'd been reading Herbert and wanted to see if any of my favourites matched hers. The games we play, huh? She mentions "Love Unknown", which is wonderful. Then try reading Bishop's "The Monument" or "One Art" after that and see the affinities.

Then I took out Bishop's collected and swam in that for a while. "Arrival at Santos" is still my favourite. Has been since 1981. From the opening, "Here is a coast; here is a harbor./Here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery:" to the close, "...either because the glue here is very inferior/or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;/we are driving to the interior." Perfect. Yes, yes I know that's what everybody says about EB. I agree with everybody.

I imagine Seamus Heaney was dead chuffed (as they say here!) when EB's letters were published and she mentions that he's at Harvard and that she thinks his work is very good.

While I'm at it, I'll recommend a poem of Glyn Maxwell's in the latest issue of Poetry Review (you can find it online at their site, click on link). It's called "Flags and Candles".Very thoughtful, careful, clever poem. When I heard Glyn read a few years ago at Poetry Now in Dun Laoighaire, Seamus Heaney was sitting in front of me and nodding his head a lot, clearly enjoying Glyn's reading. So a line of nods down the years here: Bishop to Heaney to Maxwell... (Heaney's white hair was so fluffy and so copious, it took quite a bit of restraint on my part not to muss it up from behind!)

And more connections: the Poetry Now festival, last weekend of this month, features Alice Quinn, poetry editor of the New Yorker, speaking on the newly found poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Enough riffs.

Enthusiastic Invigilator

2007-02-18T15:50:00.000Z

Went into the Model + Niland Galleries in Sligo today to look at an exhibition on drawing. Was poking around the galleries and found myself quite confused by the labels, which were so discreetly positioned and at such distances from the works they described as to be a nuisance more than anything else. So I relied on asking the young and enthusiastic woman who was sitting in place "invigilating" (a term I only bumped into when I left the USA) about which piece belonged to which artist. And we got to talking a bit about the show. She was friendly and obviously liked being there among the various art works. She had a few books with her as well; she'd been absorbed in one before I disturbed her. But she didn't seem bothered and seemed to enjoy looking at some of the art with me and offering me her thoughts on it. I love to find friendly people especially in places where we, unfortunately, have come to expect to be treated with disdain--as if we patrons of the place were getting in the way of the serious and superior activities that these employees were really there to do.

So, thank you enthusiastic invigilator!

Over the years, I suppose I've kept a running tally of the genuinely friendly encounters I've had with the people employed to deal with the public in art venues. It is a very, very small number indeed. Nielsen Gallery in Boston was notable for their warm, enthusiastic welcome--at least when I lived in Boston in the late eighties/early nineties. I recently visited Raster Gallery in Warsaw and was treated with kindness and generosity as well. I was offered (and accepted!) a glass of wine to sip as I sat in their "library" and poked around their publications.

When I used to visit the New York City galleries regularly, I'd play a little game with myself and measure the level of snootiness and chill that wafted towards me from those minimalist front desks. Cold, cold, cold with the odd (and welcome) exception. In fact, I wondered if there had been some sort of training course in that special air of frigid reception that these people seemed to have perfected. So unnecessary, so bad for business.

"Would you like me to tell you what this drawing means?" My friendly invigilator asked me this today, early on in our interaction before, I think, she got the sense that I was accustomed to visiting galleries and looking at art. Her intention was helpful, I am sure. I'm also quite sure that she had been advised to offer such a service to the gallery's visitors by her employers. I said that I'd like her to tell me what the drawing meant. And I listened and looked and thanked her when she had finished.

Barbara Falkowska and Zofia Malanowska

2007-02-12T17:51:00.000Z

Cute Hall had the pleasure of visiting Warsaw last week--to see friends and to look at some art. These two women are both distinguished artists who walk the border territory between the textile and painting disciplines. Barbara Falkowska will have a solo exhibition of her work in Warsaw opening March 1 at the Union of Polish Artists Building (Galeri DAP) on Mazowiecka (near Swietokrsyska metro stop). Her work is singular in Poland and the world. She is well-known in both Poland and abroad. I had the honour of meeting her and studying with her at Haystack in Maine in 1984. The Warsaw show will be a kind of retrospective and is not to be missed if you are in Poland in March. Mrs. Malanowska began her art career in earnest at the age of 70. Now, 91, she is producing some of the most original, unique work I have ever seen. More on it later.

The High Ones Die, They Die (and "People have had enough of Paris")

2007-01-27T15:03:00.000Z

Sad news from Warsaw this week: the death of writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of Poland's national treasures. He was 73: a heart attack after an operation on the intestine. Fine writing. The record of a magnificent, compassionate, poetic mind plunked deep in the world-- in some lovely, and as he himself called them, some really wicked places too. A few titles: Another Day of Life; The Soccer War; The Emperor; Shah of Shahs; Imperium; Travels with Herodotus (new, in Polish only now, coming in English translation later this year). Apparently, he was readying himself to write a new book encompassing the whole globe, a sort of a report from one day of life on earth, starting from a description of a sunset over Lima, The Sahara, Florence and Tibet.

A friend in Kraków wrote this week," in Kapu's first book of poems from 1986 there was a line where he said that only he will survive who created his own world."

Ryszard Kapuscinski will survive, then.

These excerpts are from Imperium, his moving journey through the post-Soviet Union. The story at the end about the bathroom and the French newspaper I have re-told (roughly, not so elegantly) to countless people since I read it last spring. The chapter is called "Jumping Over Puddles"--it's short, but like the best of RK, this ordinary encounter, with a girl in the street jumping puddles, with the taps in a bathroom in the Siberian town of Yaktusk, embrace the entire reality of our entire world. I'll give you two bits, one short, one fairly extended. Here's something Kapu learns from a chat with ten-year-old Tanya who lives in this oil-rich, Siberian "Kuwait" (Yaktusk)--

**One can recognize a great cold, she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in this mist. The corridor has the shape of that person's silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist. A large man makes a huge corridor, and a small child--a small corridor. Tanya makes a narrow corridor because she is slender, but for her age, it is a high one--which is understandable; she is after all the tallest in her class. Walking out in the morning, Tanya can tell from these corridors whether her girlfriends have already gone to school--they all know what the corridors of their closest neighbors and friends look like.

Here is a wide, low corridor with a distinct, resolute line--the sign that Claudia Matveyevna, the school principal, has already gone.

If in the morning there are no corridors that correspond to the stature of students from the elementary school, it means that the cold is so great that classes have been canceled and the children are staying home.

Sometimes one sees a corridor that is very crooked and then abruptly stops. It means--Tanya lowers her voice--that some drunk was walking, tripped and fell. In a great cold, drunks frequently freeze to death. Then such a corridor looks like a dead-end street. **

And later in same chapter, this scenario:

**I return to Oktiabrska Street, to my hotel. I'm in room number 506. To open the door, one must try turning the key a number of times. It takes from eight to sixteen attempts. Expecting results at attempt number 8 is optimistic, for by the sixteenth time the door will open for sure. The worst thing is that it cannot be locked from the inside, and it is hung is such a way that, unlocked, it opens of its own accord on the corridor. I had no choice but to ask the tenant from the adjoining room (a Buryat, technician) to lock my door for me. (We developed a ceertain ritual: I would knock at his door, my neighbor would come out, together we would open my door, my neighbor would lock it.)

In the little bathroom, there is both cold and hot water form the faucet above the washbasin, but in the shower there is only hot. Not knowing this, I turn on the shower. Seething, boiling water gushes forth with a roar. Because it is cold in the bathrrom and in the room itself, thick clouds of steam form instantly. I cannot see. I throw myself at the shower, but it won't turn off. I make a dash for the window, to let out the steam, but the window does not open; it is sealed up with adhesive plaster--and, anyhow, the handle for opening it has been removed. If I open the door of the room, the steam will burst out into the corridor; I will create confusion and scandal. But why scandal? How am I at fault here? I'm already thinking about how to explain and defend myself. Everything in this country is somehow thought out, arranged in such a way the the man on the street--no matter what he is doing, in what situation he finds himself, in what straits and difficulties--will always have a feeling of guilt. Because (as I said) it is cold in my room, the steam immediately condenses on the walls, on the windowpanes, or the glass of a little picture frame, and on the sliver of a mirror. I make a final, heroic effort and turn off the shower, swearing to myself to touch nothing else. It is damp, water is everywhere, but for a moment it is also warmer.
I walked out into the corridor to check whether anyone had noticed the cataclysm that had just shaken my room. But it was empty, dead. A television set was on in the common room, but no one was watching. The writer Vladimir Solouhin was saying: "Because of Lenin a river of blood flowed in the Soviet Union, an ocean of blood was spilled." He said that sixty-six million people died, not counting the victims of the Second World War. "All this," said Solouhin, "was done in the name of creating paradise on earth." And he concluded: "Paradise! Ha Ha! And today we are walking around without pants."
After a laborer came on, who, despite the fact that Lenin no longer counts, announced with pride that he had just read five volumes of Vladimir Ilyich in just several evenings. "It's very simple," he said, clearly pleased with himself. "I read each volume for no longer than one hour. I simply knew that Lenin wrote the most important things in his texts in italics. I recommend it to everyone!" he encouraged the empty room at the Hotel Yaktusk.
At the end of the program, Yuri Lubimov, the director of the Moscow theater Taganka, said in a critical but also depairing tone: "We have lost our minds, we have lost our conscience, we have lost our honor. I look around and I see barbarity!" Lubimov's powerful, theatrical voice filled the common room, spilled out into the corridor and lobby.
At the newstand in the lobby, the only foreign newspaper on sale was the French L'Humanité. I bought it for the sake of one photograph, to which normally I wouldn't have paid the least attention. But now I sat in my room and stared at this picture on the last page. It showed an elegant and clean highway, L'Autoroute A6, along which stretched unending lines of elegant and clean cars. All this suddenly fascinated me: the white stripes on the road and the large, distinct road signs, and the bright light of the lanterns. Everything was washed; everything was clean; everything went with everything else.
"Le grand week-end pascal," said the caption, "est commencé."
People have had enough of Paris; they want to rest.
This is so far away, I thought, looking at the photograph. As if on Venus.
And I started to mop up the bathroom floor. ***

Baby, you can never hold back spring

2007-01-18T22:17:00.001Z

The JK Ensemble, which is always on the radio here in Cutehall between half two and half four weekdays, played Tom Waits singing this song (From Orphans, his newest recording), and here is the proof if you needed any. From the garden here.

Residencies: Peter Reading's "Marfan" (2000)

2007-01-16T10:29:00.000Z

"

First the photos: Marfa, Texas where poet Peter Reading did a really interesting residency, read on below for more. The interior shot is Donald Judd's permanent installation of steel boxes in a disused factory and the other is a Prada "store" in the middle of nowhere, put there by the Milanese fashion house and the Marfa Arts Foundation. (photos thanks to Jane Lyons).

Residencies": these things that uproot creative types to different places--do they yield anything of real worth? August Kleinzahler is savage on them: his poem "The Art Farm" (in The Strange Hours Travelers Keep--FSG 2003/Faber 2004) is a case in point. Here's an excerpt:

..."Like a caravan, the Toyotas, Saabs and 4 x 4s
head south, breaking up among the interchanges
north of Boston and heading their separate ways:
some to the nation's colleges,
where they take up their residencies once more,
even with the thunder of the football season upon them;
some to the warrens and fastnesses of Brooklyn,
where the young, these days, position themselves.

Behind them, a cold front from Canada moves in
across the wooded peaks and ridges, settling
among the many valleys and turning to mush
the late vegetables, finishing off
what's left of the blackberries, deep in their brambles.
Beauty is difficult. Yes, yes, of course it is.
How would it be otherwise? Of course, of course.
But what a lot of good talk about process

and stimulating tete-a-tetes. Energized, inspired, even,
one leaves this peaceful place. Fructified:
yes, that would be the word, exactly.
Reluctantly, one returns to the world
and all its quotidian bother, fructified.
And with them goes their art, these cheerful,
satisfied customers, packed safely away
in their trunks and back seats: the rolled canvases
and tools; manuscripts-in-progress
safely transferred to hard disk and awaiting

application of all that encouragement and sound counsel:
ready for that final, determined drive
to completion and a great big FUCK YOU for you know who"...

I'm with Kleinzahler in a lot of what he's doing here: the phrase "position themselves" is just right, the whole picture of self-satisfied "consumers" of art process returning to the factories of "education" where poets are "turned out" or the art "world" of Brooklyn where they chase "success"--all this is necessary to be seen for what it is. Mostly. There are the rare exceptions. But I think Kleinzahler's point of view is essential in keeping the big picture in view and in causing us to ask the right questions: what does it take to make art? What is the "art world"? What is success in art/poetry terms? And so on. So many of these things are not challenged enough, and it takes the contrarian/marginalized voice to wake us up. (By the way, on this subject, I was surprised and delighted to hear the voice of poet Trevor Joyce on national radio here in Ireland the other day. He was talking about why poetry is a necessary art as it can do and say things that language can't do in any other way, and he was talking too about the corporatization of book-selling and how it has made most good (challenging) poetry inaccessible to punters. It was on Lyric FM. I'll try and find a link for you.)

Which brings us to poet Peter Reading (who trained as a painter), a contrarian if there ever was one. And three cheers to the Lannan Foundation for giving Peter Reading a literary residency in, of all places, Marfa, Texas. The resulting book, Marfan (which could be pronounced as "Martian" if you treat the "f" as the old English sibilant--Bloodaxe 2000) is just wonderful. It makes me laugh, deeply. I love poems that embrace humour--not chuckling, Billy Collins/Carol Anne Duffy-type humour mind you. Darker stuff. "Marfan" is full of dark humour.

No better man to plunk in the Texan desert (geographical and cultural). A poet who loves to use ancient metrical forms, who loves Latin, an expert in birds and geologic history. And he's forced into the Marfan public library("The Wisdom of West Texas, a slim vol."). Forced to read the local paper, The Desert Candle. All the while, blue-chip sculptor Donald Judd's "compound" lurks (he bought a huge disused factory complex there in the 70's where his gigantor steel, minimalist works are displayed).

Here's some of what Reading wrote during this "residency":

"Across the windswept, Pronghorn-browsed brown grass
Judd's row of concrete, seven-foot-high boxes
stretches a mile north-south, signifies zilch.

Some days I've seen Antilocapras shelter
from noon sun of a hundred-and-some degrees
in those cute sculptures--yes, and shit in'm too."

That's another beauty of this residency for Reading's work: the Texan talk seeps in
(as in the last line above) or it just takes over the poems completely as in:

"Th BP boys is doin wayl agin-
th Marfa Sector pulled in three more on em,
Undocumented Spiks lookin fer wk."

Or the sound of someone being taken over by a dialect, a sound, a "mind set".

"Sunset is like a busted-up fried egg."

"The indigineous can fuck off outa here."

"When this gets published I shall have to be
beyond the City Limit on a Greyhound."

++++
Yes, residencies good.

Winter in Cutehall, where the roads are made of water

2007-01-15T11:03:00.000Z

Where the phrase "disdain for false authorities" comes from

2007-01-13T21:15:00.000Z

Philadelphia, 1984 (if memory serves). I was a newcomer to the city, and I had that fresh, beginner's excitement about living in a city for the first time (having been a suburban Jersey
girl most of my life until then). I was thinking about going to art school but had only a vague notion of what it was I wanted to do in art. It was on Market Street, I think, that I came across an exhibition of paintings in a large, disused store-front. I remember two of the painters on exhibit: Bo Bartlett and Vincent Desidario. Both had recently finished at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and both had taken up a style of big, long, slightly macho, History-inflected painting. Influenced, no doubt, by Sidney Goodman who was teaching at the Academy then.
The name of the exhibition was "Disdain for False Authorities"--a phrase that sort of seared itself into the brain pan. It describes, I think, a very healthy stance to adopt when one is thinking about going to art school where there are all sorts of folk trying to sell you their brand of the "truth" in art.
I wasn't grabbed by the paintings in the show, really. But what did endure was a recognition and respect for painters who take seriously the making of paintings, the craft of the art. Love of materials is a big, big thing. See also Albert Goldbarth's poem, "1400", in the October issue of POETRY (Chicago), which takes on the subject of the stuff of paint and the alchemy therein that all painters hope for (even the ones with the bumps in their cheeks--that's their tongues--come on folks, admit it....you do!).

Paintings that don't smell like the art world

2007-01-11T10:08:00.000Z

Visit Norbert Schwontkowski's website and browse through the work ("bilden") or click on the long rectange above this text and you will see one of the paintings I refer to in the next sentence. Poodles on pianos, eyeballs on chairs, a monk contemplating a row of washing machines, his laundry basket empty at his feet. He showed last year in Dublin and caused a little ripple of excitement among a few people I know who love painting. The whiff of the authentic about them. They feel as if the painter is freely thinking; he's not standing in the way of allowing anything into the paintings. Schwontkowski says he is "putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible." One art writer (Christa Burger) about NS's painting wrote: " He paints as if he were devout."

Nun Body (a back-to-teaching-at-art-school poem)

2007-01-10T22:09:00.000Z

Nun Body

Norbert Schwontkowski, thank you
for "Nun in the Damp", a title
you dropped yet she is a religious
in a fugitive swamp of chalk,
anti-fouling, copper paint,
linseed oil, iron chloride, turpentine oil,
water and tea.
You concocted a "fundamental source"
and squished her in up to her neck.
She doesn't look too bad off,
can't raise that ruler to swat
Billy Tripodi, can't
answer the black phone
calls from God.

A Bit From a Wonderful Stand-Up Routine

2007-01-09T11:25:00.000Z

A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see every-body’s got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff. And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you’re saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That’s what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.
—George Carlin, 1981

My View of The Shannon

2006-12-30T19:24:00.000Z

The sign advertising the new development in Cootehall at sunset and in daylight. Pretty, no?

Clams!!

2006-12-30T10:38:00.000Z

A gushing, Gwyneth-type cascade of praise for.......CLAMS!! From Donegal, driven down here to the Carrick-on-Shannon lowlands by one wonderful Killybegs fishmonger, Mr. Gerry Blain (I'll snap a photo for you of this lovely man who could have had a second career in the movies). Gerry sells his fish at the Farmers' Market that comes and goes like a circus every Thursday in the Market Yard in Carrick.

I bought a hefty bag o'clams and an even heftier bag o' scallops in their pretty shells from Gerry yesterday--getting in the stock for the Christmas visitors. But I couldn't wait til THEN, so threw some clams in the pot with wine and garlic for a yummy spaghetti with white clam sauce for din-din last night. My daughter picked the tiny, sweet and tender clam bodies out of their shells and hand fed me (while proclaiming they looked "yucky"). Then she made the clam shells talk, of course.

For ages, there was not a clam to be had here in Leitrim. You'd have to have gone to the coast in Mayo, Sligo or Donegal to find someone selling fresh shellfish. But thanks to Gerry (sainthood would not be out of order here), that has all changed, changed, utterly changed. And I couldn't disagree more with the likes of Michael Harding who hark back to the good old poor days in Carrick when hardly a fresh carrot was to be found in the place. Yes, there's a plethora of shitboxes and ranchburgers blighting the landscape here now thanks to short-term greed, bad planning, graft and worse. But it's not all bad. Prosperity has merits. Clams, for one. John McGahern was delighted that a better life had come, through prosperity, to the denizens of Leitrim. He may have written about misery, especially about how the power-hungry in the Church preyed upon the miserable, but he was wise enough not to love poverty, nor wish it upon his fellow man.

Spotted in the pre-1990 Warsaw-style queue that quickly formed in front of Gerry's fish stall: Mari-aymone Djeribi who bought periwinkles, scallops and oysters. This Leitrim-based- Parisienne visual artist, poet, book-maker, publisher, farmer (I'll stop here, but there's more; you can visit mermaid turbulence, her publishing/book/art website to begin to get a picture) has her own farmers' market stall in Boyle on Saturdays; Maison Djeribi. She bakes the best bread and pastries ever, anywhere, bar none. And with inimitable style. You haven't lived, etc. Go to Boyle, Saturdays 10 to 4 (she's closed for the first two weeks in January though).

I've posted my first film-poem on You Tube

2006-12-30T10:36:00.000Z

I've posted the first film-poem I've made (did it in 2004) on You Tube. It's called Blow-in, County Roscommon. I'm putting in the link below. It should work, but if it doesn't, you can go to You Tube and search for me by username, which is turkeylondon (as in turkey london broil, a specialty of the house of friend Mark Dark in South Philly!!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gujHlz9ER8

A favourite book: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

2006-12-30T10:34:00.000Z

"You take a figger out of the bag nor it aint nothing only some colourt clof with a paintit wood head and hans. Then you put it on. You put your head finger in the head you put your arm fingers in the arms then that figger looks roun and takes noatis it has things to say. Which they wont all ways be things youwd think of saying o no them wood heads the hart of the wood is in them and the hart of the wud and all. They have ther knowing and they have ther saying which you bes lissen for it you bes let it happen. "I never look for my reveal til its ben." Thats what my dad said time back. My dad the connexion man. In my woal life I've only ever done that 1 connexion which Ive wrote down here I begun with trying to put it to gether poal by poal only my reveal dint come that way it snuck me woaly. I wer keaping that in memberment now. Ready to cry ready to dy ready for any thing is how I come to it now. In fear and tremmering only not running a way. In emtyness and ready to be fult. Not to lern no body nothing I cant even lern my oan self all I can do is try not to get in front of whats coming. Jus try to keap out of the way of it."

I've looked that bit of text over twice, and there's no typos--that's how Hoban wrote it, back in 1980. Have you read this book? If not, I urge you to give it a go. It takes a bit of getting used to as Hoban imagined a language and wrote it as such--it's what English might sound like in England, near Canterbury, after a nuclear holocaust in which all written language (and most of culture and civilization too) have been wiped out. What would endure in us? This is Hoban's question as he writes this most astonishing of novels. He grapples with the biggies: the nature of evil, of art, of myth... I won't waste prose time trying to describe it...Anthony Burgess said it better in his review of the book: "THIS IS WHAT LITERATURE IS MEANT TO BE: EXPLORAATION WITHOUT FEAR."

When I was taking his poetry seminar way back when, William Meredith came across this book (it had just been published), bought ten hardback copies and handed them out to us, his students. We spent a few weeks on it. I still have Meredith's mimeographed notes to us Yanks, e.g.
p.45 "bloaks"-"blokes": English for "guys"
p. 54 "pist"-"getting pissed" means getting drunk, not angry, in England
p. 185 "wanking" - an English obscenity; something along the lines of masturbating.

Musa McKim: painter and poet

2006-12-30T10:32:00.000Z

The poem wants to tell you about Philip and Musa Guston in their bed
foreheads locked like magnets
how he's charging overnight
on her battery her poetry
warmly whirring.

--from "Erasures" a film-poem, which I promise to upload to my other film-poem site very soon

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Many painters I know love Philip Guston's work, and if they don't all love his work, most love the story of his creative life. I won't go into the ins and outs (ups and downs, more to the point; Dore Ashton's book on him is comprehensive), but what endures in the larger contours of his story is how, in the end, he embraced contradictory creative impulses (in his case "pure" paintings and "thing" paintings), and the jet fuel that ignited when he fully embraced those opposing poles brought his late work into being. The painting here, Couple in Bed (1977, 206 x 240 cm oil on canvas in Chicago at the Art Institute) is from that late flowering.

Philip's wife was Musa McKim. She was a poet. A quiet poet. A reluctant poet. A woman of, perhaps, contradictory impulses herself: toward being the "artist's wife and muse" (Jesus, her name!), "mother" and "poet". She'd been a painter as well at the outset of her creative life. In an afterword to a book of McKim's writings, William Corbett writes about his attempts to get Musa to give him some work to publish in a magazine he edited called Fire Exit. He says he liked the McKim's writings for their "fresh unliterariness. They seemed to come direct from her imagination without having been mediated by art."

The book is called Alone With The Moon: selected writings of Musa McKim (The Figures: Boston 1994) I don't know if it's still in print. I bought it in the art gallery at Boston University (Guston taught there in the late seventies until his death.) The writing is uneven; some of it veers toward the overly whimsical. Other poems are perfectly pitched, showing us a writer of talent and singular taste, one who probably didn't spend enough time at the craft.

Some Music

Maybe this time you have gone so far
been away so long, that you take lacunae
for the mocassins
of your new princess.
Or maybe, by now, the princess is real.
Maybe what is real
is that you have a new princess.

I have looked for you everywhere.
In watering places, in dry places.

Where were you during the sirocco?
Should I have looked for you in the speedboat?
Did the flags get my message twisted?
Were you there, but was I asleep
and therefore invisible in the crowd?

I look for you in Woodstock,
East Hampton, the Cape and New York.
Should I have looked in Europe,
or the Orient?

I look for you in fancy restaurants.
And at Wah kee's--even at Sing Wu's.
And in the old stamping grounds.
There, all is quiet
as earth from the air.

I look for you in the air,
stopping and questioning every jet.
The air hostesses smile and say
"Thanks for stopping PAN AN," Or Eastern,
or American.

I look for you in sky-writing
thinking, sooner or later,
you will send a message that way.

When last we met you said,
"Should I ever want to be looked for
by anyone, it would be by you."

Soon the birds will be perching on my eyes.
Although it is not only with my eyes
that I look.

The neighbors, one of whom is a sculptor,
have built a fence around me
they are so disgusted.

I ease the pain by trying to evolve
into something else.
What could that be, though,
since I am fitted only
for looking for you?

Why instead of distress
signals, don't I broadcast
the news, the weather report,
some music?

I Hoid Dat

2006-12-30T10:28:00.000Z

"I hoid dat" is the best verbal way I know to show complete and utter agreement. Thus the title for an occasional "feature" on this blog.
This is WS Di Piero ( a poet who has also written extensively on visual art) in the October 2006 issue of POETRY (Chicago):

I read poetry and fiction--the little fiction that I read--more for style than content, for the palpable sense of an imagination re-fashioning reality expressively, where the tics and chewiness and cadences of language are themselves all one passion. When someone recommends a book by saying "It's about a married couple who..." my eyelids droop.

Uh-huh.

Christopher Middleton

2006-12-30T10:27:00.000Z

Since the steering wheel of this blog has been grabbed by poetry in general and is exiting the Staircase Poetry Project parkway, now merging onto the Poetry & Art Turnpike (what exit?), I thought I would post a wonderful poem. Why not? (As I type this, I am listening to Richard Thompson doing a brilliant cover of Brittany Spears' "Oops I Did It Again" with a great reverb at the end... You can find it on his recent recording, 1000 Years of Popular Music.
Now, back to this poem. One to be read aloud. And written out to feel the careful crafting of its line breaks- a good way to get inside a poem and see it from the ribcage out: this is from Of the Mortal Fire : poems 1999-2002 (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York). Middleton's syntax is always astonishing.

Memory of the Vaucluse

In this French September light
Picking out profuse

Corals that invade the vine,
Yellows in the hayrick

And pools of blue somehow
Round the rooster's comb,

To die–undiseased,
Tending a lavender field,

A naked eye
Braving the angel, who descends

As angels on the loose
Holycards in a junkshop do,

Still with time enough–
Fear forgone, bondage to speech

Waved away–to sense the feathers
Rush and whisk,

Then giving up on it
To stand, the more to live.