Glad I got to the Met for a glimpse before it becomes hotter ‘n hell. Although the museum was jammed, the show itself was comfortable. It was also much larger than I expected. I hadn’t realized how many accomplished painters there were among the Harlem group. For example, I had never heard of Archibald Motley Jr. who I thought pretty much sets the exquisite tone of the show, though by no means exclusively.
Käthe Kollwitz at MoMA
Finally got to see this intimate, brooding retrospective.
‘Tucked among the illustrious dead . . .’
‘… but still preposthumous, which I prefer to post mortem.’ — jh
That is Brion Gysin pictured on the cover of BEAT SCENE magazine.
Charles Plymell Takes Stage for New and Selected Poems
Plymell has as much in depth to say about death as Hemingway did and a lot more to say about it in terms of the present generation stillborn into a world that can offer nothing. — William S. Burroughs Plymell and his friends inventing the Wichita Vortex contribute to a tradition stretching back from Lamantia […]
Here to Entertain You
My staff of thousands is curious to know whether the music is actually being played or dubbed.
‘There he was in a dream . . .’
“He gives me a manuscript
on elegant stationery
with a letterhead of
raised black lettering
in typeface rare & delicate.
He’s terminal. We both
know it. …”
Álvaro Mutis on the Real Nowhere Man
“From his essential dullness,, his useless, worn-out gestures, his equivocal, tenacious desires, his ‘nowhere,’ his walled-in yearning to communicate, his continuous laughable travels, his raising his shoulders like a hungry ape, his conventional, fearful laughter, his impoverished litany of passions …” Or as The Beatles sang it, “He’s a real nowhere man …”
Over the Stage of Kansas
A Lifetime of Charles Plymell’s Inspired Poetry
![Charles Plymell [photo by Gerard Malanga]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Charles-Plymell-photo-by-Gerard-Malanga-e1437239454525.jpg)
UPDATED. The overwhelming number of comics, little magazines, books, posters, and all sorts of poetry and radical literature that Charles Plymell has printed during the last half-century is too many to count. All that time he was writing inspired poetry and prose of his own and having it published by a flock of small presses. Now in old age — he turns 89 today — Plymell is getting significantly renewed attention for his poetry with the release of “Over the Stage of Kansas: New & Selected Poems 1966-2023.” To celebrate the book, he will give a reading on May 18 in Hudson, New York. It’s bound to be a grand occasion.
Willem de Kooning On Escaping the Formulaic
Since today is the 120th anniversary of Willem de Kooning’s birthday, I am reminded by my staff of thousands of his fervent efforts “to break the willed articulation of the image.” Which, as it happens, is not dissimilar to the goal of the cut-up procedure in writing, intended by Brion Gysin and William Burroughs to free the mind and language itself from preconceived formulations. Nor is it a bad follow-up to yesterday’s blogpost about “Cut Up or Shut Up.”
Genesis of a Poem
All That Would Ever After Not Be Said
In 1952, when the late Gabe Pressman (dean of New York City’s local TV press corps) was a young staff writer at the New York World-Telegram & The Sun, he came across a story tipped to him by a woman from Montreal who’d taken a cab ride in midtown Manhattan. This was the human-interest feature he wrote up. And this is the poem it generated many decades later.
Term It Op Art or Visual Poem
This Is a War Protest in Red and Black
Created by Polish artist Barbara Galinska.
‘The trick is to get out of your own dead body …’
Cold Turkey Press continues to publish handmade posters printed in editions limited to 36 copies, specializing in avant-garde poets and artists of the past as well as the present. Here is one of the latest, LUDION’S LAMENT.
‘The trick is to get out of your own dead body in one piece. One quick hard twist and you’re out. Next, you turn black all over and taper at the extremities.’ — Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
Downtown Scene
Reclusive Artist Elsa Rensaa Spreads Her Wings
The New York gallerist James Fuentes is presenting Elsa Rensaa’s paintings in a two-part exhibition: OUT OF THE WILDERNESS AND INTO THE BLUE. “Her paintings, rendered with meticulous applications of thin acrylic washes,” he says, “bring forth lush, syncretic visual portals. They draw from a vast and visionary range of references, including Ancient Nordic, Egyptian, and Eastern imagery, in addition to Renaissance, Art Nouveau, and Dada art movements, with a Lower East Side iconography that is distinctly recognizable as Rensaa’s own.”
Dissident Poetry Festival to Delight Mind and Tongue
In a rare poetry reading organized by Efe Balıkçıoğlu and Sibel Erol and focused on often unacknowledged voices in contemporary Turkey, the works of three dissident authors are to be presented as a serious Turkish delight.
The presentation at NYU on Feb. 23 — both in person and on Zoom — will feature the feminist poet and artist Sevinç Çalhanoğlu, the gay Kurdish poet Fırat Demir, and Nicholas Glastonbury, who has translated the work of the late queer leftist poet Arkadaş Z. Özger.
‘There are things closer than rain / that keep hope alive’
This ‘deformed sonnet’ was written in memory of Carl Weissner, a great one who was so rudely interrupted 12 years ago today.
Monet Pays a Visit by iPhone to the East River
Dancing lights at night as photographed from the window.
Pissarro and Cézanne Seared into My Brain
Before it disappears too far into the distance, let me just say how much I enjoyed Adam Gopnik’s recent take in The New Yorker on the relationship between Pissarro and Cézanne: “How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence.” Not least, it gives me the chance to post an etching of the two of them made in the early 1980s by Gerard Bellaart, who has for many years seared into my brain his love of both painters.