"Independent and small presses get short shrift - national newspaper supplements seem loath to review indie books, the big high street sellers won't stock them." (via Murketing)
We listen to the still, small voice of poetry when we read a poem, and that voice stands in ferocious contrast to the clamor in the culture at large and, often, to the sound of society's explosions.
I just communicated in different and more productive ways. Instead of responding individually to messages that arrived in my in-box, I started to use more social networking tools, like instant messaging, blogs and wikis, among many others.
He began to make poetry from whatever happened around him — today, he might have written a blog. At the time, however, this preoccupation with the trivial, with the nothing of life that is nothing, seemed to jettison everything...
As a rhythmic source, jazz provides the illusion of simultaneous spontaneity and inevitability. The velocity of jazz’s rhythms, too, offer progressive and compelling alternatives to iambic meters.
"With all the passion and drama surrounding Howl and Other Poems... consider that the bulk of the cultural weight that it carries comes not from its text but instead from its material form." Canonical text vs. book as object. Good, if dense, reading.
The findings lend credence to researchers who argue that many important decisions may be best made by going with our gut -- not by thinking about them too much.
Mind-boggling: "here in Arizona, where the governor, secretary of state, chief justice and Senate minority leader are women, it has rankled more than a few women that nonmember men have more rights than paying female members at the Phoenix Country Club."
Because I am the coolest woman of all in NYC, I'm home on a Friday night reading poetry and about it, and look here! Watching it too. I was pretty damn pleased to come across this video of the man himself reading his poem Having a Coke With You. Here's the text; read along at home!
HAVING A COKE WITH YOU
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it
Bowery Art Boom, NYT circa 2005: "But being slightly ahead of the curve is not always easy. When Ms. Bekman opened her 400-square-foot gallery in March 2003, there were no other galleries around. "
What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time.
The postcard for Ornithology features a detail from A Dream World Glimmers In The Background Of The Soul, a 30" x 44" gouache on paper painting by Carrie Marill.
Ornithology, our summer group show, opens at Jen Bekman Gallery on Wednesday June 25th. The exhibition features photographs, paintings, drawings + mixed media pieces by a stellar array of artists: