Personism

Paired: Soth + Berryman

2009-07-16T20:42:53Z

City Pages. Photograph + cover design by Alec Soth (2004)

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

—John Berryman

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Paired: Krum + Williams

2009-07-11T04:15:42Z

University Club by Gregory Krum
This image will be included in the upcoming Summer Reading exhibition, opening at Jen Bekman Gallery on July 15, 2009

Please Come Late

Please come late,
so that I have almost given you up
and have started glancing round the room,
thinking everyone is you.
Please don’t come
until I have started missing you,
thinking I will never see you again,
praying you are lost.
Come too late for me not to notice.
Make me suffer,
wondering what you are doing
on the other side of town,
still in your dressing gown.
Make me beg for mercy
when you pick up a magazine.

Are you looking in your mirror,
suddenly remembering me?
I’m on my second coffee by now,
eating the little bits of sugar in my cup.
Haven’t you set out yet?
I decide I don’t want to see you after all.
I don’t really like you.
I’d rather be on my own.
I know it is all over between us

but I go on sitting here,
reading a newspaper,
not understanding a word.
If you came in now, I wouldn’t recognize you.
Don’t come anywhere near me
until I have gone slightly mad for love of you.

—Hugo Williams

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Cool, Cool Water - The Morning News [del.icio.us]

2009-07-06T15:21:01-07:00

As French photographer Christian Chaize says below, “Almost all of us have at least one personal history with a beach.” His series “Praia Piquinia,” on view at Jen Bekman Gallery through July 11, 2009, is a charming portrait of a small patch of sand as it changes from day to day. The beach is what we make it, Chaize suggests below, and is never the same.

Paired: Anderson + Ashbery

2009-07-04T15:17:44Z

Abandoned by Mamma Anderson | Publisher: Crown Point Press
color spit bite & sugar lift aquatints w. aquatint & soft ground etching | image size: 24.25″ x 36″ paper size: 33.25″ x 44″

Something It Wasn’t

Better homes and gardens for many
but for the rest, we are not so sure.
We need a place to turn around and be unctuous
in, feeling it not as a lack but
as something to be warded off. We are
not done with shoe polish yet
in a way we are. Isn’t that inventiveness
or something coercive like a lash that cracks
close to the cheek, something you give back
after keeping it for a while?

As sure as there are servants in heaven
others will come up to you and ask what it was
you did today, whether nests were full
and anxious, and what kind of sun sprayed
on the corners of a cheap notebook
to be dreamed as all things are, except
for fountains and animals lisping kind losses,
fervent, over here. The way it is right now.

—John Ashbery
(From a folio of six poems appearing in the Spring 2009 edition of The Paris Review)

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Paired: Sinclair + Tate

2009-07-01T18:24:12Z

Fourth of July #2, Independence, Missouri a 20×200 edition by Mike Sinclair

The Motorcyclists

My cuticles are a mess. Oh honey, by the way,
did you like my new negligee? It’s a replica
of one Kim Novak wore in some movie or other.
I wish I had a foot-long chili dog right now.
Do you like fireworks, I mean not just on the 4th of July,
but fireworks any time? There are people
like that, you know. They’re like people who like
orchestra music, listen to it any time of day.
Lopsided people, that’s what my father calls them.
Me, I’m easy to please. I like ping-gong and bobcats,
shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene,
the crunch of carrots. I like caterpillars and
whirlpools, too. What I hate most is being the first
one at the scene of a bad accident.

Do I smell like garlic? Are we still in Kansas?
I once had a chiropractor make a pass at me,
did I ever tell you that? He said that your spine
is happiest when you’re snuggling. Sounds kind
of sweet now when I tell you, but he was a creep.
Do you know that I have never understood what they meant
by “grassy knoll.” It sounds so idyllic, a place to go
to dream your life away, not kill somebody. They
should have called it something like “the grudging notch.”
But I guess that’s life. What is it they always say?
“It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.”
You getting hungry yet, hon? I am. When I was seven
I sat in our field and ate an entire eggplant
right off the vine. Dad loves to tell that story,

but I still can’t eat eggplant. He says I’ll be the first
woman President, it’d be a waste since I talk so much.
Which do you think the fixtures are in the bathroom
at the White House, gold or brass? It’d be okay with me
if they were just brass. Honey, can we stop soon?
I really hate to say it but I need a lady’s room.

—James Tate

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Paired: Listfield + Tate

2009-07-01T18:26:21Z

It’s a Question of Simian Survival by Scott Listfield

Fuck the Astronauts

Eventually we must combine nightmares
an angel smoking a cigarette on the steps
of the last national bank, said to me.
I put her out with my thumb. I don’t need that
cheap talk I’ve got my own problems.
It was sad, exciting, and horrible.
It was exciting, horrible, and sad.
It was horrible, sad, and exciting.
It was inviting, mad, and deplorable.
It was adorable, glad, and enticing.
Eventually we must smoke a thumb
cheap talk I’ve got my own angel
on the steps of the problems the bank
said to me I don’t need that.
I will take this one window
with its sooty maps and scratches
so that my dreams will remember
one another and so that my eyes will not
become blinded by the new world.

The flames don’t dance or slither.
They have painted the room green.
Beautiful and naked, the wives
are sleeping before the fire.
Now it is out. The men have
returned to the shacks,
slaved creatures from the forest
floor across their white
stationwagons. That just about
does it, says the other,
dumping her bucket
over her head. Well, I guess
we got everything, says one,
feeling around in the mud,
as if for a child.
Now they remember they want
that mud, who can’t remember
what they got up for.
They parcel it out: when
they are drunk enough
they go into town with
a bucket of mud, saying
we can slice it up into
windmills like a bloated cow.
Later, they paint the insides
of the shack black,
and sit sucking eggs all night,
they want something real, useful,
but there isn’t anything.

III

I will engineer the sunrise
they have disassembled our shadows
our echoes are erased from the walls
your nipples are the skeletons of olives
your nipples are an oriental delight
your nipples blow away like cigarette papers
your nipples are the mouths of mutes
so I am not here any longer
skein of lightning
memory’s dark ink in your last smile
where the stars have swallowed their train schedule
where the stars have drowned in their dark petticoats
like a sock of hamburger
receiving the lightning
into his clitoris
red on red the prisoner
confesses his waltz
through the corkscrew lightning
nevermind the lightning
in your teeth let’s waltz
I am the hashish pinball machine
that rapes a piano.

—James Tate

Painting via Booooooom on Twitter. Poem via Poetry on Twitter.

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Paired: Porter + O’Hara

2009-07-01T18:31:45Z

July (1971) by Fairfield Porter | oil on canvas, 100 x 80 inches

Goodbye to Great Spruce Head Island by Frank O’Hara | view larger
From the papers of Fairfield Porter

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Etsy.com peddles a false feminist fantasy. [del.icio.us]

2009-06-10T17:04:10-07:00

The problem is that on Etsy, as in much of life, the promise is a fantasy. There’s little evidence that most sellers on the site make much money. This, I suspect, explains the absence of men. They are immune to the allure of this fantasy. They have evaluated the site on purely economic terms and found it wanting.

Graphics Atlas: Welcome [del.icio.us]

2009-06-01T20:18:20-07:00

Graphics Atlas is a new online resource that brings sophisticated print identification and characteristic exploration tools to archivists, curators, historians, collectors, conservators, educators, and the general public.

Archives of American Art: More Than Words: Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art [del.icio.us]

2009-05-25T19:49:13-07:00

Often the expression of joy or affection, illustrated letters represent an irrepressible urge to picture language. They are evidence of the writer's use of words and images to amplify the form and effect of a message. The letters have been selected by Archives of American Art Curator of Manuscripts Liza Kirwin. These are drawn entirely from the collections of the Archives of American Art, encompassing exuberant thank you notes, winsome love letters, lively reports of current events, graphic instructions and other personalized communiqu?s from the early nineteenth century through the 1980s, in each sender's distinctive style.

Paired: Colombo + Skurnick

2009-05-25T23:54:43Z

iSketch 104 by Jorge Colombo.
The cover of this week’s issue of The New Yorker features another iPhone sketch by Jorge. Read all about it.
View all Jorge’s 20×200 editions.

Grand Central, Track 23

I forgot to tell you it’s almost time to go.
The sun has distilled its particular worn essence
And the glittering trout is flipped on the bow.

A man asks me what time it is. I don’t know.
I have emptied my purse and wept in the presence
Of onlookers. I forgot to remember to go

Before eleven, when the steely arrow
Shot swimming to its underneath, tense
As a stream of salmon in reverse below

The laureled, relentless clocks. The sceptered row
Of columns dreams one o’clock, immense,
Inviolate. What time is it? I don’t know.

This story concerns the night I tried to go—
Though many times I flopped into the silence
Of orange plastic seating like onto the bow

Of a lonely ship, and felt my breathing slow.
The frail, retreating stand of columns prevents
The clocks from telling me time and time again to go.
At my feet, a glittering trout swims past the bow.

— Elizabeth Skurnick, from Check In

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Paired: Plumb + Whitman

2009-07-01T18:27:52Z

Sleeping Lion by Colleen Plumb from her series Animals are Outside Today. Several prints from this series are
available on 20×200: Tiger Rug, Cabrini Green, Field Museum Sue and Amish Horses.

from Leaves of Grass

32
I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

—Walt Whitman

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Alva Noe, You are not your brain | Salon [del.icio.us]

2009-05-08T06:07:28-07:00

"...the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn't just misleading and wrong, it's ugly. In that view, each of us is trapped in the caverns of his own skull and the world is just a sort of shared figment. Everything is made interior, private, rational and computational. That may not pose a practical danger, but it presents a kind of spiritual danger."

Two Things I Love

2009-05-01T04:56:14Z

Elephants and Jason Polan.

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Paired: Thompson + Strand

2009-04-20T12:23:52Z

Self-portrait, pasture, Neponset, Il, (July 2003) by Peter Haakon Thompson | Slideshow on TMN

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

—Mark Strand

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April 7, 2009 ~ On Easter and Updike | Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly [del.icio.us]

2009-04-12T15:19:16-07:00

Easter is not easy for most poets and writers, the difficult mystery of resurrection being more intractable than incarnation... One of the best examples of the problem is perhaps the most famous Easter poem of the second half of the 20th century, John Updike’s “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”

Design Observer: William Klein — Contacts [del.icio.us]

2009-04-12T14:09:49-07:00

A book signing is a manifestation of an urge to recover something that we, as a culture, fear losing — namely the hand of the artist in the age of mechanical (and digital) reproduction. Now more than ever it seems that we want to get close to creativity: to hear the voice and see the skin and experience the physical presence of the person who made something that we deem to be meaningful. Is this because so much of our lives now is mediated through a screen?

IMS: Wallace Stevens, HarperAudio [del.icio.us]

2009-04-12T12:21:17-07:00

Wallace Stevens reads his own poetry. Stevens was born in 1879, and these recordings were made shortly before his death in 1955. Although he published poetry as early as 1914, Stevens did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of his collected poems in 1954, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Stevens' poems focus on the sound of language, on obscure vocabulary, and on imaginative images.

Ari Messer: The Last Book I Loved, The Changing Light At Sandover - The Rumpus.net [del.icio.us]

2009-04-12T01:41:51-07:00

I hate agreeing with Harold Bloom... But today I’d like to embrace my peer-pressured hatred and say that Mr. Bloom was hella right when he stated that The Book of Ephraim, which begins James Merrill’s phenomenal many-book-length poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, is “an occult splendor in which Merrill rivals Yeats’ A Vision, [Wallace] Stevens’ ghostly The Owl in the Sarcophagus, and even some aspects of Proust.” Few poems can touch the dynamism of Merrill’s pun-tastic romp through a spirit world representing our entire emotional spectrum and then some.

50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice - ChronicleReview.com [del.icio.us]

2009-04-11T23:39:43-07:00

April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released. I won't be celebrating. The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

The Facebook poets: ten rising stars of British poetry - Times Online [del.icio.us]

2009-04-11T22:22:22-07:00

...not only does poetry exist, it is flourishing – and not just among the grand old oaks of literary society, but in the grassroots of bohemia. New, young writers are using poetry to break rules and free themselves creatively.

Jen Bekman On Collecting Without Breaking the Bank | 7x7 [del.icio.us]

2009-04-04T22:38:17-07:00

Interview with me on SF's 7x7: "I think the minute you buy a print, you’re a collector. I want people to have the experience of collecting art, and we’ve thought hard about every aspect of the experience. Our pieces cost the same as posters, but are worth much more. The hope is that once people get a print from us, they’ll never just be satisfied with posters again."

Fast on the Heels of the Headlines, the Book - NYTimes.com [del.icio.us]

2009-03-30T00:04:10-07:00

For generations the publishing industry has worked on a fairly standard schedule, taking nine months to a year after an author delivered a manuscript to put finished books in stores. Now, enabled in part by e-book technology and fueled by a convergence of spectacularly dramatic news events, publishers are hitting the fast-forward button.