A third posting from Jack Anders’ essay…this section explores Galvin’s poetics in more detail. I particularly like Anders’ line—“poetry always tries to show raw flux in frozen form”: In any event, in X, all revolves around the elemental subject matter which is the end of the marriage. Each poem represents an effort to embrace the […]
Wisdom
Jorie Graham, James Galvin et al, Part 2
This is a continuation of the essay by Jack Anders as posted below. In this section he contrasts the metaphysical and mystical qualities of Graham’s exquisite poem San Sepolcro with one of her more recent works. The distinctions he identifies ring true for me. Anders then moves his focus more specifically to poems written by […]
Jack Anders on Jorie Graham et al, Part 1
I am in awe of Jorie Graham’s gifts as a poet. But although I have spent time powering through her later poems, they haven’t captured me with the same breathless wonder that her earlier work evokes. As an artist, I feel uncomfortable when this happens. It’s the art maker’s creed–we want everyone to respond most […]
Remembering and Loss
Elatia Harris left a comment here yesterday that is too apropos to not share. Thank you Elatia. I do understand what you’re going through. People our age either know what it is to see their friends dying or they don’t yet know but soon will. Looking back on it all — and, alas, living with […]
The Hiding Places
The intensity of the last week and the death of two friends in such a short period of time have been a strong wind sailing me straight into a setting sun. I haven’t been to my studio for over a week. In spite of deadlines for upcoming shows I am allowing my hands to lie […]
Feelings and Ideas
Tom Stoppard and Conor McPherson each hold pole positions in their respective areas of expertise—Stoppard is the master of idea-driven theater and McPherson is the feelings first guy. In the production of Shining City currently playing in Boston, McPherson’s characters carve out a reality driven by the way it feels inside rather than some rational, […]
Compassionless White
More from David Batchelor’s Chromophobia: In the chapter titled “Whitescapes”, Batchelor describes going to a party at the home of an art collector in London. His description of that experience is hauntingly familiar to me, but one that I have never thought through in such explicit detail: The house looked ordinary enough from the outside: […]
A Landscape I Know
Distance From up here, the insomniac river turning in its bed looks like a line somebody painted so many years ago it’s hard to believe it was ever liquid; a motorboat winks in the sun and leaves a wake that seals itself in an instant, like the crack in a hardly broken heart. And the […]
Authenticity, Identity, Reality
I’m recovering from knee surgery, so maybe that is the reason I’m sporting a surlier view of things. Bear with me here, I’ll be ambulatory and more optimistically inclined soon enough. But until then… Much has been written over the last week about the latest scandal regarding yet another faux memoir exposed. It is easy […]
The Constant Flicker of Different and Self-Cancelling Perceptions
J. M. Coetzee. I am in awe of his work, even though its textures, angles and palettes are so different from my own creative matrix. In a very readable New Yorker review by James Wood of Coetzee’s new book Diary of a Bad Year, I found a few passages that are just too good to […]