Tangled

Sometimes getting into the Xmas
spirit isn't so holly/ivy, this year especially.
But there are little road maps to lead one
through the hardened forest of the heart.
Like time in the city. Looking, first
at some art in the painter's studio
for an exhibition I'm co-curating on words
and pictures. Then at MoMa where I saw

















and wandered into the water lilies, which now
have their own room and it wasn't too crowded,
though as usual people pose in front of the paintings
as if they're at the Grand Canyon, and maybe looking
at his paint and colors and light is kind of like staring
at the expanse of that place.
I walked a lot and of course the city is packed
with tourists, but NYC is not all glittering lights
there's always an edge, a con gone wrong
thus the cop with machine gun.








A good day...I'm ready for the tree.

looking

The other afternoon I went to the fifth floor at MoMA to see Monet's waterlilies. It was packed naturally. July in New York. But I managed to get close. Next thing I know, I'm getting choked up. Something about the intimacy of his hand. And the age of the paint, the age of his strokes. The colors. The panels. I guess the deep effort, the work and how Monet seemed to be there in the crowded gallery, full of tourists sprawled on the benches. Folks posing before the painting as their friends snapped photos for the album. Like we were at the Grand Canyon.

I went there to think and prepare for a class I'm giving this weekend on looking and writing, sketching with words. We're going to spend time at the museum. I wanted to visit some of the works again. So I looked at Giacometti's thin strange figures. There was Matisse's red studio, drawing a crowd of course, the way red can. And Pollack's mad splashes. I found some Rothkos. And Kiki Smith's women, which looked a bit like gravestone rubbings. There were some neat photos by the Bechers, known for their typologies. Oh, I could have roamed for hours but it was closing time. I ducked outside to dash in and out of the prefab houses in a lot next door. Small dwellings -- perfect for a writer!

Now I'm working on getting my readings. I'll offer a handful of so-called ekphrastic poems that riff on and off of visual works of art, some at MoMA. Then present some strategies for close looking and writing. Then we'll spend time in the galleries wandering and writing. It's really a generative workshop. Here's the thing. I need a disclaimer. Because as much as I love visual art, I'm all thumbs when it comes to the practice. And I don't have a background in art history or graphic design. I'm your basic English major, with lots of literature and language courses. What little I know I've picked up on my own. Like most writers I'm an observer. I like to look and listen. Nuance is important. And just gazing. Even with my eyes closed. You see better when your eyes close and your mind opens.

I yearn to be able to make. Do I repeat myself? Wish I could draw or paint or sculpt. (Have tried knitting. Sewing. Not good.) (I can bake bread.) (And other forms of cooking.) It's paint and color and canvas I lust after. I envy poets who can draw. That kind of mark-making. When I'm looking at a visual work of art, it seems closer to the imagination than language. Then the process of words moving across a page to create images feels clunky. I resign myself to language. No, that's melodramatic. I love words and letters and everything they can do. I am thus resigned to looking at art. And let Monet's swirls of blue and green swim and shimmer so that I might pretend.

with artists

"When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you -- a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape until it gives your own naive impression of the scene before you." --Monet

Today was spent with artists...visual artists mostly, some writers, listening to them talk about their work, looking at stuff in their studios, drinking in their sentences and words about how they were doing what they were doing and what they were thinking about as they were making their videos, installations, paintings, performance pieces, short stories, plays and it was like running to the ocean after the whole year away--the first swim, the cold cutting your skin, the salty waves whooshing into nostrils as you stroke and dive and surf them, never wanting to leave, your brain exploding with the words. It was like that. It was more. The technologies--cameras and paint and brushes and pencils and computers and stuffed deer heads and I thought about my long time away. Then I read something I'd written a few years ago--capturing a dream:

...somewhere in a neighborhood -- on a lawn, trees and houses and we're talking and the future is an issue and the atmosphere is charged in a science-fiction-y kind of way -- thinking about the future and a goddess being only not a goddess but a woman with some kind of power says we need to find out about memory, about how long it takes for a memory to fade and to do that she says you can go up into the atmosphere toward the universe to the moon and circle it and so i do arms out i fly i take off with a leap straight up through the layers and higher it gets and white and clouds but like fog or haze and cold but i dont feel that just the sense of flying and i reach the moon and circle it and then i return and because we think it takes a decade for a memory to dissipate i come back to where i had been -- the same lawn but 10 years have gone by and everything is changed houses gone people gone or aged and i walk through the streets the yards the town others are gone but not me and i wake up but not really in this state of amazement....

this is an old dream not only my dream the dream of flying and i like that i found it i had forgotten about this dream and that i found it today when i went swimming again.