Tag Archives: John Walker

Mark DeCarteret

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John Walker.Seal Point Series #VIII

The Year I Went Without Winning at Anything

—for John Walker

I started with the letter that I never sent. How it might tell one about the sea. And the ease in which I steered through it to shore. Tried to put it all to rest. How from here on in, it will return to us not only in song. Churning up notes. That go back far as stones. But in the way that the boats sway in time. Keeping beat against their algae-d slips. Their oars sworn to a now unheard-of silence. As a gull laughs off a near fall. And then I tried settling into an inlet for a spell. Where at low tide another side of this world might be shown. Almost worshiped by sunlight. And its unceasing stare. Where I might be relocated for life. Shot off like a flare. And continue on as an afterthought. Opting out of these poetic doings. And thus, stop looking, so steely and tele-eyed, out past the sea. Where it straightens out its act and then esses, endlessly loops and then pools, spends the rest of eternity either too tired denying the moon’s influence or eddying. The colors slow-heated, steeping like tea, or cooled off and foolishly seen for themselves, charmed back to earth. Miracles are like this. Not worth the ink one tried thinking them less than true. Chances are you have found yourself in the same spot. Sitting atop a hill. A sound down below you. Unimaginatively still except for that gull, its near-falling. If not, I will send you a clip. Or better yet, see that I pencil you in.

The Year I Went Without the Sun Was From

the fire. Or so it was formulated. A monster sun though not big on details. Or getting it right. Not really into anyone’s suffering. Or even having some fun with them. I saw it first thing this morning. Right here where the surf is frustrating the sand. And a tiny bird’s landed. This wren or that. Seemingly new to the area. New to this mess we’ve recreated. With the eye of the same god. (Aren’t there are always some willing to be seen as blameless?) But still singing its way into my memory. How I’d fuss over it! Have a little fun. It was truly, truly frightening. How the sun was from the fire. How it gets like this. When it hasn’t been fed. Read to. These deafening winds. Storms in name only. Alabaster. And Betty Lou. Confused with the thing itself. Or the fleas that have taken us up as their own. Recasting us. Only to find ourselves signed in again. Aligned with the bored and the cross. Light is like this. Reformulated. Nothing but the details. So, let’s get this right. Life is suffering? Too monstrous to get in a word? Yes, you heard it here first. Early this afternoon. We’re so over the birds. And their tiny little songs. There’s more than enough room for no one. What fun. O what fun.

 

The Year We Went Without Frozen Particles Forming in our Mountains

Another easeful though sometimes nuclear proclamation is that of the pogonip or “dense winter fog”—that old standby métier of numbskulls and/or others like them, who’ve long been researching this sort of prefrontal thankfulness for those almost funereal directions we’ve been given to sample—the U standing for upbeat and the “Pneumatic 14” maybe attempting to re-define how for each U that you are thankful for, you picture the 14th upbeat following it in your diet, then repose that same U with its original. So that, in other words—“Mighty oaths from little acrimonies grow” becomes “My tie owes its lack of money to its many gurus” so that later the latter’s dewpoint is not only enveloping, but apparently medicinal, apparently unprofitable, along with others like them, seeming to echo the pogonip’s further researching of fronds and their charged opinions—a polemic that promises to be both pestilent and well worth excerpting.

The Year I Went Without Starring in My Own Life

—for Marguerite T. White

The word always was. Truth be told. That in a family of runts. And runt afficionados. I had the best smile. Which worked out well since I worked on a farm. Where the rest of the crew had but one tooth between them. Earlier on, I was reared by an astronaut. Which had lasted for hundreds of years. What with all the time changes. And after that, was pursued by a human in a turnip suit. Who wanted to include me in their supper plans. But I denied them. Ending any chance of dessert. Or a slow dance. Only to be left with this acre of well cared for seedlings made from felt. So lonely, I’d settled for the cranes all a-blush in the field. And what was far less this dance. Far more this commentary on flight. And the word often was. That of all the towns run by farmers. We either had us more stories to tell than the rest of the towns. Or more arms to deliver them. And that because of this. We would not only be shadowed by our own thoughts. But those of the owls. Our town fathers would lower down with wires. If the towns people got to being well-oiled enough. And how that would be followed by this untoward sun. Cut out from foil by the town mothers. Along with this fourth wall. Thrown together by the town children. And the word sometimes was. That in a city of rivers. We sold as canals to the runts. And as lakes to the farmers. We were not drawn to scale. Even though we had won us an award. For this drawing we’d done of me. Doing my best to smile. Play host to those ghosts who had outstayed our charades. That we’d working titled “The Lame Took to Walking While the Mail Took to Talking” but then switched to “The Turnip Returns Their Suit for a Pint of Ale and an Air Tank.” And the word never ever was. Unless we figure in our curiosity for the sea. And sea captains. And the ships that oft-punished them. Softened their fortitude. But then would raise them like light and as asterisks in the same breath. That the world was as flat. As any mention of death. And where I’d be welcomed back to the stage. As its sidekick, designated sickly presence. Stick-figuring in all of its grievances. Oh, how I had howled and sung. And fronted the band. Had even handled a joy buzzer. As well as a toy sword and gun. Even once, stunt doubling for my guest star’s one solo. Who, in fact, had never had her an acting class. But still went on to become. In a word. A bit of an ass.

The Year We Went Without Fables

We were shaking. Well before the black death. Well before there were babies conceived in the lab. We would carry this broken history on our backs. And the crowbars we’d need. To uncrate them. Let the sun read all kinds of things into them. We had aches where our chairs were. And chairs where our aches. We held our breath for weeks at a time. Then watched as it circled our heads. Thought of us only in terms of a funeral wreath. Or some crown. They’d have a child labor. To punch out of cardboard. And then have a teenager. Hand out free with our fries. We had cable. And nuclear blasts. Labels on our clothes. From countries we’d never heard. Or had ever showed interest. We were wearing out sacks. Well before the class action suits. And wore our shoes without socks. So far after Labor Day. The locals would bray at us. As if we had rabies. Or bared our asses to their ancestors. We were too ecstatic for our own good. Best, by now, at the art. Of chatting up strangers. And then forming stranger attachments. We would carry so much cash on us. Cross our foreheads so often with ash. What we had for faith ate at us. Had for hope developed sores. But to our credit, we shook. Well after it looked cool. Well after it was. Saw our likeness in each lens. Our finest traits in everyone we befriended. Even though we lacked words for everything. Thought the world of next to nothing. We loved hating it. Less it fit in a text. Outwaiting yet another thing. To blur into another. Be rubbed wrong. And then wronger. Growing so tired of dieting. Of the miracle food that might tide us all over. We would throw out our voices. For what little it was worth. And then would black out. In the back of a cab. Dribbling our ABCs on our bibs. Where they’ll eventually crab. Into yet another brand. To refreshen the void.

Mark DeCarteret was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. On “The Road Ride” at the Jack Kerouac Theme Park. And studied with Sam Cornish, Bill Knott, Tom Lux, Mekeel McBride, Charles Simic, and Franz Wright. (See: Representative at the Greater Boston Poetry Festival, Recipient of Thomas Williams Memorial Prize…) He’s worked a third of his life installing tile, a third teaching, and a third selling books. (Going on 13 years at Water Street in Exeter NH…) And has hosted and organized two reading series. Co-edited an anthology of NH poets. He was Poet Laureate of Portsmouth NH. Twice, a finalist for NH Poet Laureate. And his poems have appeared in over 500 magazines including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, BlazeVOX (which recently published the first chapter of his novel Off Season), Boston Review, Caliban, Chicago Review, Fence, Gargoyle, Hole in the Head, Map Literary, On the Seawall, Plume, and Nixes Mate (which recently published his seventh book of poetry, lesser case). As well as 30 anthologies. Among them, American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press). He performs with the Dadaist troupe Carteret Voltaire. And plays drums and sings with Codpiece. His latest book Props: Poetic Intros, Praises, Co-conspiraceis, Pairings was released last month by Bee Monk Press.

John Walker

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Untitled (05) (2021)
Solitude (2021)
Black Pond (II) (2023)
Untitled (01) (2021)
Untitled 03) (2021)
Study for Barge (I) (2023)
Resurrection (III) (2022)
Eel Running Pemaquid (2022)
For Harvey (2023)
Catch (I) (2022)
Catch (II) (2022)
Study for Clock and Shell (III) (2023)
Riverview (2023)

—click on any image to enlarge—

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Artist’s Statement

John Walker’s oeuvre, spanning across over sixty years, has included a variety of abstract approaches bound together by a careful balance between raw and spontaneous movement, and mindfully structured space. Walker has been inspired at different times by the art of Oceania, European masters Goya, Manet, and Matisse, and the work of American Abstract Expressionists. Throughout his career he has utilized different shape and pattern motifs: in the 1980s, a time when his work was heavily influenced by the art of Oceania, his “Alba” shape (a loose reference to Goya) was a focus of most paintings; in the ’90s, polka-dots and egg-like orbs prevailed; and his 21st century work has included a variety of repeating amorphous shapes and zig-zag lines.

Much of Walker’s work of the last 20 years is based on the coast of Maine, where the artist lives. These abstract landscapes oscillate between spontaneity and a decidedly conscientious approach to shaping the architecture of the canvas. In a palette which ranges from crisp whites and primary and secondary colors to muddied, rusty browns, greys, and black, alongside gritty surfaces and carefully manipulated linear movement, Walker evokes the character of the New England coastal landscape.

John Walker (b. England 1939) is originally from Birmingham, England, attended the Mosely School of Art, the Birmingham School of Art, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. His work can be found in museum collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Guggenheim Museum, New York; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Gallery, Edinburgh; Tate Gallery, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.

The artist’s many teaching appointments throughout his lengthy career have included Cooper Union, Yale University, the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne, and the Royal College in London. He retired in 2015 from his position as the head of the graduate department in painting at Boston University.

Editors’ Notes (Posit 35)

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Welcome to Posit 35!

It’s a new issue for a new year! This one is very special to us: marking not only Posit’s 10th anniversary, but our chance to welcome Barbara Tomash to our team. We have had the pleasure of working with Barbara before as a contributor – her brilliant poetry can be found in Posit 16, Posit 21, and Posit 31 — and we are honored and delighted for her to join us as a fellow editor.

And what a fantastic issue with which to celebrate! Characterized by both range and cohesion, this collection brings together artists many decades into their careers with others at the very beginning of their journeys, offering challenging work energized by biting social commentary alongside more contemplative poetry and painting, centered on the practice of observation and its restorative profundity. We hope you find the aesthetic conversation generated by their juxtaposition as satisfying and stimulating as we do.

Durell Carter’s poems bring linguistic music and warm-hearted grace to his own unique amalgam of morality tale, sermon, meditation, and blues. These poems reach for harmony, empathy, and stability in a world forever poised to “shift slightly to the left.” Although he feels at “home / anywhere something is at stake,” Carter’s narrators long to “envision the home of all your homes” and maintain “the strength . . . to carry one day to the next” even as they “can still smell the pain that isn’t [theirs].” In these poems, moral instruction comes from the more as well as less enlightened: from a grandma who “was the strongest person alive” to an entitled woman “throwing soul eaters / and verbal iodine / at the man reaching upwards / to God.” With admirable generosity, the narrator makes a point of empathizing with her by reminding himself of “whatever castle I had the audacity / to think was mine,” reminding us that we all need to “become resistant / to spiritual pneumonia.”

The light-hearted pop-culture iconography of Nancy Chunn’s phenomenal works is like sugar coating on chemotherapy, camouflaging as it conveys the challenging medicine our ailing society so direly needs. The scope and coherence of Chunn’s projects are as staggering as their prescience: the works from 1996 and 2001 excerpted here are distressingly apt. The painstaking nature of Chunn’s project is matched by its monumental scope: her series, “Chicken Little and the Culture of Fear” has 500 panels, while “Front Pages 1996” comprises 366 front pages from the New York Times that serve as physical and conceptual grounds for the artist’s graphic and verbal commentary on war, militarism, political corruption, gun violence, climate change, and more. Ultimately, Chunn’s humor sparks more terror than relief, leaving us with the uneasy feeling that the joke might be on us. Although Chicken Little might have been mistaken and her gullible followers fools, we would be fools not to respond to the alarm sounded by these deathly-serious works.

One can no more look away from Robert Feintuch’s paintings than from a miracle — or a shocking impropriety. In dialogue with Philip Guston and Samuel Beckett, Italian frescos and TV cartoons, Feintuch’s work unites and juxtaposes high and low, humor and dread, playfulness and gravitas. He may depict the ethereal pastel blue sky and glorious puffy white clouds of Renaissance paintings, but instead of Michelangelo’s heroically muscled divine Arm endowing Adam with life, Feintuch depicts one that is stick-like and dimpled, stretching down from on high like a rubber band to proffer us a fire bucket — or brandish a punitive cudgel. Instead of Adam’s human perfection, we must face our own embarrassingly exposed, inexorably aging, unglamorous and unglamorized physicality. Feintuch’s existential despair is leavened and sharpened by the witty bemusement of his visual and verbal puns, such as the scattering of tiny and shriveled mineral and anatomical “stones,” his pontificating Pontiff, or the mundane “line” being unglamorously “toed.” But Feintuch’s humor is humane as well as mordant, revealing the truth of our selves to ourselves with a wry, sorrowful, sympathetic grin.

Ed Go’s philosophical exploration of the meaning of words starts with “signifiers” but translates them and weaves a progressive structure of elements as varied and yet intriguing as a bower bird nest: history rewritten to a different timeline, imaginary literary and cultural myths, ideas about religion and the perspective of our own imaginations and memories. In “things that are not interesting and why and also things that are and why not,” Go begins by asking what are the questions that intrigue us, with surprising comparisons: “red rhinoceros is interesting not / because it is red red is not/interesting but because / rhinoceros like sea urchin is— / the ripe flowering fruit / apple pomegranate pear,” bringing these musings back to us and our singular and private imaginations: “the tree that grew in your backyard / whatever tree that is for me.” As the work progresses, witty and wild historical juxtapositions delight: what can we think about the possibility of “cool being birthed in the midst / of mccarthy & new england myths / i saw goody marilyn dancing naked / with the devil! / i saw ozzy osbourne live / in 83?” Go’s work amuses and provokes, but the observations at core remind us, with tenderness, of our humanity: “babies in cuddled bosoms breathing / also start in breath and blood / from tundra crust to overfarmed soil / to bleachers at your high school thing / where once with breath and tonguetips touching.”

Howard Good returns to Posit with five tales of a world terrifyingly out of balance. With restraint, compression, dark humor, and the voice of matter-of-fact reportage, he reveals tragically absurdist realities barely worse than our own. In these worlds, almost like in ours, “families brave oceans in paper boats,” “smoke from distant wildfires blots out the sky,” and “every street is a crime scene, every person both a suspect and a victim.” Worse yet, there, like here, “people [are] walking around … as if nothing terrible is happening” and “none of those responsible will be held liable” despite the crows crying, like this poet, “less as frantic warning and more as bitter recrimination or desolate testimony.”

Brian Henry’s spare and meaningful poems open a vast and quiet expanse to the reader, like standing on a hilltop and surveying a plain where the beauties of the landscape are almost visible but need the experience of a long view to be discerned. These poems, indeed, are so open that the reader can feel they are collaborating in the writing of them. The titles, too, are beautiful and far from explicatory. For instance, what might we find in “The Museum of Two Dimensions?” The inksplash denotes the silence between the line groupings; a necessary pause to explore, and sometimes point out what’s left unsaid: “Out of / an abundance of // *.” The riddling, aphoristic compression of these Koan-like poems is also wonderfully “open at all hours / and on all sides.”

To say John Howard’s poems are ekphrastic is to draw a stick figure of a symphony. The beauty of the imagery is only a part of the moving whole, portrayed first in a prose poem, whose series of unexpected questions begin, “If I said a sparrow was falling, would you look up or down?” and continue as an inquiry into death, culpability, and the evanescence of a life. In “Pyramide de crânes,” Howard responds to a still life of skulls by Paul Cezanne, seeing in these a continuing story, stretching through time. Howard directs us first to the resemblance of the skulls to “ the ancient masonry of the most holy / of trilogies: a mother & father with child,” / “rockpale when painted in ochre tones” then to the “dirt where the first great war dug itself in,” and “must now include the fields between each jaw & collarbone / absent ridges where no instruments can be placed, nor played, no music heard.” Although “we have worn these poems & paintings as robes, & as skin,” this familiarity, Howard reminds us, is, grimly, still part of our present and our future : “… there are always dead leaves to lament / always the wind shouldering so much dread for a future / in which there is no future, always the sounds to remind us / that wheeze & whisper as history, that little cough of bone grown / to an ocean-sized gullet of absence.”

With bespoke forms and sparkling language, Jill Jones’s poems remind us to, as E.M. Forster urged, “only connect.” Their wry tone and dire observations notwithstanding, these are in no small part love poems, addressed not only to an explicit or implicit beloved but to the chaotic rapture of being alive — despite our commercialized, technologically-mediated existence. The alienation of a mall-filled society in which “sirens line the road, plastics become / bedrock, streetview, the grand simulation” and we “loiter with powerpoint loyalty plans / bullet points with mercantile bang-bang” is contrasted with the organic pleasures of the natural world where “an almost-sweet & tangled smell lifts / from flowers, paths, the unknowable air” and “life is handsome, abundantly / strange . . . with every shining loaf / and complicated kiss.”

Burt Kimmelman’s poems celebrate the temporality of the material world to confront the mystery of the eternal. His adherence to formal restraints, such as the three, four, five, and six syllable lines that comprise each of these poems, instantiates his disciplined commitment to evoking “what was left unspoken” without letting the image stray from its concrete referents. His ekphrastic “Three Windows, Two Chairs” is typically faithful to its subject: a painting by Jessie Boswell which is all about people not portrayed within the frame. With deceptive simplicity and masterful grace, Kimmelman’s poem foregrounds human absence by carefully attending to and personifying its non-human presences, such as “a book / [which] lies open for any // breeze,” a tower which “paces the highest ridge,” and “windows [which] picture // the sea and sky as one.” All of these poems reveal the mysterious path by which attention to, and appreciation of “the waters of life, / our visible world” has the power to bring us closer to knowing the “unspoken” “absence” that “must become / of us all.”

In “Marginalia,” William Lessard’s darkly comical pandemic chronicle, the salience of the question, “do we have a plan B?” is demonstrated by the fragmented futility everywhere in evidence. In this Text + Image assemblage, paragraphs of complete, if not logically or narratively sequential sentences are interspersed with graphic panels whose gridded subdivisions call to mind the partitioned isolation of quarantine. Lessard’s monochromatic, self-enclosed cubicles resemble cells or cages in which even the quotidian monotony of “DRINK COFFEE DRINK COFFEE DRINK COFFEE” is walled off from ‘HUMAN RESOURCES” and “STAKEHOLDERS,” and the letters in “LOVE” are partitioned behind bars. Besides the coronavirus’s iconic spiked sphere, his dollar-sign motif suggests the overarching primacy of money — alongside death, brought to mind by somber blocks of solid black. In Lessard’s sardonic vision, we are “joyfully doomed” so long as “selfishness controls the means of production.” Although “now we are working together” on “another word to carry,” it is still “heavy with hatred at its center.” But perhaps there are glimmers of an alternative, such as “Melville in the breath & ripe / with seahorse in the evening.”

The mythical young women in Anna Meister’s poems retain their strength and exuberance in spite of the many calamities visited upon them, including disloyal followers and the Missouri River running dry. Meister’s wordplay is reminiscent of Stein: “give her citrus, citrus feels like / flying. She uses the rinds for / smiles— (there are no / wastelands here),” as are her unexpected turns: “Footstools they chant. // Stairs, they reply,” as well as touches of rhythm and song: “O Love, O Love, O Sweet O Love.” This young poet’s craft and originality are remarkable. In “Dustbowl Dreaming,” “invisible fences split into two-by-five / squares separate us only holding on / by the electricity between our collars.” Even though “we’re all in boxes again and i’m / yelling echo-location, i’m down in the / well! water’s at my ankles and my wrists / are blistered,” the reader can enjoy both the humor and the determination of personas making their way against the odds: “we are the generation of seaweed— / we maintain our shape when plucked for / flower bouquets.”

In her “Field Notes,” the emotional content of Carolyn Oliver’s observed nature that “resents root disturbance, a seed packet warns. In the garden bed where sorrel helped itself, a squirrel skull surfaces, with pinholes for missing teeth” contrasts with the object materiality of cigarette packs, silver trucks in the moonlight, and “headlights (that) smolder inside glassine envelopes.” Oliver notes the inevitable and ubiquitous intertwining of the two: “triumphant maple expels a rusted staple slowly, through eye-level moss and lichen.” The ostensibly journalistic title of this series belies the living breathingness with which she endows nature, but Oliver’s skill is such that we don’t see it. Rather, it feels to the reader “as if we see what the cold allows us to see. As if we are inside the snow. As if we are the cold.” Contrary to actual field notes, people make an oblique but necessary appearance, and a story takes shape in a few lines: “Abiding, a girl with green hair stands against a fresh gale.” “What is living? he asks at bedtime. (Only ever at bedtime.) What does this all mean? I feel that something is missing in my life.” But above all, Oliver’s images “follow a forked-tongue swallow-tail to a gold corner above the door to the cerulean house” and observances “like flexing knuckles, mornings straighten or crook back” richly reward the reader in a way that simple field notes can never do.

In “Six Poems from T O D A Y,” Stephen Ratcliffe’s project of daily poems might be called an observance in both the visual and ritual sense. The form, four daily sections of two lines each, is both a visual record taken from a single vantage point, and a work that deviates according to author’s choice. Like a ghazal, some lines and phrases change places. And as in any view, there are details that remain the same and others that change: the weather, the birds. Because of the form and the repetition, Ratcliffe’s “grey whiteness of fog,” “yellow and blue bed,” and “green leaves” take on a visual rhythm that almost transmutes the poems into paintings. The repetition of the same view is both hypnotic and compelling. Obviously, small changes are one contrast that makes this happen: “2 quails landing next to seeds on table below fence” becoming “4 pelicans flapping across horizon towards point.” But into this continuous painting (which could be called film, although it feels more fantastical) Ratcliffe adds statements/instructions that are impossible, ephemeral, and strangely attractive: “following cypress as subject in landscape translate sky color to language of long thin lines left blank;” “describe a certain grey of something or other visual element two straight lines equal or unequal length.” At the same time personal, locational, and universal, Ratcliffe puts into words the experience of time passing in a set of prayers in praise of the joining of the natural world and the human spirit.

Pablo Saborío’s poems sing with music and meaning, burning with “the fire / that only a human mouth // can ignite into language.” With stunning economy, his mellifluous words create worlds as intriguingly strange as they are resonantly familiar. Each of these poems is like a “house [that] hosts / an ecosystem of desires.” These poems of heart, hope, and subtle ideation expect the reader to be “writing / this by reading this” even as we embrace “uncertainty / as a tangible thing: // more actual than the mist / that blurs the horizon / after your thoughts arise.”

With nimble humor and a devastatingly sharp point, Jerome Sala skewers the vapidity of contemporary capitalist culture. The flattering mists of memory have no place in these wickedly funny poems, which gleefully dash any illusions we might hope to cherish for the superiority of some imagined alternative to the vulgar venality of “game show proletarians.” Neither one’s own “ethnic roots;” a French variation of Family Feud; the contemporary “art house crowd;” or last century’s asymmetrically-clad bohemians “heckling Diaghilev’s “decadent” Cleopatra” show any interest in rising above the lure of superheroes or “a brand new red car” to embrace aesthetic challenge. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose comes to mind as one savors these trenchant verses.

John Walker’s use of color, pattern and motif straddles the border between abstraction, symbology, and representation, referencing the landscape of coastal Maine as he carries on a dialogue with Matisse, Constable, and Australian Aboriginal bark painting. With the uncanny suggestiveness of asemic writing, his totemic canvases are like missives, bearing coherent if inexplicit messages to the viewer’s subconscious. A recurring fluid, rising dual shape brings to mind water currents as well as parted hair, wings (of bird or angel), and even Cezanne’s Montaigne Ste.-Victoire. Other recurring shapes suggest buoys, traps, shells, and pendant weights. Walker’s intense palette of cobalt and other blues, grounded and lined by cream, white, and black, evokes the awesome volatility of the sea and its dominion over nautical working life – not only fishing but painting. This is masterful work that reminds us of painting’s continuing potential for aesthetic pleasure at its most profound.

Thank you for reading!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editors’ Notes (Posit 34)

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Welcome to Posit 34!

The singularly powerful literature and art in this issue challenges conventional dualities of appropriate and inappropriate, beautiful and unbeautiful – as well as the props of avoidance and aversion on which they lean. These ingenious and accomplished artists and writers find the through-line from body to beauty by celebrating the glory of unglorified physicality. It is a privilege and a pleasure to offer works of courage, conviction and love that are as profound as they are liberating.

What happens when a terrifically charismatic personage walks into a room? Galen Cheney’s dynamic paintings are that personage. These large and intricate abstractions of color and energy combine past with present as the artist reuses, rediscovers and recombines materials from past works to make new and exciting compositions. Her life-long interest in graffiti and other works that show the hand of the artist is reflected in the exhilarating movement and sure and brilliant color work in these passionate pieces. Her process involves collage, “fragments and strips of paintings that I have ripped or cut up” woven and painted into new compositions with a seize-the-day attitude that reminds us, as she says, “there is no time to make anything that is not true.”

Derek Coulombe’s musical and wildly imaginative ekphrastic poems are an exuberant and pointedly unglorified celebration of materiality. The graphic detail of his poetic reportage challenges standard notions of nature and artifice, beauty and disgust. Umberto Boccioni’s bronze sculptures (among other influences) come joyously to life in a very bronze way: “Three bronze-all-the-way-through runners running at speed under heavy sun and all atop these extremely green lawns. Bronze-all-the-way-through means bronze outers and bronze inners, bronze skin, blood, mucus, bronzy organs, bronze lungs blowing in and out all heavy under all the running, bronze colon moves bronze stool, and bronze urine comes out wet in bronze jets.” Coulombe invents a surprising, almost exhilarating moment in imaginary time: shrieking bronze runners “running heavy beneath a smiling and hot sunshine smile widely too, all three smile with smiles of bronze too, big and wide, toothy, with bronze tongues, bronze teeth and gums, and all with shrieks ringing out and upwards always.” To go further, some of the sculptures are torsoless, “and so every low roundness of every soft bronze part is a sort of smiling line, a big torsoless grin from all the hard running parts and all three times over.” Coulombe, too, details the bronze “meatuses” and “feces, mucus, spittle, wax;” in short, every anatomical organ and its concurrent actions and reactions that are strangely, yet familiarly, human. This delightful and joyous tour-de-force all takes place “under the big warmth of the sun and the kind color of the powdered blue sky.”

The queerness of Steve DeFrank’s painting defies assimilation into the stale dichotomies of conventional aesthetics in favor of a joyful and ambitious syncretism. With their orifices flowering, melting, and exploding in cartoon shapes, toy-like textures, and colors reminiscent of neon, play-dough, and bubblegum, these works combine the irreverent humor of a Shakespearian fool with a surrealistic visual vocabulary reminiscent of Dali’s dripping clocks and a graphic eroticism that brings to mind O’Keefe’s flowering genitalia. This is joyful work that challenges received ideas of beauty and humor with graceful and accomplished painterly technique.

The aural, visual, and conceptual elements of Jared Fagen’s poems operate in concert. His short, frequently one-word lines are austere in their spareness yet breathlessly urgent, enacting, in the poet’s words, “delay, deferral, suddenness, and respiratory performance” in order to reach and utter “the essential.” The “lapidary lilt” of Fagen’s prosody not only offers “a viaduct / to an / interior” via an “aria / of waves” but it operates on a visual level as well: these long, narrow poems lead the reader’s eye headlong down the (virtual) page like plumblines searching the metaphysical depths. Engaging the multiplicity (or non-existence) of identity, art’s quest for “agape” and “Tarkovsky’s gold,” and the ineluctable pre-eminence of time (“we lose / to what passes” until “we / shatter abruptly”) — these chiseled verses decline facile notions of closure with disciplined attention.

Thomas Fink’s “Yinglish Strophes” invoke the back-and-forth flow of the ancient Greek chorus to and from a point of origin to enact a dialogue with the poet’s immigrant roots. The “yinglish” of these poems channels the wry irreverence and blunt, evaluative stance of their Yiddish-speaking narrators, capturing the tension between the Old and New Country generations with humor but not condescension — or romanticization. These verses capture the economy and inspiration of their speakers’ admonitions, despite and because of their imperfect grasp of their adopted tongue: “Is brisket / shopping this?” captures every ogled woman’s sentiment in four words as efficiently as “[f]inds / the take with the / give” captures a realistic attitude towards marriage. These narrators may be dispensing advice in a new world, but their old world wisdom is clearly applicable, whether it be to love or politics, social trends or the manipulations of our market system (“would fib lots stores / from label truth”), poetry (“[t]o make / a living doesn’t flow // that river”), or popular culture. With unmistakable fondness and a poet’s ear, these verses take up the challenge: “Why not / of your origin be civil?”

Maxwell Gontarek’s intricate vision reacts to Vallejo and Lorca, language and “the stippling of science” through “lattices” that explore the idea of envelopes, and question what “envelopes” us, including history and politics, guns and antelopes; a history of the Americas where “my godmother worked at the envelope factory for 50 years + she still wakes up at 3:00 AM / you asked if she liked it I said I didn’t think it crossed her mind.” In this poet’s clear-eyed view, we may be living in “a hemisphere that is actually an envelope.” And Gontarek says outright what all poets sometimes think: that even “after the revolutionists stop for orangeade / . . . the most your poem can do to support a movement is to give someone a papercut.” Thankfully, Gontarek perseveres, giving us verses that show us hidden layers of the world we live in, slightly askew and loved: “It is such a cool night / No matter what our heads will remain cow-shaped and we will try not to tip.”

Jessica Grim looks through a green lens, sometimes dark, always compassionate, at our relationship with language, the natural world, and ultimately ourselves. We have little real control and sometimes great sadness: “west of here where / sun rises later you / could weep for the dark / compression of your thoughts.” Grim suggests we share this kinship with nature: “tiny bird / dislodging dessicated / leaves from the / smallest branch // as might become / a past we / have little relation to / outside / of having lived it.” Our own lived experience is narrow, but the vastness of our unknowing is compensated by this realization, and in unlooked for, unexpected joy: “Sky through shades / of green / defining color / screed / as it finally wanders into song.”

Heikki Huotari’s prose poems interweave internal references as well as concepts from science, mythology, philosophy, contemporary politics, and popular culture. Individually and as a group, these poems highlight the absurd yet melodious music of existence. At the same time, these “flights of fancy seek to serve.” With erudition, grace, and humor, they offer an incisive commentary on the complexities and contradictions of our lives. This work is concerned with the relationship between reality and our account of it, in which “reality is flowing and reality is ebbing on an oblique mile-wide boundary of misinformation,” and “what one knows with 90% certainty is 95% cliché.” Facing such a mismatch with our shibboleths, the speaker is sensible to “jealously . . . guard my wave state,” even as he undertakes to “sing the feedback loop into existence.”

In R.J. Lambert’s alchemical ekphrastic poems, the work of an unknown artist is addressed in the language of art criticism reminiscent of the 19th century writing of John Ruskin. But it’s as if Ruskin has been transported to a strange new realm where the membrane between poetry and art is transcended: “The draw of broken art, domi—— / The vitality. His p—— / his color—transcen——.” The work itself transforms during the course of the poem to an ecstatic and unexpected embodiment: “Minor color, L’art ancien / reports no brown ink. / Also, a mixture closer / to feathered time / which, in print / the bodily structure reveals.” The poet asks us to reflect on these marvels induced by art (“The future’s graphic/drawing of drawings / impacts the personal”) with sober joy, even wonder: “An artist playing artist, / filling out the forms / All of this is mine? / Even the cobwebbed moth / Even the flattened lizard.”

Brendan Lorber’s militant poems about the “not normal times” of the pandemic train a sharp eye and attentive ear on the exploitive underlying logic of capitalism, which makes us hope “that the economy / might not be totally over . . . despite / only ever having been a chasm we participate in by screaming.” The distress informing Lorber’s verses is balanced by the spirit of resistance animating his witty but urgent warning against the “oligarchs’ dark arts” tricking us into “driving [ourselves] down / a boulevard of faschy schemes.” These poems offer a wake-up call against the “self-lethality” of complicity. “Like someone full of sparkle in the form of batteries / and marbles they ought not to have swallowed,” we are urged not to surrender to the dominant narrative and let “ulterior neglect” become “a principle come to life within its victims.”

Suzanne Maxson’s poems are full-throated celebrations of life, even as they cast an unflinching eye on the artist’s struggle to “savor / life on two feet” and access “the catalog we call myself” after devastating damage to “those / neural threads where in the pons perception, attention, / and memory entangle.” Astoundingly, these poems find meaning even at the moment of loss: while a stroke renders “the air a bright translucent dimensional density / of motion,” the speaker finds herself “distracted and absorbed / by every beauty even in the form and utility / of that green plastic hospital mug.” These poems celebrate “the visible the tangible and the intangible / . . . this impermanent placement on the ground / called home” — the “sufficiency of beauty and feeling” of “what is.” Although “the day is only white noise / to which we dance a jerky jig // while above the birds that day / pours into itself as night,” Maxson proves that “everything is all right . . . even in the unjust / and violent world unfurling always into / chaos” because everywhere there is beauty to be found, if we know how to look: in those birds and that jig, in Rothko’s silence and Frankenthaler’s “fifty-one colors,” in a Welsh farmer’s “broken / brown teeth” and a mother calling “out to my children / Here I am for you, imperfect / but present,” and above all, in these powerful elegies to the gift of existence.

Mikey Swanberg’s poems can make you cry. They are full of humility, joy, and love serendipitously found in the details of the dailiness of life. “I knew I knew nothing / The dog of kindness / pressed her paw hard / on my hip / Wild blackberries / scratched the shit / out of my arms, but later / I couldn’t find a mark.” There’s a Frank O’Hara spontaneity and sweetness to these poems: “did birds once fly in and out of you / or was that me.” Swanberg has abundant love for the past in all of us: “my god I liked to stay up late / in the kitchen talking shit / being sweet and noisy / in those blue cat hours,” and old loves are not forgotten: “I’ve been wearing as a winter coat / what someone I love once said to me.” Along with love and life, these poems celebrate art, including poetry: “only half of the calls the birds make come with a purpose / the experts all agree / that they just really like to sing.”

Ken Taylor’s richly allusive poems combine echoes of Benjamin’s aesthetic theory, the nostalgic Americana of Western player pianos and tintypes, and Tintoretto’s “gay” depiction of Maundy Thursday, with a more personal evocation of the unsatisfying fragility of modern life, especially during the pandemic, “when the calendars quit” and “the sun rose and fell but nothing advanced.” Taylor exposes a hollow repetitiveness underlying the tales we tell ourselves, “framed as a constant stickup,” and the need to believe otherwise, “tightly bound in the chords of a pitched belief that i’d escape the lassoing abyss.” But he also celebrates defiance of stale norms, suggesting an overlap between the Holy Trinity and an anonymous, nonbinary protagonist, X (“the many unfolding as one”) who wants “to say what it is not what it means,” and “aims to make fibrous smooth — / returning to the grid of viscous promise” in the hopes of “moving closer to a feast they can almost taste.”

Kukuli Velarde’s ceramic sculptures contain multitudes and span millennia. With fertile imagination and impressive technique, she undertakes an ambitious investigation of, in the artist’s own words, “aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance . . . revolv[ing] around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture.” These works bring humor, anger, love, joie de vivre, and aesthetic pleasure to the complexities of “colonization and coloniality, contemporary history, social injustice and racism” – capturing and exploring colonialism’s generative as well as destructive impact on aesthetic expression. Velarde combines indigenous and Christian, ancient and contemporary iconographies to invent an oeuvre as organically rooted as it is original.

Mary Wilson blends lyrical images with a stunning and sensitive clarity about our response to the political and natural world. “It’s raining in the news / a storm or congress of box / jellies on the artificial reef / where some “they” sank / ships, planes and concrete.” In striking metaphors, Wilson notes some machine-like qualities in us, “Before the house stands a small girl / whose face, obscured in the rubble of / the foreground has been blurred / by some precision. It’s like, “look / here, you’re a tense lens mounted / to a vehicle.” Behind these original and somewhat disconcerting perceptions where “we get the very weight of looking,” there’s a deep understanding of who we are and what we could be, “[w]hen at last we’re hopeful / Secure from our want.”

We hope you enjoy these as much as we have!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann