Personism

Paired: Soth + Berryman

City Pages. Photograph + cover design by Alec Soth (2004)

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) 'Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.' I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

—John Berryman

Paired: Krum + Williams

University Club by Gregory Krum
This image will be included in the upcoming Summer Reading exhibition, opening at Jen Bekman Gallery on July 15, 2009

Please Come Late

Please come late,
so that I have almost given you up
and have started glancing round the room,
thinking everyone is you.
Please don't come
until I have started missing you,
thinking I will never see you again,
praying you are lost.
Come too late for me not to notice.
Make me suffer,
wondering what you are doing
on the other side of town,
still in your dressing gown.
Make me beg for mercy
when you pick up a magazine.

Are you looking in your mirror,
suddenly remembering me?
I'm on my second coffee by now,
eating the little bits of sugar in my cup.
Haven't you set out yet?
I decide I don't want to see you after all.
I don't really like you.
I'd rather be on my own.
I know it is all over between us

but I go on sitting here,
reading a newspaper,
not understanding a word.
If you came in now, I wouldn't recognize you.
Don't come anywhere near me
until I have gone slightly mad for love of you.

—Hugo Williams

Paired: Anderson + Ashbery

Abandoned by Mamma Anderson | Publisher: Crown Point Press
color spit bite & sugar lift aquatints w. aquatint & soft ground etching | image size: 24.25" x 36" paper size: 33.25" x 44"

Something It Wasn't

Better homes and gardens for many
but for the rest, we are not so sure.
We need a place to turn around and be unctuous
in, feeling it not as a lack but
as something to be warded off. We are
not done with shoe polish yet
in a way we are. Isn't that inventiveness
or something coercive like a lash that cracks
close to the cheek, something you give back
after keeping it for a while?

As sure as there are servants in heaven
others will come up to you and ask what it was
you did today, whether nests were full
and anxious, and what kind of sun sprayed
on the corners of a cheap notebook
to be dreamed as all things are, except
for fountains and animals lisping kind losses,
fervent, over here. The way it is right now.

—John Ashbery
(From a folio of six poems appearing in the Spring 2009 edition of The Paris Review)

Paired: Sinclair + Tate

Fourth of July #2, Independence, Missouri a 20x200 edition by Mike Sinclair

The Motorcyclists

My cuticles are a mess. Oh honey, by the way,
did you like my new negligee? It’s a replica
of one Kim Novak wore in some movie or other.
I wish I had a foot-long chili dog right now.
Do you like fireworks, I mean not just on the 4th of July,
but fireworks any time? There are people
like that, you know. They’re like people who like
orchestra music, listen to it any time of day.
Lopsided people, that’s what my father calls them.
Me, I’m easy to please. I like ping-gong and bobcats,
shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene,
the crunch of carrots. I like caterpillars and
whirlpools, too. What I hate most is being the first
one at the scene of a bad accident.

Do I smell like garlic? Are we still in Kansas?
I once had a chiropractor make a pass at me,
did I ever tell you that? He said that your spine
is happiest when you’re snuggling. Sounds kind
of sweet now when I tell you, but he was a creep.
Do you know that I have never understood what they meant
by “grassy knoll.” It sounds so idyllic, a place to go
to dream your life away, not kill somebody. They
should have called it something like “the grudging notch.”
But I guess that’s life. What is it they always say?
“It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.”
You getting hungry yet, hon? I am. When I was seven
I sat in our field and ate an entire eggplant
right off the vine. Dad loves to tell that story,

but I still can’t eat eggplant. He says I’ll be the first
woman President, it’d be a waste since I talk so much.
Which do you think the fixtures are in the bathroom
at the White House, gold or brass? It’d be okay with me
if they were just brass. Honey, can we stop soon?
I really hate to say it but I need a lady’s room.

—James Tate