In the earlymorning lamplight you
Were hiding from I asked you for a safety pin
You did not respond (you had fallen back asleep)
I found a safety pin on my first attempt
In a bowl of jumbled bracelets by the mirror
I know you
I know where it is that you
Would stow a thing like that
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:
(scanned from Chris Felver’s book “The Poet Exposed”)
A friend is a poem is a friend is a poem, and sometimes this is true on a Monday.
TK
as my favorite poet, i thought i should send you a poem i really like. today i am making paninis with honey-mustard. i don’t know how to spell ‘panini’ and either does the computer. i miss you.
may
Snow by David Berman
Walking through a field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.He asked who had shot them and I said a farmer.
Then we were on the roof of the lake.
The ice looked like a photograph of water.Why he asked. Why did he shoot them.
I didn’t know where I was going with this.
They were on his property, I said.
When it’s snowing, the outdoors seem like a room.
Today I traded hellos with my neighbor.
Our voices hung close in the new acoustics.
A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.We returned to our shoveling, working side by side in silence.
But why were they on his property, he asked.
A piece from my creative translation project of last semester, made up of letter poems: letters to Alice Notley, from all sorts of cool ladies, turned into poems. This one’s based off of a letter from Anne Waldman. You poets might recognize some of the names she’s referencing.
Thanks to Heather for her handwriting.
Scanner inspiration comes from Frankie.
“The Wild Party” by Joseph Moncure March
Misha, in all of his wisdom, gave me a classily bound and rare (#434 out of 2,000) edition of this book for the holidays. Its pages are thick, and uneven at the edges. The author uses colons shamelessly, and well. Art Spiegelman (illustrator, author of “Maus”) rediscovered this book years ago and illustrated a new version of it (that’s where the picture above comes from). Here’s a tiny taste of the roaring twenties romp that lies between the covers (a party based on this book will undoubtedly occur at my house in the near future):
9
Some love is fire: some love is rust:
But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.
And their lust was tremendous. It had the feel
Of hammers clanging; and stone; and steel:
And torches of the savage, roaring kind
That rip through iron, and strike men blind:
Of long trains crashing through caverns under
Grey tumbling streets, like angry thunder:
Of engines throbbing; and hoarse steam spouting;
And feet tramping; and great crows shouting.
A lust so savage, they could have wrenched
The flesh from bone, and not have blenched.
I always seem to be trying to do six or seven different poems at the same time and just hoping I can keep them all well-nurtured enough so that one of them will suddenly get strong enough to take over all by itself until it is done.
-Elizabeth Bishop, in a letter to Robert Lowell
The Brunch Poems have taken a two-day hiatus; instead of writing them I’ve been having brunch with once-or-twice-a-year-in-their-presence friends, and food and them are great excuses. See y’all tomorrow.
I arrive at Chase’s at 6:34pm and
straightaway we hang a photograph
on the wall (I have these skills I am
Woman) and then atop the redblue
plaid of the comforter that could only
be his we talk about prospects of office
chairs and a ten-year-old love interest
and a book title in all capitals. When I go
to the bathroom the walls the tub the tiny
toilet remind me of other Brooklyns I’ve
known and I want to ask Chase to pose
in the bathtub for me with a prop like
a Frisbee or an empty foam cup but
we have to go to dinner and that means
three layers for the arms and the boots
we’ve got. I don’t even buy sliced bread
anymore. I make tacos. The intonation
of this Timothy-middled man is so dear
to my heart & throat I’ll imitate it twice
at dinner and then again to myself
in Grand Central two hours later when
my socks have taken up residency at my
toes and it’s not the jokes about college
tours but the strict announcements of delayed
arrivals that bribe my mind awake.
panache, perhaps 