Welcome to Posit 42, featuring visual art and literature that integrates innovation with interrelation, challenge with resonance, and discomfort with grace.
Despite the aesthetic and substantive diversity of these works, all of them can be understood to probe “the nomenclature of / the in-between” (Eléna Rivera, almost never seen as it really is) in search of “some / nourishment / among the ashes” (G.C. Waldrep, after brueghel). In these “strange times indeed” (Evan D. Williams, Untitled, etc.) when “the world is in a perilous state” (Orchid Tierney, dear dr. Williams:: to Marcia), it might seem that “the easy thing / is to untouch the world” (Mike Bagwell, oracular optimism). But these works offer another alternative, one fashioned from “[a]rmatures, birth tusks, suspension points, ornamental vines, levitation, lament” (Evan D. Williams, Experimental Poetry) to “find the sea / that has always been / under our lives” (Evan D. Williams, oracular optimism) — or, in Tamara Kostianovsky’s fabric carcasses, and David Webster’s medical imaging-inspired canvases, under the skin.
Mike Bagwell’s Poem of Thanks: The Reversed Star shows us in “real time” that the substance of a poem, like minerals in seawater, can be suspended within the constant flow and rush of living: “a hex against the pauses in poetry / and in the writing of poetry / be there no more pauses henceforth.” For here is the extraordinary intimacy of an extended meditation that takes heart from its interruptions. We encounter a poet-father yearning to erase the boundaries between his inner ruminations and the vital, vivid moment in which his child abides: “how many traps I’ve built / for my body to be alone / with its thoughts / and even more elaborate ones for it to be alone without them / hey blueberry eyes my daughter says / to herself in the fridge photo.” Leaps, juxtapositions, and unexpected images abound in these short-lined passages, “forgetting the soul’s purpose as if / that’s a bad thing as if my pouring / out of water back into the sky / is not the most divine theft,” all pointing to the pulse of human connection.
James Butler-Gruett plays freely and hilariously with idiom, expertly and consecutively flipping expectations: “God’s not closing the door / but he is flicking the door stopper spring / so it sounds like a woodpecker’s stutter — my favorite season.” In “Opposum Coroner,” the poet writes a wickedly funny small treatise (a treat!) on death, ranging from the Opposum Coroner itself, who “crumples up another autopsy report” to three poet friends texting “not the same as hate … much funnier” about a despised mutual acquaintance they heard on a famous show, to Lazarus himself “whom the Gospels tell us wore linen / because when you’re rotting who cares about wrinkles.” Butler-Gruett wickedly pinpoints the quirks and generally hidden secrets of our lives: “Like everyone else I practice smiling in the car … because someone said / It improves your mood / one of those people we know / Against our will in short bursts.” Even our flimsy self-defenses are skewered with dry and insightful wit: “But Jim says there’s a kind of grape they make / injected with flavor to taste like bubblegum / and my every pretense drops against my will / The sugar lift of something new I’m waiting / Only forever to find something to live for.”
Nancy Cohen’s paper works have the impressive presence of revered paintings or tapestries. One can imagine them variously gracing the walls of a castle, invigorating a museum or warming a public space where the viewers are in need of human connection. Saturated with color and texture, they strike the viewer as multi-dimensional, engaging an enveloping haptic sensibility in response to the paper’s rough and textured surface as well as its light and translucent qualities. Intrinsic to the work, Cohen’s line drawing in paper pulp is remarkable for its delicacy and freedom, creating powerful abstractions that yet remind us of our natural environment, its rivers, trees and perhaps even the smallest of our concerns, as Cohen says, “an insect wing, a bit of lichen.” Cohen centers her work on the line between “our fragile bodies and our fragile environment” which are “inextricably linked.” These pieces gracefully dance on the line, so essential to our moment, between expression and contemplation.
In this excerpt from her new book, other islands, Valerie Coulton conjures lyrics of deep and delicate grace to evoke the blurred lines between loss and love, pain and solace. Interweaving italicized quotations from an ailing mother with the poignant familiarity of “twenty-five boxes of Jell-O,” a “white azalea,” a “black vase,” and “honest knives at ease / side by side,” these haiku-like verses contemplate the generative comforts of house, home, and family alongside their inevitable loss. As tender and intimate as they are contemplative and universal, Coulton’s sensorially grounded stanzas vibrate with psychological and metaphysical resonances as elusive as “the green of something / just outside the frame” when there is “always something moving in the dirt / in the unconscious.” Informed by an appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things and animated by the heightened senses of an observer acutely aware that experience is as fleeting as it is precious, these serene meditations accept and mourn the cycles of making and loss that define our lives.
Elizabeth Dodd’s smart and adventurous prose poem series featured here, From the Workbook for the Interpretation of Dreams, rides the boundary between sleep and waking, looking for (and finding) the lace-like fusions of memory and narrative, the past and the present, the act of writing and the mind’s free wanderings: “Tonight, the memory feels almost like dreaming: the detached attention resting in the pillowy dark, the pique pinned for replay like a private meme.” The poet follows her workbook’s prompts into “the brain’s club-hopping REM cycles” and out again to the first hours after a bad dream when “the details melt. Suffering becomes a concept, the dream’s sharp-wire awareness dulled.” Dodd draws our attention to what is masked by the pressures of daily consciousness—that the narrative of a life is built equally in night’s dreaming, whether remembered or not. In the pages of her intrepid workbook, the thrill of a more edgeless and kinetic consciousness arises: “It’s like a hand-drawn flip book, your thumb strumming the pages, ppppprrrrrrrbbbb—done.”
In Corwin Ericson’s mythic worlds, familiar creatures and objects transform, and each asks an existential question. In “Never Turn Your Back on the Ocean,” the poet imagines “ a life raft on your lawn,” asking, in a point of view seldom considered, “ if you were a baby just delivered /… you would wonder / what now? This is the world? Is it just all rafts / and breakers? Hooks and chum?” In “Duck Song,” we wonder, is it the duck itself or the hunter who is playing the “last song?” And in “Fledgling,” the narrator learns to fly on their own living carpet: “After its first molt / Its markings emerge — / braided animals, squarish flowers. / As it dreams, its fringe flutters.” “Brechtian” is the story of a hat’s metamorphosis in a possible love relationship where the main character will “be betrayed by the woman / who has put on his hat / who’s singing now —” The what-ifs in these tales posit another way of being, in places known, yet strangely unknown, to us. Each poem makes us wish to be there to delight in the strangeness. “Here swims the seventh swan. The next world will be feathered.”
With a mix of buoyant spontaneity and stately rhythms, Pearl Kan’s beguiling poem cycle Empty makes a case for quietude. The poems seem to emanate from a voice resistant to the noise of speech, searching for a way to exit the hurly burly of language while still committed to its music: “I held the sound I am looking / for and found out it was /far off and is /shelter in a cup /wrapped / If it was given it is lost.” The poems all begin with the line “I came at him empty” (a quote from Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi); under the spell of this lyric refrain, they overlap and harmonize in an ongoing meditation on emptiness: “I use the word I know / to try at it / To try the name of it / To try at the aim of it.” If Kan’s lines tend toward hesitation and fragmentation, they also ring with imaginative assurance. Kan suggests that to be quiet is to linger in presences: “Enter softly the hour / is full of animals / and dull soft pieces of sea glass.” These delicate ponderings prise open one door after another to tender engagements with our world: “You can lift little sunrise / tend to it with butter /and milk such soft / devices.”
Tamara Kostianovsky’s body of work is the body itself in Merleau-Ponty’s expansive notion of the “flesh of the world.” The title of one iconic fabric carcass with lush leaves and flowers, rather than bloody, violated organs in its splayed interior, is “The Body is the Landscape:” a concise manifesto for this artist’s oeuvre and a signpost towards the uncanny blend of animal and vegetal as well as generative and violent referents that arouse such delight and unease in the viewer. The human element is layered literally as well as figuratively over her unification of animal and plant components by the artist’s use of discarded clothing to fashion (!) the layers of reconceptualized flesh her sculptures expose. Kostianovsky’s use of fabric once worn to protect and conceal human bodies in order to reveal and comment upon the interconnectedness of what’s beneath the skin complicates and deepens this work’s beautiful and disturbing challenge to the distinctions and boundaries we might otherwise take for granted.
With these collaborations by David Lehman and the late, great David Shapiro, we get a glimpse into the playful erudition and poetic chops of two seasoned and accomplished poets. On display are an array of talents and interests that both overlap and rhyme, metaphorically as well as literally. These poems touch on poetics, philosophy, humor, high and low culture, po-biz shoptalk, and above all, play – via formal constraint, wordplay, rhyme, and the call and response process of collaboration itself. Moving with ease and grace between irony and imaginative flights of lyricism, Shapiro offers: “Poetry is not a game, nor is it a dream. / But poetry is a big dream and full of vertigo. / Poetry… or have I said too much already? Be compact,” to which Lehman responds: “All poems lead to the highway (my way). / . . . Vertigo is a dream that contains the index of forgotten books.” In “Poem in a Chinese Form,” the two revisit the question of games with winsome lyricism: “The dead live in the game of our youth / Like a child’s game, but what are the rules? // . . . An amphitheater of the angels.” These poems are animated by the palpable presence of friendship — Shapiro’s slightly deflating observation that “Love is friendship with flash” notwithstanding. Scattered throughout the wit and “flash” enlivening these “loose villanelles,” “four by fours,” and aphorisms are potent moments of transcendence that “[i]nto the aurora let a star burst // A star-birth / And thousands of butterflies.”
The title of one of Eléna Rivera’s lyrically uneasy, contemplative poems featured here, “Almost never seen as it really is,” distills the poet’s fascination with the limits of perception: “as if I haven’t just / walked backwards / into reality.” The poems’ lines examine the slippery, fervent work of our senses as we struggle to penetrate a reality outside our own frame: “How difficult to keep the eye fixed on a point / When there’s a multitude of selves / a palette of them.” If these poems locate our love/hate relationship with the real in “the mass hysteria of matter,” they also find something tender in perception’s blur: “All lights all darks / can lose brightness / & end with our falling in love.” Encountering a sculpture, a color’s shadow, or a tree branch, Rivera claims for herself (and for us) a kind of exaltation: “I mean to be thrilled by a garden /or a line a building makes.” In Rivera’s lyrics nothing, no matter how closely attended to, is “seen as it really is” but the most complex dimensions of looking are always palpable.
With stunning physicality of language and image, Orchid Tierney’s series of epistolary poems dance as if before a sharded mirror reflecting the experiences of the poet herself melded with those of William Carlos Williams: “the doctor in you is always reading the signs :: but you cannot escape your glass :: even the grass is screaming while the glass birds have fallen silent.” Addressed in their titles to dear dr. Williams and in their bodies to a “you” who seems to be, at least in part, an amalgam of Williams and a contemporary (female) poet, they consider faith, inspiration, death, grief, guilt, and especially the relationship of the poetic process to the mundanities of daily life. For artists like Williams and Tierney’s narrator, simply filling up the gas tank or driving over a pothole catalyzes a poem, along with their ambition: “you desire to be the definition :: but you are too ganglion to define tradition :: the gloopy slime of the pond will ensnare any wheel who dares to follow your motor.” Meanwhile, outside the window, the scene can be ominous: “the bulldozers in the clearing” have chased away “the cuckoo :: the hawk :: the crow.” But Tierney also sees signs of hope. The birds, she writes, “have found another place to sing,” and “your grief taps the window :: but deer insist on feeding :: with you here enduring.”
In these rich and tightly packed lyric meditations by G.C. Waldrep, the poet measures a profound faith in materiality as a manifestation of the divine against the rigors of poetic interrogation. The stepwise movement of “after brueghel” from an “antecedent / burning / its trial transcript” to a speaker who “woke” for “some / nourishment / among the ashes” calls to mind the Dutch/Flemish master’s Parable of the Sower whose seeds are scattered from soilless path to rocky ground to good soil. In the poem’s version, the spiritual seeds are borne by the “slow meters” of “old voice” shape note singing, although Waldrep’s poems eschew the rough authenticity of that tradition in favor of stately architectures of chiseled grace and formidable conviction. In “sobriety calendar,” we are offered an alternative to body-soul duality by the “backlit vortices” of glass, whose materiality encompasses its own transcendence much like the human vessel “drap[ing] / its crude self / around” “all it isn’t, / tangent to all it is.” Analogous dualities are rejected in “prolepsis,” in which the spiritual truth “dispersed between / examples” is presented as a “must,” like the Resurrection’s evidence for the present’s incorporation of a transcendent future. In the same way, the theological souls of these poems are inextricable from their masterful intellectual and prosodic embodiment.
John Walser perceives detail with an acute attention that manifests as love. In this suite of poems, every image captures the tone of winter: “the cold like a crow’s beak / and “how breathing labors and labors / like lugging limestone.” Both time and the ineffable quality of the season are somehow precisely limned in: “Look how four o’clock high / the chemical sun burning the blue cold is.” And surely every reader has at some time wondered “Why does the freight train whistle / from beyond the city count today / as a sound of nature?” Or we believe we have done so, having read Walser’s words. In “John Coltrane Lush Life for Julie,” we journey from outside to in, where making chicken broth becomes an actual love poem in every ounce of process: the melting of the chicken skin, the meat falling from the bones, “let (ting) the fat rise and harden / then I’ll crack it like thin lake ice / stepped on, ridden on / breaking under its own weight.” This poem reiterates the poet’s desire and ours: “I want you to come home: / to be amazed by the plasma / the breathable broth air.”
David Webster’s wide-ranging oeuvre is unified by the primacy of process: the restless, unending tides of becoming and unbecoming that animate art-making, as well as life on the macro and micro scales on which he works. Webster’s work blurs boundaries, or perhaps, reveals their inevitable blurriness, in part by revealing interconnections: between abstraction and referentiality, painting and sculpture; but also between function and disease, cells and torsos, hair and muscles. His layering of line and form with spare but striking color accents generates worlds entire unto themselves, replete with question and suggestion, stability and change. Permeated by a sense of dedication to craft as well as to art writ large, these works bring to mind the great Modern experimentations of Picasso and Klee, as well as Michelangelo’s sensually charged physicality. The pleasure of experiencing their craft and refinement is weighted and deepened by a pervasive if inchoate sense of loss.
With wit and a light touch of irony, Evan D. Williams cleverly directs/misdirects the reader by titles that hint at more complex stories, some of which we may guess. Two of his titles are definitions of art; certainly, “Experimental Poetry” makes the reader think twice, opening with: “Introduction: Two planets in one house with no running water.” Later references to ‘Mismade Girls’ and John the Baptist as possibly the first-ever conceptual artist add enjoyable angles to these convoluted meditations. Other poems employ other voices and modes of language, like the Biblical-sounding yet unfathomable “excerpt” of “True Escape,” “From whence sharks have increas’d; for shark doth seize my shark—shiv shiver.” Still, there are nuggets of hard reality in this imaginative and seemingly light-hearted work: “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be sold. We can try again, America. Give up the depraved man amongst you. Unbind the bird boy.”
Thank you for being here to experience and support the work of these wonderful artists.
Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, Bernd Sauermann, and Barbara Tomash
