Recently in Art Category

I've just asked this question at Yahoo! Answers: What makes a good poem in the early years of the 21st Century. Feel free to answer the question.

Michael Hoerman tells about the latest collaboration between Robert Creeley and Francesco Clemente at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. The blog is worth reading if just to see the Clemente portrait of Creeley. Hoerman also mentions an earlier collaboration between the two, Anamorphosis, here at 2River.

Kim and I were chatting yesterday about The Iliad. Kim works where I work, at E&Y, as a researcher and industry analyst for the health care industry. She's one of those fearless readers who will take on something like The Iliad without flinching, even though she doesn't have a degree in literature. Kim said that she was enticed to read the epic after seeing the recent movie (which I missed out on, at least on the big screen). Apparently, a coterie of cognoscenti of the Homeric version hooted and howled through the entire movie, especially at scenes the director intended to be taken seriously. Kim's own review? A thumbs-down. Meanwhile, she's up to Book III, and already awash in body parts, epithets, and feckless gods.

I finally bought a laptop and installed a router to make the house wireless. Now I can browse the web from the comfort of my easy chair. That's much easier than walking upstairs, booting the desktop, and waiting for the computer to connect to DSL from
SBC. The wireless aspect is much more convenient.

One of my first discoveries from the easy chair was the The Poetry Center of Chicago Broadsides: original poems and visual art, letter-pressed onto cotton paper with archival inks in limited editions of fifty to one hundred. The copies of the broadsides are gif images. Otherwise I'd copy and paste Shiloh by James Tate.

I rarely buy impulsively, even when it's easy to do so, even more rarely when the buying is difficult. Nonetheless I just called the Poetry Center in Chicago, had a pleasant conversation with Kenneth, and ordered the Shiloh broadside--30 of 50. There's only a few of the 11X15 broadsides left, and for $99, you're really not doing that much to support poetry. But, nicely framed, you'll have a wonderful poem hanging on the wall.

Late last winter the Gentlemen's Hiking Club came across a tree stump that presumably had been the meal of beavers. I was amazed at how much the stump resembled the Nefertiti sculpture, as seen from profile, and I started thinking those hungry beavers at one time must have studied ancient Egyptian art. I've been to sculpture gardens in the past, one in Buffalo, where storms kept all but a few dozen away from a grand opening. We all gathered under shelters and drank cases of wine. That was a drunken, delightful day, but as the Gentlemen's Hiking Club stood around this found sculpture of Nefertiti, discussing it the way a class in art appreciation might, we all felt time and the world suddenly expand, collapse, and everything was here and there, infinite and minute. Clouds were indeed ships, castles, the fist of god. Shadows were ancestors and dead friends. As we hiked away, up the rock path, toward the trail head, away from Nefertiti, we knew the trees would soon be green leafing and the dogwoods would be white and the redbuds would be red. The woods would be spring colors, and all around was different and the same.

Go see http://www.artisdead.net, David Ondrik's web site of photography. I met David last weekend in Albuquerque, where he lives and works. He steered me toward this site as a way to get in touch with him and to sample his work.

Enough can be said by the work itself with little prodding by me, so I'll refrain from too much narrative here. But I am astonished by some of the pieces you'll see here, particularly "New Mexico," "Wasteland," and "Mirage."

Equally worthwhile are David's (and friends') narrative statements about technique, strategy, definition, purpose. So often I find artists can be maddeningly obtuse, even inarticulate, when making the traditional "artist's statement." And yes, I include Pablo Picasso in this unfortunate category. It's as though so many of them believe they have to make absurd or outlandish remarks about art and its social function, or lamely mysterious claims about the relationship between art and the artist, the World, Knowledge, Blah Blah Blah.

But this artist puts some thought into his craft and his art, always careful to include the role of the viewer in his deliberation. And he does so in clean, direct prose style.

But look at the photos first. They are powerful art, no doubt about it.

In today's NY Times: Pedro Pietri has stomach cancer and is trying to get to Mexico for holistic healing. He founded the Nuyorican poets. This is where my academic training has left me stranded . . . in the canonical towers of western European (and to some degree, Pacific Rim) literary tradition. I am, as my friends and former teachers know, a devotee of the New York School. So small a crowd it is for the noise it once made in that noisome city, and still makes from time to time. This term "nuyoricans," I was familiar with, if only vaguely. But Pedro Pietri? Never heard of him. Despite his "fame" and world reknown. And his most famous poem, "Puerto Rican Obituary," why, I know absolutely nothing of it. The Times quotes the opening lines, of which these are the first few . . .

Juan
Miguel
Milagros
Olga
Manuel
All died yesterday today
and will die again tomorrow
passing their bill collectors
on to the next of kin
All died
waiting for the garden of eden
to open up again
under a new management
All died dreaming about america . . .

Pedro went to Vietnam in the '60s, then donned all black clothing to mourn the loss of self he endured there--a self that finally saw no enemy in the Vietcong but only in the powers that invade small countries on the basis of lies (sound familiar?). Well, you get the picture. He came back to America to live the dual life of the Carribean in the northern city, and to write about it. Not his, or not just his, but of his fellow Puerto Ricans in New York: nuyoricans. And to found a literary movement which, to paraphrase the article's author, is no less a movement for being Puerto Rican, for not being western European or PacRim.

The photo of him in his Bronx apartment is disheartening. Go to today's Times and look at it. Look at it. Not just the poetically black garb, "applejack" hat included, but the apartment. Look.