chestnuts_4774

For every word has its marrow in the English tongue for order and for delight.

-- Christopher Smart, from Jubilate Agno

Jubilate Agno

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MoMA Courses Online Registration Open for Winter/Spring 2012

PMNYS Fast-Forward Preview (Part 1) by Mab MacMoragh

Registration for Winter/Spring 2012 MoMA Courses Online is now open! Information and registration here.

PMNYS is an independent student project by the Post Millennium New York School painters, a group of artists who met virtually in the Spring 2011 MoMA Online Course, 'Materials and Techniques of Postwar Abstract Painting' taught by Corey D'Augustine.

This is Part 1 of the project, which will eventually include a video of the paintings along with a narrative in a virtual setting.

PMNYS Painters are:

Betsy Ritz (Rhode Island USA)
Bobbie Friedman (Rhode Island USA)
Chris Jeffrey (Vermont USA)
Deborah Rhee (Melbourne, Australia; Dallas, Texas USA)
Doug Brannon (North Carolina USA)
Hilary (USA; Berlin, Germany)
Jackie Mintz (Maryland USA)
Kim Charlton (New York USA)
Mab MacMoragh (Georgia USA)
Mania Row (Essex and London, UK)
Maria Rosa Benso (Turin, Italy)
Marie Louise Eriksen (Denmark)
Maryse Wicker (France, Connecticut USA)
Monica Ridruejo (Spain)
Myriam Kassin (Bogota, Colombia)
Pauline Ginnety (Ireland, France)
Rose Golledge (Brazil, UK, Portugal)
Starr Davis (California USA)
toon den heijer (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Thank you to MoMA Courses Online!

Crossposted

daylily_2807

Everything that is touched by light
loves the light.

-- Linda Gregg, lines from 'Surrounded by Sheep and Low Ground'

Read 'Surrounded by Sheep and Low Ground'

ginkgo_7342

What I thought I had left I kept finding again

      but when I went looking for what I thought I remembered

as anyone could have foretold it was not there

      when I went away looking for what I had to do

I found that I was living where I was a stranger

      but when I retraced my steps the familiar vision

turned opaque and all surface and in the wrong places

      and the places where I had been a stranger appeared to me

to be where I had been at home called by name and answering

      getting ready to go away and going away 

...

There are the yellow beads of the stonecrops and the twisted flags

      of dried irises knuckled into the hollows

of moss and rubbly limestone on the waves of the low wall

      the ivy has climbed along them where the weasel ran

the light has kindled to gold the late leaves of the cherry tree

      over the lane by the house chimney there is the roof

and the window looking out over the garden

      summer and winter there is the field below the house

there is the broad valley far below them all with the curves

      of the river a strand of sky threaded through it

and the notes of bells rising out of it faint as smoke

      and there beyond the valley above the rim of the wall

the line of mountains I recognize like a line of writing

      that has come back when I had thought it was forgotten

-- W.S. Merwin, lines from 'Fox Sleep'

Read 'Fox Sleep'

4227

Like a tree that sadly drops its leaves,

I drop sad words, scattered
By the wind. And if time should
Gather them unwanted and unneeded . . .
So be it . . . The golden grove . . .
Talking in soft undertones.

-- Sergei Esenin, lines from 'The Golden Grove'
Tr. R.A.D. Ford

Sergei Esenin

4230

As long as I struggle to float above the ground
and fail, there is reason for this poetry. . . .

                                     See me rise like a flame,
like the sun, moon, stars, birds, wind. In light,
In dark. But I never achieve it. I get on my knees
this gray April to see if open crocuses have a smell.
I must live in the suffering and desire of what
rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding
of gears against our bodies and lives.

-- Linda Gregg, from "It is the Rising I Love", The Sacraments of Desire: Poems

Read "It Is the Rising I Love" on Slow Muse

Linda Gregg

3808

Most of what can be said has yet to be said.

-- Michael Ryan, from A Difficult Grace

Interview with poet Michael Ryan

A Difficult Grace

3602

The shadow of a leaf returns to the leaf
Dancing
When I was a prince each moment
Ventured outward
Returning to me covered in green leaves
I had a country I had a plan
At the center of creation
Dazzling waters would rise and fall
Small birds would sing in the leaves and small
Hands gather mountains into a ring
O my estranged, my dearest, the world
Can only be safeguarded by shadows
Dying unafraid into real colors
In your sunlight

-- Donald Revell, lines from "Tithon" American Poetry Review 40:6

3564

Immortality

Age cannot reach me where the veils of God
   Have shut me in,
For me the myriad births of stars and suns
   Do but begin,
And here how fragrantly there blows to me
   The holy breath,
Sweet from the flowers and stars and the hearts of men,
   From life and death.

We are not old, O heart, we are not old,
   The breath that blows
The soul aflame is still a wandering wind
   That comes and goes;
And the stirred heart with sudden raptured life
   A moment glows.

A moment here – a bulrush’s brown head
   In the gray rain,
A moment there – a child drowned and a heart
   Quickened with pain;
The name of Death, the blue deep heaven, the scent
   Of the salt sea,
The spicy grass, the honey robbed
   From the wild bee.

Awhile we walk the world on its wide roads
   And narrow ways,
And they pass by, the countless shadowy troops
   Of nights and days;
We know them not, O happy heart,
   For you and I
Watch where within a slow dawn lightens up
   Another sky.

-- Susan Mitchell

3670

IV.

In our consciousness of time
we are doomed to the past.
The future we may dream of
but can know it only after
it has come and gone.
The present too we know
only as the past. When
we say, "This now is
present, the heat, the breeze,
the rippling water," it is past.
Before we knew it, before
we said "now," it was gone.
 
If the only time we live
is the present, and if the present
is immeasurably short (or
long), then by the measure
of the measurers we don't
exist at all, which seems
improbably, or we are
immortals, living always
in eternity, as from time to time
we hear, but rarely know.
 
You see the rainbow and the new-leafed
woods bright beneath, you see
the otters playing in the river
or the swallows flying, you see
a beloved face, mortal
and alive, causing the heart
to sway in the rift between beats
where we live without counting,
where we have forgotten time
and have forgotten ourselves,
where eternity has seized us
as its own. This breaks
open the little circles
of the humanly known and believed,
of the world no longer existing,
letting us live where we are,
as in the deepest sleep also
we are entirely present,
entirely trusting, eternal.
 
Is it concentration of the mind,
our unresting counting
that leaves us standing
blind in our dust?
In time we are present only
by forgetting time.

-- Wendell Berry, from 2007

Wendell Berry

cloud_3558

You never look at me from the place from which I see you.

Jacques Lacan 'Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a'
Tr. Alan Sheridan

Jacques Lacan

cloud_3544

The secret of the image...must not be sought in its differentiation from reality, and hence in its representative value (aesthetic, critical or dialectical), but on the contrary in its 'telescoping' into reality, its short-circuit with reality, and finally, in the implosion of image and reality.

-- Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images
Tr. Paul Patton and Paul Foss

Jean Baudrillard

cloud_3493

2610 (glass of the glass sea shadow of water)

From a Phrase of Simone Weil's and Some Words of Hegel's

In              back              deep the jewel
The treasure
No              Liquid
Pride of the living life's liquid
Pride in the sandspit wind this ether this other this element all
It is I or I believe
We are the beaks of the ragged birds
Tune of the ragged bird's beaks
In the tune of the winds
Ob via              the obvious
Like a fire of straws
Aflame in the world or else poor people hide
Yourselves together              Place
Place where      desire
Lust of the eyes the pride of life and foremost of the storm's
Multitude moves the wave belly-lovely
Glass of the glass sea shadow of water
On the open water no other way
To come here the outer
Limit of the ego

-- George Oppen

Listen

[And Leaving In a Great Smoky Fury]

And leaving in a great smoky fury
of his loved ones, he sailed
backwards to Europe discovering islands,
the pale ones and the ones like
elephants and those like pearls.

But the trees shall stand never
so high as in his native land!
they hoped, but he found ruins and
aqueducts and fountains, and loved them.

-- Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara

4608

Prime

I don't believe that you made me
into this tremolo of hands,
this fever, this flat-footed dance
of tendons and the drapery

of skin along a skeleton.
I am that I am: a brittle
rib cage and the hummingbird
of breath that flickers in it.

Incrementally, I stand:
in me are eons and the cramp
of endless ancestry.

Sun is in the leaves again.
I think I see you in the wind
but then I think I see the wind.

-- Malachi Black

Malachi Black

2399 (cloud)

2251 (Japanese maple)

YIELD Everything, Force Nothing

Years circling the same circle:
the call to be first,
and the underlying want:

and this morning, look! I've finished now,
with this terrific red thing,
with green and yellow rings on it, and stars.

The contest is over:
I turned away,
and I am beautiful: Job's last daughters,
Cinnamon, Eyeshadow, Dove.

The contest is over:
I let my hands fall,
and here is your garden:
Cinnamon, Eyeshadow, Dove.

-- Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine

MoMA Online Courses- Online Registration now open!

Ticking by Mab MacMoragh

How do the online courses work?

These 10-week classes can be accessed at times that are convenient for you; there is no set time when participants are required to log in. Each week, starting with the first week of class and continuing for nine subsequent weeks, students participate in lively discussion forums with one another and the instructor. The courses provide unique videos, slide shows, and readings.

Read more and register

Artist Deborah Rhee looks back on her experience with MoMA Online Learning as part of the Materials and Techniques studio painting course taught by Corey d'Augustine and comes away with a thumbs-up!

Read Deborah's blog post

(crossposted)

What He Thought

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does "flat drink" mean? and the mysterious
"cheap date" (no explanation lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic--
and least poetic-- so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans

were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked

"What's poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

or the statue there?" Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think-- "The truth
is both, it's both!" I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. "If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.
That is how he died,
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry--

(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.

-- Heather McHugh

Hear Heather McHugh read this poem at Poets.org

Giordano Bruno at Wikipedia

2402 (azaleas)

The Parcel

There are dying arts and
one of them is
the way my mother used to make up a parcel.
Paper first. Mid-brown and course-grained as wood.
The worst sort for covering a Latin book neatly
or laying flat at Christmas on a pudding bowl.
It was a big cylinder. She snipped it open
and it unrolled quickly across the floor.
All business, all distance.
Then the scissors.
Not a glittering let-up but a dour
pair, black thumb-holes,
the shears themselves the colour of the rained-
on steps a man with a grindstone climbed up
in the season of lilac and snapdragon
and stood there arguing the rate for
sharpening the lawnmower and the garden pair
and this one. All-in.
The ball of twine was coarsely braided
and only a shade less yellow than
the flame she held under the blunt
end of the sealing wax until
it melted and spread into a brittle
terracotta medal.
Her hair dishevelled, her tongue between her teeth,
she wrote the address in the quarters
twine had divided the surface into.
Names and places. Crayon and fountain pen.
The town underlined once. The country twice.
It's ready for the post
she would say and if we want to know
where it went to–
a craft lost before we missed it–watch it go
into the burlap sack for collection.
See it disappear. Say
this is how it died
out: among doomed steamships and outdated trains,
the tracks for them disappearing before our eyes,
next to station names we can't remember
on a continent we no longer
recognize. The sealing wax cracking.
The twine unraveling. The destination illegible.

-- Eavan Boland

Eavan Boland : The Poetry Foundation

2233 (dogwood)

A year—& through branches light comes,
A pilgrim out of March from a farther world.
There is a flaw in the air. I breathed it
From the swamp, a kiss of damp
Translated to a plague that would remote me
From care & corroding solicitudes, crown me
With this headdress of red-painted deer-hair
& weight my ears with wheels of copper.
My face painted blue & silver, my body
Washed in crimson dye, they would greet me
First with lamentations to mourn my old life,
Then by psalms I could enter
Purged & reborn & singing in a tongue
Not mine I know not where to go. (I know.)

-- Averill Curdy, from 'Ovid in America'

Averill Curdy

2164 (redbud)

After all, we sleep among secrets
and wake to their burden.
If we could pay attention at all points then
theory would be what really is there. But then
another intimacy begins…

-- Ann Lauterbach, lines from "Stepping Out"

2138 (cherry)

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

-- A.E. Housman

0574

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs 

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time 

To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind, 

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind 

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow, 

And, nothing himself, beholds 

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- Wallace Stevens

On "The Snow Man"