Wasatch Mountains in Utah (October 2011) Writing about writing poetry: It soothes my soul the way reading scriptures comforts believers. In an earlier post I referenced Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry by Jane Hirshfield (here), an inspiring and thoughtful meditation on how poetry comes into being. And now I have another to recommend: […]
Poetry
- literature
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They Might Be Giants
T. S. Eliot Harold Bloom first wrote about his now famous theory of the anxiety of influence in the early 1970’s while I was in college. Bloom focused on poetry and traced the complex challenge facing a poet in search of his or her own unique voice while being inspired—and intimidated—by a powerful precursor. The […]
A Silky Attention Brought to Bear
The sand along the shore in Small Point, Maine: The water’s silky attention brought to bear I’ve posted a few Jane Hirshfield poems on this blog previously (here and here) and continue to explore her body of work. In the meantime I have been savoring her volume of essays about poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the […]
Leaving the Heavy Behind
The light in Canada Politics and art have been combined and comingled in the past, producing work that is powerful and provocative. Goya. Guernica. Beckmann. But that isn’t the case for me and my way of working. In fact mixing the two is a toxic brew. Over the last week I have had to conscientiously […]
The Whole Ball of Who We Are
An excerpt from Bulabula 1, a painting currently hanging in my show at Lyman-Eyer Gallery in Provincetown A Ball Rolls on a Point The whole ball of who we are presses into the green baize at a single tiny spot. An aural track of crackle betrays our passage through the fibrous jungle. It’s hot and […]
- Aesthetics
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Raccoons and Uncertainty
Markings on wood, from the African art collection at the Brooklyn Museum: Beautifully ambiguous Poems, poets and poetry provide a parallel universe that sometimes helps make a little more sense of my own huddled world of paintings, painters and art. A good example is this excerpt from an essay by Joel Brouwer that appeared on […]
Water Washing Over a Shelly Back
Soul What am I doing inside this old man’s body? I feel like I’m the insides of a lobster, All thought, and all digestion, and pornographic Inquiry, and getting about, and bewilderment, And fear, avoidance of trouble, belief in what, God knows, vague memories of friends, and what They said last night, and seeing, outside […]
- Art Making
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Thingness
Kyaiktiyo Pagoda, featured in the film MANA: Beyond Belief, is a Buddhist pilgrimage site in Burma. Tradition claims that the boulder was placed on the cliff 2500 years ago by Burmese spirits. A gilded boulder sits on top and is believed to contain a hair of the Buddha. ______ This is a Wonderful Poem Come […]
- Aesthetics
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Drift
We live in an age where pluralism and inclusiveness are the norm (Tea Party excluded), but disenfranchising divisions are still occurring. Music, visual art, poetry, prose, architecture—all the artistic métiers have within their creative borders a whole slew of tribes that speak their own patois. Look at the language barrier that exists between two people […]
- Aesthetics
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What the Soft Animal Loves
Atesse, from a recent series of paintings One aspect of having online access into every nook and cranny of the world (as well as the latest thoughts of millions of bloggers) is being able to see into the extraordinary range of human passions. I’m not referring to the largest engine of human cyber passion, pornography, […]