Category: photography

We never know what will save us (Bob Dylan).

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Today it’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Specifically these songs:

Girl from the North Country

Masters of War

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right

Oxford Town

Corrina, Corrina

And now I’m thinking about college: about Charles Hartman, and Jen Superson, and Andrew Oedel–about second semester of senior year, when Winged Nike was right outside the window and my refrigerator had only pickles & cheese inside it and my jeans got lost in Sam’s room for so long that when I got them back, they felt new. And dinner was a far walk away but at least we never had to cook it. And we did this on the streets of New London:

Now Andrew’s in his own real band and doesn’t have to pretend anymore. Now Jen is somewhere in NY gesturing excitedly, I’ll bet.

Now I’m in a house that smells of sweetgrass, with a lot of papers all around that mean I’ve done hard work, and also that I have all of it to do. Robert Hughes once said, “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.” God I hope so.

Literary love (Baldwin).

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I’m in the middle of my fourth reading of Giovanni’s Room–the third reading this year. I don’t think there’s much left for me to underline, but I’m sure I’ll find a way.

“People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not.”

I want to go SO BADLY (exhibit).

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“Painters and Poets” at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

From the website:

The Tibor de Nagy Gallery marks its 60th anniversary with “Tibor de Nagy Gallery Painters and Poets,” an exhibition celebrating the gallery’s pivotal role in launching the New York School of Poets and fostering a new collaborative ethos among poets and painters in post-War New York. The exhibit focuses on the gallery’s first two decades, the 1950s and ‘60s, when its vibrant, salon-like atmosphere and director John Bernard Myers’ passion for both art and poetry gave birth to these unique partnerships.

All I can do is go to the gallery’s website and click through the tiny pictures and hope that suffices (it must suffice). A few I love, even in their tiny, virtual forms:

That’s Frank O’Hara, at the Museum of Modern Art. And here’s Larry Rivers’ portrait of John Ashberry:

New York Endeavor (mine).

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In honor of a friend of mine, who knows me better than I might care to admit, I’m going to challenge myself to write a poem every day while I’m home in New York. These poems will all be posted on this site. They will likely be short, or possibly they will be rambling, but surely they will be mine. The challenge is to see what I can make when I’m under the constraint to make something every day. No: the challenge is to put on display what I’ve made on the day that it was made. The terror of the challenge is posting a poem that you’ll all know was Made That Day, which means I won’t really get to eye it and dine with it and give it love nudges for weeks until it’s in shape. Hence, this experiment is a search for new shapes, as well as an ode to advice not taken until now. Along the lines of O’Hara, I’ll call this endeavor Brunch Poems, and either you’ll read it, or you won’t.

(photograph: “Woman Looking at Victory Garden Harvest Sitting on Lawn, Waiting to be Stored Away for Winter” by Walter Sanders)

 

Saul Williams.

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A friend gave me “said the shotgun to the head” when I was twenty. Said

friend is now married but still eats sandwiches at hours

inhospitable to sandwiches. Last night I dreamt

of Cornel West, woke up thirsty for the noise

of some man with stature and a boom. Hum diddly

couldn’t find the room inside this room to yell

but websites never cease to flaunt their wares

so here is sleek Saul Williams, staring fair.

 

And here is sleek Saul Williams:

“Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again – the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world’s greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding.”