Memory-filled story poem by an aging man who carries a large board from Metropolitan Lumber in Soho through once vibrant New York neighborhoods to Stuyvesant Town. Illustration consists of quick sketches done by William Eaton at a Hauser & Wirth press preview, with a quotation from the British artist Phyllida Barlow. Also recalled: Jill Clayburgh in “An Unmarried Woman.”
¿Qué es esto? Un poème, deux poèmes, en fait. L’un d’eux se trouve ici en trois versions : poèmes en prose (ou plutôt des petits contes), espagnol et français, suivis du poème original in English (further below!). Dentro de unos… Read More ›
Short poem about wastebaskets, mailboxes, fear of bombs, more waste, and those few people – is this what they call us? – who have yet to make it possible for phone, Internet, entertainment and credit-card companies to take money directly from our bank accounts whenever they wish. Artwork is a non-figurative drawing made during a recent session of the Woodstock Drumming Circle.
Nudity may count for less and less. But to appear out of step with our times! (Horreur !) Poema en tres versiones (espagnol, français et l’anglais original). And apologies to Ezra Pound as regards the title! (Artwork is a watercolor of a naked female swimmer, legs spread — plunging too optimistically into the future?) Text now comes complete with an “Addendum concerning John Ruskin’s horror of his wife’s public hair.”
In which the poet does his best to cope with having had to drop off a package at an Amazon retail store. Light verse (hooray!), and, as with much light verse (or the best: W.H. Auden, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker . . . ), includes a kick or two. Artwork is a still life of bottles (and you can’t paint such a watercolor without thinking about Giorgio Morandi!)
Poem about spring (and winter) and war (and peace), inspired by a warm Saturday scene in New York’s Union Square (which was not named in honor of the Northern anti-slavery cause in the Civil War, but did host a huge, pro-Union rally). Artwork is an oil pastel of a female model. Does it speak to our sense of our precariousness?
A poem about a belligerent tourist in Costa Rica, and with a tip of a large cap to Freud’s sage, prescient, sad observation (as translated in Civilization and Its Discontents): “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the blows. ” The accompanying art is after la Madonna con Bambino of Luca Signorelli, in the collection of la Pinacoteca di Brera, a Milano.
