Pieta, Konrad Witz

I have 5 minutes every morning to write, so I'm going to make them count: Here's today's time, from finding the painting to posting:

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Free writing today:

Have you held grief in your lap, have you finger-combed its hair, have you hunkered in red robes and howled? Have you noticed that two others still sway, pendulum, pendant? Have you seen the anachronistic background--literally out of time? And have you noticed that time for us all is running out?

Here is a woman and here is her burden. Here is the one to whom she's given birth, to whom she's now given birth.

Here is a woman who touches his hair, that part of him dead first.

Here is a woman who shrouds herself and curls up, fetal.

(Egg tempera and oil on panel--sumptuous red robe not unlike St. Christopher's in another Witz painting--idea of temper, idea of temperament--idea of id/ego/superego--viewer, gondola, grief; saffron, level playing field as background, tempera going to oil--changeover?)

Monday's Musings

I'm reading about art and poetry's relationship as I'm making out my Humanities midterm on ancient and classical literature. The theme of my HUM class is Place. Of course, my mind drifts to fiction, especially to Ms. Eudora Welty, who writes about this so eloquently in "On Place in Fiction:"

Unpredictable as the future of any art must be, one condition we may hazard about writing: of all the arts, it is the one least likely to cut the cord that binds it to its source. Music and dancing, while originating out of place-groves - and perhaps invoking it still to minds pure or childlike, are no longer bound to dwell there. Sculpture exists out in empty space: that is what it commands and replies to. Toward painting, place, to be so highly visible, has had a curious and changing relationship. Indeed, wasn't it when landscape invaded painting, and painting was given, with the profane content, a narrative content, that this worked to bring on a revolution to the art) Impressionism brought not the likeness-to-life but the mystery of place onto canvas; it was the method, not the subject, that told this. Painting and writing, always the closest two of the sister arts (and in ancient Chinese days only the blink of an eye seems to have separated them), have each a still closer connection with place than they have with each other; but a difference lies in their respective requirements of it, and even further in the way they use it-the written word being ultimately as different from the pigment as the note of the scale is from the chisel.

This leads me to think not of place as noun (region, location), but also of place as verb (orient, position), which brings my musings to the function of the line (in art, in poetry) as having both location and intentional gesture. This makes me think of a sundial, and why I don't know...I have left place for shadow and light and their interplay, and my brain is exploding with ideas that I cannot formulate

(We used to have a sundial in our garden that read "Only the Happy Hours" but it has disappeared...If THAT's not a telling detail, I don't know what is).

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Red Devil--Oh, Desire....Mephisto

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Lucinda Williams - Copenhagen

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CRAZY ( LIVE ) excellent

Oh, CeeLo, can I borrow your outfit?

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"Who Would I Show It To?"

I am part of a three-woman reading on Thursday, September 22. We're being sponsored by my school's Department of Art and we are reading in a gallery, surrounded by the beautiful work of the visual arts faculty, and we are covering all three major MFA genres--poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. This is so exciting to me, and I must admit that I am worried about reading my new poems but I am not at all worried about my shoes. (Typical).

I have been practicing my reading set (my 15 minutes of Andy-dom), and here are the poems that I am reading

"78 RPM"
"First Anniversary: Reading Russian Literature"
"Ornithology"
"Blind Contour Drawing"
"Archaic Fragments: Odysseus"
"In Ictu Oculi"
"First Person Plural, First Person Singular"
"Here Lies Pamela"
"Unchained Melody: The Studio Version"
"Housewifery: An Annotation"
"Anything in the Thicket"

I am ready. I have many more new poems to read, but bookending all these new elegies with two very old poems seems to be a good way of framing this reading.

I surely hope Harvey would be proud of these new poems. I think he would be. I did my best to honor him and I am hopeful there'll be many, many new poems.

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Queen - Spread Your Wings (Maida Vale Studio Version)

"Why can't you be happy at the Emerald Bar?"

I have tried art, boyfriend, counseling, the whole damned alphabet all the way to zeitgeist and zoology class...and I don't feel much of anything. Emerald Bar or Emerald City, without Harvey home is no place.

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Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

"The thing that's important to know is that you never know. You're always sort of feeling your way."

Diane Arbus

Intermission

Here are some beehives from the 15th century, as preserved in the Bodlein Library. Aren't they beautiful?

I'm writing really hard these days, and I hope there will be new poems very soon.

Seriously....He'll be yours if you're not scared of a sting or two.

(Listen to the link above, and this will make more sense).

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The Pulse of New York

"The Day Lady Died." "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." "The Bridge." "Try to Praise the Mutilated World." "February Evening in New York."

Read one of them--or all of them--and remember the city, 10 years later.

(Frank O'Hara. Walt Whitman. Hart Crane. Adam Zagajewski. Denise Levertov).

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After a Long, Long Lull

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Queen - You take my breath away

Elegant, elegiac, eternal. I miss your voice.

(I wish I had a video of Harvey singing this to me, but I have it in the memory palace. I wish he would find me, I wish he were behind me).

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Adele, Live--VMA

What Love Looks Like

In case you've forgotten, as I sometimes have forgotten, here it is: My son Dan and his girlfriend Amy...Sometimes you just need to see a couple of smiling faces in the world, and these are two that I treasure.

(o to feel like this again)

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Literary Tidbit

As a traveller stands unsure which way to go,

Seeing the paths fan out in all directions...

Ovid, Fasti

(and not Frost, centuries later!)

I also found something out about the neoclassical origins of Clorox. I'm saving that for a poem.

Enjoy your long weekend. Feel well, eat well, write well.

PS The painting above is by Winslow Homer, Shepherdesses Resting. I wonder if Christina's World has a relationship to this work.